The Icelandic Canadian - 01.10.2002, Page 29

That was the first day we saw cloud in
Hofsos, after four days of blue sky and
brilliant sunshine. Heavy leaden cloud all
around us, just a few hundred metres above
our heads. And a bitter Arctic wind blow-
ing across the fjord. We’d packed our rain
gear, some cheese, a couple of oranges and
apples, chocolate-covered biscuits, four
bottles of water. We’d walked out along
the rushing and rocky river, up and up
along the tumbling turning river. Up the
valley. Mountains and cliffs on either side
and the glacier waiting ahead of us. And
then the sun beginning to break through
farther up the draw, its glare on the glacier
up ahead of us.
So many colours on the hillsides, so
many varied hues of green. Olive, and
apple-green. Beryl. Verdigris. Chartreuse.
So many different shades of pink, of brown
and gray. The pigment of straw and sand,
of basalt, and patches of rust. The bloom of
rock, the bias of vegetation. Orange lichen.
Green lichen. Gray lichen. And moss. Such
an assortment of values for snow above,
values for soil below. Ginger. And bronze.
And sienna.
To be happy. And to stay out of jail. You
can imagine how that surprised me. It was
our fourth long hike together. Nancy and I
had found an old stone fence drawn across
the valley and a rock foundation, perhaps
the remains of a former sheepherder’s hut.
We’d settled there for our lunch and Nancy
told me her story. I never once thought
before about the need to stay out of jail,
about making that a life goal; I’d even
imagined that the local penitentiary would
be a great place to do some writing. John’s
Collected Prison Diaries; a fatuous idea, I
know.
Nancy lives in Madison, Wisconsin
where she does some kind of work with
disturbed children, elementary special edu-
cation. She says her students in their frus-
tration sometimes swear and throw chairs
at her, then come to her an hour later for
love and comfort. Troubled and unnur-
tured babes she calls them.
She has a city backyard that opens into a
small patch of forest where wild turkeys
and grouse and a variety of songbirds rose-
breasted grosbeaks and indigo buntings
and Eastern towhees gather round the feed-
ers that she hangs from poles and tree
branches with easy sightlines to her win-
dows. A good place to be happy it seems.
And she is. But Nancy quarrels often with
the squirrels and starlings that chase round
those sunflower feeders. Who knows,
maybe that trifling battle against nature’s
dark forces on her days off school brings
her a kind of joy.
Nancy’s grandparents mixed Croatian
and Austrian on the one side, Swiss on the
other were already proud of their socialist
beliefs when they arrived in America, and
they settled in the already socialist
Milwaukee. The Swiss grandfather had
been forced to leave a neutral but conserv-
ative Switzerland because of his politics
and Nancy’s father, a quiet man but a
charismatic speaker, became a union leader
at the local Allis- Chalmers plant. A tractor
and farm equipment manufacturer since
1914, Allis Chalmers sent its business roots
in Milwaukee back to 1847.
My California-based Mindscape CD
Encyclopedia defines Joseph Raymond
McCarthy, the Republican senator from
Wisconsin (1947-1957), as opportunistic
and shady, a liar and a blustering bully. It
was he who presided over the permanent
subcommittee on investigations which
charged a variety of army officials, mem-
bers of the media, and public figures of
being spies and Communists.
His words given in an address at
Wheeling, West Virginia in February 9,
1950: While I cannot take the time to name
all of the men in the State Department who
have been named as members of the
Communist Party and members of a spy
ring, I have here in my hand a list of two
hundred and five that were known to the
secretary of state as being members of the
Communist Party and who nevertheless
are still working and shaping the policy of
the State Department.
McCarthy’s accusations were never
proven and he was censured by the Senate
in 1954 dead by 1957 because of his heavy
drinking. And though it preceded him, he
lent his name to the ongoing campaign of
the House Committee on Un-American
Activities. McCarthyism, that particular