Day 179-exploring Óspakseyri

   July 1-As might be expected, everyone slept in this morning.  Gaui and Magga basically feel that they are on vacation, so there is no need to stress over bedtime.  This appears to be a common feeling among Icelanders, who let their sleeping schedules float and change over the course of the year.  Gaui says that he simply sleeps less this time of year when there is no true darkness at night, but that he sleeps longer during the winter when there is only a little light a few hours each day.  We had been worried that we might not get much sleep, since there were no window shades or blinds in our rooms, but we found that we had no problem; it is just a matter of being tired enough to sleep!

Óspakseyri and its associated church.

   Gaui’s house at Óspakseyri, on Bitrufjörður, dates from the 1940s, when many farmers built large concrete houses to house their families and the numerous farmhands.  Mechanization of farming reduced the number of required workers dramatically within a couple decades, leaving farmers with houses that were much larger than they needed.  Gaui and Magga have put a lot of work into fixing their house and it was wonderful.  It was able to accommodate their family, our family and Sigrún and her two girls without any problems, even though there was only one bathroom!
   The farm’s name, Óspakseyri, means Óspak’s sand bar and refers to Óspak, whose escapades are discussed in one of the Icelandic sagas.  Apparently, he was not a particularly nice man, who stole from his neighbors.  The saga claims that he built a harbor at the farm to allow him to defend himself from his enemies.  Low tide reveals an extensive berm that might be the remnants of his work.  A parish church has existed at the farm for many years as well.  The community, not Gaui, owns it, but much of the work to maintain it and the cemetery falls to him and his family.  Services are held there at Easter and Christmas and for the occasional baptism or funeral.
   Also on the sandbar are a number of buildings that are now owned by Gaui and Magga, but were originally built by the local farmers’ cooperative.  Cooperatives were established all over Iceland around the end of the 19^th century and early in the 20^th century, much like in the United States.  The oldest building of the Óspakseyri cooperative was built in 1914 and housed a general store that provided staples for the local farmers.  Ships would travel around Iceland in clockwise or counterclockwise directions, stopping at sites such as this one to offload supplies and take on produce from the cooperative.  In the case of Óspakseyri, Bitrufjörður is deep enough for ocean-going ships to enter, so the ship would sail in and drop anchor and then the men from the cooperative would row out to it to exchange goods.  As the Icelandic road system was developed and improved after World War II, it became quicker and cheaper to transport goods by truck and the last ship stopped at Óspakseyri in 1970.  There is also a community center where locals could get together for plays, card games, and other such community gatherings.  Again, the improved road systems allowed them to get out of the fjord for such entertainment and it was last used in the 1980s.

Sheep were killed, hung from the conveyor hooks, and
skinned in this room, before the carcass was rolled into the
next, refrigerated room, where it was butchered.

   The other building was the slaughterhouse.  After collecting their sheep from the highlands in the fall, the cooperative members would work together for about a month in an assembly line format to butcher the lambs that they brought with them.  As the farmers grew older and fewer, this became more difficult and the last time the slaughter house was used was 2002.  Similarly, the store had fewer and fewer customers and shut its doors for good in 2004.  A few years later, Gaui and Magga bought the buildings and land from the cooperative, which is in the process of being dissolved, so the remaining funds can be paid out to its members.  A neighbor wants to reopen the store, so Gaui and Magga are going to spend the month of July moving out the storage items they have been putting in there these past few years.  We hope that the neighbor can make a go of it, but we don’t quite see how the store will cashflow.  There are not many farmers left in the area and Óspakseyri is not on one of the main tourist routes, so it will difficult for them to attract enough customers to justify the business.

Gaui occasionally will bait the hundreds
of hooks on this fishing line, drop it
into Birtnafjörður from his rowboat,
and then leisurely coil it back in,
hopefully laden with cod and other fish.  

Gaui intends to float this rope in Birtnafjörður.
Mussel larvae will attach themselves to it and
begin to develop.  Each year Gaui will pull in the
rope, pick off the small mussels, and place them
into protected areas to grow for two more years,
when they will be big enough to harvest and eat.

These boxes contain the eider down that Gaui and Magga have collected from the eider duck colony on the island that they own as part of Óspakseyri. Once it has been cleaned, they will sell it.

Magga and Sally by a dolphin skeleton that Ágústa found on the nearby shore last summer.

One of many arctic tern nests at Óspakseyri.



Gaui poses under a picture of him
as a child skinning a sheep head,
which was subsequently boiled. 

   While the kids played around the house, Gaui and Magga showed us and Sigrún around Óspakseyri.  The ladies all took short naps and then we loaded the cars and headed back towards Hólmavík.  The sheep-raising museum south of town hosted some family races, similar in nature to our three-legged races and sack races.  We arrived just as the races were ending, so we wandered around the museum instead.  Óspakseyri’s slaughterhouse figured prominently in their displays, and Gaui and many of his family members were in the pictures.  There were even a number of items on display that his family members had made or used.

   We drove on to Hólmavík so Sigrún could visit the art display, since she knows the family from her time as a student.  Jóhanna and Björk had sold probably half of their artwork, so they were happy.  Sigrún headed back to Reykjavík since she needed to work at 8am the next day, and the rest of us drove back to Óspakseyri.  We watched the final game of the Euro 2012 soccer championship (Spain beat Italy handily, 4-0).  The kids played around some more and we ate fantastic lamb for supper.

   We went for a short after-supper walk along the beach and Gaui and Magga showed us the chapel and the cemetery.  The oldest gravestone dated to 1870.  However, there are many graves in the graveyard that are much older.  As the ocean slowly ate away the ground near the church, human bones started to erode out at locations where no graves where marked.  Consequently, locals placed some large boulders along the coast to protect the graveyard.  Like the night before, the late night Sun gave us no clue to the time, and we finally had dessert around midnight.  Then everyone went to bed.

The Balafjöll mountains north of Hólmavík.