cold | A Farm in Iceland

Here’s the deal. For over 1,000 years, that’s 40 generations or so, maybe more, or about 2.5% of the human experience on Earth,when you wanted a drink of water for 8 months of the year, this is where you got it: from within ice.

Out the Back Door of a Lost Croft on Stekkur

And ice was a power of negation from outside of the world. You had, in other words, to reach into the enemy, right outside of the human world, to survive. And you sent your kids out to get this water. From there. And they did it. And this was called independence; for almost all Icelanders, if you wanted children you had to accept a bargain of absolute poverty like this. There is no moral to this story. Still, when we look at Inspired by Iceland’s images of the country:

Well, just remember you’re looking at 40 generations of Icelandic children approaching the Frost Giants and stealing life. The theft goes on.

When I landed in Reykjavik three weeks ago, I found a map of Iceland made of stone and ice, frozen in the harbour. It was cold that day, with a strong wind. Now I am in the East Fjords and the wind came up again, and look what I found …

A Map of Iceland in Water and Ice

Still not perfect, but getting there.

Oh, and where am I sending this image from? Here…

All day I’ve been working on Gunnar’s book Inseln im Großen Meer, or Islands in the Wide Sea, which chronicled Gunnar’s trip to the Islands of the Atlantic and the Spanish Mediterranean in 1928. It is a beautiful book, with islands of light appearing out of the great dark sea, which is not just water but childhood and paradise, changing as the light and his mood changes, and always foreboding and dangerous, with the kind of awe usually reserved for God. Today, in East Iceland, though, all that water is more like this …