It’s early, before eight in the morning, but only Helga is left at home. The rest of the family is already in the fields, working. And that they returned yesterday that would be twelve at night. But it is what these eternal days have.
In summer the sun gives you a rush that there is no stopping you, says Helga, and there is a lot of work, with the lambing of the sheep, feeding the lambs that have become orphans, mowing the grass, herding the cattle…
Since sheep have appeared in the conversation, I have to ask you about a question that has been with me since I left Reykjavik. In the meadows of tender grass I see those white specks: sheep, dozens, hundreds of them. And at first I thought it was a curious thing, but then I began to think about answers: why do they always go in threes?
I take breakfast easy. I have no other choice if I want to look good before the feast he has arranged for me. On the table there are ten different jams, three types of sausage, sheep pâté, pickled herring, sweet bread, eggs, tea, coffee, pancakes… This is enough for a long talk.
In winter, on the other hand, it’s hard to get out of bed, says Helga. It’s ten o’clock in the morning and everything is still dark, and the wind runs sharp, and the snow swirls… Have you seen what farms were like in the old days?
Yes, I have seen them, small rooms with double-sided grass cover. In the eternal nights of the harsh winter, life took refuge in tiny beds where they slept curled up or in the tiny kitchens where they burned what they could, even dry sheep, because there is no firewood where there are no forests.
Each family, Helga says, had a different brand to stamp on the logs that drifted from America or Siberia and washed up on the beaches. The first one to mark it kept it. No, this is not a friendly land, Helga says, although it seems to me that she shines with that point of pride of someone who descends from dozens of generations that have survived here. Because the challenge is huge, in a country where often the names of the settlements have many more letters than inhabitants and in the face of a nature that deserves all the capital letters and capital letters available, because here it shows itself without fuss. Are you interested in a glacier, the largest in Europe? Volcanoes, sulphurous waters, newly created mountains?
A tour of the surroundings of the capital is enough to visit the landmarks of what is known as the golden ring. There is the geyser that has given its name to all the geysers in the world, or the overwhelming waterfall of Gullfoss, and those perfect craters that stand out everywhere. And something that seems less spectacular, but that gives me more to think about. In Thingvellir, the ‘parliament plain’, where eleven centuries ago they already met to legislate and judge the affairs of the island, the Atlantic ridge looms. That is where the world splits: America on one side, Europe on the other. And Iceland that expands between one continent and another. That is the mother of everything that is cooked under this island. Faced with that, a volcanic eruption is no more than a breath away. Our life, not a spark.
The last eruption was a bummer, says Helga. Ash everywhere. But it did not affect the sheep. This is what matters.
And that they go three by three? She looks at me indulgently as we pour ourselves one last cup of coffee. The answer is obvious: the mother and her two pups.
