"We can't turn back. She awaits us at Askja."
"Who?"
"Freyja."
I was quiet for a moment. Then I said, as gently as I could, "I'm right
here, Birdie. I'm sitting right here next to you."
Birdie shrieked with laughter, slapped the steering wheel with both
palms. "Of course you are, little fool! Do you think I've lost my mind? I refer, dear girl, to Freyja the goddess."
Worse yet. "Birdie ... she doesn't exist."
"Slander! Was it not said of Freyja, a full two centuries after the onslaught
of Christianity, that she alone of the gods yet lives? That entire marvelous pantheon-Freyja's twin brother, Freyr, hung like a wild ox; brawny Thor, an
occasional cross-dresser but man enough to challenge Christ the interloper
to a duel; Baldur, son of Odin, fair and beautiful and doomed to die by one of
Loki's lowliest tricks; Loki himself, who consorted with giants and demons,
who bedded a giantess that bore him three monsters-the Fenris Wolf, the
Midgard Serpent, and a daughter named Hel-instigator of Ragnarok and
the end of the world; and finally Odin, the All-Father, the One-Eyed God of
inspiration who intoxicated men in battle and infused poets with verse-all
vanished. True, gods come and gods go, forcibly retired mostly: banished,
outlawed, discredited, disgraced. But this was not the End-Time they'd envisioned for themselves, no pitched Armageddon, no wild doomed battle with
cataclysmic demonic forces, but instead a pathetically peaceable usurpation
by a lone god and his tragic son. Whoosh! An entire pantheon relegated to the
grinning void. Except Freyja. She alone of the gods yet lives! Fertility goddesses die hard, my girl. Yes, Freyja awaits us. Mistress of divination, bestow
on me your mantic gifts-"
I interrupt her now, Cousin, because I can. At the time I was helpless, it
was not possible to slip a word in edge- or any-wise. She was uninterrupt-
ible, she was hemorrhaging words. Hour after mile after hour after mile we
bounced and jostled at tortoise speed on rutted track through tortured
landscape, and hour after mile after hour after mile Birdie talked on on on.
Sometimes I listened, sometimes I managed to block her out, sometimes I
could scarcely decipher the gush of words bleeding together in a bewildering mix of English and Icelandic. Thought interrupted thought, idea generated idea, her brain a Big Bang of associations impossible to track.
Yet she was not stuck in her head. Or rather, she was, she inhabited her
mind, but she inhabited the world too. Her senses grew acutely sharp. She
noted every rut, every knife-sharp rock, and deftly steered the jeep to avoid
them. When we got stuck in a sand pit, Birdie, without missing a beat, without skipping a word, slipped the jeep into neutral, leapt out, and singlehandedly pushed the jeep out of the ditch. I was watching, I saw her. Mania
endowed her with physical strength and acuity beyond human. She believed
herself godlike and she was. She kept an eye on the sky, on the clouds, the
wind, the temperature, the road conditions, talking talking all the while. It is
impossible to replicate, Cousin, this state of your mother's. Or at least, I am not up to the task. The fluidity of thought and motion, the concordance and
elegance of her speech, the perfect symbiosis of world and mind. A pile of
stones on the road could spark a discourse that ranged hundreds of years in
mere minutes. Something like this:
"Cairns," Birdie began, pointing to a tower of rocks out the window, "are
called prestar because like priests they point the way but do not follow it.
An old Icelandic joke. Ha! Are you aware of the Icelanders' long history of
resistance to religious authority, how even as pagans they were for the most
part inconstant and opportunist, switching allegiances on a whim? Don't
think for a minute they abandoned the old beliefs wholesale when Christianity was announced as the national religion, and Thor's and Odin's men
accepted sprinkling with water right there at the Althing in the river Oxara,
though some waited until the horse trek homeward when they could dunk
themselves in hot springs instead of cold ones. True they built churches
and attended them, baptized their babes, but when it came to matters of
real import, old ways readily resurfaced. What fool would pray to the new
White God before a fishing trip when Thor was still ready to assist? Remnants of lost beliefs persist to this day in transmuted forms, rural superstitions, the old pagan land spirits, the vaetir, transmogrified into folklore's
Hidden People. Iceland is a numinous island, is it not? A paradise for pagans, for all who believe that every thing lives and is imbued with spirit.
