everything in the sky

Jackalope lives.

The Hub Of Reykjavik (by secretdark)

Hence
And
Hither
And
Thither

Autumn in Ásbyrgi (by secretdark)

Just another day at the office.

Portraits of shepherds (by secretdark)

“There aren’t any ants in Iceland, are there,” we say to the Ranger.
“…’ants’?” he says.
“So that’s a no.”
“What is ‘ants’?”
So we explain ants.
(He eventually remembers ants.)
(He wants a panther, he says. He’d let it roam the park and ride around with him in his huge truck. It would pad over the moss, its large soup-bowl paws leaving barely an impression, and maybe over time its colouring would change until its dark fur was dappled and grey, blending into the moss-covered rock around it - a moss Panther.
He’s never seen a panther in the flesh.)

I pitch my tent between a new couple and a volunteer with cerebral palsy (“Basically, the right-hand side of my brain is fucked.”). At night I hear talking from each side, two sets of low murmuring. The couple explain their days to one another, laugh a little, are happy. I’m envious of the intimacy and privacy they have - that they can share their private thoughts with one another. They are on a time-limit, each going their own way at the end of the project, but for now they have something. So they enjoy it.
The guy with cerebral palsy talks to himself - laughs and mutters as if conducting conversations with someone. He doesn’t do this when he’s around other people, just when he’s alone in his tent or in the bathroom. I remember reading once that a long time ago the human brain used to be wired differently - the lobes fused so that the right and left hand sides would communicate as if they were two separate objects, whole and entire. Instructions and conversations with yourself, or simply another part of you, all in your head, indistinguishable from a conversation with God. That’d be something.
A couple murmuring, fresh and new, and a guy who maybe, just maybe, talks to God.
I never build up the courage to eavesdrop on either.

The Icelandic government has a set up several councils and organisations to maintain linguistic purism and to prevent Icelanders from simply using English or Danish words instead of looking for Icelandic alternatives.
One result of this is that new Icelandic words are created and put on (amongst other things) milk cartons, alongside a cartoon explaining them, their meaning, and their etymology.
For some reason all the latest words on the milk cartons have been about relationships - ‘dump’, ‘sweetheart’ etc. For a while before I knew what the little cartoons were about I kinda thought that someone had simply forgotten about a sad cartoonist somewhere.

Notes from a month spent offline:

After days spent building steps and felling trees and hiking and digging, we eat huge meals. Our bodies become terribly efficient digesting-machines. So much so that one of us paused briefly at the end of his side of a particularly fierce debate to let forth with a long and vehement fart (as if to punctuate his argument.)
It was rich. Triumphant. Melodic.
It had a beginning, a middle, and an end.
It sounded like an old, old elephant that was
finally
finally
dying.

There is a volunteer who, instead of swearing, loudly exclaims “Monkeys!” when something bad happens to him. I like to believe he actually blames a specific group of monkeys for his problems.

“My first words were ‘bugger daddy’,” she tells me. “My family didn’t tell me until I was older. They’d always just told me it was ‘daddy.’”

While trying to get dressed in my small tent, I turn and squirm and, hulk-style, rip a pair of underwear clean in two.
The brief moment of incredible power is the highlight of my week.

There are names are Ingi and þyri, pronounced ‘Inky’ and ‘Theory.’ He is large, bald, and incredibly muscular. He teaches kindergarten. She is quiet and wears strange serapes. They treat us like their children, scolding us in thick Icelandic accents.
Inky and Theory.

I could listen to beautiful Icelandic girls tentatively pronounce ‘windows’ all day. (“We-ind-ohs.”) (I think it’s the ‘ohs’ I like the most.)

“He disappeared like birds die - no-one knew where he went.”

After months of sunshine, it finally starts to get dark at night, and I see a car with its headlights on again. It’s a jeep, and it growls and swerves over gravel, its eyes blazing like some terrible predator.

We spent time trying to prevent paths from becoming too wide or veering off where people have decided to wander off it.
Desire lines.
I spent a lot of my summer eliminating desire lines.

I woke up this morning when a baby wagtail tried to perch on my tent. It fell, sliding down the canvas. I spent today digging holes and had lunch by a large glacial lake. I’ll play some guitar in a little while and then I might cook some dinner. Something with fish, maybe, and rice, and a thick, white sauce.
I like my life.

“I pray for soft soil,” she says in her thick Italian accent.
“Huh?”
“Soft soil. At the camp site, for our tents. I pray for soft soil.”
That’s a nice prayer, I think.
Later she says that she says she has to go because she has places to be. She emphasises the ‘be’. I know it’s simply because the idiom’s not in her native language but I like the idea that there are places that require her to be there. Like she’s fufilling some kind of agreement with a place that requires simply her existence there.

Later that night the smaller one walked into our hut unannounced, took a long pull from a bottle of peach schnapps, and told us he was one of the ones who could see the Hidden People.
It’s been a good summer.

As volunteers for the Icelandic Conservation Agency, we move, week to week, between national parks and protected areas. Most of the time we live in tents but sometimes we live in small huts the rangers look after. When we do, we have things like coffee mugs and dinner plates and mattresses again, and we live lives of quiet, welcome domesticity.

I’ve been offline for two weeks, working out in the middle of nowhere.

Our bright orange waterproofs are made of thick rubber. They are only vaguely the shape of a man. I’d guess the seams were stitched by an industrial machine with a large needle. They smell like bouncy castles.

Someone wrote ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ in the ash that covers the back windshield of the truck. I like to think of it as our Bokonism. 

We stumbled across a Viking Rennaisance fair. One viking was smoking a Marlboro, another adjusting his hearing aid. They played the Macarena over the sound system. A tourist wandered by snapping photos wearing a t-shirt that said “Reykjavik Fucking City.”

There are always those people who believe that being a leader is being the guy who walks the fastest, talks the loudest, or is the last to put on sunscreen.

I turned 29 last week. I usually forget about my birthday right until it happens. It’s an odd feeling, realising you’re another year older - like feeling a gear slip in a mechanism of which you were only vaguely aware.

I saw an old couple eating ice-cream cones in a gas-station restaurant near Borganes. They ate them delicately, discussing the ice-creams together. They reminded me of tortoises eating lettuce.

There are golf courses everywhere here. It’s a very popular sport. Where once farmers bit deep into the cold ground, hoping to grow something, anything, to survive, men in plaid um and ah over which stick to use to hit a ball. (The wooden one, man. Always use the wooden one.)

The soil is either rocky and volcanic - hard and small - or like clay - slick and brown and rich and fertile. Steam rises from odd cracks in the ground. The wind howls and runs screaming around the little huts we stayed in like some terrible creature that had been turned loose. This country feels like a place that God hasn’t quite finished making yet.
We spent the last week building stone steps on the side of a mountain. We’d drive stakes into the ground and hit frozen soil a few feet down. We’d hit the stakes harder then, pushing them through, and from 6 feet away you could feel the force of each blow through your boots - like the land was resisting, or perhaps as if with each blow you were brushing up against some terrible power held in it.

“Are you happy?” said the Ranger, talking about some work we’d just finished.
“No.”
“Is okay,” he said, looking down at our wooden steps before peering out into the distance. “Is okay to be happy.”

During winter in the valley, the ice and snow push down on the rocks causing some of them to splinter or shatter depending on what they’re made of and how they were formed. Some explode into small pieces, other splinter out, others still crack perfectly in two. The ice and snow melt and the valley floor is left filled with beautiful patterns.
I spent a large portion of my day taking photos of rocks.