CHAPTER ONE 1 | The Way to Little Lava Two routes led to Little Lava. The longer one took most of an hour, circling wide through marshy pastureland and traversing a tongue of the lava field that bordered the farm. Now, because the tide was out, I could make a direct approach, straight across the mudflats: twenty minutes' walking. I tugged on a pair of rubber Wellington boots and slipped my arms through the straps of my pack. Beyond the gravelly spot where I'd parked the car, the ground was sodden; it trembled underfoot. Legs apart to keep my balance, I trod across the spongy turf, then splashed through a shallow pond. I found myself in a terrain studded with grass-covered hummocks ranging in size from soccer balls to sofa bolsters. Such hummocks are common throughout rural Iceland. They are called thufur . A thufa arises when water in the soil freezes: the ice, expanding, mounds the soft upward. I clambered over, stumbled between, and lurched through the field of thufur. Icelanders recognize a form of locomotion called thufnagangar , or "thufa-walking." It is said that a farmer come to town can be discerned, above and beyond his fusty suitcoat, by the manner in which he clambers, stumbles, and lurches over level pavement. I came to a teetering halt as, at my feet, a snipe flew up from the grassy crack between two thufur. Scape! Scape! Scape! it cried. It had a long needlelike bill, a russet back, and narrow wings that crooked halfway out their length--wings that whistled as the bird went off twisting and dodging a few feet above the marsh. I started walking again, headed for the house on its hill. On the map, the site was marked with an X and the name Litlahraun in parentheses. The X and the parentheses meant that the farm was an eydibyli , a deserted place. It would be home for me, my wife, and our son during the summer to come. In Icelandic, litla means "little"; hraun , pronounced a throaty "hroin," means "lava" or "lava field." Little Lava, we called it. It lay on the coast of Iceland fifty miles north of Reykjavik. It had been a farm for at least six centuries. The last residents had departed just after World War II when, like so many Icelanders, they moved to the city, abandoning the struggle of subsistence farming in favor of weekly paychecks, of electric lights, refrigerators, indoor plumbing, phones, roads--amenities that had never made it across that obstructive marsh. I had come to Little Lava for my own reasons, my own rewards: solitude, birds on the wing, the healing breath of the wind in my face, and the chance to take the days one at a time, the long bright days of the Northern summer. The house stood on a green knoll like a big thufa. The building was small and drab, with unpainted concrete walls. Beyond it stretched a plain of dark lava. To the west lay a gray line: the bay. The house looked like a block of lava tumbled away from the flow, or a box of no particular value washed ashore and stranded by the tide. It was late May, on the cusp between spring and summer. I had flown to Iceland two weeks ahead of my wife, Nancy, and our son, William. In Reykjavik I had stayed with our friend Thordur, an adept and cosmopolitan fellow in his thirties who makes his living selling long underwear that he imports from Sweden. Thordur lived with his mother and father in their comfortable modern house in a suburb of Reykjavik called Seltjarnarnes. Icelanders tend toward the literal in their naming of places. Seltjarnarnes means "Seal Pond Peninsula"; Reykjavik is "Smoky Bay," in reference to the steam that early settlers saw rising from the volcanic earth. At Thordur's parents' house I slept in the guest room, whose windows looked out on Faxafloi Bay. Across the bay, some sixty miles distant, stood the long chain of mountain peaks that formed the spine of Snaeffellsnes, "Snow Mountain Peninsula." Little Lava lay where Snaeffellsnes attached to the mainland of western Iceland. In Reykjavik Thordur shepherded me around the city, helping me obtain the government documents that I needed, open a bank account, and buy a car. I had wanted to go to Little Lava as soon as possible. I filled my backpack with my clothes and some food. I put the pack in the car, along with my collapsible kayak. I drove out of town headed north. A hundred squelching steps after scaring up the snipe, I roused a pair of more formidable birds: Arctic skuas, about the size of crows, with charcoal backs and pale gray bellies. They came flapping up from the boggy ground and, without hesitating, flew at me. They pumped their long wings. Their webbed feet dangled. Kee-yow! Kee-yow! they screamed. I ducked as one of them darted at my face--its wings sounded like a bedsheet ripped in half above my head. Clearly, the skuas had a nest nearby, but I wasn't about to go looking for it, not with those sooty demons hectoring me. I kept on walking, dodging thufur and ducking skuas. After a while the birds quit harassing me; they flew back and landed on a rock near the car. We would be passing this way often on our travels to and from Little Lava, and I was glad that these were Arctic skuas and not great skuas. The great skua is a dun-colored brute twice the size of the Arctic skua. Defending its nest, a great skua will glide in silently from behind and club you in the head with its beak or talons. The blow, I'd been told, could knock a man senseless. The land shelved off about four feet where the marsh met the tide flats. A notch led down to the sand. The exposed boggy banks were of peat, a compressed coffee-colored mass dripping with water and flecked with blackened twigs and rootlets. Peat bogs cover a tenth of Iceland, about half the island's vegetated area. In the past, people burned peat for cooking and to heat their homes. More recently, they have gone about trenching these wetlands, draining them to make pastures and hayfields at the expense of