Áshóll bound: to a land without predators
There are certain places on earth where the song from little orphan Annie "I think I'm Gonna Like It Here" just inevitably plays in your head. Iceland is one of those spots for me. I’ve arrived back to Reykjavik where I am enjoying a mid-day coffee before the last leg of my journey to the very north of the country to Áshóll farm to re-join my beloved Icelandic friends and assist with another festive, immersive lambing season. I was last there for lambing season in spring 2023, and while I am of course resigned to the fact of being beyond the technical window of adoption eligibility, I do consider Áshóll a second home of sorts and am greatly anticipating reunions with friends of multiple varieties— there are the humans (Farm owners, Anna & Svienn, Anna’s dear parents who live in an upstairs apartment on the farm house, Anna & Svienn’s 3 daughters (18-28) and their 4-year old granddaughter, Alexandra). Then, there are the 4-legged variety (Pilla the sheep dog, nine glamorous Icelandic horses, & of course the 300+ sheep and their soon to be abundant lamb offspring. Finally, there are natural surroundings of the Grýtubakkahreppur mountains, Fnjóská River and Eyjafjörður fjord— all very much alive, and good friends as well.
The work during lambing season is incredibly absorbing and fun. The lambs typically start arriving right at the start of May (though an early arriver has already graced the barn this year, I hear!) The mother sheep have all been sonogram scanned— they typically have two lambs each—so anyone deviating from that standard is spray paint marked on their back (pink for one lamb, blue for 3, a bewildered “4” was sprayed on one poor, comically wide sheep last time I was there). The work progresses over the course of the season— first transforming the barn interior, setting up birthing pens you can bring individual sheep into when you see them starting labor, distributing hay and water along the six long isles of sheep, unfurling great five foot tall plastic wrapped hay barrels like enormous cinnamon roles, helping occasional sheep with difficult births, marking mom and baby triads with increasingly creative combinations of spray paint designs to distinguish who goes with who, piercing lambs ears with little orange earring tags identifying the farm, and slowly migrating families into shared pens, then out to pastures as the lambs grow.
Record keeping is essential throughout— noting which lambs are adopted out to other mothers, and other health and birthing details. There is an entire “bible” containing the records of every sheep in the herd, its lineage (there are just 5 rams siring all these babies!) and a byzantine coding system for every aspect of their life— color, health, horn shape, etc. (I remember asking middle daughter, Rakel, last time what the difference was between #10: “white not otherwise specified” vs. #11 “all white.” (Answer from Rakel: “All white is like, very white and number 10 is like, maybe a little bit dirty?” Noted…) Come fall, when the herd is brought back to the farm, each lamb's weight and overall health will again be assessed and recorded.
Anna and Svienn take the bulk of the night shifts, and there is a small cot in the barn that they can use to snag a small moment of rest when there is one. My shift lengths are much more merciful, and I generally have time at the end of the day for a solo walk in the mountains, or bike ride to the small outdoor geo-thermically heated community pool about 7 miles away— ideal for swimming and enjoying a “hot pot” (hot tub) soak after with mountain views. I find a particular relaxing joy to the background murmur of a language that, despite my repeated, albeit anemic, attempts to study, I barely understand. This leaves me listening to an opaque, enigmatic soundtrack of sporadic nouns: “tomorrow… okay…… yes… later.”
It is, of course, an interesting time to be leaving home. There are so many physical aspects of northern Iceland that are similar to the Puget Sound region of Washington where I’ve been based the past 15 years, and to my Pacific Northwest roots in general—the immediate proximity to stunning water and mountains, a populace that loves stories, and an embrace of the great shifts in seasons and accompanying changes in light. Phenotypically, I can sometimes slide under the radar as not an obvious foreigner, especially on the farm when I’m typically dressed in the traditional blue coveralls of barn work. One time, last visit, I was helping tidy the grounds of the nearby church and graveyard where Anna’s grandparents are buried and an elderly Icelandic man mistook me for the official cemetery worker. I felt like Groundskeeper Willie, from the Simpsons, and was momentarily proud, before feeling sheepish that I couldn’t understand nor answer his questions pertaining to the burial site of a dear relative.
This uniform works as a helpful camouflage verses in the city, where my American clothing no doubt betrays me as a tourist. It is exceedingly difficult to keep pace with either the understated uber elegance or Bjorkian outlandish-but-they-totally-pull-it-off fashion standards characteristic of Scandinavian urban style. And yet, despite my occasional shape-shifting ability, I still often feel like a bemused alien when in Iceland, wondering how I’ve managed to be beamed down into this new planet where things seem in some ways familiar, and in some ways so profoundly novel in comparison to my home.
