Rokk

Force-12 winds rip around the country, a bus is blown off the road and a teenage boy dies in the accident. Cars are also blown away … Bryndís worries that the ship her husband works on, a trawler captained by her uncle, will go to sea this afternoon despite the terrible, dangerous weather. The captain has a reputation for stubbornly keeping to decisions. Seems like a dramatically fatal attitude here. The snow melts under the warmth of the wind from the south-west. We are on the leeward side of the country, and so don’t feel the brunt of the snarling low pressure pumped-up by warm Gulf Stream energies. But even still, the fjörd below us at the port is foaming and cars are urged not to cross the pass to the next fjörd as some have already been blown off the road there. Parents are telephoned with the request to pick their children up via car from play school and elementary school to avert the risk of walking in the wind. Iceland in January. The drama of the weather continues. Valdís invites me out for cake and coffee (I have tea) at the café across from the school. The cake she describes last week as looking something like Vatnajokull, the huge glacier in the southeast of the country. Turns out it does. Björn and Hrefna join us. It is difficult to walk outside at all between the gale and the wet ice everywhere, so Björn gives me a ride home afterward. He tells a joke about an Icelandic farmer who is going to Reykjavík for the first time ever in an airplane. The stewardess hands out chewing gum to people to help equalize the pressure in the ears during the flight. The man unsteadily gets off the plane at the end of the flight, gets his bag, then comes up the stewardess and asks, How do you get this stuff out of the ears?