Ísafjörður (Westfjords, Iceland)

Ísafjörður is the largest town in the Westfjords and is situated on a spit of land that is surrounded by water on three sides.  There are also tunnels on every roadway into town.  Q really liked the tunnels we went through -- they were mostly rough-hewn rock, rather than the more finished concrete or tile versions we've seen in the U.S.  At times, the tunnels narrowed to one lane, which was a bit unnerving, as we had to hope that cars would be able to use the pull-off enclaves and take turns without accident.  I couldn't get any decent photos in the darkness of the tunnel, but you can see what they look like here (you can even watch a video of driving through the tunnel).

We found a nice bakery in Ísafjörður that featured this classic car right outside. The poor woman who served us had to stretch her English skills to describe every item so that we could pick out our sandwiches.

"And it also has -- what is it called?"
"Cucumber?" I suggested.
"Yes, cucumber."

It wasn't too hard to guess, as cucumbers were served at every breakfast buffet.  They are one of the few vegetables that aren't imported, as they can be grown indoors year-round in Iceland.

We also got some tasty desserts at the bakery: A chocolate cake flavored with cinnamon and a chocolate-covered, strawberry-creme filled, gingerbread cake (which was really delicious and very sweet).

As we came out of a shop in Ísafjörður, we heard an odd noise. Looking up, we saw this pair of ravens perched on the shop building. We got to hear a number of different vocalizations -- do you know that scientists have identified up to 33 different vocalization categories among ravens? These two really seemed to be "talking" to each other. Ravens mate monogamously for life, so perhaps these were a mated pair.

Ravens have a prominent place in the folklore and mythologies of many cultures. In Norse mythology, the god Odin was depicted with two ravens (perhaps a mated pair?), Huginn (Thought) and Muninn (Memory). Every day, they flew forth to see and hear everything going on in the world, returning to whisper the information they had gathered to Odin. In this way, they were his eyes and ears.

There were a number of cloudy days on our trip, but the clouds were so often striking and sculptural that the sky just became another stunning landscape.

As we walked around the residential area of Ísafjörður that evening, we saw a pussycat across the street.  As always, Q made appropriate cat-welcoming sounds (he wants to pet every cat we find). With no hesitation whatsoever, the cat ran right over to me.  I wasn't even making cat-sounds!  Without waiting to be petted, the cat then skittered around us, moving up the street.  

We followed.  

If we turned onto another block, the cat turned with us, running until it was ahead of us, but looking back every once in a while to make sure we were still there.  In this way, we were leading and following this cat for quite some while.  She clearly wanted to be near us, but not too near us.  Her path was circuitous, weaving under and around parked cars, moving across the street and back again.  There was something mysterious about the persistent, ambivalent attentions of this creature in the twilight hours of an unfamiliar city.  Where did she want to lead us and why?  

We walked with her all the way out to the water's edge, but finally thought we should walk back to where we first saw the cat, so that she would be close to home.  When we did, we met a woman who said this was her sister's cat.  We were glad to lead the cat back home safely, though still perplexed by her behavior.      

Next up: The Arctic Fox Center in Súðavík

Þingvellir National Park, Iceland

Þingvellir National Park, Iceland

After leaving Reykjavík, we were off to see the Golden Circle, which includes Þingvellir, Geysir, and Gullfoss. We started in Þingvellir National Park, which is located on the boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. In most places, these plates can just slide past each other, but here, they break apart, as much as 1mm to 18mm per year, resulting in dramatic fissures and earthquake activity. This photo is from the entrance to the park, just past the visitors center. It is actually a pretty small rock fissure, but somehow I can capture the feeling of the earth separating more on this small scale than in the larger rifts we walked through.

The Almannagjá fault in Þingvellir National Park, Iceland

The path from the visitors center takes us on the Almannagjá fault toward the Lögberg, the Law Rock. This gives you a better sense of how big the rifts can get along the tectonic plates in the Þingvellir plain. It also shows you how popular this site is -- look at all the visitors!

