Oraefi. Ófeigur Sigurðsson

the warrior queen of Icelandic culture, to take this thing ceremoniously from its cooler and hand it off to the superintendent of the Phallological Museum with a little speech. The ceremony was shown prime time on the national news. There’s no leg museum and no buttock museum, said the Minister of Education, but we’re proud of the Phallological Museum. Back east in Öræfi, there was nothing for it but to discard the leg and ass-cheek in the trash incinerator at Svínafell, an incinerator which heats the swimming pool Flosalaug, wafting a grilling smell over the countryside in the spring breeze, a pungent mix of smoke and soot and trash fumes.

      The nasal-voiced regional reporter from the State Broadcasting Service in Suðurland reached Öræfi despite sandstorms at Skeiðarársand that rendered his car entirely plain, stripping all its markings; he interviewed Dr. Lassi after news of this mysterious accident spread, asking about the vet’s impressive initiative and the case of the man whose life Dr. Lassi had worked so remarkably to save, the Alpine Child. In an interview broadcast via telephone, Dr. Lassi said she had no choice but to amputate … dismember, whispered the language consultant at the State Broadcasting Company into the small headphone in the regional news correspondent’s ear … dismemberment, repeated the language consultant in the ear of the correspondent … dismemberment, blurted out the correspondent in front of Dr. Lassi … the dismemberment of the Alpine Child at the hotel in Freysnes, said Dr. Lassi, I was forced to take off a leg, I had no time to lose if the youth was going to live. Dr. Lassi showed the correspondent the leg and butt check, lifted the piece up and shook it a little bit and let it crackle over the microphone where it rattled the wider population, it’ll be discarded in the trash incinerator, Dr. Lassi told the radio listeners, to heat up Flosalaug, which is usually heated with tourist trash but the tourists won’t have arrived this early in the spring, they arrive with the migratory birds … this is energy … trash is energy … all matter is energy, she said, somewhat off track … but the nasal regional correspondent from the State Broadcasting Service asked, energetically: Is it fun being a veterinarian? Yes, it’s fun, said Dr. Lassi, when things are going well. Then they went around the hotel and showed the correspondent the sights, the blood-drenched angle grinder and the maids cleaning the wallpaper. Is it true a sheep bit this man? asked the correspondent, but Dr. Lassi replied carefully that the man had encountered a flock of wild sheep some place up in Öræfi, the Wasteland, where they had been all winter or even for several winters, Dr. Lassi said, and that’s a violation of the law, I cannot say for how many centuries the laws have been broken here in the country … but as to whether a wild sheep bit the man, I cannot say: I don’t know what bit him, but something did. At the end of the interview the correspondent explained somewhat frankly the journey the penis had made by bus to Reykjavík, its warm reception, and the place of honor it could expect there in the capital’s culture.

      Dr. Lassi settled down in the Öræfi region while she attended her patient at the hotel in Freysnes, ordering her family to stick around in the tent trailer at Skaftafell and not to trouble themselves, no matter what happened. I must write my report, Dr. Lassi told her family; she had resolved to find out what had happened in the wilderness, where the traveling Alpiner had been, where he came from … It’s not possible to saw off someone’s leg and save their life and then just walk away; that would be unethical, writes Dr. Lassi in her report … How educated are you!? Dr. Lassi shouted at me like I was deaf from the pain in my leg, no longer a leg but a phantom limb, that was the first thing she wanted to know … how educated is he!? Dr. Lassi shouted at the interpreter, who she felt was being sluggish, reluctant to translate … He’s a graduate student, the interpreter reported to Dr. Lassi, he’s studying in the Department of Nordic Studies at the University of Vienna …And what’s he doing there!? asked Dr. Lassi, loud and clear. He’s looking for his mother … no, wait, he’s writing a dissertation in Toponymy? Toponymy? Toponymy? Well, fine, but is that really a field of study these days? Dr. Lassi asked the interpreter… And does “the kid” have a name? He’s called Bernharður, the interpreter said to Dr. Lassi, Bernharður Fingurbjörg, from Vienna.

