Читать книгу On Time and Water - Andri Snaer Magnason - Страница 9

The old teak shelf in Grandpa Árni’s writing office was buried under anthologies of flowers, books by Halldór Laxness, and the full collection of Jökull, the journal of the Icelandic Glaciological Society. It held one of my favorite books, Benedikt Gröndal’s massive book of birds, and then one day I noticed a beautiful blue book on the shelf: In Reindeer Country, written by Helgi Valtýsson and published in 1945. The book describes Helgi’s travels with the photographer Edvard Sigurgeirsson in the highlands north of Vatnajökull in 1939, 1943, and the year Iceland gained independence from Denmark, 1944. Their expedition sought the last reindeer herd in Iceland, the final descendants of the reindeer who had been brought to Iceland in 1797. Reindeer had once spread across the whole country, from the far north to the Reykjanes Peninsula, but had almost everywhere become extinct. The last herd survived in a kind of secret valley at the foot of a glacier, Brúarárjökull; the animals’ calving grounds were in a place called Kringilsárrani.

Helgi was a romantic, a progressive, a poet. For some reason, his reindeer book had passed my notice at the time I was writing my own book Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation, a defense of the Icelandic highlands and of the exact region his book describes. When I opened In Reindeer Country, I was struck by its lovely hand-painted photographs and by its travel descriptions. But the text was far from an everyday account of travels in the mountains. The words rose from time to time into a florid flood, a baroque hymn rather than a travel narrative:

The wild highlands are a wide embrace, mountain blue. Their stillness quietens you, listening […] Fascinated you attend to your own soul’s breath, this essence you’ve forgotten about for years. It’s here you first perceive your spirit’s immeasurable expanse, and you stand still and astounded in the deep silence amid unspeakable reverence for your soul’s divinity. The distance, the mountain blueing, the great glacier’s dome, the weighty murmurations of silence—all this is reflected and echoed beneath your soul’s vault, spanning Heaven and Earth, your spirit’s wide horizon. You are moved to tears, resonant as a tremulous bell in the pregnant silence of God’s vast expanse, becoming one with it.⁴

I read aloud, pausing for a long time after the words, to be moved to tears, resonant as a tremulous bell in the pregnant silence of God’s vast expanse. I’ve read volumes of sublime nature poems but I can’t remember having encountered something so elevated. This fragment was not an isolated example: the book as a whole is not just a travel narrative but a grandiose declaration of love for this nature. Helgi is writing a praise song for East Iceland and for the wilderness north of Vatnajökull, especially Kringilsárrani, which is unique in Iceland and, indeed, in the world. Kringilsárrani was once a kind of island, a fifty-square-kilometer wedge covered in vegetation, six hundred meters above sea level. It was bounded by a triangle formed of the Brúarárjökull glacier along one end and two untamed, almost impassable glacial rivers that merged on either side. There were high glacial peaks and so-called push moraines, heaps of fertile land the glacier deposited when it surged forward around 1890. It was almost as if the glacier had taken the surface vegetation and rolled it up in front of it like a carpet. These heaps could be as high as ten meters; they were unparalleled in modern geology. Only on Svalbard were there examples of glaciers that had thrust land up in front of them in this same way.

Helgi and Edvard stayed in this tremendous wilderness that hardly anyone had ever visited. Edvard photographed and filmed while Helgi kept a journal of their travels as he reflected on his confrontation with the mountain’s glory. When Helgi left the area, there was regret in his breast:

Probably we fellows have said farewell to Kringilsárrani and Vesturöræfi for some time, and I perhaps for good. That thought peculiarly arouses a bitter sense of loss and mysterious longing in our breasts […] Having once seen them, one does not forget these places’ evening-blue, symphonic colors and contours, not if one has looked with the open eyes of body and soul. Unbroken peace, the stillness of wilderness, all beyond earthly understanding and of a higher intelligence—all these trickle and flow in over the rimy firmament of our minds and souls.⁵

Helgi Valtýsson was born in 1877 and came of age while the spirit of the first Icelandic independence movement resonated over those waters. Helgi describes his time in Kringilsárrani as a spiritual enlightenment. He writes his text into a hundred-year or more tradition in which true manhood involves composing praise poems about plovers and whimbrels and mountain lakes, a manhood that involves serenading the summer, the mountains, the flower-covered slopes, and hope itself. He pursued that despite living through other, harsher social realities of the times: infant mortality, poverty, disease. But this romantic view of life is notable for its gentleness; one is unlikely to find a better example of the unadulterated worship of nature anywhere else in Icelandic literature. Romantic philosophy arguably reached its apotheosis at that exact moment of the writing of Helgi Valtýsson’s book. With the vocabulary of one hundred years of romanticism, Helgi could capture the impressions of the highlands in an overflow of baroque metaphors.

On their first trip, Helgi and Edvard were in Kringilsárrani for two weeks without any contact with the outside world, from the end of August 1939 into early September. By the time they returned, the Germans had invaded Poland, officially changing the worldview Helgi and Edvard espoused. The book was published in 1945, the same year the first nuclear bomb exploded, the same year modern “atomic poetry” emerged on the Icelandic literary scene. The world had lost its innocence; war’s miseries had caused many to wonder where he’d gone, this so-called God. Books that unabashedly set their faith in a beauty that was in harmony with the almighty no longer paid their way. Poets instead composed inscrutable modernist poems. Steinn Steinarr wrote about “Time and the Water”; other poets wrote about the “nothing” that happened after death. Halldóra B. Björnsson wrote:

In earth’s cold darkness our journey ends

and we no longer know this journey took place.

Europe burned, yet the war changed the world and gave rise to numerous industries. The aviation industry altered entirely, as did metal production; the nuclear industry emerged while mass production expanded, its capacity all too evident. The world’s aluminum industry grew by 1,000 percent in just a few years in order to meet the war’s need for bombs and airplanes.⁶ The U.S. government instructed Alcoa to build twenty new factories in three years, giving them priority access to finance and raw materials.

At the end of the war, however, production did not slow back down again. The aluminum industry found an alternative outlet for its products with the emergence of the disposable consumer economy. Enterprising designers developed products that allowed people to use dishes, cutlery, food packaging, aluminum foil, and other valuable things only a single time. They packaged drinks in energy-intensive aluminum cans people could throw away instead of rinsing and returning as they did with glass bottles. This mindset went against the values held by previous generations, who had learned to respect what was valuable, to throw nothing away, to finish their meals, to fix things, to make use of everything.

The packaging industry and a consumer society thus combined to create an infinite demand for raw materials, which slowly but surely intruded into untouched areas around the globe. In 2002, the world’s consumer machine stretched its tentacles to the northernmost corner of the planet: a decision was taken to flood the bulk of Kringilsárrani under a fifty-square-kilometer reservoir behind the proposed Kárah-njúkar Dam. The purpose? Producing subsidized electricity for the Alcoa aluminum smelter in Reydarfjördur. The plant produces a fraction of the aluminum that Americans throw into landfill. An annual amount of aluminum equal to four times the size of the U.S. commercial air fleet ends up on such trash heaps just from aluminum cans alone. Recycling cans in the U.S. would eliminate the need for three or four such factories.

“The all-encompassing silence of God’s great expanse” and the whole environment Helgi described in his book finally drowned under two hundred meters of muddy glacial water when a plug was set into the Kárahnjúkar Dam in the fall of 2006. But the area did not drown forever because the water level fluctuates, revealing several square kilometers of shoreline of fine, light silt. Each spring, this lifeless land appears, gray as a ghost. Kringilsárrani is just one of the thousands of treasures today’s generation of earthlings quite literally throw in the trash each year.