I love these textured rocks -- I don't know what process gives them these striations, though. Is this the result of the lava flows from volcanic activity or the stress of the tectonic plates? (Maybe, as Q said, these were giant fingerprints!)

Another cool textured rock. This trip made me wish I had taken a geology course in college. Or that I just had a geologist along to explain things to me.

We stopped to take a selfie as we walked through Þingvellir.

And there were mysterious paths into the rocks . . . but signs forbade us from straying off the main path, as it damages the fragile plants. (We saw other visitors doing so, though, much to our annoyance.)

Of course, Iceland is full of hidden treasures.  Did you know that in his book, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne placed the passage leading to the center of the earth at the mountain Snæfellsjökull in western Iceland?  

Þingvellir is also a key historic site.  Beginning in AD 930, the Icelandic national democratic assembly (Alþingi) was held yearly in Þingvellir. (This remained the national legislative assembly until 1271, at which time governance was surrendered to the Norwegian crown, though Þingvellir continued to be used as a courtroom until 1798.) People traveled from all over Iceland to attend -- here they would pass new laws, make criminal judgments, create marriage contracts, and enjoy the opportunities for trade and entertainment.

This is the view from the Lögberg (Law Rock). Here the Law Speaker would recite from memory the existing laws of Iceland (one third of the laws were recited each year, along with the rules of the parliament). The early Icelanders re-routed the river to provide water to the site of the Alþingi -- unfortunately, this caused problems later on with flooding and made the site almost impassible in some years.

The annual Alþingi acted as a national court, where criminal cases were heard and punishment enacted. Punishments might involve fines, outlawry, flogging, or execution. This is Drekkingarhylur ("the drowning pool"), where, up to the early 18th century, women who were convicted of adultery, incest, or infanticide were drowned. (Men convicted of capital crimes weren't drowned -- they were burned or hanged.)

Q got to clamber on the rocks near Öxarárfoss (a waterfalll flowing from the river Öxará over the Almannagjá rift). The story is that this is where the river was redirected by the Vikings for the Alþingi.

Q gets up close and personal with Öxarárfoss. 

Closeup of Öxarárfoss in Þingvellir National Park, Iceland

The water is flowing by, but I can capture just this one moment with my camera.

One of the reasons I enjoy posting photos and travelogue is to better remember our journey. Without a story, the memories tend to fade away. But when I capture a moment in time and place it into a narrative, I get to keep the memory. (Or, as cognitive science would argue, I construct the memory. Whatever. I still get a memory.)

Next up: Geysir

Memories of My Mother

After a long hiatus, I have a new post on my other blog, Memories of My Mother.  I hope you enjoy it.  If you haven't visited my other blog before, you might want to read some of the earlier posts, including the first one, to get a sense of the project.

My mother, Nancy Driessel Stearns (date and place unknown)

Aparth-eyed

My first year of college was hard for me. I felt socially isolated and disconnected from many of the students in my dorm, who spent their free time getting high or going to fraternity parties. I joined a couple of student groups to try to find a community, including the Anti-Apartheid Coalition. The Coalition was working to convince the college to divest itself of any holdings in companies that did business in South Africa, which at the time was still under apartheid, a system of racial segregation created and maintained by the state. The idea was, first, that it was immoral to reap profits from a violently repressive, racist state, and second, that divestment would create economic pressure for South Africa to change its oppressive policies. Those of us in the anti-apartheid group spent time educating ourselves about the history and politics of South Africa as well as putting together campus rallies and demonstrations to urge the college trustees to divest.

I grew up inspired by the activism of the 1960s. I often felt that I had been born in the wrong era, as I so passionately wanted to be part of a larger social change movement. Yet by the time I came of age in the 1980s there was little enthusiasm for social activism. While I proudly identified as a feminist, the popular culture offered up anti-feminist backlash; I wouldn't find a strong feminist community until the 1990s, when I was in graduate school. The political idealism of the anti-apartheid movement was deeply compelling to me. I wanted to be part of a movement that worked toward positive social change and I truly believed that dedicated activists could, in fact, make the world a better place.

