scribbles

I hitch-hiked from Selfoss to Akureyri at the end of last month and I will tell you who I met.

In the first car there was a lady and her elderly mother. A massive 4×4 had just darted past me like a giant mechanized hornet, and this humble shambling little red car had stopped for me, right there in front of the farm where I had just spent the last two months. The lady’s English was so broken that I doubt it has ever been whole, so it was a bit difficult to explain to her I only needed a lift to road 1, and then I would turn left, left ma’am, left towards Vik. I sat on the backseat with a big bag full of swimming things, and they left me at the crossroad.

In the second car there was a local man who worked for a company which owned a branch in Nice, southern France, and had been there several times. He was going to a factory somewhere and left me in a petrol station.

In the third car I was shivering with cold. I had just waited over an hour in the wind and rain for some kind soul to take pity on me. The sky-high advertising tower in front of me was flashing bed and breakfast addresses, and digits, 7°C, 11:20, 7°C, 12:05, 7°C. The biggest jeep I’ve ever been in had driven past, slowed slowly, and had come to a halt so far off that I thought they had stopped for another reason, but a guy jumped and walked towards me. It happened that I was picked up by three Chinese lads, students in Liverpool and on holidays in Iceland. They were very nice and friendly, and I showed them the beach in Dyrholaey. They let me off at the petrol station in Vik, heartily shook my hand, and I went in to have a petrol station coffee to shake off the cold.

In the fourth car I was happy. Despite the nearly non-existent traffic going eastwards, I didn’t have to wait long. A Dutch/American couple stopped to have me on. She had rainbow hair. He had a curly black beard and expressed himself with beautiful eloquence. They were on the same mission as me; go as far East as possible. We stopped several times for taking photographs, in Jokulsarlon, by the sea, and in a village restaurant we had cauliflower soup and buttered bread, debating medieval costumes and weaponry. It was getting dark by then and we all opted for spending the night in the next guesthouse. We made black coffee in the kitchen using a tissue instead of a filter, because we had no filter, then the power went off; someone came to fix the problem despite the late hour, and kicked us out of the house to show us the northern lights. They were amazingly beautiful, danced all over the skies for hours while we stood outside freezing. I don’t know if they carry wishes as well as shooting stars, but I made a wish.

In the fifth car I stayed for five hours. A man in his fifties picked me from the guesthouse and drove me all the way to Egilsstadir. He was alone and anxious for someone to talk to during his trip, even though he spent around half of it speaking on the phone. He occupied some sort of important position in the farming business, liked to hunt, has six children, the second youngest of which can play the piano and sing and is currently shooting a film where she was cast as a popular Swedish singer whose name I’m not sure I recognized. He taught me to count to one hundred in Icelandic, showed me Hofn then Diupivogur, drove up a fabulous mountain road, congratulated me on having such a simple name, and I seem to recall he asked me a lot of questions and occasionally waited for an answer. There were a lot of reindeers on the way. One was wearing a blue bow and I wondered who I would offer a reindeer to.

In the sixth car I was driven down to ferry-port-village Seydisfjordur by two young Danish mafiosi en route for their homeland. I have very little to say about them. They drove with their hoods on and the music was crass and they asked if I was taking the ferry. They let me go in front of the pale blue church.

In the seventh car I was driven back up to Egilsstadir. The car was actually a pick-up truck of sorts and I think the man was an electrician, though it was difficult to say since he spoke no English and the drive was short. But he looked kind, and had a lovely white beard.

In the eighth car I met a sunny young woman, who made a little bit of small talk, then picked up her cell phone and made a call. When she was finished she announced that her boyfriend, who was driving a truck trailing hayballs and who happened to be doing so just in front of us, would drive me to Myvatn. And so she overtook him and I swapped the car for a truck.

