Circling the Midnight Sun Read online

  Eager to touch the Arctic Circle in Iceland, I headed north toward the island of Grímsey, the only part of Iceland that reaches my target latitude of 66°33’N. As I travelled clockwise around the main island, the road was good, mostly an all-weather two-lane with traffic that became increasingly sparse as the day went on. Horses were everywhere. They were not wild, but they seemed to have the run of the place. In shadowed valleys I saw groups of recreational riders, some surrounded by dozens of riderless horses, sharing the common pasture; they seemed to have joined these posses just for fun. Having left Reykjavik in mid-morning, by early evening I was in a guest house in Dalvík, with a cold Viking beer in hand, watching the sun swoop past the northern horizon.

  Early the following morning, I walked to the harbour to board the Samskip Saefari, a deep-hulled little stump of a ferry that looked ready for big seas, sitting quietly at the wharf. On that August day, the sky was clear and the weather report was good, but a couple of rough-looking deckhands still took the precaution of chaining down a tandem truck of asphalt that more or less filled the available automobile space on the vessel. There were a couple of cars tucked in under the passenger cabin on the deck above. And besides an assortment of mail and parcels that had come aboard in sacks for stowage in the purser’s area, the only other cargo appeared to be a couple of tourists and a shrink-wrapped pallet of beer and liquor.

  After a couple of hours at sea with the white-tipped peaks of the main island falling behind, Grímsey appeared, hardly bigger than the image on my map, a tiny island with a runway running up the middle like a zipper. Walking up the hill from the harbour and along Runway 36 (so called because it runs exactly north, 360° like the arrow of a compass) toward the Básar Guesthouse, located right on 66°33’N—the Heimskautsbaugur (Arctic Circle in Icelandic)—I ran the gauntlet of thousands of cranky and very territorial Arctic terns that seemed personally aggrieved that I had happened along. By the time the Arctic Circle monument came into view, I’d had my toque tweaked off twice, I was spattered with tern shit, and I’d had to resort to putting a stick into the collar of my windbreaker to deter these persistent, if beautiful, dive-bombing representatives of the Grímsey welcome committee.

  The monument was a plain metal three-step stile over what looked like a piece of thirty-centimetre stainless steel oil pipe, the kind you would find in a refinery in Deadhorse, Alaska, Khanty-Mansiysk in northern Russia, or Norman Wells in the valley of Canada’s fabled Mackenzie River, except that it was in the middle of a tundra golf course (one of two right on the Arctic Circle; the other is in Fort Yukon, Alaska). It was as if the designer of this unusual marker were asking the visitor to imagine the Arctic Circle as a circumpolar oil pipeline. Only 6 percent of the earth’s surface is north of this line, but the industry estimated that this small zone of land, ice, and sea contained as much as a quarter of the world’s undiscovered but recoverable oil and gas. The Grímsey monument’s pipeline motif might have been closer to the heart of the matter than it first appeared.

  I jumped up on one end of the pipe and, with my arms held out for balance, walked its length, imagining that if I continued tiptoeing along the line for 17,662 kilometres, I’d be back to where I started. Dismounting, I dug out my GPS unit and decided to “walk the line” from the beaches on the west side of the island to the ninety-metre cliffs on the east side of the island, a distance of maybe a kilometre and a half.

  Convinced that no one was looking, I imagined myself balancing on the actual line, walking for the first few hundred metres with my arms out. The view brought horizons of infinite possibility. The sameness of undifferentiated smoky blue sky over smoky blue sea was contrasted by the richness of every tundra green imaginable and the chorus, near and far, of birds. The cry of the terns. The deliberately slow, slurred chu-weet whistles of the plovers. The bickering of razorbills and kittiwakes that ebbed and flowed over the beeline whirs of puffins, busily defying gravity on their travels between the water and their burrows along the cliff edge.