      The interpreter worked on the report with Dr. Lassi, Bernharður wrote in his letter, passing on the words I spoke there on my sick bed at the hotel in Freysnes. The interpreter had a hidden narrative gift, filtering out all the delirious babble and needless descriptions; she weaved together a pithy narrative, an escalating, logical sequence of events. Dr. Lassi found it highly compelling and envisioned publishing the report in the Journal of Agriculture or even submitting the report to the great agricultural paper Freyja or publishing it in Friends of the Animals or just in Nature Papers; she imagined, too, getting to know the interpreter rather better, though Dr. Lassi didn’t yet know if the shy country girl had any lesbian inclinations.

      I wanted to reach Mávabyggðir, said Bernharður, Dr. Lassi’s report says, and stay there a while to study the place names, their origins and local forms; my intention was to go from Mávabyggðir over to the pass, Hermannskarð, where Captain J. P. Koch and his companions went on their 1903 expedition to measure the ice shelf at Öræfajökull, those preeminent men after whom the pass is named. I was planning to celebrate the 100th anniversary of their expedition there, and then to go up to Tjaldskarð, the valley up from the glacial shield volcano, between two peaks, where Captain Koch spent two weeks in a tent in a variety of weather conditions, knuckling down to his research during the periods he could not be outside taking measurements. One day, as he was sitting writing in the tent, hoarfrost and a heavy snowstorm outside, he saw that the oilcan had sprung a leak and so he and his companion, Þorsteinn, would need to fetch a new one from down in the settlement, and return the horse they had with them since they were no longer using it and all it was doing was risking death. They dressed and hurried away from their spot, following an ancient, perilous way down the precipitous, fissureridden Virkisjökull, the horse with them; Virkisjökull is a tumultuous glacial cascade that descends from high cliffs, a difficult and obstructed glacier, and visibility was low due to fog and rain as they were coming down. They descended to the valley Hvannadalur, where in the old days people picked angelica; it was a long trip, Koch and Þorsteinn went with their horse over the great belt of rocks the glacier had created, tracing a slender path of loose stones at the bottom of a precipitous landslide, with sheer drops down into gaping fissures, I will need to go carefully once I get there, I thought to myself, Captain Koch and Þorsteinn headed to the cave Flosahellur on the way because Koch wanted to examine it; it’s great to be here, Captain Koch said in Flosahellur, Bernharður said, Dr. Lassi wrote. From there Captain Koch and Þorsteinn headed down a peat landslip to the lowlands, then down the mountain to get supplies at Svínafell. There was a man there with a newly-acquired wooden leg: not long before he had been out to the shore with three other men hunting seal. They were caught in extreme weather and frost and blown off their path; two of them were lost for good while the third made it home to Svínafell, about 40 kilometers away, with tremendous difficulty: the leg had frostbite and so was sawn off, the stump bound together, and a peg leg made from driftwood, a boot painted on it. Koch and Þorsteinn paused briefly, wolfed down some provisions, gulped down coffee, got a new can and rushed back that very same day, the same route up Öræfajökull; no-one would do such a thing nowadays. I planned to descend the glacier this way and make a research expedition to Svínafell and confirm J. P. Koch’s measurement of Öræfajökull, although all the time I was worried about how I would fare with the horses and my traveling trunk, a large wooden box; I would find a way when it came to it, having never been there before and knowing nothing about the way it was, but I had to go if it were at all possible. Captain Koch had taken a horse down there so I knew it was possible, and I was of the mind that someone ought to traverse the same route in the year 2103 to remember Captain Koch and the 200th anniversary of his expedition, though probably everyone will have forgotten him by then. Place names, though, last forever. On this trip there were many names to encounter: for example, Fingurbjörg, or Finger Rock, the name Captain Koch gave to the large rounded rock on Mávabyggðir, or The Place Gulls Settled; Hermannskarð, The Soldiers’ Pass, the gap through the glacier the soldiers took on the way to Öræfajökull; Tjaldskarð, the Tent Pass, where they were situated when measuring Öræfajökull; and Þuríðartindur, a large and beautiful mountain peak named after Þuríði Guðmundsdóttir from Skaftafell, Þorsteinn’s sister; under this rock Koch and he enjoyed the pancakes she had baked for them as provisions, and they were so grateful to her for the delicacies