Akureyri
The Light is On!
A Merry Icelandic Christmas
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Category Archives: Architecture
Gathering the Living and the Dead
When the winds reach 125 kilometres per hour, I tell ya, the walls of a graveyard are welcome shelter.
The black church at Buðir still has the power to draw people to it, even though its town pretty much vanished long ago.
When you’re out there in the midwinter wind, it’s pretty clear, though, that the church is an expression of Budir, not Budir an expression of the church.
In other words, here under the volcano (cloaked in fog of its own making), in a lava field blown with dunes of stinging orange sand, the broken bits of old scallop shells, in a wind the volcano sends out to sea like a searchlight, there is power and light that exceed our understanding.
It is good to honour them.
It is good to remember that the living have been given their life by the dead. Even our words, even these words, are the work of ancestral voices meeting the world, often in winds so strong you don’t breathe the air, it breathes you. (I am not writing these words. My ancestors are. That kind of experience. To them, I am a mouth — a door.)
Gunnar wrote a book about some of this, called Vikikvaki, a story of the dead coming to life and dancing on New Year’s Eve.
He meant Iceland.
(The wind has passed now in the mid-day solstice light)
The dead meant life. They meant the wind. It is good to enter these forces. It is also vital to have shelter.
A Tale of Two Cities
There are many Icelands. Reykjavik, for instance, shows its pop culture face below.
Akureyri is more mysterious.
It’s Akureyri for me! You?
The Angel of Akureyri
She settled on the hill in 1940.There was war.
Akureyrarkirkja
She lights up the city even now.
Let’s hope she hangs around for a long time.
By loving her, we warm the cold.
Let her keep bringing us together.
Getting the Blues In Akureyri
Remember that summer light?
I think she misses the Akureyri Viking Store trolls, don’t you?
The Icelandic Version of the Chicken and Egg Paradox
Icelandic bridges are like stepping stones for giants.
In part, they used to break up because they were done on the cheap, but in part they were done on the cheap because they often broke up.
The Impromptu Art Galleries of Iceland
Farmer Art
Tourist Art
Guesthouse Art
Government Art
Really!
Ewe making art.
Elvish art viewer.
Tern art.
Tourists who think they are in Köln art.
Tourist art.
4×4 Art
Elf art.
Local tourist board art. (Really. They lay down netting to prevent overpopulation and erosion, the bane of puffin sociability.)
Teenagers running the wool shop and campground art.
Tourist stacking art, with tern artist.
Iceland is art!
Iceland: Not Always “Green”
A luxury hotel for the Northern Lights Crowd on the South Coast, and in front of the construction site, surely, the most carbon-wasteful billboard imaginable. The amount of rubber that wears off those tires joins the rubber that wears off the hundreds of thousands of cars rushing past every summer, too.
But I bet the hotel is planning on letting you keep your towels for an extra day without laundering them. Truth is, the carbon footprint of the concrete that goes into every building in Iceland can hardly be paid for by being “green” for a lifetime.
Icelandic Erosion Stories of Hope and Despair
When I first went to Iceland nine years ago, the Icelanders told stories of how they lived on a new land, in the process of being made. You can see how that works, here in Njardvik, where with each storm the fjord grows smaller. It’s quite the problem, really, if you’re on one of the two farms in the fjord.
Now, Icelanders tell stories of how climate change caused Vikings (not Icelanders but Vikings yet [who were Icelanders!]) to cut down all the trees, and continues to victimize Iceland, making it pay for industrial decisions taken elsewhere. I miss the old story of hope, of rolling up the sleeves, doing something, and getting on with it. After all…
… either way, you still have to fix your fence. Might as well give your neighbour, the sea, a piece of your mind while you’re at it.
It is, after all, not a new story.
Iceland Speaks Through Her Black Sand Beaches
At the mouth of the Sellfljót, Iceland speaks.
Here, human activity, such as a lost fishing float, is a glaring addition to her conversation, but remains dwarfed by it.
