I won’t even go into what delayed me. If you know your life and its setbacks, you know mine. Only the details are different. The plot is the same. sooo…..I will continue, or maybe begin.
I went to Iceland for Christmas in 1994. I had taken the Ring Road around the whole island the year before and experienced being wide awake all night all summer. No wonder they read so much. Every night as our exclusive little tour bus drew up to our home for the night I would canvass my fellow travellers for a book to read, to be met by protests. “You just got one last night. “
“That was last night. I need another one tonight. “ A book a night, because I was wide awake, unable to sleep in the twilight zone that passed for night, about two or three in the morning. I loved it.
On the other hand when we—my first cousin Terry, his wife Lorna , and I—came the next year, we had a mid-day brunch with other cousins who lived there, staying longer than expected while I did the dishes (I couldn’t speak Icelandic so I had to do something). We left the house about noon just as the sun was rising, and went to visit another cousin to have coffee overlooking the ocean as the sun was sitting low, about 1:30 p.m. (Actually there are about 4 hours of so-called day light in Reykjavik on the shortest day.)
I want to say it was Dickensian. Of course it wasn’t. But at eight in the morning when I went finish my Christmas shopping , there was a small kerosene lamp, like a small bomb with a single glowing wick, set at the door in front of every open shop. Reykjavik is a city of light in a country of light—electric, neon, ubiquitous and dazzling. I went because I wanted to be there on the shortest day of the year. And I wanted to write another book. (Letters to Icelanders: Exploring the Norther Soul, Key Porter Books, 1995)
I’ve already said it was dark. It was also cold. Unprecedented. Reykjavik, as you no doubt know, is on the end of the Gulf Stream and quite mild, with a moderate temperature range neither very high nor very low. The city of Akureyri, too, is one of the warmest areas in Iceland although it is only 62 miles from the Arctic Circle. Not that year. On Christmas Eve it was 32 below, Fahrenheit. We went swimming.
Three pools—outdoor, of course—with the water set at different temperatures, kept us comfortable, The first pool, at about 60 degrees, gave us the first drop after a hot shower indoors; the swimming pool at 70 degrees was then comfortable for swimming, and the third pool at 40 (or 50?) prepared us for reality. You know at home you are warned not to run around a pool for fear you might slip and fall. No fear there. You had to run to keep your feet from freezing to the concrete!
I exaggerate, and my memory may not be accurate about the temperatures. It may have been subsumed in the larger memory of the day: I visited a sod house on that day, the shortest day of the year. It was closed, of course, but my cousins knew the curator and she let us in for a special visit. It was cold. We had no livestock heating a room next to the baþstofa, and no warm capa pie body in bed. Thank goodness I didn’t have to sleep there. As it was I had cramps from the cold for the rest of the evening.
I won’t go into Christmas Eve: ptarmigan with skinned grapes (I skinned them until I understood that my hostess wanted me to stem the grapes not skin them) with carermalized potatoes; church (for everyone in the city, I guess); and the presents. Christmas Day was spent visiting friends, reading a book and eating chocolates. That’s a condensation of my Christmas in Iceland. Sorry it took so long.