The Icelandic Canadian - 01.10.2002, Blaðsíða 31

like my Christian upbringing, the rules for
marriage might be far too tightly bound.
Too stingy. Too well-defined. Men are
supposed to stick with men friends, and
women with women; anything else would
be far too dangerous. And one close com-
panion, a husband or wife, should be good
enough for anyone. How do we balance
this, I thought. Our need for security, for
long-term relationships. Our need for
broader friendships, male and female. For
variety. For passion. For new relational
discoveries.
I’ve heard stories from the Soviet Union.
The Mennonite families there, some of
them my relatives, were broken up during
the Stalin regime and individuals shipped to
different parts of the country the men
always to Siberia. Marriages were broken
up. And with the impossibility of contact
some of those men not knowing what had
happened to their first wives and children
perhaps they’d been killed, perhaps emi-
grated and iost for all eternity remarried
and started second families.
Here in the north of Iceland, far from
Canada and Susan, I wondered how fickle
my affections might be, how quickly I
might establish new friendships and
alliances. By the end of two days I was out
hiking with Nancy as though we’ve been
together for years.
It’s not that I fell in love with Nancy.
Not like that, it was more the walking. The
walking; I thought I should name it exis-
tential, make it a philosophy, a walking ide-
ology. Each step seemed to swell with inti-
macy and experience. Those long miles we
traveled, I could feel them in the muscles of
my legs. I carried a pack on my shoulders
and my back began to ache. My heart could
tell the distance too; the thump, thump,
thump in my chest. And my lungs. Uphill I
was always out of breath, and I could hear
Nancy breathing behind me. My nose. I
smelled the horses and the wildflowers, the
rotting slough. My ears, the birdsong and
the whistling wind.
Was I being unfaithful? Of course not.
My pants remained forever belted and
buckled, and my imagination too. But
monogamy may not offer the best strategy
for human genetic survival. And relation-
ships do begin and grow on platforms
other than physical desire. It may be one of
the curiosities of our culture that we attach
so much to our taboos on human sexuality,
when there may be infidelities far more
threatening.
I don’t know much about marriage, or
infidelity. Earlier in the day I had no idea
how I’d ever turn around, return to
Hofsos. If we hadn’t faced the flooded
meadow and the aching cold against our
naked feet we might have walked like that
forever. We might have walked on up the
mountain, and across the glacier, along the
northern lowland and into the sea. Walked
to the island of Grimsey. And on, and on.
Perhaps across the water and to the North
Pole. Nancy and I, we walked well togeth-
er.
My dreams for the future have always
been simpler than Nancy’s, and more com-
plicated too. I wanted as a young man to
experience, to feel things. I wanted adven-
ture. I wished to be a farmer. And a fisher-
man. A scholar and a truck driver. A
forester. A monk, and a musician. Those
three or four few good jobs I was offered in
my life would certainly have cramped me. I
didn’t take them, they were all office jobs.
And I hoped to fall in love, to be happy in
that love, to come home in the evening
from my pursuits to find contentment. I
longed to live with intensity but I wished as
well to be free from tension. My dreams so
full of conflict. Or full of paradox. There is
a difference.
Martha, in her sixties and breakfasting in
Iceland, spoke one day about her need to
swim in the fjord. Skinny-dip, she said, she
had to do it, couldn’t sleep thinking about
it. She meant to go early next morning, she
hoped someone would join her. She said
she didn’t understand that need, that
yearning, didn’t know how to describe it;
though she tried.
But it was clear to me, Martha’s mean-
ing. One word. Desire. With a capital D.
She was looking for a god, a goddess. Eros,
or Aphrodite. A sacrament to carry her to
the next stage of life’s journey.
My early years, two and three and four,
we still kept a horse to help us with our
farm work. Nellie; a big bay, probably
some Clydesdale cross. She must have been
gentle, I was never afraid of her; though my