The Icelandic Canadian - 01.10.2002, Blaðsíða 26

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 57 #2
high school two miles from home, Eden
Christian College. I attended compulsory
prayer meetings there. I witnessed my
classmates’ testimonies a horror and
embarrassment to me. I suffered the iron
will of a severe all-male faculty.
I couldn’t believe when I attended the
catechism class, when we paraded in front
of the church for our baptism, that my
peers would agree to such a collection of
guarantees, such ideas, the jargon, this
grotesque epistle of black and white. (And
I’m sorry to write all this now, I imagine
some of my most loved readers will be
offended.) The Trinity, the Resurrection,
the blood and the cross, the elements of a
fundamentalist Salvation, this Christian
victory over darkness, I found nothing in
the dogma that called to me, in this tyran-
ny of light.
Like those early Iceland missionaries,
Lorvaldur and Olaf Tryggvason execution-
ers and men of the sword, Christians as
well as politicians; some of my highschool
colleagues splashed off overseas to bring
light to contemporary dark nations.
Unwitting soldiers for a consumer civiliza-
tion.
Barbara Kingsolver in The Poisonwood
Bible, the story of a missionary family in
Africa, documents in fiction how that light
offered its share to the destruction of those
so-called heathen; helped to undermine
their culture, their traditions, their spiritu-
ality; pirated their wealth and resources;
exploited the cruelties and hatreds that had
flourished there for centuries. Poor Africa.
No other continent has endured such an
unspeakably bizarre combination of for-
eign thievery and foreign goodwill. We
whites and westerners need to command
everything, will steal anything, destroy
anything we can’t understand. The tyranny
of white, of black and white.
Still, all the world moves in circles, much
like the Iceland sun. Some of the gospel
taught to me thirty-five years ago I might
now preach in simpler more palatable
clothing. I sit with my computer and key-
board every day to write some kind of
hope and salvation for my own spirit.
Spirit birds, I watched those pale ptarmi-
gans fly off low across the pasture east of
the Hofsos north road. So much like the
willow ptarmigan I saw in Churchill but a
life species for me, I had never seen them
before, not even in Canada. Large birds, I
watched where they settled on a green
knoll, where they vanished into the
herbage, the shadows.
I turned and looked for the sun. Behind
me. And a trailing ghostly quarter moon. I
had begun to wonder about my directions,
the sun’s path confused me. I pulled my
compass from the pocket of my old pack.
Yes, this north-south road, I smiled a con-
firmation and marched on.
My voyage of discovery. My first hike
across the Icelandic frontier, first glance
out over this polar ocean. The road began
to climb ahead of me, I marched up. And
then the road fell, I marched down. I
marched to the very end of the north road,
to the clustered buildings of the last farm,
where the fields crumbled into the fjord,
where the water and the brown cliffs and
islands beckoned from beyond. I squatted
there on a rock for some biscuits and a soft
drink while the coloured roofs of Hofsos
glimmered in the distance.
I waited for Nancy to catch up with me.
And when she came I pointed at the four or
five parasitic jaegers flying just over the
headland to our left. Some of them com-
pletely dark and chocolate in colour, others
with bleached bellies and throats. I told
Nancy about their feeding practices, their
piracy, that they harass other birds, gulls
and terns, and snatch the food they dis-
gorge and drop. Strong fast flyers those
jaegers, skua, falconlike, with long and
pointed wings; we watched as they spun
and wheeled and plunged.
Later that afternoon we visited the island
of Drangey, Nancy and I and maybe a
dozen others.
Pelagic birds auks and petrels and shear-
waters, though they prefer life out on the
open ocean must, of course, go ashore in
spring to nest and breed. They arrive in
huge flocks on the cliffs where they
hatched, sometimes on the very ledge.
They court and feed and raise their young
and disappear again in summer, flying and
swimming, to their secret places on the
high seas.