  Then there came a familiar hoarse croak. It took a minute or two to locate the source, but eventually I spied two ravens sitting in the sunshine at the top of the cliffs that dropped down into the sea on Grímsey’s eastern shore. If I were a raven, I’d hang out there as well, given the view, not to mention the bounty of eggs, chicks, and birds of every size and description on the menu.

  Later, in one of the clutch of small houses clustered around the harbour, Ingólfur Bjarni, a gangly teen with a workingman’s hands, invited me in to have a look at his family’s collection of stuffed birds, which included some exotic migrants blown onto the island on the shifting North Atlantic winds. I mentioned having seen the two ravens on the island’s eastern headland. “Yes,” he said, “there are always just two ravens on the island,” as if that were something everyone should know. “That is how it has been for nine hundred years. If one dies, the other goes to the mainland to find another. Or if a third tries to settle on the island, the other two chase it away. But always just two.”

  I had come to Grímsey to touch the Arctic Circle in Iceland but also to fish with Ingólfur’s dad, Svafar Gylfasson, and Svafar’s equally slim and handsome twin brother, Bjarni, in their fourteenmetre fishing vessel called the Nunni. This is what Icelanders have been doing since Ingólfr Arnarson, founder of the first permanent settlement here, arrived in the year 874. We set sail at four in the morning and pulled nets until mid-afternoon, filling the hold with stout wide-mouthed North Atlantic cod, bright orange karfi, silver saith, and a mixture of bycatch: skata (grey skate) and skarkoli (plaice). And I imagine that they had always done the job with the same devilish humour that caused Svafar’s hired hands, Adam and Arni, to toss a vicious toothed catfish in my direction to see how far I might jump to avoid being bitten.

  Like their Norse forebears, they fished with eleven trossa barriers, each consisting of ten thirty-metre gillnets tied together, with anchors and marker buoys on either end. Each time a trossa was pulled and reset, its placement was marked on the map so that when the boats went out—year-round—in darkness or in fog, they knew exactly where to look. Each net was pulled at least once every twenty-four hours to ensure that the catch didn’t spoil in the water.

  Between nets, the lads chatted, ate homemade cake, drank coffee, and smoked as the Nunni chugged its way to the next location, all within view of Grímsey. There was an onboard Internet connection and a laptop computer on the bridge that they used to report an estimate of their catch to the Icelandic Department of Fisheries daily, so that the taxman might keep track of how things were going. Like young people all over the world, Adam checked his Facebook page when the captain was below. There were no factory trawlers here, or near here. Svafar and his crew animated the sagas of the present day. Had global warming changed much in their lives? Not really. The fish might be a bit bigger, said Svafar, and they seemed to grow better in warmer water. What wasn’t to like about that?

  Back in the harbour each day by mid-afternoon, they weighed the catch as it was unloaded and hauled away on tractor-drawn wagons to be processed. The cod would be split and salted by another arm of the family business operating just off the Grímsey wharf, and the rest of the catch, sold fresh on the Internet before we even reached port, would be iced and packed in plastic shipping tubs that left town three times a week, stacked four high on the Saefari and trumping cars and other cargo for deck space. After a two-part brine-and-rock-salt curing process, the salted fish left the island, as less time-sensitive cargo, for shipment by air to grocery wholesalers in Spain and Portugal, who bought every delicious white flake that Grímsey could send.

  One afternoon, after the Nunni’s hold had been emptied, the decks rinsed clean with sea water, and the hired help sent home, Safar asked if I’d like to join the family in checking herring nets set at various locations around the island. The herring, he told me, ran in schools along the base of the island’s cliffs, close in to shore. The islanders did eat them, pickled, fried, or boiled, but herr
ing was more of a staple food for their sheep. Icelandic sheep, the ones that produce the famous Icelandic wool, eat fish for protein in addition to forage from the Arctic heath.

  The wheelhouse was crowded with more bodies than it saw most days. There was Svafar’s father, who was still working another boat in the family fleet; Svafar’s wife, Unnur, who ran Krían, the only restaurant on the island; and his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Gyda, who served at Krían when she was not at school on the mainland. Rounding out the group were Bjarni and his wife. It was a family outing, except for Ingólfur, who was working in the family’s fish plant to ice and process the day’s catch.

