Three
Weeks with the Sheep: A Visit to the Klaustrið Residence at
Skriðuklaustur, Iceland
by K.I. Press
More at kipress.ca
 Landing in Iceland and taking the
40-minute bus ride from Keflavík (the "f" is pronounced like
a "p" in this context, one of the many mysteries of the
Iclandic language) Airport into the capital, Reykjavík, is, as many
have said before me, like landing on the surface of Mars. What others
have not mentioned is the feeling that someone on the bus must be eating
a hard-boiled egg. It didn’t take me long to figure out that this was
not the case; rather, it was the pervasive sulfuric smell of the
Keflavík-Reykjavík area, which is full of natural hot springs. In
fact, at my guesthouse in Reykjavík, the egg smell hit me every time I
turned on the hot water in the bathroom. After only a few days of
washing my hair in Reykjavík, it was covered with a palpable minerally
film.
Iceland is known as "The Land of
Fire and Ice," and when you arrive in Iceland, you are met with the
Fire part of the place. Go to the big tourist destinations in the
Reykjavík area, and you’ll see rocky, barren lava fields, a clear
view of the mid-Atlantic rift, the volcano Mt. Hekla rising in the
distance, and hot water everywhere. If a farmer finds "Wet
Gold" on his property, he’s rich, for he can sell the geothermal
energy from the hot spring.
But where I was going was much more on
the Ice end of the spectrum.
A tour guide had, outside of
Reykjavík, pointed out the house where Iceland’s Nobel-winning
writer, Halldór Laxness, had lived. A few days later I was reading
Laxness’s book Under the Glacier (a.k.a. Christianity at
Glacier—highly recommended, by the way) while flying over the
Icelandic interior in a little plane (there was no security, at all, in
the tiny domestic airport in Reykavík). Looking down over the barren
interior, I saw mountains and ice, and ice and snow, and mountains.
Egilsstaðir, where I landed, is an
unusual town just for not being on the coast. It is situated on Lake
Lögurinn (a.k.a. Lake Lagarfljót, home to the lake monster
Lagarfljotsormurinn) and exists as the service centre for the entire
East Iceland region. For a town so small, and a region so sparsely
populated (the biggest town in the region, Egilsstaðir is home to less
than 2000 people), the services are excellent by Canadian standards, and
the town has been booming due to a controversial hydro-electric project
in the area. Icelanders are very proud that they have one of the highest
standards of living in the world, especially since it was the poorest
country in Europe before WWII. Everything is expensive, but, just like
when you’re travelling elsewhere in Europe, you simply have to stop
converting to Canadian dollars in your head, or you might go insane.
When I looked at my bank account and credit card bill, it really wasn’t
as bad as I had been warned.
Luckily, I wasn’t paying for
accommodation. I was in Iceland to "cloister" myself for three
weeks at Klaustrið, a residency for artists, writers and scholars. The
site of a medieval monastery called Skriðuklaustur, the property was
more recently (in the early 1940s) owned by Icelandic writer Gunnar
Gunnarsson, who built an impressive house with stone walls and a turf
roof, intending to expand it into a downright sod-roofed mansion, before
his wife’s illness forced him to abandon the property for the city. He
donated it to the state, and it now houses Gunnarsstofnun, the Gunnar
Institute, dedicated to the study of his works and of the literature and
art of the region, as well as a café and a little museum dedicated both
to Gunnar’s life and to the medieval monastery, now being excavated. A
medieval Madonna statue in wood which had been found in the area—both
the form and the material rare in Protestant, nearly treeless Iceland—was
a fellow resident in a darkened room down the hall, on loan to
Skriðuklaustur from the National Museum of Iceland.
Skriðuklaustur lies in the Fljotsdalur
Valley, a long skinny river valley flanked by steep, rocky hills on
either side. Out of the highlands flow countless little glacial streams.
(If you kept going up in to the highlands, you’d eventually find
yourself in the general vicinity of Snæfell, next door to Vatnajökull,
the country’s largest glacier, and incidentally where Laxness’s Under
the Glacier is set, not to mention Jules Verne’s Journey to the
Centre of the Earth.) The streams gather into a kind of delta in the
valley, becoming the Lagarfljót River, which widens into the lake,
narrowing again on the other side of Egilsstaðir and flowing north to
the Arctic Ocean.
