A couple of months ago I wrote this article and submitted it to the Reykjavík Grapevine. As I have found in recent months there is a tendency within the print media not to reply to e-mails, neither to inform of publication nor to reject articles. This lack of information flow is pathetic and any good publication should at the very least reply to their e-mail. Being turned down doesn’t bother me. Being ignored does. As the Cluetrain Manifesto so eloquently puts it: You’re too busy “doing business” to answer our email? Oh gosh, sorry, gee, we’ll come back later. Maybe. Anyway, I had forgotten about the article until a couple of days ago, and found it regrettable that it had never seen the light of day. So I publish it here in full, ever so slightly updated. Enjoy.
The relationship between an Icelander and his coffee is a strong one, almost as strong as the coffee itself. It’s a relationship built on trust. In fact, if the coffee beans were to stop flowing to Iceland for some reason, it is safe to assume that the entire nation would regress from a top-5 GDP per capita country to a nomadic tribe within a year. A friend of mine said that to understand the caffeine-alcohol cycle Icelanders live by is to understand Icelanders.
Some months ago the rescue helicopter TF-SIF lost power and crash landed in the sea just outside of Straumsvík, the location of one of Iceland’s aluminum refineries. The captain of the ship that was conducting a rescue drill with them at the time of the power failure moved his ship out of the way and waited until the rotor blades had stopped twirling before sending in men on life rafts to save the crew. The helicopter itself is buoyant, and while the entire thing was wrought with danger no harm came to anybody. Within a couple of minutes everybody was safely on board the ship, where the captain offered them coffee.
In most countries the immediate reaction to a helicopter accident would be a thorough (if unneeded) medical inspection, trauma counseling and possibly even a healthy dose of Xanax. Not here. Here it’s simpler. “Do you take milk or sugar?”
This tendency to reduce any calamity to a cup of coffee is remarkable, but not entirely surprising. When navigating the overcrowded hallways of the University of Iceland the biggest hazard is that almost every single student has a hot cup of Java, black as night, thick as crude oil. And while people have not yet, to my knowledge, resorted to intravenous drips, the level of calm achieved by your average Icelander during a coffee break is almost fictitious. I heard a story of coffee last summer that far better illustrated the calmness of Icelanders in the face of danger.
In the winter of 1973, Arnór and Helga were a newly engaged couple. Christmas had just passed and the darkness of January was around them. But in spite of the cold weather and they had better forget being allowed to sleep together before the wedding, if Helga’s father had anything to say on the matter. Despite this they met up one extremely stormy night to go to the movies together. The storm was so strong that Helga had to hold tight onto lampposts and rest at the sides of buildings on her way to the cinema, which was just at the other end of the street.
After the movie, they decided to go back to her place for a while, and letting the strong easterly wind push them they arrived back home just moments later and tiptoed up into the attic.
As implausible as it may sound these two young lovers of 18 years of age decided to pull out books and read from them. Arnór selected Brekkukotsannáll by Halldór Laxness, as his understanding of literature was limited and Helga’s brother had suggested it as a good introductory reading.
Let me reiterate the danger they were in: Helga’s father would have been extremely unhappy had he found them together, alone, in the attic, reading at this late hour. Despite this they sat and read.
A moment later there was a alarming knock on the outside door followed by some worried shouting. “Wake up, wake up,” the woman outside shouted. “There’s a volcano erupting in the town!”
“Are you drunk again?” somebody called back to the hysteric woman out of a window.
“No! I swear, I’m sober!”
A volcano. An eruption. In the town. Helga and Arnór would be caught! How could they explain this? “We were just reading!”
In the previous weeks and months Arnór had learned the hard way that the third step from the bottom in the rickety staircase creaked, and had learned to navigate his way up and down without anybody hearing. But this eruption caused a bigger problem, he could not possibly get past his father-in-law without being seen or heard. “I suppose we’ll just have to face the music,” he said and the decided to descend the staircase into the kitchen.
Helga’s mother was busy preparing coffee. “Oh, you’re here?” she asked him grimly, pulling an extra cup out of the cupboard. Helga’s father looked up at him. “Oh, you’re here,” he said loudly and glared at the mischievous youngsters as the earth ripped open underneath the town. But despite the looming peril the father took a dramatic pause and then said calmly: “I suppose you’d better sit down. Want some coffee?”
After the family had been collected, some sandwiches made and some hot steaming coffee put onto the thermos they got dressed warmly and went out into the night. The weather had calmed down, the wind was almost still. The air was cold but from the east came a warm glow as pellets of molten rock were hurdled skywards: outside Kirkjubær, a fissure had opened.
On the 23rd of January 1973 a volcanic eruption began on the small island of Heimaey in the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago, just east of the town, literally in the back garden of the farm Kirkjubær. In the preceding months a few anomalous things had happened that in retrospect were foretelling but at the time were just odd.
The first had to do with potatoes. Many people planted potatoes in the ground around Kirkjubær, and plots were shared not only with the people from the local farmhouses but also others from the town. One family had talked to the farmer at Kirkjubær about getting a lot for the summer and he said no problem at all. The following day they arrived with their seedling potatoes and a hoe, but the farmer had misunderstood something. “I’m sorry”, he said, “I just gave up the plot to somebody else. But there is that little plot yonder, you can have it if you want. But be warned: nothing has ever grown there.”
Reluctantly they put down their potatoes and a few months later they got the largest potatoes in the harvest, huge hulking potatoes weighing half a kilo each.
They needed somewhere to store the potatoes. Thankfully the farmer at the next farm north of Kirkjubær, Oddstaðir, was willing to lend them part of his potato shed. Potato sheds are supposed to be cool and damp, but this potato shed, one that had stood longer than most houses on the island, was suddenly going through a warm streak: potatoes went bad there at an alarming rate, no matter how much more ventilation they added.
Long story short, the ground was getting warm, really warm. Potatoes were growing faster, potato sheds were boiling from the inside, and snow that fell on the ground during winter melted along the 1.6 kilometer long belt from which fire would spew a few months later.
And it was during this bittersweet moment, the beginning of the eruption, that the young lovers walked with the other islanders in a solemn line down to the docks where the island’s fishing fleet waited to ferry them to safety. All with bellies full of coffee, nobody saying a word. Silence drew over as the volcano rumbled on the far side of the island, only meters away from some of the houses. “Stay close to the middle of the street,” a man shouted out. “If there’s an earthquake, houses may collapse.” Without even a murmur the crowd huddled together and kept on walking.
Even as the ships set sail out of the harbor, gliding through a patch of sea boiling underneath them, the crews handed out coffee mugs to all the people and the islanders’ newfound adversity was reduced in a couple of sips to a state of gentle repose.
