The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2009, Blaðsíða 34

176
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #3
like the sky it meets effortlessly above, it
shuffles and shifts with the ebb and flow of
the swampy waters behind it and the crash-
ing waves of the lake in front. It was a bit
out of the way and quite an adventure to go
there, so it wasn’t a place one went every
day. There were two ways to get there. By
road, it was the kind of trip that meant you
needed to get your bike and stuff ready
before you went, like you were going on an
expedition. Or, by boat- but almost no one
went there by boat, except the odd fisher-
men and Brian Oleson and I who often
took a skiff with an 18 horsepower motor
and water-skied the three miles down the
river, past Gutti Guttormsson’s farm and
the Big Bend out onto the lake and to the
bar.
It’s a lonely place, the sort of spot that
just might inspire a poet. And it “Gutti” as
young and old knew him, (and to this day
Gutti in the Icelandic Community is
enough to identify who you mean, like a
modern day Cher or Madonna)who
immortalized Sandy Bar in his poem of the
same name, in a poetic triumph of the pio-
neering immigration from Iceland to
Canada in 1875. From Gutti’s window he
could look over the marsh grass onto the
thin strip of sand beyond. People from
Winnipeg and Gimli often talked about
Sandy Bar, and when they said the name
they did so with the rhythmical intonation
that elevated the emphasis on the “Bar,” as
if they knew it. I always knew that most of
them had no clue where it was. On that
narrow muddy road, made by the draglines
through the swamp, to see another person,
much less a car, on any expedition was a big
deal. They had just heard the name from
Gutti’s poem. Gutti was a poet who had
never set foot in Iceland, yet wrote in the
Icelandic language with an elegance that
immortalized him as a giant of Icelandic lit-
erature.
Many have tried to translate its
essence into English, perplexed by the skil-
ful rhyming and the power of the words
portraying the agony that the immigrants
faced and the ecstasy they hoped for.
Against the backdrop of a fierce thunder
and lightning storm, the poem Sandy Bar
was conceived as he stood amidst the set-
tlers’ graves on that narrow sliver of barren
beach. This place and the lives of those
“buried deep at Sandy Bar” were inside his
soul and with those words he entered into
their long-sleeping souls. He immortalizes
their legacy as the thunderstorm sails
northward with the revelation that, “More
than flesh and all its grandeur lives today at
Sandy Bar.” And he wrote, “Broad and
definite tracks will lead to the world from
Sandy Bar.” So it was, and is. As I grew
older, I discovered what these words meant
to me, whether or not Gutti had intended
them in this way. The world from Sandy
Bar is a wide world and being able to imag-
ine that world is the first step in going
there. The descendants of these settlers
moved out across North America, but for
each of them there is a corner in their soul
given to Sandy Bar.
In Riverton, people gave each other
the space to be themselves. Perhaps it was
because there were a lot of independent-
minded people, many of who spent so
much time away from home, that they val-
ued home and life in the community all the
more when they returned. Music was often
the place where they came together. There
was a live-and-let-live attitude and with it
came an acceptance of people as they were.
Poking fun at those “putting on the style,”
to borrow a line from one of Solli’s songs
was a more likely response to a situation
than punishing gossip. Riverton was a
“Whatever!” kind of place, to use a phrase
that is part of the jargon from the worldly-
wise teenagers of the generation of today.
Perhaps the Riverton spirit of those days
has quietly morphed its way into modern
times as the world of “Whatever!”