Drawing to Write

Sometimes you need to draw or take photographs before you see a building or landscape properly. Here are some of my sketches, all but one of them from trips to Iceland.

Stofnun Sigurdar Nordals (The Sigurdur Nordal Institute) in an old part of Reykjavík. This house, like many in the style, was imported from Norway during the nineteenth century. I lived and worked here on and off for six months in 2001.

Norwich Cathedral in East Anglia. In 1999, I visited it with some close friends, Shane and Fiona - Shane was doing his PhD in England. Their apartment was just down the road from the Cathedral, which is surrounded by cricket pitches and parks.

Gullfoss in the south-west highlands, a waterfall that is a bit of survivor - proposed developments that would have ruined the area were in part blocked by a local woman, Sigrídur, a statute of whom now stands near the falls.

Fríkirkja - the Icelandic Free Church - near the downtown pond. The vast majority of Icelanders are members of the State Lutheran church, but the small Free Church is perhaps the most beautiful church building in Iceland. It's tucked in next to the Art Gallery.

Here, what I suspect was the last small fishing boat to be tied up at along Aegisída, a long, thin park that runs the southern shore of Reykjavík. A left-over from the days when Reykjavík still had small, independent fishermen, the boat reminds me of an old fisherman in Laxness' The Fish Can Sing who, despite the change in Icelandic society, refuses to raise his prices to make a profit from his life.

Almannagjá in Thingvellir, the site of Iceland's old Assembly, established in 930. The ring road used to travel down it, but now, of course, it's mainly bus loads of tourists and the odd returning Icelander.

(More drawings of Iceland can be found here and here.)

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Why write about travel?

Or, why write at all?

I recently finished writing a chapter on travel writing for the Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing (due for release next year). The chapter argues that much of the pleasure of travel writing lies in its combinations of forms: of all types of writing, it relies most on incorporating at least some aspects of exposition, description, narration, analysis and argument, and humour. It is a genre of mixes.

For example, someone like Bill Bryson uses a mix of narration and exposition to create both a sense of lived experience and a sense of place - for Bryson, the link is formed by tone, or his attitude (witty, loving, silly) to the subject matter. Robert Byron has less of the Bryson-type personal narration, but greater amounts of description - the unity of Byron's The Road to Oxiana lies in his style, which varies considerably but which is always sharp and very fine. But the liberating thing about travel writing for the writer is that it allows them great freedom in how they manage the combination of forms.

What I didn't address in the chapter was the broader question of why we write about our travels in the first place. I doubt there is an answer for everyone. One way of re-phrasing this question is to ask, what does writing give us that travelling, on its own, does not? And the answer to that must vary greatly.

For me, writing is almost always multi-directional and, at its best, a cheating of time. Unlike real-time travel, which is at some level always hostage to a sense of destination and the limits of time, travel writing is completely open-ended and timeless. The ultimate destination of a real destination could lie in the past, in a dream that you had as a child, in an ambition, or in a moment that you've never fully resolved. Or the trip may in fact be taking you ahead, towards a book that you're yet to read, but which when you read it will make sense of your journey.

Because it exists in language and not in budgets or train timetables, travel writing is unbounded in a way that actual travel never will be. In the case of travel, which is so often constrained by practical matters, language enables a second, endless journey to be anchored onto the first.

Jumping in Puddles

Or, moments of nostalgia.


Today, it's the turn of Sigur Ros' "Hoppípolla", which comes with one of my favourite video clips, and with a narrative I recognise from my childhood in Iceland and which I hope, as in the clip, I will return to in old age.

*

Brosandi / Smiling
Hendumst í hringi / Spinning round
Höldumst í hendur / Holding hands
Allur heimurinn óskýr / The whole world a blur
Nema þú stendur / But you are standing

Rennblautur / Soaked
Allur rennvotur / Completely drenched
Engin gúmmístígvél / No rubber boots
Hlaupandi inni í okkur / Running inside us
Vill springa út úr skel / Want to erupt from a shell

Vindurinn / The Wind
Og útilykt af hárinu þínu / And the outdoor smell of your hair
Ég anda eins fast og ég get / I breathe as hard as I can
með nefinu mínu / With my nose

Hoppípolla / Jump into puddles
Í engum stígvélum / With no boots on
Allur rennvotur / Completely drenched
Í engum stígvélum / With no boots on

Og ég fæ blóðnasir / And I get a nosebleed
En ég stend alltaf upp / But I always stand up

Og ég fæ blóðnasir / And I get a nosebleed
En ég stend alltaf upp / But I always stand up

*

It's a gorgeous song, with a wonderful conceit: keep coming back to what delighted you as a child. I use the song in one of my introductory creative writing units, honestly one of only two or three occasions that I bring up Iceland. The line, for me, that holds it all together is "og útilykt af hárinu þínu" - the outside smell of your hair.

