Álftafjörður, Iceland – August 2, 2014

We came to Iceland six weeks ago, with the best intentions of photographing some stupendous close-to-the-Arctic-Circle scenery, soaring sea birds, and elves awaiting behind every raise and fall of the land.  Here on the island things are either soft or hard: soft is the moss of many hues, and so is the water in ponds, puddles, fiords, and thousands of waterfalls, while hard is the rock, stone, cliff, gravel scree, and weather. There is no in-between.

There is also very little good light, much of it stolen by billowing dark clouds spitting dark rain day after day. John hunches over wet coastal rocks and their spiderweb textures. I look for traces of color in melting ice floes. This is all fine and splendid for several days, but after a few weeks our bodies and minds, not fully engaged in a variety of creative processes, begin to yell: feed me something else than Skyr, lamb meat hot dogs, and Princess Potatoes. Enough!
So we go foraging. Icelandic tundra, the larder we need to search, is clumpy and — like all northern tundra — a hell to walk on, but there are rewards sticking out of the clumps: magnificent boletus mushrooms, erect on their pale stems. They are frequented by tiny brown snails. Sweet little snails: since we have no intention of stewing them with marjoram, pepper, onions and sour cream, I just pick them off the ‘shrooms and look at their dark eyes on top of tiny tentacles, moving around: are we actually beholding each other? then settle them gently on a nearby leaf. Later we cook the ‘shroom bounty in our small camper we dragged across the Atlantic on a container ship, and pour the resulting mess over a pile of boiled rice or — sorry, bodies and minds — Princess Potatoes again.

We soon learn to avoid stretches of tundra recently grazed by sheep. The woolly bastards get to our ‘shrooms faster than we can, and are very thorough. We also steer clear of the potential ‘shroom grounds near coastal villages with fish processing plants, since they are often staffed by Polish workers who arrived in Iceland after their motherland joined the EU a few years ago. They do what we do, and clear the tundra of every boletus they can put their hands on. I know, since I am Polish, too, and cannot help myself: I must gather, or I will die from my tribal yet unfulfilled desire.

What complicates matters is the advent of the blueberry season, which overlaps with the gradual decline of the mushroom supply. We therefore approach blueberry bushes with a palpable sense of confusion: is this what I need to do now? but what about mushrooms?  Yet we persist, improvise our berry menu, and soon line up the following gastronomical concoctions on my drying towel:

— biscuits with a layer of heavy sour cream, blueberries, and some black currents fished out of a jam jar
— Styr (Icelandic yogurt, of the Greek kind) dollop with blueberries and one grape (too expensive to have more)
— a pile of blueberries with a chunk of Icelandic orange chocolate
— minute rice with blueberries, raisins, and a gulp of yummy black current syrup made in Poland
— Icelandic pale ale beer called Einstock — one plain, and one brewed with Icelandic Arctic berries

And so it goes. Like the good supplicants we are, we bend over the tundra and pick, gather, cook and eat, and soon start all over again. I already see tiny flowers of lingonberries sprouting on their stems, and soon we will start picking these small tart berries as well, a hard task given their size. But– how good they are!

Besides our insatiable appetite for gathering and consuming mushrooms and berries, John and I have a long history of losing our heads over such things. Many years ago, while on our first NGM assignment (“Still Eskimo, Still Free – the Inuit of Umingmaktok” published in 1977) we got stuck with no food on the shores of Parry Bay in the Canadian Arctic, together with one of the semi-nomadic families we followed and photographed.

This bout of starvation was no one’s fault, but a typical joke of nature taking its bounty away after a good summer when fat glistening Arctic char used to virtually jump into our outstretched arms. Suddenly, there was nothing to eat: the migrating caribou went elsewhere, nasty fall gales fouled the nets and made fishing impossible, and seals swam off to some other waters they preferred. We had seven kids in our camp, including a baby, four adults and a dozen Inuit sled dogs. Our pup Mis did not suffer since we still had some remnants of dog food, but the rest of us went hungry. The kids tried to stone speedy gulls and way-too-alert ground squirrels, but to no avail. At least our Inuit friends lived in a good size canvas wall tent, but the three of us crowded our small and profusely leaking yellow Eureka, and shivered.

One wet and utterly miserable morning I set out into the hills and found what we needed: a bounty of mushrooms. Soon John joined me, and so did the kids, whom we encouraged to collect something they usually did not gather. We even found remnants of seal oil and used it to stew our mushrooms with some berries thrown in, and this is how we all lived for a good while, replenishing our supplies whenever they ran low. And after 13 days, John and I decided that since in spite of the hunger, cold, and stress we somehow managed not to get snippy with each other we should actually get married.

So when we take no pictures of the stupendous close-to-the-Arctic-Circle scenery, soaring sea birds and elves, and instead just gather mushrooms and berries with our greedy hands, we do not feel guilty. We celebrate.

-Yva Momatiuk