A Viking Repast - OR - The Relentlessly Terrible History of Iceland, in Three Courses

I'm happy to say this story, excerpted from my book-in-progress The Frost Giants, will appear in the 2010 edition of The Best Travel Writing; and in 2011 it will appear in The Frost Giants itself, though I'm not allowed to name the publisher just yet. A very very small excerpt, below;


The parked snow machines were working vehicles, cobbled together in the most utilitarian way, and the Spartan forms turned my mind to Viking ships. Years ago, Hordur had shown me a picture of such a vessel, a full-scale replica he’d built in the mid-90's and sailed across the North Atlantic with a small crew. The undecked, 40-foot boat had rolled and banged and wallowed, but they’d made it, all the way to New York City. The Iron Age design was a product of minds that revered utility, and the 1990’s replica was a product of minds that equally revered history, minds that still drove Icelanders into the wilds for ancient winter rites, like Thorablott.
A history of utility...it was the story of the Icelanders. Although a thousand years separated this evening's feasters from the first Norse to land in Iceland, an ethos of severe pragmatism bound them like an invisible but invincible chain.

That chain stretched back to primal Iceland, to a time and place of nameless ice caps, restless volcanoes, and snow-blown moors; a time and place of nameless exploding seas, cracking crags and moaning caverns, forests of cold-stunted birch, snapping river-ice, and gurgling streams.

After millions of years of mute anonymity, the windy, icy island was visited by its first animals: beetles and birds, foxes and fishes. In Europe, the Neanderthals came and went. Eons later, farming spread from the Balkans to Scandinavia. Millennia after that, Rome rose from dust, flourished, and collapsed, five centuries after Christ. All this time, the little storm-lashed island was unknown to humankind.

But one blustery day (every day seems blustery in Iceland) a sail appeared off the north coast. The first arrivals were not Norse, they were not Vikings: they were Irish monks, Christian hermitae who'd set out to find new land in which to worship in peace, and the farther from Dark Age Europe, the better. They arrived some time after 750AD, and for just over a hundred years, they farmed in what must have been unique isolation.

(c) 2010 Cameron McPherson Smith



Pictures at an Exhibiton

Written by Mussorgsky,
Orchestrated by Ravel,
Conducted by Saolenen!

For years, maybe over ten, I've been fascinated and thrilled by this piece of music. Today, it says, for me, all that needs saying;

Note this is only the first part, and that while it begins rather traditionally, and uneventfully, later, very strange and exciting things happen, things I try, night by night, to decipher, note by note! What is he doing _here_ and then _here_ or _here_?

Assembly

Building, building; a slow, careful assembly of the life-support equipment that will allow me to explore the stratosphere!

Now, about that exclamation mark: lately I wrote a piece, about exploring the Vatnajokull ice cap years ago, and it was laden with exclamation marks; one reviewer told me: "Honestly, Cam, lay off these punctuations,"...and to a degree, I agree, most of the time I don't need them. But sometimes I don't want to move so carefully and slowly, sometimes life isn't that way, and sometimes exclamations, well, I mean them to leap out off the page, even if that's a little embarrasing, just as though I were sitting there with the reader, getting so animated and excited by my recollections that yes--it's a little embarrassing how thrilled I become and how it animates me. Can't worry about that (though I will dial back on the !'s).

Regarding assembly of my flying machines; good progress recently; first, a sketch of my breakdown of a SCUBA breathing regulator, first simply to understand it, and then to identify whether or not I can convert it for use in very low, high-altitude pressures (near-vacuum):



Conclusion: the demand regulator, while containing some delicate elements, is essentially simple, and I can convert it for my uses. Doing this will be straightforward, but of course I'll want to test the unit before going up. To do that, I need to build a small vacuum chamber, large enough to hold the regulator and the overpressure / exhaust valve that also needs to be installed. That starts with another drawing:



...followed by assembling the chamber, seen here near completion, though the vacuum pump is malfunctioning and needs looking into:



Finally, a schematic sketch of the pressure garment, with miscellaneous notes to self, and specific model numbers for various parts; each manufacturer and model number has been selected over months of research...Now the fun part: buying and building!

GSH6a Diagram

I've obtained diagrams and a technical manual for the pressure suit helmet, but there are some things I'd like to know that I can't make out in time images alone (one, below); I need a technical Russian translator!

Work continues: I'm installing a pressure gauge now, then working on the gloves.

The Functions of Fear

Regarding my last post--I'd forgotten the value, and function of fear; to cause prudence; to cause caution; to cause self-preservation. I need to remember those functions, rather than let the sensation itself work on my psyche (note that Cicero classified more than a dozen types of fear, but for the moment I'm subsuming them all within the one word):

Thanks, Flynn, for the reminder!

Below, Philippe Petit walks the wire in Australia, from the most inspiring film I know, "Man on Wire". This man, without fear, would not have accomplished what he did; he would have dashed out onto the wire without a care. Rather, fear guided him to spend a year of preparations.

Fears

I am consumed, obsessed, with fears; I can barely sleep. Am I setting myself up for a quick suicide mission by building my own pressure suit, and trying to use that to
sustain my life in a balloon ascent to the lower stratosphere?

On the one hand, a pressure suit is a relatively simple piece of equipment--people have been building these garments for over 70 years--and I think I've built a functional suit that will sustain me to 50,000 feet altitude.

On the other hand, one very small mistake, in this stage of my preparations, could kill me.

So, I move very slowly & carefully, and I try to get some sleep.

Further Footage of November Pressure Suit Test

A bit more footage of that first test:



And a still photo of the whole rig:



I've learned a lot from researching and building this suit, and now it's on to building further suit components and refining the design. Busy, busy, tonight at writing group, tomorrow all day at the Portland Garment Factory, where I'll be consulting with Britt Howard on custom production of a few of the suit elements (specifically the fireproof coverall) that I don't feel confident to take on myself.

Still on crutches...a unique way to locomote!