Gerri Griswold's "Iceland Affair"

Even her friends call her "peculiar." Her Facebook pages (yes, she maintains several) are littered with selfies taken in the crapper at Logan Airport or the big bathtub in her back yard (censored by soap bubbles). She drivels on and on about her juicing diet and her real job (one of them) as a radio station traffic reporter. She has a pet pig. She's passionate about bats and porcupines, which she rehabilitates for the White Memorial Conservation Center.

Where am I going with this? To Iceland, of course, for Gerri Griswold is passionate, too, about the land of Fire and Ice, which is how our paths crossed. Gerri's is the spirit behind Iceland Affair--and that's what makes this quirky all-day, all-Iceland festival in Connecticut so much fun.You just never know who you might meet and what you might learn.

According to a press release for Iceland Affair, which Gerri has almost single-handedly put together near her home in Connecticut each year for the last five, Gerri Griswold fell "hopelessly in love with Iceland on her first trip in May 2002 and has since traveled there 34 times."

Reading that made me seriously jealous. I fell in love with Iceland in 1986 and I've only racked up 18 return trips. How does she do it?

One answer is, she doesn't sleep. I learned that the hard way, sharing a room with her for a June night in Iceland in 2013, where she was up until at least 3 a.m. editing photos to post on Facebook. She once was a professional chef, Gerri told me. "I'm used to having five burners going at once."

To fund (or fuel) her Iceland habit, Gerri established a travel agency, which I wrote about in a previous blog post. [Read it here: http://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2013/09/krummi-travel.html] I toured with her group for about 24 hours, during which time I hiked along the rim of a volcanic crater at midnight, swam in a natural hotspring, visited sulfur pots and lava formations, learned about lichens, found the ram with the biggest horns in Iceland, and listened to the stirring voices of a men's choir in the elegant surroundings of a bird museum while munching on Icelandic cheese. I think that was more than five burners going at once.

And it was fun. Gerri's company pairs an elegant logo of a raven with a name that, while it does mean "raven," is pronounced by every American as "crummy": Krummi Travel. The company logo is No crybabies, cranks, or pantywaists allowed. What's a pantywaist? I spent that whole day touring with them and didn't have the nerve to ask.

Still don't know--and don't tell me, because I'm taking part in another of Gerri's productions this weekend: the Fifth Annual Iceland Affair in Winchester Center, CT.

Inside the Winchester Center Grange on Saturday, October 18, from 10 to 5, will be a full slate of lectures and presentations. At noon, I'll be speaking on my book A Good Horse Has No Color: Searching Iceland for the Perfect Horse. There will be talks on Iceland's geology and its currently active volcano, Barðarbunga. The breeder of Icelandic goats whose farm we all saved from the dragons (bankers) with the Indiegogo campaign will be there, as will experts on Icelandic gyrfalcons and Icelandic pop music. [Read more about the goats here: http://nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2014/08/save-icelandic-goat.html]

Downstairs at the Grange will be free food-tastings all day: Icelandic hot dogs, dried fish, chocolate, skyr, and more. Vendors will be selling Icelandic sweaters and vinaterta and books (mine, of course).

Outside on the Winchester Center Green will be a veritable Icelandic petting zoo: Icelandic horses, Icelandic sheep, Icelandic sheepdogs, Icelandic chickens--yes, there really are Icelandic chickens.

"Anything worth doing is worth overdoing," Gerri stresses.

Finally, at 8 pm, there's a concert (which is not free; Gerri's got to pay for this event somehow). The Fire and Ice Music Festival at Infinity Hall in Norfolk, CT will feature Icelandic musicians Lay Low, Svavar Knutur, Myrra Ros, Agnes Erna, Snorri Helgason, Bjorn Thorodssen, and Kristjana Stefansdottir, playing everything from pop to folk to jazz. [You can read bios of the artists (and buy tickets, if there are any left) here: http://icelandaffair.com/musicians-2/]

"Surprises are in store for every guest attending--and for the artists," Gerri concludes.

I'm not surprised. 

Krummi Travel

One day last summer, under the midnight sun, I drove through the surreal landscape surrounding Iceland's Myvatn in a tour bus decorated with streamers and balloons. The driver, Thorstein, carried a big bag of candy. The company logo was No crybabies, cranks, or pantywaists allowed. What's a pantywaist? I didn't have the nerve to ask.

