Alma Sóley Wolf was 14 years old the night a large mass of snow fell through the window of the room where she was sleeping and buried her for forty minutes, until the rescue teams arrived.
Alma Sóley Wolf recounts that experience naturally. This is not the first avalanche that has buried Flateyri, a town in a fjord in northwest Iceland. Èric Lluent, journalist and collaborator of La Vanguardia, takes note of this. The cold fascinates him. One day he immerses himself in the icy water of the Laugarvtn to find out what it feels like. He writes that it is like a hammer blow to the chest and lungs. He stays submerged for twenty seconds and takes two minutes to catch his breath.
In Lluent's book, Islàndia, l'illa del vent (Ara Llibres) there is ice, snow, blizzards, sand storms, earthquakes and volcanoes. When they erupt, Lluent runs as the first to see it. Without ice and fire, he reasons, without feeling the extreme living conditions in which they live, it is impossible to understand Icelanders.
There are guides to Iceland that look like postcards, and books by journalists that look like love letters, disturbed by the beauty of the island. Lluent has written a book that is also personal. From the exoticism of his first trip in 2008, motivated by a chance encounter with two native women at the Gràcia festivities, to his becoming an adopted Icelandic. The book tells about that love. And she describes an island more real, but just as fascinating as the one she discovered in her early days.
Lluent tours farms that survive in a precarious balance between flocks of sheep that look like something out of a Nordic design catalogue; he gets lost in the long night of Reykjavík, capital of a country in transition in which crimes – although minor and mediated by alcohol – have collapsed the penitentiary system and there is a waiting list to enter prison; reveals that in Iceland, which champions the fight against climate change, almost all hydroelectric energy goes to polluting aluminum smelters.
And he ends up talking about the Arctic tern, the seabird that, when bad weather arrives, flees thousands of kilometers away, only to return in spring to the exact patch of grass where it hatched. Iceland.
