The Museum of Whales You Will Never See by A. Kendra Greene

Author:A. Kendra Greene [Greene, A. Kendra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

*

They say the thing that changed Iceland was the rubber boot. They say that for a thousand years there was nothing for it, the damp and the wet, shoes cut like slippers instead of boots, a kind of minimum—of material, of investment, of separation from the ground—and so ephemeral anyway, the wrap of fishskin or sealskin or sheepskin cupping the sole soon scored and sliced to tatters, inevitably, from walking the volcanic earth.

But eventually there was an inescapable war, and the British landed, and the Americans soon enough, and nothing ever keeps confined to a military encampment. They say the rubber boot was a revelation. They say that the Icelanders had spent a thousand years with wet feet, and now even a fisherman could come home with dry toes. They say it was a shock. The dryness was too foreign, too unsettling, too drastic to be borne. So radical was the change, they say some people sometimes poured a little water into their rubber boots, an intervention, to make them feel right again.

From the Norsemen to the Second World War, Iceland lived in the middle ages. That’s how the Icelanders say it. All that time before, all those Icelanders in houses with no tables or chairs, with two or three people in a bed and those beds too short to lie down in. So much of that time working in the dark, in those main rooms named for the old saunas, baðstofa, even though the island had long since been denuded of the wood to burn to heat a sauna, and long since plunged into a little ice age that left the island colder even than during the sauna years.

Indeed, by one kind of accounting, there had never been much to begin with, not the stuff of civilization, not on this island where the wood had long ago been burned, where everything was built from driftwood or shipwreck or turf cut from the ground, where there was essentially no usable metal or workable clay to be dug from the ground, and anyway no heat source hot enough to work them. Children’s toys were bones and shells. There was no national dance and not much music, and the national costume was first dreamed up not by custom but by a designer, and even that only a hundred years ago. We know the date the first well-meaning priest planted the first potato in Icelandic soil to keep people from starving, but there was never a date for it sprouting.

These days there are greenhouses, now that the geothermic heat is better harnessed, and they do all right with cucumbers and tomatoes and such viny veg. But essentially, on this island, for a thousand years, no resource was kept at home when it could be sold abroad—the salt fish, the whale oil, the herring, and with no guarantee what could be fished next year.

This is a country where the first bridges didn’t come until 1920. This is a land of people so

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.