What is the Icelanders' obsessive interest in dreams but a leftover of the
Norse practice of seidur, shamanic divination by a seeress. Prophecy, Freya
min, is a woman's gift! Write your dreams down. Pay attention. No one rivals your namesake in the art of augury. Our Mistress of Vaticination!" And
then glancing out the side window, indicating the entire moonscape before
us, she began speculating on the ratio of glaciers to lava deserts. ". . . the
primordial nature of Iceland's habitat. What looks like destruction is actually creation. Earth is being thrust up, birthed beneath our feet! Iceland is a
baby, Freya, a geological and political infant, the last settled of the European nations, the penultimate holdout against Christianity, dragged a thousand years later kicking and screaming into NATO. Independent people,
indeed. Protesters teargassed, nearly blinded. Freyja's eye-rain or eye-hail
or eyelid-showers or cheek-storm or eyelash-cascades, all kennings for gold.
Gold itself is moving-current sun. Sun-month. So much more poetic, the old names for the twelve months: sun-month, hay-month, harvest-month,
slaughter-month, frost-month, ram-month, Thorri, Goi, single-month,
cuckoo-month, seed-time, lamb-fold time. Eagles are lamb-enemies. Arm
is falcon-perch, ships are surge-horses. Heathens practiced pre-Christian
baptismal water rites. Good Lutheran fourteen-year-olds receive confirmation, Freya. You turn fourteen this winter, do you not? I've never seen you
on your birthday. Summers only! Your Connecticut winters must pale, my
dear. Manitoba boasts colder mean temps than Iceland mean being the
operative word, hoary and hoarfrost and hoar. Yes, they called Freyja a
whore! Reviled our Mistress as a she-goat in heat, the gods' own slut and a
shameless brother-fucker. Ah, the degradation of fertility cults and dominance of all-father sky deities! Of all my enemies is Ulfur not the worst,
cloaked in his Arni Magnusson, rescuer-of-manuscripts holiness? Only in
this book-sick ancestor-worshiping nation could a man like Ulfur be
revered. Don't forget, the Fenris Wolf is the demon bastard of Loki. I am
the true poet of the age, Freya min! Wisdom cannot be stolen, only divined.
Look at Odin, hanging from the World Tree, sacrificing himself to himself,
self-revealing the mysteries of the runes. Let Ulfur call it eagle shit, Word
Meadow is divine divination, I tell you. Odin, I know where your eye is concealed, hidden in the well of Mimir but where are Olafur's letters concealed? Hidden in the well of Askja! Askja means box, caldera, but aska
means ashes, box of ashes, ash districts. Ash blew as far as St. Petersburg.
Fleers of ash. We descend from those who fled, who bid Iceland good-bye
and in some cases good riddance. Did you know that some emigrants refused to speak again of that barren land, never wrote home, reinvented
themselves as Canadians and Americans, passed down no stories, only bitter glimpses, `life in Iceland was a living hell,' a distinct lack of nostalgia for
wasted lives of near-indentured servitude, nineteenth-century Iceland a
semifeudal society, while back in Iceland emigrant became synonymous
with traitor? Of course not all newfoundlandlings turned their backs so decisively, many indulged in homeland sickness, misty-eyed longings. Olafur
foremost among them. You can only have one mother, one motherland, and
so descendants of pioneers invent a New-Iceland-of-the-diaspora, an
Iceland-of-the-mind and -memory, a mythic homeland, an oddly old newworld Gimlian golden age-"
It took a river to shut her up. A tributary of the glacial river drew a line in
the sand and dared us to cross it. I was sent to scout the shallowest spot.
"Like Saemundur taught us!" Birdie yelled. I cursed Saemundur. Was he the
one who made her think she could do this? The odd thing-and I swear I remember this though it seems implausibly impossible, hallucinatory even at
the time the river's banks were blanketed with bright pink flowers, lurid as
Birdie's salmon coat against the jet-black sand. I blinked my eyes; the pink
vision remained. What had Saemundur advised? You just try to judge the
most shallow spot, which is often where the river runs widest. The widest point
was easiest enough to find-about twenty yards downstream from where
Birdie waited in the jeep-and it was calmer, too, a flattened pool compared
with upstream's muddy torrent. But what if it contained unexpected depths?
The glacial sediment, Saemundur had said, makes it hard to judge. Jeeps and
trucks being towed from rivers are not uncommon sights in Iceland. They make
for good rescue photos! If our jeep got stuck in this river, there'd be no one to
rescue us. So bootless I waded in. Glacial melt instantly flooded my sneakers. Ankle-high, then shin- and knee-deep in ice water. Any deeper than my
thigh and we'd be sunk for sure. I glanced upstream and nearly lost my balance and plunged in. Birdie was waving me out of the river. I waved back,
motioning her downstream to where I stood. "This is the best place to cross,"
I announced, climbing into the jeep, hoping it was true. The jeep lurched
through wheel-deep, and when we made it to the opposite bank a wildchildish pride surged through me: If Marna could see me now!