Like most college students, I was juggling the academic work of writing papers and studying for exams, as well as a number of extracurricular activities. As the semester wore on, paper deadlines neared and we stepped up preparation for our big divestment rally, so I got even busier.

It was an unwelcome surprise, then, to wake up one day with my eyes glued shut.

Seriously, my eyes were completely glued shut, and I couldn't open them. I didn't even know that was possible! I panicked, and finally found my way to the sink in my dorm room. I washed out my eyes and was able to able to open them, which was a huge relief. My eyes were red and puffy, crusty with some stringy mucus secretion. Weird. It seems like a design flaw for a species that relies so much on sight that your own eye secretions can render you unable to see. I rinsed them out more fully and got ready to go to class.

I know -- you're thinking that I should go to the student health service and get this red-eye-gluey thing checked out. But you don't understand: I was busy. With important, life-changing, world-changing things. What did it matter if I had a little eye goop in the morning? We were going to end apartheid. Not only were my personal problems trivial, but ignoring my suffering revealed the depth of my selfless commitment to the cause. Real activists are willing to lay their bodies on the line, risking arrest and bodily harm on a regular basis. Of course, I wasn't in the least prepared to face arrest or expulsion, so my inflamed eyes would just have to do. And it never occurred to me that this even needed treatment. I didn't think of it as an infection that could be spread or that it could have long-term consequences if left untreated. The same boundless optimism that made me think I could change the world also told me that my body could take care of itself.

Another reason I didn't see this eye goop thing as a problem had to do with the pink eye scares of my childhood. When I was a child, my parents and the pediatrician periodically thought I had pink eye. I rubbed my eyes and they were red, so they couldn't tell if my eyes were red because I rubbed them or if I was rubbing them because they were red and infected. Just to be on the safe side, they would diagnose it as pink eye and prescribe daily eye drops as treatment. Couldn't be simpler, right? Except not for me. I have a very strong blink reflex -- when I see something coming at my eye (even if it is just a tiny drop of fluid), I blink. To me, that has always seemed reasonable. So to get the eye drops in my eye, my mother would hold my eye open and say, "Now, don't blink." And I would agree not to blink. But then as the eye drops were falling toward my eye, I would blink so forcefully that she couldn't keep my eye open, and the eye drops would fall on my closed eyelid. We'd do this a couple of times, and then my mother would just give up, hoping that some of the medication got into my eye through my closed lids.

As it turned out, it hardly mattered -- I never did have pink eye as a child. So I learned two things from this experience: One, that some things are out of my control, like blinking, and two, that I was invulnerable to pink eye.

But back in my college dorm room, I had to figure out some way to manage my goopy eyes. So I worked out a system. I'd keep a damp washcloth next to my bed so that I could clear out my morning eye-glue, at least enough to open my eyes, and then I could get on with my day. I worked my shift at the cafeteria, went to class (I never missed class), then handed out leaflets for our upcoming divestment rally. I'd stand in the path through the main campus green, wearing my denim jacket covered with political buttons, rub my red and gooey eyes, and offer leaflets to passing students.

"Don't forget about the rally on Wednesday!"

"Anti-apartheid rally, Wednesday afternoon!"

"Divest now!"

The passing students could not have been less interested. This was not Berkeley -- the majority of these students were not politically engaged. And South Africa was far away. What did this have to do with their lives? When the administration later attempted to ban keg parties, then the students found their political voice, to be sure. But the number of students interested in demonstrating to ostensibly help people in a distant country was a small minority, at best. And even if successful, our movement would only benefit those oppressed by apartheid indirectly through economic pressure -- it was not as though attending the rally would instantly free Nelson Mandela and others unjustly jailed. But I couldn't help being angry at the apathy I saw all around me. Why can't people see how important this is? So we persevered, handing out leaflets and getting the word out about our rally. I even wore a DIVEST NOW sandwich board to classes one day. I was the only one wearing a sign. I got quite a few stares that day.

