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What a Difference a Sack of Fertilizer Makes
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Category Archives: Land
Lunch in Iceland? It Doesn’t Have to Break the Bank
So, lunch. That would be nice. Why not the Apotek in Reykjavik?
Highly rated. A rather desolate environment, sure…
… but you came here for desolate, right? The bracing subarctic! And there is a fine menu. Why, the hamburger is only about CAD$40. Add a Gull, of course, and it’ll be around $55.
What? That was a whole day’s food budget? Not to worry. There are other options. The road to Seyðisfjörður, for example, or just off to the side, in case there’s a car. Serving travellers for 1100 years.
Neðri Uðafoss
The menu is simple.
Bilberries and Rainwater
Add a Skyr for CAD$2.00…
15 grams of protein!It even comes with a clever little Chinese folding spoon, which you can keep as a souvenir! And you can wander while you eat.
Efri Selfoss
Bring a coat, though. It’s Iceland! Oh, and dessert is the same as lunch.
But that’s OK, right?
The Best Way to Approach the Sea
Sideways, so sly?
Or head on, so bold?
With a house for company?
With a fence for (ha ha) protection?
Or with a sandbar to still that water down until it turns to swans?
In snow?
In the midnight sun?
From halfway down a ridiculous cliff called, for some reason, a road?
From the land of the dead at the bottom of the cliff?
Among muck-raking sheep?
From the city?
From a place on no map?
From a boat?
From a coal mine?
With a lighthouse?
Through a gate while tipping over in the wind (a common affliction)?
On a lazy evening when horses come to visit and refuse to eat your apples because they’ve never encountered such a strange thing before?
At the end of the road?
Without a road at all?
When the sea turns to silver?
When silver turns to the sea?
When the sky rains gold?
Over the mouth of a river?
Or when the sea flows into a river’s mouth and speaks of deep mystery?
These are the mysteries of people who live after the landing that makes firm ground out of waves that, wouldn’t you know, is not so firm after all. Yeah, best, maybe to just wade out with the trolls.
Waiting for whatever comes!
War Memorials in Iceland
In West Iceland, the aluminum plant in Hvalfjörður, which draws power from the dammed highlands, is watched over by the abandoned World War II fighter base that guarded the British Fleet, and which is now gone to the birds.
In East Iceland, the aluminum plant in Reydarfjörður draws power from Skaftafell, in the cloud at the height of the Lagarfljót, watched over by an abandoned horse-drawn manure spreader on the farm Gunnar bought to avoid the Second World War.
These too are the faces of war. In Iceland, which won its independence during the Second World War while its colonial masters in Denmark were occupied by the Germans, that war is honoured by double-edged memorials such as these.
Iceland is Beautiful But the People Are (Almost) Gone
Churches without mowers with scythes…
Mountain villages with neither people nor sheep.
The fishers walked away.
The settlers made little mark.
The farmers went to Canada.
There are reasons for these things. They have to do with emptiness and inhuman power.
That too is a human strength, but not for the young.
Skaftafell
Mysteries.
Secret Falls
These are my secret Icelandic falls. I’m not telling you where to find them, because it does not matter. What matters is the finding. If I told you, you wouldn’t find them, and finding is such a pleasure.
And the leaving again. Even if I came back, I’d find something else.
No, what you need to find lies somewhere else, but I promise it’s there. This one, maybe?
Or this one?
Look at that hill. If you’d come in the right season, you’d find 50 of them, and leave each one to find it in your heart again. Off you go!
What You Need Right Now Might Just Be an Icelandic Rock
After a long time between languages, it’s time to go down to the shore.
And pick up magic rocks and hold them in. your hand.
And put them down.
And leave them there to talk to the sun in their nonhuman tongues.
And walk back up through the library of the birch forest.
And the lair of dragons.
Give one last glance to the lake.
And go back to the skáldverk in silence.
And begin again.
The Tangled Relationship of Humans and Ravens
Humans, it is commonly said, live on Earth and ravens in the air. Not so in Iceland. Look below.
Humans: Hjarðaból
See that? The humans have a nice farm with lots of light and air, although they walk about on the land like old rocks. The ravens, though, who fly through the air with the greatest of flashiness, have a home deep in a dark, opened crack of the earth, where they hunker down. See it there? If not, I’ve highlighted it below.
Ravens: Stekkalækur
Humans and ravens: the perfect pair. Just ask Oðin.
The Most Beautiful Thing About Hengifoss
Well, first off, Hengifoss is cool because to get there you have to walk at the top of this 80 metre high cliff, and you don’t see it, which is good.
And then you get to spend a couple hours, and finally you get to walk up the river.
You never reach the falls.
Distant views are good, though.
And a bit of dilly-dallying along the way.
And the sandstone, like, that’s cool, too.
And, well, this stuff:
Not to mention a bit of cooked seabed. Very shiny!
You’ll never get to the falls, though. Here, let me show you why:
Sinkholes! Worth a peek. All this ice is hollow like this. Tricky.
And not just that. No path to the left:
No path to the right:
The whole time, the falls are calling out with the sound of artillery going off as boulders are bonking down off the cliffs. You can’t get close to the cliffs or the water, but who cares.
You can just sit around waiting for the sun to get out from behind a cloud.
Definitely that. There is, you see, a mystery here, and I don’t just mean how gorgeous these falls really are, but, well, dragon blood:
And the best of all is you don’t get to the falls. That’s key. The cliff along the way plays a part in this. That’s it in shadow at the left of the image below. 
Here, maybe the following image will make it clear. The water doesn’t matter, except to focus your body and your eye. The mountain makes a space, and in that space water has no floor. It falls straight towards the centre of the Earth.
And you are in that space, falling with the water. You are in the centre of the Earth.
You can’t go further because you are as far as anyone can go. In the heart.
The Four-Directional Icelandic Cross
Following the Old Norse prototypes that long ago divided Iceland into the quadrants of a compass (Still used by the Icelandic Government’s tourism promotion board to label the country as West, North, East and, South Iceland [and don’t you dare travel around the country in the other direction; it only works poorly]), the Icelandic Cross is not divided into two axes, the vertical Heaven axis and the horizontal Earth axis, meeting at the heart, or Christ, but into four quadrants, blending the living and the dead with the action of the mind. It’s why Lazarus is so popular as a figure on Icelandic altars (Christ raised him from the dead, maggots and all), and why the Valþfjófstaðurkirkja looks like this, drawing its graveyard deep into thought.
The pre-Christian rowan trees of the graveyard are welcome as well.
A Farm in Iceland 