  The herring catch was very poor; in fact, the only things in the nets beside seaweed were diving seabirds that had tried to swim through. But as the Nunni circled past the iconic yellow lighthouse on the bluffs of southern Grímsey, a cry from the deck drew everyone’s attention to a pod of dolphins surfacing off the starboard bow. Svafar tugged my arm as he spun the wheel around. For a minute, it looked as if this fishing trip would shift into marine mammal sightseeing.

  Hanging over the bow railings, the women pointed and called back to Svafar at the helm, to let him know where the dolphins were. Bjarni retrieved a pump shotgun out of a locker on the back wall of the wheelhouse, and he too headed out on the deck. Everything was happening so quickly. Momentarily, the pod disappeared. But then, after a few tense moments, it reappeared portside, farther away. The ladies cajoled the captain. Gyda was on her cellphone, calling friends with a high-speed inflatable to join the hunt.

  In time, the Nunni circled and circled again and eventually synchronized with the sleek grey mammals. The pod glided alongside, as if to ride the bow wave of the boat. Suddenly there was a percussive thud.

  At first, everyone thought Bjarni had missed, although that seemed difficult to believe, given that the animal was no more than a few metres away. But in time, it was clear that one of the pod was losing the ability to dive for any length of time. Blood streamed into the water from its back.

  Aware that there was a chance the animal might die and sink, the women anxiously yelled directions from the foredeck back through the open wheelhouse windows, imploring Svafar to manoeuvre the boat close to the dying dolphin so that someone might get a gaff to grab it and pull it into the boat.

  As the animal slowed in the water and tried to draw breath, its tail began to sink, and the intensity of the moment caught me totally by surprise. With the shrill voices fading momentarily into the background of engine noise and the movement of people within the vessel, I stood dumbfounded, looking at that beguiling “smile” of the dying dolphin’s turned-up mouth as it looked up at the boat. The only other place I’d seen that face was on television as a kid, watching Flipper, the family-friendly and apparently so intelligent star of that long-running 1960s series. But suddenly Flipper was meat, the catch of the day.

  “Come on, come on,” the ladies cried, as Svafar manoeuvred the boat. “Quickly, quickly.”

  But to no avail. With everyone looking on from just out of reach because the big fishing boat could not get close enough, quickly enough, the dolphin broke the surface with its beak one last time, and slowly disappeared from view.

  The women’s shoulders dropped and their arms fell to their sides. Unnur, turning to look at the Canadian visitor, must have seen something on my face that hinted at the emotional intensity of what was going on inside. “Dolphin is one of the absolute favourite meats for the table,” she said. “It’s so disappointing to know that we came this close to filling the freezer with dolphin meat for the next few months. I hope you understand.”

  That evening, at Krían, Svafar exchanged his captain’s gear for an apron and bussed tables. The place was full of British tourists who had come for the birds and to touch the Arctic Circle. As well, tables by the window were occupied by a boisterous shoal of fishermen from the Icelandic mainland who had moved north for the summer to work from Grímsey harbour.

  Svafar drifted over and asked if I would like to try some dolphin. “There’s a bit left in the freezer,” he told me. The plate arrived with another ice-cold Thule beer. I closed my eyes to try to blot out the image of pan-seared Flipper, even if in my head I knew that what I was really struggling with was the clinical separation of life and death and the sanitization of my own carnivorous nature. The meat was dark, and rich and tender. The experience was more than a little surreal.

  The following day, sitting at a concrete chess table in a little park overlooking the harbour where Grímsey youth were swimming and pulling each other around in a Zodiac, I saw the sail of a sleek sloop-rigged boat appear around the south coast of the island. It was a vessel of some size. As it approached, I could see an impressive graphic of a familiar big white form and, along the waterline, “Polar Bear” in large blue letters.

