A road designed to stay up while going down.
An important principle in a windy land!
Practicing Your Geometry in Hellnar
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Category Archives: Land
Watching the Sea
It’s hard not to look out to sea in Iceland, waiting for mysterious voyagers. Even the land does it.
Arnarstapi
It’s a lonely thing, but doing it together with an island eases that and teaches patience.
Snæfellsjökull Two Ways
Here is the great lone volcano and glacier, looking North from Londrangar. In this shot, it has a cloak of lava and moss spread at its feet.
Here it is a few minutes later, with human alteration: a farm!
It’s a stunning spirit, any way you look at it.
Icelandic Building Code
Build what you want. Bright colours help with depression.
Really, that’s it.
Icelandic Slime
It’s not like other slime. Here in Canada, slime on rocks is, you know, gross. In Iceland, where it doesn’t rise from pollution, it’s like a green sun glowing from the edges of the Earth and the sea at once.
Glow on, slime, glow on!
Eider Farming
A warm feather quilt comes from a relationship between an Eider farmer and the Eider ducks. Each neck is marked and protected.
Fishers offshore are, perhaps, not so protected.
Harvest is not always a killing. It can be the taking of surplus feathers after nesting, in return for protection from foxes.
These are simple and complex things. To learn them, go to the far North. It is a tenuous economy, but a proud one, which is more than can be said of most.
Lessons from a Poet’s House
Kristján Einarsson lived here in Djupalæk.
It’s a bit more exposed than a North American or Continental poet’s house. Here’s the kind of poem you write in a place like this:
Strings
Stones are strings.
Kristján
The water makes them roar.
Its a delight to know
What lives in the mind of water…
Mind you, water is tight these days:
Lots in the Atlantic, but for fresh water for the sheep, it has to be brought in in plastic tanks. Even though it falls, almost daily, from the sky. Isn’t this the real poverty and isolation?
Icelandic Priorities
Those are the rules. The application is individual.
Some Mountains Aren’t Nice (But Say Hello, Anyway)
Throwing stuff at you all the time, and everything.
Quite endearing, really. So, this exclusion is really attractive to humans. We can really identify with it. So what do we do? Build a road so we can dump two piles of gravel at the end of it, just to say hello.
Well, in mountain language, that is.
~
Welcome to the East.
Not in the Middle of Nowhere in Iceland
When you’re there, you’re somewhere. Really. That’s the point. When this was an active farm, its location wasn’t referenced to Fáskrúðsfjörður or Reydarfjörður (as here) or anywhere else in the East. It was here.
This is the centre of the world.
A Farm in Iceland 