There is no other description for that smell, is there, than simply that it comes from outside.
(And, while I am putting the case for Sigur Rós, I might as well add another favourite: "Ára Bátur", or Row Boat, available as a live in the studio recording here.)

Cook's Tribulation

My thanks to Richard Carroll, who has provided me with the answer to a question I posed in my last post, about the naming of Cape Tribulation. Richard tells me that it was named by Captain James Cook when his ship, the Endeavour, ran into a reef nearby.

My own extensive research - well, Wikipedia - confirms that this is right. It gives Cook's words as: "...the north point [was named] Cape Tribulation because here began all our troubles".

Cape Tribulation

You don't really need more than the name, do you - Cape Tribulation. Which, in a way, remains with you as the thing to say about the place. Cape Tribulation. Or Cape Trib as it comes to be abbreviated. It lies about 70km north of Cairns, a cable-ferry ride and a winding drive on the other side of the wide, crocodile-famous Daintree River.

The Daintree River

The locals, with season passes, get preferential treatment: the right-hand and quicker lane onto the ferry. Their line-up of utes with caged trays, near-illegal dogs, and a spray tan of atmospheric mud sits parallel to small rental cars, all white or baby blue, all unambitious Hyundais, Toyotas, and Nissans, all occupied by city refugees in Billabong T-shirts.

I imagine the ute driver next to me - of course, with a beer in his non-driving hand - going home to a vast property of abandoned fields and damp, dark sheds; but he is probably being told by mobile phone to pick up a bottle of claret to sip on the deck of a white-walled mansion overlooking one of the thin beaches of the north. Well, maybe: some of the old divides seem to survive here. Uncomplicated, he is in fact going home to drink beer in a damp shed.

We, for our part, have lunch at Whet, a restaurant occupying a wide balcony overlooking the last stretch of road into Cape Trib. I say into Cape Trib, but really there is no point at which you feel yourself in. There are three car parks, a few gift shops-cum-stores-cum-information centres, and a slight concentration of people on the beach. And there is a headland, which I assume is the same Cape that at some point in the white settlement caused tribulation. I wonder how. It's a fairly modest headland, and perhaps in another history it would have been called Cape Pleasant, or Cape Mild, or even Little Point.

No, that's not fair. There is every point to Cape Tribulation. We enjoy our time there, and stray up and down the beach at low tide, half expecting a crocodile to come out of the water and make good the warning signs: "Do not walk by the water's edge."

We stay close to the rainforest, errant fronds of the green shreds that lean out of the canopy, forever telling the sea that it can stop the tide.

My son Finnur not looking at Cape Trib

Beachcombing

The local cliché is true - this really is the place where the forest meets the sea, with only a thin spread of sand lining the dead space between. But the sand, the blank lining, is for me where it counts. Where the sea leaves something behind. Where the coconuts fall and roll for a journey into the Pacific. Where you can see the spiders before they see you. Where the heavy, muddy smell of the forest is blown dry by the salty, brown haze. Where you can stand up and walk, and look, and adopt a perspective. The sand, however narrow, is a spot for us.

Standing still to run

I am inverting the U2 song, 'Running to stand still', for this picture of my son Finnur as he has his first go at flying a kite. He is standing still, but, in odd moments like this when he stops to concentrate and suddenly gives himself over completely to the task at hand, I see him running on ahead.

These are transition moments: swimming on his own across the pool, reading to his younger brother, explaining to his grandparents that he has become an 'expert' at kite flying.

Four Mile Beach, Port Douglas

Waking up in Port Douglas

Surely the best thing about starting a holiday is waking up on the first morning and going for a walk, a first exploration of where you'll be spending the coming week.