Guðmundarstaðir

Yesterday (the 16th), we traveled to Mosfellsbær, fifteen minutes
from 101 Reykjavik, where Disa´s parents have their self-made
mountainside woodland. The old joke is reprised, Disa telling it.
"If you are lost in the Icelandic woods, what do you do to be rescued?"
The answer: "Stand up." It´s true, the trees are not tall here, nor are
they plentiful. So it is with a kind of pioneering spirit that her father
and mother, Guðmundur and Aagot, have been working on this
once-naked mountainside since their retirement some years ago,
planting varieties of trees, shrubs and flowers. It is a pastoral place
with a long view below of the valley and of Mount Esja.

Aagot named the park, Guðmundarstaðir, after her fisherman husband.
She relates to me that she had a motive for doing so, as Guðmundur,
in the first weeks of his retirement, was listless, uninspired, perhaps
a bit depressed. So the name was to call him to the mountain, to get
his passion involved again. It worked. Here, on a 35-degree volcanic
slope, they have created a woods, a garden, a family place for picnics.

There are varieties of birch, Alaska willows, larch, spruce, Norway pine,
and the first bamboo in Iceland. There are scattered clusters of blue lupin
flowers. In boxed planters, they have planted garden vegetables. It is land
they have been given to develop and use, an exchange program by which
citizens are able to enjoy sections of the countryside while at the same
time improving the land. On this particular Thursday, the day before
Iceland´s Independence Day, there is a celebrative mood. After having to
carry buckets of water from their home to Guðmundarstaðir for years,
today marks the first day of running water at the site. Through a friend
of a friend, Guðmundur has been able to arrange to run 100 meters of
yellow hose from a farmer´s barn, across the bumpy dirt road, up to the
family´s mountainside park. Today there is water flowing into the plant,
flower and vegetable gardens. Though he is a tireless, non-stop worker,
Gudmundur may now save his 72-year old back a little strain.

Aagot leads us up past the gardens to a small tree, recently planted. Under
its boughs there is a nest with a mother thrush sitting atop it. She appears
calm as we tiptoe within ten feet. "She knows and trusts us," Aagot says,
matter of factly. Disa´s mother is 70, wiry, well-read and very much alive.
You look in her eyes and see light. Her English is excellent, to the point
where she will pause at times in mid-sentence, not satisfied with the rote
word, looking instead for the one which more aptly reveals the colour she
wishes to communicate. Later, across clumps of untracked ground, she leads
her daughter and me to the site of an old sheep shed. The shed is gone, but
the depression in the ground remains. Life has been here before.

There is a picnic bench where we all sit. Disa´s sister, the concert pianist Anna,
arrives with her son, Gummi. Guðmundur stops work and sits with us to
have a nibble of food and puff on one of his long super-slim cigarettes. Aagot
points up the cliff face to where three evergreens have grown to a height of
maybe four feet. Guðmundur and his grandson scaled the mountain a few
summers ago to plant them. They are the only trees to be seen at that altitude
for miles around. Aagot is proud of those trees, and of the trees and shrubs
and flowers surrounding us. On this volcanic island in the North Atlantic,
such things are victories, the result of hard work. During our walk to the site
of the sheep shed, Disa walks ahead for a while. In this time I am alone with
her mother. I tell Aagot that I am quite impressed with Guðmundarstaðir.
She nods. "It is our idea that in 25 years, the children of our children will
enjoy this place, when the trees have grown." There are no tears in her eyes
or catch in her voice when she says this. She is simply describing her and her
husband´s vision to me, the passion and inspiration which is at the heart of
their daily labours here, at Guðmundarstaðir.

DL