The Icelandic Canadian - 01.10.2002, Page 24

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 57 #2
speaking, to turn off the sun. I talked to my
housemates about a twelve o’clock quiet
rule. I tried the blinds in the bedroom,
searched through the luggage for my trav-
elers’s sleeping mask, located my earplugs
the birds here apparently never stop
singing.
I peered out the window that first mid-
night in Hofsos as the black-headed gulls
circled above and noticed next door at the
church the painter still painting the
church’s white walls; discovered a man and
a woman beyond wielding shovel and hoe
and at work in their garden. Four words
came to me then just as I fell into bed this
tyranny of light, I must have stolen them
somewhere. And then I slept.
And so I walked north in the morning
on the dirt road along the fjord with the
island of Drangey on my left, the ridge of
clambering mountains two kilometres dis-
tant to my right, the Arctic Ocean far
ahead. I walked past the whimbrels and
terns, past the flying and winnowing snipe,
the dozen perched common snipe. Those
snipe, I could actually see in my binoculars
their two outer tail feathers vibrating as
they soared overhead. And dunlins, I found
them in the ditches, black bellies and their
short down- curved beaks. I noted the
great black-backed gull gliding, and a cor-
morant on the water, great cormorant.
There in a puddle beside the road after a
brisk walk I met with a family of
phalaropes.
Red-necked phalaropes, Phalaropus
lobatus, their lobed feet, a species I had
only ever seen before in Churchill. That
female so brilliant in appearance; her rust-
coloured neck, her black mask, the white
throat and white spot by her eye, gold and
gray etching each feather on her back and
wings. The male paler, smaller. That male
often builds his nest alone, waits for his
mate to lay her eggs; then incubates and
raises their young while she flies off to look
for another male, another nest, to start a
second brood. Red-necked phalaropes,
except when breeding, spend most of their
life on the ocean. They rest and sleep on the
water, swim and spin and dab with their
bills to pick small crustaceans and fish from
the sea.
P.A. Taverner, in Birds of Canada,
writes of that phalarope whirligig action on
the water, the inland Wilson’s phalarope:
They swim about like blown thistle- down,
their white bodies riding high... They pause
here and there and whirl about in little cir-
cles as the black water-beetles do, stirring
up the mud with their delicate little feet and
bringing to the surface a harvest of tidbits
which they seize with quick passes of their
rapier-like bill.
I passed fences along that road, to the
left and the right, pastures for sheep; some
five hundred thousand sheep in Iceland
twice as many as people raised for their
wool and their mutton. I passed ewes with
single lambs, passed ewes with twins, ewes
with triplets. I passed black sheep and
scruffy white sheep. I passed white ewes
with black lambs, black ewes with white,
families of mixed colour. Sheep, they all
turned to stare at me and bleated as I wan-
dered by.
My father and I, one early morning
when I was barely a teenager, took the
black two-door 1957 Ford and drove a half
hour from home up onto the Niagara
Escarpment south of Vineland, Ontario.
From there if we turned around and if it
was clear looking out over the lake, even
before construction of the monster CN
Tower, we could sometimes make out the
taller buildings of downtown Toronto
forty miles straight to the north of us dark
shapes on the horizon.
But not that day. No time to stop, no
time to admire city skylines; we had come
out thinking real estate, farm real estate.
Maybe my father had fallen into one of my
own boyish dreams. I never once thought
fruit farming quite up to the mark. Seven
piddling acres; I needed a property with
broad tracts of land and animals, like my
uncle’s in Manitoba. Or maybe my dad had
his own phantoms to chase. He may have
thought this his last chance to capture me,
to build a dynasty, to find someone to take
over his twenty-years’ labour, to inherit
the family farm.
We had come out looking for farms we
might buy, large farms. There on the
escarpment we could find dairies, and silos
for corn, and granaries, cattle and com-