Michael Clarke
No one can understand the lure of the sea more than those who have lived far inland. Summer holidays for me in England were the sea, the salt spray, seaweed, sand, boats, seashells, crabs and sea breeze. I envied anyone so lucky to live in such a wonderland. When I first got a brochure from Akureyri I couldn’t believe my eyes. Could that blue stuff on the map possibly be THE SEA? I write this sitting in my second home in Hrísey looking out onto a wondrous view of mountains, sea, beaches and skies.
Yet go to any Icelandic seaside town, and what do you find? The beaches are strewn with factories, junk, rusty old ships, slaughter houses, fish factories. If there are any houses so unlucky as to have been built overlooking the sea, you will find that they face inland, and if there is a window facing the sea at all, it is probably a tiny kitchen pantry window, with a thick net curtain. Dalvík, for instance, is idyllicly situated by a peninsular extending far into the fjord. If you can find your way past the garages, garbage collection facility, decrepit bulldozers and other rusty machinery you will finally get to a picnic bench with a wonderful sea view. It is just past the rusty skip dump. In Sauðárkrókur the situation is even worse. The whole picturesque length of the beach is lined with an impressive array of car repairers, strewn with the rusty car skeletons, tyres, along with various small industries who advertise their services by surrounding the buildings with a large selection of their products that never made it to the consumer, in various states of decomposition. Why have Icelanders so little respect for the seaside, for the sea view. In other countries, if you can manage to stand on the roof of your house on tiptoe with a pair of binoculars and spot what may appear to be a wave between the factory walls you can charge at least triple rent!
But not so in Iceland.
The sea to the average Icelander is the Big Bad Troll, the Eternal Enemy, the Bringer of Wrath. The paintings in the sitting-rooms are lakes with swans and mountains, not the view over the bay.
There have been two things over the centuries that Icelanders have feared most. Not invasion. Not the Bomb. Not pestilence. Not Atilla the Hun nor Hitler nor Saddam. No-Poverty and the Sea. And yet it has been the sea more that anything else that has kept them from poverty. Even in recent years, after the bank collapse, it has been the sea that has kept them afloat. But at a cost. It is also the Great Enemy. Almost every family has lost a loved to its mighty arctic waves. So when firmly back at last on dry land, the seafarer turns his back to the waves, rather turning his face to the hills from where…..
But at least for now, landlubbers like me for whom the sea has still a wonderful magical allure can enjoy a spectacular marine panorama-with no sea monsters to spoil the view.
Michael Clarke