In the ninth car, which was a truck as already mentioned, I fell asleep. The sun was beating down on us and though it was very cold outside, behind the glass, I dozed off with the heat. We crossed the empty wasteland of Iceland chatting amiably, especially after I had had the nap already mentioned too. He asked me in which farm I had worked before, and in which farm I was going to work, the name of which I had forgotten. But I remembered my hosts’ names, and told him, then he made a call to a friend, who, allegedly, knows everyone everywhere in Iceland; then he was able to tell me where I was headed. That’s how you realize what it implies when you read that Iceland is a small island, with only three hundred thousand folks on it.

In the tenth car I just drummed my fingers to the beat thumping out of the radio. The lady was going to town, she was in a hurry, she was in a great hurry, she was chewing gum in a hurry, smoking in a hurry, driving in a hurry, way above speed limits. As a result I reached Akureyri very early on.

The eleventh car was Ingo’s car. He was smoking and drinking coke and he wasn’t in a hurry. He drove me to his farm in the valley. My new home.

I get out of bed at 7:30 on a Friday and the rain beats my window senseless. The Suzuki violin method disc 1 is playing in the living room and the notes are seeping in from under my door. I’m so hungry I could eat a pony.

Sunna goes to school and Dorothée goes to work and Kjartan has been away in Reykjavik since yesterday afternoon. I have some muesli then bake the cinnamon and raisin buns. Jan comes in when they’re almost ready. It smells like cardamom, he bends his narrow frame to peer in the oven. It won’t be done and cool in time for breakfast. I wrap them in a tea towel and put them in the bread drawer. This is where we hide cakes, as Jan says, the darkest shadow is under the spotlight.

In the stables we come up with a new  feeding plan, as we seem to do every weekend. Maybe a little bit less food and three times a day? What’s left overnight seems to rot, literally, overnight as well. The hayballs are so warm inside that they mist up the place. The chickens swap me five eggs for a pan full of potato skins, the horses try to eat my jumper, Skuggi the dog tries to grab an egg. I don’t have enough eyes for this job.

Back home Kirsten, who is staying with us for a few days, has got up and is having breakfast. We’re off to bottle up some syrup in the rhubarb house. Dandelion syrup. I made it the other day. It takes so much time to bring it to boil, let it simmer, sieve it and bring it to boil again and let it simmer again, that meanwhile bacteria can evolve into dinosaurs and get wiped out by a giant asteroid. Twice. Then we have 200 pots to fill and our hands fill with blisters, so much so that we nickname ourselves Blister Brigade. Or Blister Bastards. Whatever. Kirsten and me play music together, too. I’m on the fiddle. She’s on the guitar. You should hear us play the Skye Boat Song. Last time we nearly got one note right.

The three of us have lunch, Jan makes bread, we play foot ball with hayballs then Kjartan comes back in time to lend us the car. We go to Skalholt church again for a concert. A gentleman sings some Bach to us for an hour and I drift in and out of the brightly coloured squares of the glass windows. There is no clapping when the show is over.

Ola and Pawel live in the next village so we decide to pay them a visit. We wake them up, at 4pm, but they’ve been at work in the morning. They offer us coffee then we all go to the wild hot pot.

Last Sunday I was alone in the wild hot pot with Jan, we had just escaped a horse competition for an hour or so, where we had been freezing our toes off watching Sunna trot around. It had been nice to look at, but cold, so cold. We begged the car off Dorothée then sped to the hot pot. A group was just leaving. The ground was thickly covered with snow, the grass hanging over the pot was sewn with ice pearls. It was like a dream. Except that in dreams people are themselves, but not quite, and places are familiar, but not true. You know.

It got too dark so we left. It was snowing again. We went home, had dinner, and converged in Kirsten’s Blue Castle to watch the end of Chaplin film Modern Times, which we had failed to watch in its entirety the night before. Then we spent hours chatting and laughing and it was good, I was so happy to be sitting in between them two, on top of a mattress and under a down duvet,  with tales of gingermen slaughter, infantile diseases and very out of date food.