Paired with this hoopla was the elegant image of a raven, painted by the Icelandic artist Jón Baldur Hlíðberg (see more of his work here: http://www.fauna.is/defaulte.asp) and used as the company's logo by permission (okay, after the fact, but she did get permission) by the founder of Krummi Travel, Gerri Griswold of Connecticut.

Yes, Krummi Travel. Krummi is a fond nickname for ravens in Icelandic, but it was pronounced by pretty much everyone in Gerri's group as "crummy."

Being able to hold those two competing thoughts in your mind--elegant artwork, sounds like "crummy"--explains Gerri's brilliant approach to travel in Iceland. Yes, ravens are beautiful. They're also crummy: They eat the eyes out of newborn sheep. And Icelanders love them enough to give them a nickname on the order of "Tommy." (I know Icelandic men with the nicknames Gummi and Mummi.)

With Krummi Travel you get the nature and the culture of Iceland: the beautiful bird (mountain, fjord, etc.) and the layers and layers of cultural meanings. And you get it by meeting Icelanders.

Our tour guide around Myvatn, for example, Illugi (pronounced something like It-Louie), was a real raconteur. He jabbered on and on about how he lost his dog in the lava field. He made himself cry, remembering it. He made all of us cry. We were all out there in the lava field with him, in the snow, looking for the dog, who had fallen through a hole in the lava into a cave and burned her toes in the hotspring that nearly filled the cave floor. She was gone overnight. Illugi had to call in the Icelandic Rescue Squad to lift her out. 

But there she was, in the bus with us, missing a few toes. She happily climbed up an enormous tuff-ring volcano and hiked all the way around the crater rim as if we were taking a walk in a park watching the sunset--which we were, Icelandic style. 

Along the way, Illugi stopped to dismantle a cairn of stones some previous tourists had piled on the rim. He was quite annoyed by it. Cairns are used in Iceland to mark a path. They're not to be taken lightly or set up willy-nilly. To put one here was like spray-painting a statue. It was rock graffiti, which reminded Illugi to tell me about the real graffiti.

Can you imagine? Someone had clambered down into the bowl of this crater and spray-painted "CRATER" on the rocks. The letters were 17 meters tall, I later learned from a report on IcelandReview.com. 

The same someone had written "CAVE" in a nearby cave and "MOOS" on a mossy lava field (couldn't spell). Interviewed on local TV, the local police inspector said, "I mainly find it strange. A very peculiar motive must be behind it.”

Peculiar indeed. Somebody thought it was "art." 

A few days after my visit with Krummi Travel, I read about an Icelandic artist who was gallery hopping in Berlin. Reported IcelandReview.com, "He noticed an exhibition at the Alexander Levy gallery by an artist by the name of Julius von Bismarck, a student at the Studio Olafur Eliasson," run by the famous Icelandic-Danish artist. The visiting Icelander, Hlynur Hallsson, took photos of what he found on the gallery walls:

[For more photos, see http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/search/news/Default.asp?ew_0_a_id=400624]

He then contacted the Icelandic media--and the police. 

Bismarck, the German art student, quickly released a statement denying that he was the "nature terrorist." He said, in part: "Different anonymous artists collaborated on each location to produce the inscriptions." He said he wasn't even in Iceland at the time.

The gallery's website, on the other hand, gave him credit: "… In a series of nature inscriptions, Bismarck and Julian Charriere directly bring together nature and its conceptual (humanised) form …" [See http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/search/news/Default.asp?ew_0_a_id=400643] 

Hlynur, who outed Bismarck, is also known for "spray-paint artwork." As he told the website Akureyri Vikublad, "I don't approve of works that damage nature, regardless [of] whether they're made in the name of visual art or commercialism. To mark moss, lava, or rock faces with paint which doesn't wash off in the rain is unnecessary…. To write in the sand or snow can be more effective even though it only lasts a short time. … Then nature would have been given the respect it deserves."

Reading this, I was reminded of an essay by Justin Erik Halldór Smith called "The Moral Status of Rocks." [Read it here: http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2013/05/moral-status.html] He writes of meeting a "student in rural Iceland, of sheep-farming stock" who said, "in the hope of conveying to me the whole ethical-spiritual outlook of her country in a single concrete example: In Iceland we are taught not to smash rocks." 

Smith goes on to talk about "environmental ethics" and why it usually refers to animals, sometimes to plants, but rarely to rocks. Except in Iceland. Where building a meaningless cairn, spray-painting a title on a crater, or smashing a rock are things no thinking human should do. Not even crybabies, cranks, or pantywaists--I mean, tourists. Or artists. Or those of us who aspire to being both.

Join me again next week at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.