  Later, during a quick tour of the Web from the comfort of another table in Krían, I learned that this was one of two vessels operated by a high-end Arctic tour company, en route from Britain to Greenland. As the crew lowered the sail to prepare to motor into Grímsey harbour, patrons lined up on deck in their parkas. In truth, it can be brutally cold at sea, even at more southerly latitudes. But the image of the bear and the parkas juxtaposed with that of Grímsey kids in bathing suits made me laugh at the terra nullius (meaning “land belonging to no one”) expectations we southerners insisted on bringing north, before the people who live there gently showed us what was really going on.

  Back on the Icelandic mainland, driving south from Dalvík to Reykjavik felt anticlimactic after Grímsey. But in the afternoon light, the iridescent glow of a valley of new-mown hay suspended between braided meltwater brooks fed by high alpine drifts pushed dolphins, ravens, and anything but the immediate presence of the place completely out of mind.

  As I settled in for the five-hour drive to Reykjavik, the rhythm of the road polished the sights and sensations of Grímsey. A golf course! A polar bear on a twelve-tonne keel. A family that fished every day of the year on open ocean. No ice. Climate change, at least in the short term, was helping rather than hindering the day-to-day doings of a contented lot of seafaring folk. Ten thousand birds for every human on the island. “Air fishing” with big nets for puffins that ended up served with ribsgel (redcurrant) sauce on the Krían table. Terns that migrated seventy to eighty thousand kilometres each year, Arctic to Antarctic and back, and still had energy to fuss with strangers who dared to enter their personal space. And Flipper.

  Interestingly, although Iceland was the last Arctic land to be settled or occupied, it holds the oldest written texts in the circumpolar world. As I approached Reykjavik to see them, I wound down past Mount Esja and around the bay to a guest house near the university. The following morning I parked by the big brand new glass honeycomb of the harpa concert hall. With map in hand, I found my way to the National Centre for Cultural Heritage, known as the Culture House, on a hill overlooking the Reykjavik harbour. It is here that some of these medieval texts, the Eddas and the Sagas, are kept and interpreted. Written in runic letters on animal parchments with vegetable inks, these documents were a literary phenomenon in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but they reported on activities and explorations reaching back to the tenth and eleventh centuries, essentially the first written texts of human experience in the circumpolar world, another reason to begin my journey in Iceland.

  After the brightness of the summer sun on the white plaster walls of the Culture House, it took some time for my eyes to adjust to the subdued indoor lighting. The Sagas area was even more dimly lit than the vestibule. But slowly, through text and imagery in backlit panels that gave a stained-glass-cathedral effect to the space, the place came alive. I wandered among busts, sculptures, and other artifacts placed on plinths and pedestals in the room full of ancient stories about the birth of Iceland, its Viking exploration roots, and its fierce allegiance to democracy. But after a while, having appreciated that what was on offer here were very cleverly and effectively w
rought reproductions of the actual documents and the original texts, my initial enthusiasm was replaced by disappointment and thoughts of moving on.

  Looking for the way out, I stepped through a darkened portal with the red glow of an exit sign above the door. It turned out that this was more of an entrance than an exit. This was the inner sanctum. Here, in even lower light, smooth surfaces of sealed glass cases reflected the faces of fellow visitors bowing to behold the real thing. The real Sagas were smaller than I’d imagined, especially after I’d soaked in the glorious (and colour-enhanced) enlargements next door. A story called Margaret’s Saga was the smallest of the lot, with pages perhaps five by six centimetres. Beside this exquisite relic was an interpretive card that said midwives and new mothers often prayed to St. Margaret. Copies of this saga were sometimes placed against the thighs of women in labour to ease the birthing process.

  Nearby were sample pages from the thirteenth-century Poetic Edda, a collection of Old Norse poems primarily preserved in a medieval manuscript called the Codex Regius, along with stories from the Prose Edda, written by Snorri Sturluson. Captivated by the notion of such antiquity right there in front of me, I have no idea how long I was there, barely registering the other visitors bumping into me as they moved past in the darkness.