Make new friends, but keep the old...

“A girl name Saskia will pick you up at the airport. 

She drives the old car gray Golf 

I think you will find each other at the airport or parking place

See you soon 😊”

So went my initial whatsapp correspondence with my host, Anna, upon arriving to the tiny northern airport in Akureyri. Did I have this girl Saskia’s phone number? I did not. Did I know what she looked like? No I did not. But so it goes in Iceland– there is a relaxed, casual attitude and assumption that things will work out, because you will figure them out. I was reminded of this shift in attitude when boarding the plane at the smaller municipal airport in Reykjavik where not only do they not threaten a full cavity search because they are bored or you dared to bring 9 (9!) ounces of toothpaste in your carryon, they don’t even ask for your ID. They just scan your boarding pass and wish you a good flight. Thus, I wasn’t alarmed by the ambiguity of the pick up plan. It’s about 100 yards total at the Akureyri airport, from the actual plane, across the runway, through the one central room with the luggage carousel, to the front door. Outside, there is a circular drive and a small parking lot. I picked up my bag, and stepped outside into the brisk late afternoon, and waited to for the sight of the family’s gray VW Golf, hopefully driven by a woman who would hopefully be named Saskia, A quartet of tall British CEOs who had been on my same flight, loudly talking about their respective companies and helicopter ski plans, were soon my only companions left at the airport entrance, and were already on their phones heatedly asking someone named Brenda where their car was. Chill out, dudes. I thought, rolling my eyes, as if I were already a local, I’m sure it’s coming, give Brenda the day off... 

Luckily for the Brits and for me, our respective chariots arrived. As I walked towards a gray VW Golf, I saw a refreshingly non murderous seeming, platinum blonde young woman inside, who opened the door, and was indeed the Saskia in question–a mid to late 20s German girl with an immediate warm and welcoming smile. She told me she had just arrived three days before me and had actually been slated to come to Iceland to work as an au pair to a one year old in a suburb of Reykjavik. Three days before she was supposed to leave, however,  the family had to abruptly cancel due to a medical emergency of some kind. She was understanding, but also already had a non-refundable flight to Iceland, so panicked, she sent out a flurry of messages to alternative Icelandic hosts, and fortuitously, Anna replied. I admired her relaxed, positive attitude in the face of this change– a sheep farm in the rural north is quite different than a suburban babysitting gig, and indeed she said she has had a unorthodox flair for improvisation that at times had baffled her family– her mother is a dentist, her father runs a heavy machinery equipment company, and her older sister has a young child and also works at the mother’s dentist office. “I’m kind of the black sheep of the family” she said as she drove us along the stunning fjord-lined road north to the farm, no pun intended given our destination. 

It’s been delightful swapping stories and working alongside one another the first week. Since childhood, she has been a dancer and actress of both dramatic and musical genres. She has been in a theater troupe for years too–most recently starring as Ophelia, and plans to next move to Berlin to enroll in a theatrical mask-making school. That’s just what I think everyone in Berlin does, but I’m sure there must be some municipal sewage workers and other careers as well. 

When we got to the house that first evening, I was greeted by a smiling Anna and Svienn, and the two sheep and their two lambs in the small pen outside the barn. Anna had prepared a delicious dinner for us– white fish, quartered potatoes, crispy from their air fryer, and sautéed carrots, onions and red pepper. Svienn had recently found out he had a much older half brother– a welcomed revelation who had been warmly welcomed into the family, and he had caught the fish we were eating. Anna told us about their recent weekend trip to Prague with 7 couples. “We women are a sewing group for 30 years, but… we never sew,” she told us, smiling.

The men of the couples were apparently all friends decades ago who went snowmobiling together, so the women decided that when the men got together, they would too. It’s nice for Anna and Svienn to get a weekend trip in late April before May arrives which is marked by non-stop lamb births, as well as the work of planting all the potatoes, necessitating rotating duty shifts and about four hours sleep per night. As we were eating dinner, Saskia’s tattoo on her upper right bicep was clearly visible from under her short sleeve– a gorgeously rendered whale, filled in with a decorative lined pattern that she got in tribute to her best friend. The friend is a human, not a whale, but apparently shares some ineffable majestic and admirable whale-like qualities. Anna asked me if I had any tattoos and I said I didn’t, a traitor to my generation. Anna said she too was the lone untattooed one amongst her “sewing circle” friends. “It used to be very uncommon to see tattoos in Iceland,” she said, but now many people are having them!” 