If Mama could see me now she'd fall into another dead faint, that's what
she'd do. On the other side I climbed out of the jeep to shed my waterlogged sneakers and jeans, exposed in my underwear for all the world
meaning no one in the world-to see. A blast of wind sent me scurrying
back into the jeep barefoot. Why does Birdie get to stay dry? She's the
driver, the road-story maniac. I shivered and chattered and all Birdie said as
she steered the jeep back onto the track was "It's going to rain" and it did.
Fat wet plops blurring the windshield. I closed my eyes and when I finally
opened them again the rain had stopped and the jeep had stopped and we
were staring at an oasis. A gigantic patch of desert-defying green stuff.
"Rises the earth out of the foam, fair and green," Birdie intoned, quoting
Voluspa, and for the first time in hours what she said made perfect sense.
Life is persistent, I'll say that for it. Where nothing should grow sprang
some of the richest vegetation I'd seen in Iceland, against the backdrop of
the magnificent table mountain Herdubreid, shaped like a birthday cake
with ice cap icing. We sat awestruck in the jeep, Birdie reciting the last
stanzas of Voluspa by heart.
"I'm hungry," I said finally, but Birdie of course could not hear me, lost
in the currents of her verbal spew. "I'm starving!" I shouted.
That she heard. And stared at me as if I were insane. "No need to yell,
elskan. There's food in the back, help yourself."
Food indeed: an entire shopping bag full of licorice. Twenty-some packages of multiple varieties: salty, super salty, and sweet. Why? I didn't have
to ask. The answer was clearly printed on each package: Freyja brand. With
a black cat logo. Was this Birdie's idea of a joke? I was far too old by then
any remnants of my child status were rapidly vanishing-to think candy for
dinner either funny or fun. But there was nothing to say, or rather, no one
who would listen. So I sat in the jeep sucking salty mouth-puckering
licorice while Birdie surveyed the oasis on foot, a tall blond flash of salmon
pink weaving through tall green grasses.
Singing woke me from a sitting sleep, a haunting melody, Birdie serenading me outside the jeep window. Ride, ride and follow over the sand ...
the outlaws of the Odadahraun are herding sheep ... "I've found it, Freya
rnin, Fjalla-Eyvindur's hideout, his very shelter, one of the greatest outlaws
of all time, sheep rustler, Icelandic Robin Hood, folk hero who survived
here in this very hut through the horrendous winter of 1774 on angelica
root and raw horse meat-"
I would say it was the most miserable night of my life except the next
was far worse. To call it cold would not do it justice; assume from here on
the meanest of temps. Birdie and I in a cramped stone hut huddled in
sleeping bags sucking licorice. The little I slept I dreamt, not unreasonably,
that I was back in the ice cave, hearing Saemundur's name as I shouted it
echoing off the frozen walls unanswered.
Signs awaited us come morning: antler and sand.
I woke alone, stiff and hungry with a licorice-thick fuzz coating my
mouth, my clammy sneakers oozing glacial silt. Outside the hut it was a sunny day bit by razor-sharp wind. I found Birdie kneeling on the blackened bank of the river, holding something in her hand. A single enormous
reindeer antler. Artfully sculpted. Freyja left us this sign, elskan. See the shape
of Fehu, rune of Freyja and Frey; Fehu the first letter of the Runic alphabet,
now we learn our ABC's, good pagans knew their futhark: Fehu, Uruz,
Thurisaz, Ansuz, Raido, Kenaz. She is near, elskan. She is near.
I left Birdie scratching rune shapes with the antler tip in the riverbank's
black sand. I knew we had to get out, turn back, and it was up to me to make
this happen. I squatted in the grass to pee, filled the plastic water jug from a
spring, rolled up our sleeping bags, and tossed them into the jeep. By this
time the wind had picked up and as I took Birdie by the hand and led her to
the jeep, still clutching the antler, we got slammed by a wall of sand. It
swirled so thick we couldn't see, could only run toward the dark shape of the
jeep, arms covering our faces. The jeep was a haven but a stationary one.
There was no going anywhere, even Birdie could see that. Curtains of sand
blew over us, spattering the windows, a weird desert blizzard that trapped us
for an hour or more. For once Birdie wasn't talky. She fell into a deep, almost
catatonic, silence, head slumped on the steering wheel. Wouldn't answer
when I spoke, wouldn't move when I shook her. What if she was slipping into
a coma? When she finally spoke her words came slowly, heavy as stones.