The rally came off, though it wasn't as well-attended as I had hoped. We stood in front of the campus administration building, listened to the speakers, and chanted as loud as we could.

Hey hey!

Ho ho!

South African stocks have got to go!

Hey hey!

Ho ho!

South African stocks have got to go! . . .

We were a small group, to be sure. But student groups across the country made similar demands, and colleges started to feel the pressure to respond in some way. There was some divestment, though the process was sometimes slow and incomplete. And the international social and economic pressure did have a role in bringing down apartheid. I think we made a difference. 

Photo of the protest via  

I came through the experience with my optimism largely intact, both in terms of social change and in terms of my own body. Maybe I couldn't marshal thousands of students into the rally. Maybe the trustees delayed their decision on divestment. But in the end, the divestment movement had an effect. In the end, apartheid fell. And that goopy eye thing? After a week or two, it cleared up on its own; I never did go to the doctor about it. It wasn't until years later that it even occurred to me that I might have gotten pink eye that semester. No matter how often I got sick or hurt, I maintained a pretty robust belief in my body's resilience, assuming that any physical problems would resolve themselves without the need for medical intervention.

I have to admit, though, that my political optimism was a bit bruised by all those apathetic students. It can be difficult to sustain one's hope for social change in the face of such pervasive disinterest. My experience as an activist and as an educator has taught me that you aren't going to reach everyone, or even most people. You can leaflet and argue and talk yourself hoarse, but many people will not be persuaded. Like blinking, this is something I can't fully control.

However, as a teacher I've also learned that we can sometimes have an effect on someone that isn't immediately apparent. I don't know that I changed even one mind or inspired one student to attend the rally. But it could be that being exposed to the passionate political ideals we wore so proudly and shouted so enthusiastically created a sense of possibility for the power of a dedicated movement to enact social change. Those seemingly apathetic students may have gone on to become political activists for some other cause, or they may have formed community organizations or joined the Peace Corps. And certainly our public activism raised awareness about apartheid for students who might have otherwise not even known about it.

In the end, I'll never know whether or how they were influenced by our leaflets and chanting. I want to believe that I made a difference, even for those students who seemed utterly uncaring. It's important for me, even all these years later, with my idealism a bit tarnished, to have made an impact. I'd like to think I had at least some effect on them.

Well, if nothing else, I probably gave some of them pink eye.

***********************************************************************

NOTE:  I've come to enjoy storytelling podcasts like The Moth and The Story Collider, which feature live performances of people telling true stories from their lives.  It got me to thinking -- if I had to give a live storytelling performance, what stories could I tell?  I wrote this story with that in mind (it's not the same, of course, since I am writing it, not telling it live, but one does what one can).  Many thanks for helpful feedback from Clio, Ken, and, of course, Q.  The title was also Q's idea, so blame him for the pun.  (In case you were wondering, Divestment Bunny, pictured above, is a relic from my college days, when even my stuffed animals were politically active.)   

A home for imagination and creativity

When I was a child, I was given a dollhouse.  I played with it throughout my childhood and kept it set up even after I stopped playing with it (my younger sisters continued to play with it while I was in college).  When Q and I moved in together, I set up the dollhouse in our apartment.  Eventually, though, I stored the dollhouse and all its furnishings in a closet, waiting for a time I could bequeath it to another child.

Looking spiffy with the fresh paint --
and the open door invites us to peer inside.

Cease and desist

Dear Brain,

I hope this letter finds you well.  I would like to begin by thanking you for the excellent service you have thus far provided.  I have had little cause for dissatisfaction over these many years and have come to rely on you for everything from motor control to memory (although I must say your performance in the memory department has been rather spotty at times).  Whenever I have needed you, you were there. 

It is, therefore, with a heavy heart that I must register my current complaint.  It must seem to you a rather trivial matter, given your otherwise exemplary performance.  Indeed, I have tried my utmost to simply ignore the problem and hoped that you would resolve it spontaneously.  But my patience has been stretched to its breaking point.  I have reached the limits of my goodwill and cannot turn a blind eye to such egregious behavior on your part. 

