BobHarris.com - Friday pudublogging: Remote Icelandic Island Edition

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Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts,
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A Woefully Incomplete Guide™

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Friday pudublogging: Remote Icelandic Island Edition

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Friday, 24 August 2007

The view north from Stórhöfði on the southern tip of Heimaey in the Westman Islands:

Taken in 55 degree weather during a steady drizzle. In other words, on a fabulous summer day in Iceland.

With weather this cold, you can see why Fuzzy would be the fashion choice for local wildlife.

"Heimaey," incidentally, is pronounced roughly like "Hay-may," albeit with anything from two to four syllables, depending on how seriously you take your diphthongs.

Most of the locals seem to say something pretty close to "Hay-may," or maybe "Hay-ma-ee," but one lady in the airport made it almost into a Norse saga: "Heh-ee-muh-aye-eh-ye," assuming she ever finished. I must have walked away at some point. As far as I know, she may still be standing there in the terminal, just going "ah-ee-uh-muh-ee-ah" and awaiting some sort of rescue.

Heimaey is also the scene of an annual Puffin Rescue as wonderfully loopy as anything I've ever encountered. Every August, thousands of baby puffins take flight for the very first time, and every August, hundreds get confused by electric lights and find themselves wandering aimlessly into the island's one small town.

Fortunately, it's a local tradition to let the kids stay up late, catch and protect the pufflings during the night, and release the baby birds to the sea every morning. Adorable family fun.

That said, by "protect," I mean "shove into cardboard boxes." Not fancy, but it works.

Also, "release" often means "throw overhand." It works just fine for the birds. Some kids even compete to see who can hurl their baby bird farthest. Grab! Zing! Yay!

So, every August, in this small town on this tiny island off the coast of Iceland, hundreds of poor baffled birds spend their first night of adulthood so completely confused that they actually need sleep-deprived children to stuff them in boxes and then fling them like footballs back into the sea.

I dare you not to giggle at this whole idea.

And really, who among us has not been that puffin at some point in life?

Unfortunately, increasingly warm summers (yes, another probable sign of global warming) have been meddling with the puffins' sense of timing, and they're emerging from their nests later each year. The current lead story of the islands' newspaper, Eyjar ("Islands") is an interview with Kristjáns Egilssonar, a local expert who seems to be grumping about the weather, near as I can tell. Which, I should add, isn't far. My Icelandic doesn't extend much beyond "lundi" ("puffin"), "hvar er minn bjór" ("where is my beer") and "snyrting" (the room used, one assumes, to snyrt, often after a bjór; most of us snyrt several times each day*).

Then again, given my struggles with Icelandic, Kristjáns may be simply discussing the pronunciation of "Heimaey." Although the article doesn't seem nearly long enough.

Anyhow. Sad to imagine global warming might actually affect even this remote spot.

Will post much more, I promise. Iceland is exceedingly cool. For now, anyway.

* Disappointingly, "snyrt" and its related forms actually just mean "tidy up," as I understand it. So "snyrtingar" is apparently a polite phrase meaning something like "dressing rooms."

Whatever you were imagining is your own snyrt.