Humans travel by the millions to Iceland every year, to stand at the edge of the Earth and look into the abyss.
The Last of the Glaciers Melts in the Jökulsárlón
Notice how it looks back without blinking.
The Edge of the World
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Monthly Archives: June 2019
Logging in Iceland
Old growth timber gets logged in Iceland.
And stacked up beside the road outside Hallormstaðir. Hawthorn City.
Count the rings. I count 23 years.
Back before the Millenia, in Old Iceland, this was a tourist place.
The tourists were Icelanders. In Modern Iceland, men brought in the heavy farm equipment.
And got at it.
When Gumnar lived at the end of the lake, just a few minutes away by car or the length of a saga by foot, there were no trees here at all. Modernity, it seems, is a return to the old world, with fun equipment along the way.
Not Post Modern But Post Herring
What do you do with all those industrial plastic fish bins after they have been used to empty out the sea?
Egilsstaðir
You make a beach, that’s what you do — into a lake that is now severely compromised by hydroelectric dam run-off, and then you sell it.
Something’s Fishy
I love Egilsstaðir, truly, precisely because it is not romantic.
What Iceland Can Teach About the 1970s
In the 1970s, A-Frame housing, cheap and easy to build, was all the rage in Canada. We were being very modern and Scandinavian back in those years, two things we’ve given up. We also soon grew tired of living at a slant and having half our floor space unusable (not to mention bonking our heads). I lived in a house like the one below for two years.
After that, we all gave it up and invented the 1980s, which was all about rectangular solids painted to look like California, with Tudor trim. In Egilsstaðir, however, the 1970s are still alive and well, because, well, it’s Scandinavia and, also, they couldn’t afford to throw anything away. And it’s still modern! A lesson for us all.
Happy Ruins
Ruins in other countries don’t look…
…well, so alive!
But, that’s what building with the earth will do for you!
Lagarfljót.
A Farm in Iceland 