I am eager to have at least some background knowledge going into this trip, which I hope will make me more useful, though I will of course have to re-learn much of what I was taught before. I have been struck at each visit, how whenever something is explained to me, it is described in terms of values. First, care—for the safety and comfort of oneself and the animals—and second, preservation— not wasting anything, and maintaining carefully what you have. Strikingly, too, to my American/Seattle/city dwelling mind, instructions are never explained in terms of speed (i.e.— “do it this way, it will be quicker,” or “here, this is more efficient”), language which I have often deployed when attempting to “help” someone.
The Icelanders are, of course, extremely graceful and seemingly always working, but there is not a sense of being “rushed.” Nor, incredibly, did I feel like I virtually ever witnessed displays of frustration—the delta between how much time or effort one expects something to take and how much time it is taking. They will almost always refrain from ever jumping in to offer corrections, unless the concern is safety, as one awkwardly struggles to uncoil a massive hay barrel, or fumbles a knot you know you were just shown, because, of course, life is expected to be effortful. The answer to my myriad questions which I generally pose to Rakel (who has endless patience and even seems to enjoy explaining how everything works) about how to do that which, to the novice, seems nearly impossible is often a simple: “it’s not easy.”
Related to this theme, I feel like I am looking forward to this particular Icelandic stint with an added sense of curiosity in the context of this specific moment in the world where the answer to many existential questions of the day also seems to be: “it's not easy.” I’ve noticed I’ve received several recommendations lately from people who feel a draw to works of utopian fiction— writing or movies that envision hugely imaginative worlds unbounded by the limitations of what is typically deemed possible or practical— work that takes the much maligned term “unprecedented,” so ubiquitous of late, in a 180 direction toward the beautiful, sacred, or surreal. In the non-fictional world, Iceland’s current Prime Minister, Kristrún Frostadóttir, chairman of the Social Democratic Alliance, is an economist, mother of two young kids, and, at age 36, the world’s youngest serving state leader. The party sites “well-being” alongside housing and foreign affairs as a top priority and central pillar of their government:
"Well-being is the experience of health, happiness, and prosperity. Describing well-being therefore requires moving beyond applying only traditional economic metrics such as gross domestic product (GDP), to measure the quality of life and welfare of a population. It is necessary to consider environmental and social factors that affect people's daily lives, such as health, housing, employment, education, income, communications and air and water quality."
(Icelandic Prime Minister, Kristrún Frostadóttir, image from here)
This approach of care, for land and animals both human and non, is how survival has been possible in this rugged and wild landscape for over 1100 years and is taken as a given, not a charitable exception to a general mindset of extraction. These simple facts feel to me simultaneously straightforwardly true and utopian."
Another example of fact and metaphor, at the end of lambing season in late June, there is a great ritual day where all the family, extended and intergenerational, gather to “push” the herd of rapidly rotunding lambs and newly svelte mothers, out into the nearby mountains where they will graze freely in the grass and wild herbs until being rounded back up in fall. There are no fences, because there are no predators—no bears or coyotes or wolves to worry about in the country. In the aforementioned “bible” of sheep codes, there are entries for incidental causes of death ranging from the fairly straight forward #6: Fórst úr fóðureitrun, (“died of food poisoning”) to something where the translation must have failed, as I was unsure what exactly #9 “Grip was missing from the mountain last fall” meant, my best guess being it referred to a slip? But cliffs aside, demise by predator, and the accompanying fear, is something Icelandic sheep are free from. Their jobs are to romp and adventure, and enjoy the company of the herd in their beautiful, bountiful surroundings, where the summer grass is plentiful, and abundance vs. scarcity is the defining feature of their world.
And yes, Iceland is a capitalist country too, and an expensive one, where, like everywhere, the economic margins for small farms are thin and the interest of the coming generation to take on this traditional way of life grows ever scanter. Vegetarians are also scarce here, so the sheep (especially males, sorry, dudes…) of course, don’t live forever. As none of us do. But what would it be like to live for the time we do have in a world where every creature could enjoy such an existence? What possibilities for imagination could emerge if the all-absorbing concern of survival was taken off the mental plate? That question and ways to help cultivate more expansively imaginative spaces at home, in this era and always, will be front of mind throughout this stint.
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