Last time I was in the country, I accompanied my cousin to Reykjavik before she flew home, and she had wanted to get an Icelandic  tattoo. As fate would have it, the Reyjavik tattoo convention happened to be going on that weekend and one could have the pick of the litter for on-the-spot tattooing in a hotel ballroom. There were tattoo artists there from all over the world, but of course we were looking for a local, and went to the booth for Reykjavik Ink. We were thus both surprised when the barrel chested bald man, tattoo gun in hand, greeted us with a thick American Southern accent, explaining he was originally from Alabama but had found the good life here in Iceland. I still think her tattoo is one of the best I’ve seen– a beautiful line drawing of an Icelandic sheep with her two lambs above the Icelandic word “dugnaður” below it–one of those hard to translate gems I encountered on a site collecting unique Icelandic terms: 

(from the site): 

It would be too simple to translate this word as “hardworkingness.” (even that is not a word in English..) It’s closer to the word “mettle,” or the Finnish concept of “sisu,” but neither of those completely captures the meaning. Literally, “duga” just means something will “do.” It is “enough”. So when you tell someone they’re “duglegur,” really you’re just saying “You are sufficient. You’ll do.” But the word has come to encompass both hardworking-ness, determination, diligence, intelligence and a number of other undefinable traits – basically saying “you have what it takes to make things happen.”

A nice reminder to have on one’s arm the daily reminder that you are enough, you’re hardworking, and can make things happen. 

At one point over that initial dinner Svienn looked at me with a winking glint in his eye, and a smile on his face that communicated, well, you know we all have to ask, and just said, “so… Trump?” Sigh. It is never a simple moment when called upon as an American to explain, answer for, much less defend the actions of one’s government and foreign policy. I will never forget being on a brief vacation in Nicaragua in the early 2010s and having one such indelible encounter. I was traveling with a friend and we’d gone to a very humble, small “museum” run by ex-Sandanista soldiers about the war with the Contras. The museum consisted of two large rooms with blown up black and white photos from newspapers hung on the walls and the ex-soldiers acted as docents walking you from image to image and pointing things out with their bamboo sticks (“There I am! Let me tell you about that day…”) My traveling companion did not speak the language and was relying on me for periodic translation, so was confused when our guide grabbed my hand and placed it on his head, rubbing it back and forth, telling me in rapid Spanish: “Feel that. Feel that shrapnel and feel what your government put in my body.” Talk about words failing. “Lo siento for the actions of the Regan administration and the crimes of Oliver North when I was a pre-zygote” felt both beyond anemic and beyond my vocabulary, but before I could muster even that, he reassured me with a big smile: “But don’t worry! You and I are cool, and you tell all your friends in America to come to Nicaragua and they will have a friend in me too! It’s the big fat cats up above us both that we have to all watch out for and work against.” I still think of the profundity of the generosity of this statement, along with the accompanying wide eyed confusion of my traveling companion who was baffled why I’d seemingly given this stranger a noogie and then was getting misty eyed about it. 

Suffice to say, this moment was decidedly less intense. I had actually thought about it before, wanting to be simple and direct so there were no ambiguities: “dangerous clown” I said, while making the gagging motion. They smiled and shook their heads, “we are just so confused how he can be popular?” Anna said. Saskia luckily chimed in offering her own trepidations about the rise of the far right, Musk-endorsed AfD party in Germany and the ominous popularity of the Fascist-curious political movements around the world. Saskia said the threat of the Nazi party is so profoundly drummed into German youth in fact, with WWII studies being a core part of every year’s curriculum, that she actually feels anxiety when she sees a German flag flying. 

Later, in a one-on-one conversation together, about the mindset of the American electorate in general, Saskia judiciously said to me: “well, there are quite a lot of memes about the theme that, well, Americans are quite. “ she trailed off a bit, losing her nerve. “Dumb?” I hazarded. “Yes!” she said, animated and relieved not to have had to break the news to me that this was our global reputation. “Oh, I’m aware,” I assured her. Speaking further, I was able to express a bit more nuance as well, broaching tentative theories about the previous election using vocabulary words  like “disillusioned” and “existentially demoralized by the funding of an ongoing genocide” in speculating on possible reasons for the results. 

We eventually headed to bed–I wasn’t sure how long I had been awake at that point– probably a little over a day? Anna gave me the option of taking the next day easy, but I was eager to dive into lambing season, so we all planned to convene at the usual 9:00 the following morning and all went to our separate quarters to go to sleep. The house is built on a hill with three stories– the lower level has a large mud room for all the boots and coveralls, and there’s a sink and a small bathroom. You take off all external layers here before heading any further into the house. There are two daylight rooms in this lower level– one small one with a bunk bed and a desk where I am staying, and a larger room with three twin beds where Saskia is. On the main floor is a kitchen with a breakfast nook that looks out to the gorgeous surrounding fields and mountains, a dining and living room, and three bedrooms for Sveinn and Anna and their two younger daughters, Silla (who is living here in the year between high school and university) and Rakel (who lives mainly in Akureyri but visits often, especially during lambing season). Their older daughter, Guðbjörg, lives across the fjord in the small town of Dalvik with her husband and four year old daughter, Alexandra. Upstairs live Anna’s parents in their own unit. Anna’s grandparents started the farm, and over the years raised a variety of animals including cows, mink, foxes, and now sheep. Luckily foxes and sheep were not being raised at the same time. 

It was good to be back.