It’s Saturday night at Löngamyri and Dorothée leaves in a fancy shirt and bright red lipstick. Kjartan and Sunna take chairs in the corridor to watch her favourite TV programme from his laptop. Tonight we will know who will represent Iceland at the next Eurovision contest, and Sunna has a favourite – a lady she knows, who sings and plays the violin.
Dinner table cleared up, newly returned from Reykjavik Jan asks me what about this lemon pie I promised.
I promised it some days ago when, one evening, Dorothée came back from shopping with a lemon for me (I had asked) and Jan had gone all sulky. If she has a lemon I want a lemon too, he whined, and so the next day he received a beautiful lemon with a blue ribbon tied around it. Jan was glad but skeptical – what to do with a lemon? I use lemons for hot lemons first thing every morning, but he’s not so keen, so I said, give me your lemon, and he said no, if you have two lemons then I want two lemons too! So I said, give me your lemon and I‘ll make a lemon pie that you can eat.
It’s still Saturday night and on the Eurovision made in Iceland soundtrack I’m making the lemon pie. I make a floury mess on the table and (not lifting a finger to help me) Jan gasp as I use a wet cloth to clean up. It will just go in the table cloth! No it will go where I want it to go. It’s well-behaved flour.
I have to go to the rhubarb house to weigh sugar because there’s no scale in the kitchen and when I come back, Kjartan and Sunna are still watching the contest and Jan has begun knitting again. He knits gloves for himself. He’s a complete beginner to knitting but he’s doing grandly fine. Slowly he knits, looking so homely shabby with his faded grey corduroy trousers and dusty black jumper, copper hair poking up over his head, bowed in concentration. He has to stop to talk, or to get me the rolling pin. I look everywhere for it, but he finds it in the first cupboard he opens, and crowns himself kitchen king before sitting down again, and oh I praise him again to find a pie dish, great kitchen king will you please help me find a pie dish. As he fails and I spot pie dishes on the very top shelf, I tell him he’s a useless tall person and get his chair to reach them.
I bake the crust and make the lemon filling and Sunna calls me, Eva come and see, Eva, Evaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, so I peek round the corner at the laptop screen. It all looks like plastic people mimicking tasteless music to me.
I’m finishing the lemon filling and Jan asks if he can make the snow. I say sure. ‘Snow’ means beaten egg whites in French and Czech too, as we found out on the day he was making a bread pudding. That day I had hand-whipped the snow but on Saturday night Jan triumphantly finds the electric beater (lazy man) and whizzes up the egg whites with glorious chuckles. He stops, says, is it enough, and it’s not, so he sighs, whizzes again. Such hard work.
Lemon pie goes in the oven, Sunna’s favourite wins the show, lemon pie comes out of the oven, Jan knits as much as he can, lemon pie cools down, Jan jumps and claps, lemon pie gets eaten. Score.
On Sunday morning we go to church. Kjartan drives us there and as we arrive, the sunlight floods the church in holy rays from the sinful clouds. The bells ring and we walk in. For an hour I listen and watch (I speak around ten words of Icelandic) and think about how churches really are upturned boats and how we could be under the sea right then, with octopus stuck to the glass windows and the sun is actually floodlight from a nearby submarine. My ears buzzed from the seafloor pressure. I quietly recited the universal prayer in French when time came, though the only God I think worth celebrating is the sun and the sun is now submarine floodlight and I’m a bit confused about things.
On the drive Jan gives me 2500 ISK he owed me because I paid for the petrol when we took the car to Vik, actually he owes me 2501 ISK because he tried to score 5000 ISK at the pump but missed it by 2 ISK, and I should tease him about it. Kjartan holds out his hand as well, hoping the money distribution includes him too. I tell him he’s chasing a dream, because Jan pays me for looking so nice. Kjartan wonders if I’d look nicer for 5000 ISK a week. Maybe, maybe I would. Probably I wouldn’t, though. I’d just do what any sensible girl does, buy chocolate with the extra money.