 It’s a beautiful setting, but it is
not friendly for much walking. The highway, though sparsely travelled,
has no shoulders, and walking in the ditches can be challenging. Walking
straight up onto the steep, rocky hills is impossible, and while you can
go a little ways into the valley, you’ll quickly meet up with a
network of dikes into which the glacial streams have been coaxed to
flow. There are a few places you can walk up a bit into the hills
nearby, including a path to Hengifoss, one of the tallest waterfalls in
Iceland. Given the time of year (October) and the fast-changing weather
(I learned to go "uh-oh" if I was outside and felt a cold wind
suddenly come up the valley), I never made the half-day commitment to
see those falls, though I did venture to a much closer, and smaller set.
To see more of the countryside, you would really need to rent a car.
In the valley and at the roadside
everywhere, there are sheep. And sheep. And sheep. And more sheep.
Whereas coastal towns are based on the fishery, in farm country,
everywhere you go, you scare sheep. They stare at you for a second
before running away en masse, their fat woolly bottoms bouncing to the
other end of the pasture. Farming is entirely based on livestock in
Iceland, primarily sheep, although you’ll see a few cows now and
again, and there are also plenty of very cute Icelandic horses, which
resemble My Little Ponies. I was told that, 20 years ago, there were
more than twice as many sheep (about a million), but the government
started paying farmers to stop producing them. In the summers, the sheep
roam free in the highlands, rounded up each fall by Icelandic
shepherds-cum-cowboys. Gunnar Gunnarson’s most famous work, known in
English as The Good Shepherd, or Advent, is a moral tale
about a simple man who sacrifices himself to round up other peoples’
sheep from the highlands. When I was there, the valley was speckled with
white sheep-dots as far as I could see.
Hungry sheep and cold humans decimated
Iceland’s forests not long after they arrived in the ninth century.
Now, along with the standard of living, forestry is one of the things
Icelanders like to talk about most; in Reykjavík, going to the country
to plant trees on the weekend is a popular pastime. Around
Skriðuklaustur, there are actually a surprising number of trees.
Hallormsstaður, in-between Skriðuklaustur and Egilsstaðir, is the
country’s biggest (and beloved) forest.
Skriðuklaustur is pretty isolated, and
I got a lot of writing done while there. With nowhere to go without a
car, and only two books in English in the library, the Internet was my
only source of procrastination (although, as we all know, it’s a good
one). There is just one guest apartment in the house, although there is
a separate guestroom in another wing, where some volunteers from Costa
Rica were staying for a few days while I was there. But in general, you’re
alone in the house whenever the museum and café are not open.
This can be pretty weird, as you listen
to the terrific, Gothic-novel-esque wind howling incessantly throughout
the night, or as miscellaneous strangers out for Sunday drives ring the
doorbell hoping for a coffee, or circle the building snapping pictures.
One staff member does live in another house on the property, but I gave
myself a heart attack one day by thinking I had locked myself out,
although it turned out there was just a trick with the lock. The
apartment would be a good place for two writers to stay together—two
writers who sleep in the same bed, anyway. In fact, the staff were
surprised I hadn’t brought my spouse. The apartment is bigger than
many I’ve lived in, and there are two separate computers available,
one in the apartment, and one downstairs in the Gunnar Institute.
I think, for myself, I’ve discovered
that I prefer more structured residencies, at least when I have only a
short time to devote to them. When someone cooks for you, not only do
you not need to worry about cooking and cleaning, but set meal times
force you into a schedule (not to mention a bit of social interaction).
At Skriðuklaustur, you do your own cooking, and the director of the
Institute drives you into town once a week for supplies. The only
scheduled residency-related activity was to give a talk on Canadian
Literature at the high school in Egilsstaðir.
But the staff is great, the setting is
beautiful, and the facilities excellent, so, if you are looking for a
truly isolated time to write, or are looking specifically for a
residency to which you can bring your spouse (at most residencies, this
is forbidden), Klaustrið is an excellent choice.
Residencies can be from three to six
weeks in length, and up to 1/3 of the year’s spots can be awarded to
writers, artists and scholars from outside Iceland. For more information
about Klaustrið, including how to apply, visit www.skriduklaustur.is.
K.I. Press is a Winnipeg writer originally from Alberta. Her most recent book is
Types of Canadian Women (Gaspareau, 2006). She works for the Winnipeg Folk Festival. She was formerly the reviews editor with The Danforth Review. |
