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Wow ... I want to thank
everybody who responded to the Bjork thread. I've always had a fantasy about
going to Iceland. (In our spelling, we emphasize the Ice part, but their
spelling always was meant to emphasize the Island aspect. It's Greenland, the
next stop westward on the Old Viking Trail, that has all the Ice.) Now I think
I'm ratcheting up my fantasy. Imagine -- just a lousy airport layover, and you
end up driving through the volcano and lava flows and splashing around in the
hot springs! I'll never say, "Oh, bummer, another airport layover!"
again. (Schiphol is a GREAT, thrilling, fun airport for layovers.)
When I was involuntarily
and grudgingly forced to attend mandatory college, a retired priest who did not
strike me as a repository of Wild Thrills forced us to read "Njal's
Saga." I braced myself for another tremendously boring literary classic
experience, but WOW! It was the most thrilling, lurid, colorful, swashbuckling,
violent adventure of protracted family revenge I'd ever read! It's still very near the top of my
Great Books List. And most of the places where the noisy, bloody events of circa
1000 took place (including a spectacularly wild account of the conversion to
Christianity) are still there -- Iceland isn't prone to rapid change or
overdevelopment. (Most of the families involved in the big massacres are still
there, too -- Iceland's a hard place to flee from.) So I've always planned on
quite a bit more than just the free airline day bus to the hot
springs.
Lately I've been seduced
by a website of some people who run an Icelandic pony ranch and take tourist
idiots like moiself on pony treks through volcano and geyser territory. That's a
very difficult trip to purge from my fantasy queue. I can't imagine a living
experience that would so closely resemble a dream.
Too bad Gould doesn't seem to have
ended up there. Unexpected visits to screwy places like that must have been one
of the few perqs of his concert career he looked back on with nostalgia. I've
been to his Hudson Bay wilderness haunts and agree with everybody that Iceland
would definitely have been his cuppa tea. The English artist William Morris took
a youthful visit to Iceland, and it inspired his art for the rest of his life.
(If anybody says, "Oh, the wallpaper guy?" consider yourself whacked
on the knuckles.)
Elmer "the Happy
Wanderer"
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