the bog-dwelling birds. With my first steps onto the flats I sank ankle-deep in mud. Farther out, the greater proportion of sand gave a firmer footing. Twice a day, the tide came and filled the flats. Twice a day, the sea cut off Little Lava from easy access. Now, with the tide out, freshwater stream channels veined the mud-and-sand expanse. In a burst of orange legs and brown wings, a redshank took to the air, shrieking. Gulls drifted off with more insouciance at my approach. Above the narrow peninsula extending south from Little Lava, a raven flapped and sailed, flapped and sailed. The clouds knit themselves together, and the wind picked up. The air was chill. I was glad to be wearing a thick wool sweater beneath my parka. Raindrops stung my face. Putting up my hood, I trudged on. My heart was grieving; my life was full of pain. At times the pain would subside, but it was always there, always waiting, ready to close in again like the rain on this typically fickle Icelandic day. Nine months earlier, my mother had died. She was seventy-three years old. She had driven home from a birthday party for her three-year-old grandchild, my brother's daughter. The police believed she had come into her house and surprised a burglar. He picked up a kitchen knife. He backed her into a bedroom. He kept on stabbing until she was dead. My own house is twenty miles from my mother's house, in central Pennsylvania, and I was the one who found her. Since that day, I had lived with grief, and fear, and hatred for one who could commit such an act: the police had arrested a man within a few days of the killing, a man I knew but slightly, a man who must have been the antithesis of the gentle, wise woman I had loved all my life. Not long before she died, I told Mom we would be spending the following summer in Iceland. We were sitting at her dining-room table. From the tree-lined street, a breeze blew in through the open windows. William sat on the floor in the living room, playing with some painted wooden blocks that I had played with when I was a boy; Mom had been watching him while I ran some errands in town. "You'll be there all summer?" She gave me an inquiring look as she set down her red pen. She'd been editing a technical paper for an engineering professor at Penn State University, the school where my father had taught until a few years before his death. For as long as I could remember, Mom had done freelance editing, often for students and faculty for whom English was a second language. I nodded. "Late May through August. We'll be staying in an abandoned farmhouse. Some friends of Nancy's own it. No electricity or phone. It's on the coast, and you get there by walking across a marsh at low tide." "Sounds like your kind of place," Mom said. Mine, and also my wife's. It was Nancy who had taken us to Iceland in the first place. While doing graduate work at the university, she had become fascinated by the Icelandic sagas, the heroic stories of the land's early settlers written down during the Middle Ages. Together we had visited Iceland three times: once before Will was born, once with him when he was an infant, and once when Mom had taken care of him in our absence. And twice Nancy had gone there on her own, to take guided horseback tours into the deserted volcanic interior and to study the Icelandic language. On those two visits, friends had taken her to Little Lava. Nancy was enthralled by the culture and the literature of Iceland. I had come to appreciate the country for its wildness, its teeming birdlife, the purity of its air and water, and the grand views opening across the windswept land. Mom asked me some questions about the house at Little Lava. What kind of shape was it in? Would it keep us warm and dry? I didn't know much about the old farm, having only seen pictures that Nancy had taken. "It'll be a lot better than a tent," I joked. Could we be contacted in case of an emergency? I assured her that, one way or another, a message could be gotten to us. "What if one of you gets hurt or sick?" I shrugged; I hadn't figured that out yet. Thordur had advised a cellular phone, but I would not consider one. "It's not like the middle of Alaska," I said. "There's a farm about a mile from the house." She looked over at Will, still playing with the blocks, building a small house of his own on the floor. "Do you think he'll like it?" I shrugged again. I was not at all sure that he would. She looked at me with level green eyes. "I'll miss you." I would miss her, too. I was her firstborn. We had always been close, and we had become even closer after my father died, of a heart attack, on Christmas Day in 1986. Memories of that day can still cut me to the core. It was before Will had been born. Nancy and I had gone over to my parents' house for Christmas dinner. When we got there, no one was home, although the lights on the tree were turned on; then the phone rang. By the end of the day, we three were sitting together in the living room--Mom, Nancy, and me. We were numb. I remember that we opened presents, fumbling with the wrapping paper; I guess it was a way of distracting ourselves. We were in shock. My dad was suddenly, irrevocably gone. He had been with us, full of life, just a day ago. Now we would never see him again. What could be more bitter, what could be sadder, than to lose a parent, just like that, on Christmas? I had found out: to lose a parent through murder. It was after Dad died that I came to see how much my mother loved her husband, how deeply his death had hurt her. Nine years had passed, and Mom still mourned him; she would be in mourning, I understood, for the rest of her life. But she also loved life. Life had not ended for her with my father's death. Slowly she embraced an independence that she had never before wanted or needed. [CHAPTER ONE CONTINUES ...] Copyright © 1998 Charles Fergus. All rights reserved.