These beaches are at the end of a 30-kilometre-road and a two hour walk, so they feature in few guide books. We can shift our point of view and eliminate human dominance in the image, but looking out to sea…
… or even climb the hill to … and look from there.
It is a different story at the mouth of the Jökullsá, just south of the famed glacial lagoon. They are in all the guide books, just footsteps away from the madness of the Ring Road.
Whether the beach is really black is questionable, but, still, it’s lovely. The river has built an estuary over the last couple years, and seals have moved in. Note how the human story now dominates: the image has directionality and an object, which is more dominant than Iceland and the Atlantic themselves. It’s not just a matter of a camera’s point of view. Even if we sweep up an even larger pile of fishing garbage on the Sellfljót…
… Iceland dominates, and the human story remains foreign and intrusive, despite its beauty (which is largely in the way it catches the light.) These effects are not created. by the light, either. Back on Diamond Beach, the light reveals a story of humans on the hunt, either for seals or icebergs…
… while on the Heraðssandur…
… the light and the land speak. Still, it might be that nature and humans can coexist…
… and it might be that putting nature to work, such as at the aluminum smelter on an old farm in Reyðarfjörður …
Sómastaðir
The oldest stone house in Iceland, rebuilt by Alcoa, and now a National Historic Site.
… is a comfortable form of coexistence as well, but it might not. As an example, just consider that the hydroelectric dam in the Highlands that powers the Alcoa plant at Sómastaðagerði above required the diversion of Jöklá into the Jökullsá, and the subsequent combination of both rivers on the Heraðssandur (below) to prevent flooding, all funded by the industrial project but no doubt predating it by many centuries.
The transformation of a continually-shifting pair of estuaries into a stable beach system is a great feat of civil engineering. If you want black sand in Iceland, here it is.
However, the sand, and the shifting estuary system has only moved further south. Here you can find exquisite black sand beaches framing lagoons north of Höfn, in the Fjörur sandspit in Álftafjörður, or on the Hvalsnesfjara in Lónsvik in Lónfjörður, cutting historically-significant and productive farms off from the sea.
The people whose ancestors have been here for 1100 years might be furious, but the resulting black sand beaches are beautiful. The madness of the Ring Road is only metres away, but is strong enough to keep people off. Not so the Atlantic, though. It is devouring the beach even as it builds it up.
That’s just the thing, though. Back at the Glacial Lagoon, the destruction is also a dominant force. Have a look:
Even if you pull the humans and their attempts to view nature free of themselves away from the picture, what remains is destruction, because the lagoon, the river, these icebergs and the black sands of Diamond Beach are all a result of a dying glacier, melting under climate change. Nature, this is not, but what nature looks like as it corrects an industrial intervention. Of course, at that other great black sand beach, Dritvík, you can ignore the ogres, if you like, and even the ruins of Iceland’s great fishing camp, home to 500 men every summer…
… and if you forego that trail because no-one mentioned it, and the tourbus took you to the trailhead at Djupalón, you can forego the ogre there, too, if you like, and enjoy the force of the water on the black sand.
You wouldn’t be thinking like Iceland, though, nor would you in the Hvalfjörður, where the black sand beach is actually the fighter plane airbase that protected the Allied fleet during World War II…
The point is, these black sand beaches are exquisitely beautiful, but it’s best not to bring one’s preconceptions of nature to them. Most of us come from countries and cultures in which history is represented in buildings and human social activity. It’s no different on Iceland, just that here the buildings are made of sand and the human social activity is usually done in conversation with the sand. When you walk those beaches, you are talking with powerful creative and destructive forces. Gunnar wrote about this in his great novel “The Shore of Life,”
which he wrote as a cry of pain after the Battle of the Somme. It is as great a human story as Halldor Laxness’s “Independent People,”
but one that gets far deeper into the soul of the land, right where it battles with the sea.
Diamond Beach
This is the land’s story.
A Farm in Iceland 