I have endured more than a month of near-constant replay of the same tune.  It is more than I can bear.  True, there have been moments, even whole days, during which I was not plagued by the endlessly repeating musical loop.  But just when I think it is over, when I hope to be truly free of this torture, I find myself whistling the refrain under my breath.  I have done everything I know to end this cycle.  I can find nothing -- no other music, no mental trick  -- to successfully expunge this earworm.  I even attempted to replace one song loop with another to no avail.  I must, therefore, respectfully ask you to take immediate action to end your musical barrage.

It wouldn't be so bad if the music were more complex or varied.  There are some songs I could happily listen to every day.  Frankly, what bothers me most is the sheer inanity of your choice.  I ask you, honestly, who wouldn't be irritated by incessant replay of the theme song from I Dream of Jeannie -- a show I haven't seen for at least a decade, and one which at best is silly and might more accurately be described as puerile.  I mean, really -- I'm not asking for high-brow classical music, but this is just embarrassing. What are you trying to communicate to me?  Am I supposed to dress up in chiffon and live in a bottle, devote myself to servile submission to my "master" -- or are you just encouraging me to watch more television?  I cannot decode the message, if any, that is being conveyed, and I have had enough. 

As of receipt of this letter, I demand that you cease and desist your musical assault.  Prompt action on your part will ensure that no punitive action will be taken against you.  Should you fail to respond in a timely manner, I am prepared to settle this matter formally in court.  I deeply regret the necessity of this letter, but you have left me little recourse.  I hope that we can resolve this amicably and return to the mutually satisfactory relationship we have had in the past. 

Sincerely,

Deborah C. Stearns, Ph.D.

Why are these slides a funny color?

I've been scanning in old slides that I got from my maternal grandparents. It's been fun to have more family photos from long ago, as I have very few photos from that era. But I've also learned the importance of color correcting these slides. When they are scanned in, they have a colored cast that is quite distinctive and makes them look dated. I have been using the color correction tool in Photoshop (I use AutoCorrect so I don't have to set the levels myself), and the difference can be quite dramatic. Here's the original scan of my mother and her parents (Christmas, 1962?):


Here's the color corrected version:


Here's the original scan of my brother and me (note my anxious look -- this shows up a lot in my childhood pictures):


Here's the color corrected version:


Here's the original scan of my brother (whose own son looks *exactly* like him at this age). I love this picture -- just look at that big grin!

Here's the color corrected version:

I'm curious about why there is this colored cast, though. It could be a function of the film developing techniques at the time (movies from the 1960s and 70s have a very different color cast because of changing film techniques, for example). Or it might have been done intentionally for slides, as a way of compensating for the effects of the warm light being cast by the slide projector (which would have been yellowish). Or is it just a function of these slides being old, and that the colors have changed as they aged? If anyone knows why these slides might be off-color, I'd love to know the answer.

New blogging project

In honor of Mother's Day, I just wanted to let you know about my new blog, Memories of My Mother, where I will be posting weekly explorations of memories of my mother. This project represents an exercise in mindfulness, as I spend some time each week reflecting on my mother's life. In addition to the regular blog posts, I'm raising funds toward a college scholarship in her name at Montgomery College(as part of the Women's Studies Scholarship program). All net proceeds from sales of my handcrafted goods in my Etsy shop will go toward the Nancy Driessel Stearns scholarship fund. Right now, there is only one item in my Etsy shop, but more will be listed in future, so check back regularly to see what I have available. The project is described more fully on the blog, so if you are interested, pop over and read about it there. Feel free to post comments, if you are so moved. There are links on the blog to subscribe via a reader or via email (to have new posts emailed to you), as well as a link to my Etsy shop (on the right hand menu).

Happy Mother's Day!

Clive Wearing

An interview and brief discussion of the case of Clive Wearing, who has severe anterograde amnesia as a result of viral encephalitis that caused brain damage. He can't remember anything for more than about 30 seconds or so -- the only constants in his life are his love for his wife, Deborah, and his music. It's both sad and sweet all at the same time.