For villagers living near Eyjafjallajökull, flight cancellations are the least of their worries as they face up to the long-term damage of the eruption, writes ELAINE BYRNE
‘EVERYTHING IN Europe closed down and we were sitting in our backyard looking up at the smoke. To us, it’s just a volcano that is working.”
Ársæll Hauksson, 27, lives directly underneath the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in southeast Iceland with his wife Porgerdur Gudmundsdottir and their three-month-old daughter Saga. They farm 300 sheep and 150 horses near the tiny village of Hvolsvöllur, in Skálakot. Hauksson remembers his dog Garún acting “weird and barking a lot” the day before the eruption.
When he received the police text message in the early hours of April 14th with instructions to evacuate to the highlands, Hauksson was not scared. If anything, “we were over-relaxed”. The music on the radio stopped and voices came on. “Nobody was afraid but everyone had a little feeling, what if the wind changed?”
The massive flooding from the glacier meltwater worried villagers more than the lava flows when Eyjafjallajökull erupted, which literally translates as “island-mountain-glacier”.
Hauksson and his family are very casual about the columns of ash which have loomed above their house for the past three weeks. Seeing it for the first time, it is mesmerisingly addictive to watch the intensity and fierceness of the plumes grow abruptly from thousands of small bubbles to dead weights of black smoke in the sky.
This extraordinary act of raw nature is oddly beautiful and utterly stunning.
It’s strange, then, to sit at the couple’s kitchen table over a cup of tea and learn that they have become bored talking about the volcano. Life goes on as normal for the farmers in Hvolsvöllur – with just one tedious exception. The volcano ash is everywhere.
The dust has covered the grass, which means that there will be no hay this summer. The lambing season is well under way but the sheep have to stay inside and fodder stocks are running low. No corn will be planted this year.
The ash has gotten inside the farm machinery and the filters on the jeeps have to be changed daily. The electricity turbines on the side of the mountain are caked in deep and spongy silt and can no longer be used. It is amusing, then, for those living close to the volcano, to hear that the tourist shops in Reykjavik are selling jars of volcanic ash for €6.
Circumstances have forced Hauksson and his father-in-law, Guðmundur Vidarsson, to become volcano entrepreneurs. Their sheep enjoy much of the grazing rights in the highlands which lie on the south side of Eyjafjallajökull. This gives them and their superjeeps unique access to the volcano, which means they can bring visitors close to the source of the ash. They have blocked the entrance to the off-road mountain trail with their Fendt Farmer 305 tractor to prevent the growing number of volcano hunters going up off their own bat and depriving them of a vital alternative income.
EVERY OUNCE OF extra torque and suspension in Hauksson’s superjeep is necessary for our 30-minute drive directly up the mountainside to the volcano. The vastness of the empty charcoal-grey landscape is mind-blowing. The yawning valleys on the approach to the glacier can only have come from JRR Tolkien’s imagination. But it is the shades of grey that are oddly beautiful. In some parts, the waterfalls have washed away some of the ash, leaving behind faint lines of greenery which look out of place in the lunar panorama.
The most startling thing about the journey is the inconceivable notion that, only three weeks ago, everything around was covered in rich green pastures. The dust rises when you walk and tastes like grit in your teeth, and it gets inside your clothes like fine sand.
We get within two-and-a-half kilometres of the volcano crater, the closest we are permitted to go by the national authorities. Apart from the wind, everything is calm and it feels strangely safe. Though the volcano is directly in front of us, a dense fog has swept over the Eyjafjöll mountain range and obscures any view of the volcano, its spitting boulders and jumping lava.
The hour spent beside Eyjafjallajökull waiting for it to live up to its terrible reputation is underwhelming. It is like Croagh Patrick or Carrauntoohil on a misty day – with the added smell of sulphur and the taste of ash. Every now and again the clouds lift and the glacier shines a dull crystal-green colour. The heart of the plume is virtually vertical but at a certain point it exhausts itself and drifts in a permanent perpendicular haze in whatever direction the wind decides.
The wind is too strong to hear the volcano. Hauksson says it sounds like a deep bass rumble, “like somebody is really mad down there”. Others have described it as the sound of war with bombs in the distance.
The tiny purple gleymérei flowers are the only things that have survived the ash and have blossomed sparingly on the rooftop of the mountain in the shadow of the volcano. Hauksson is very happy that something is at last growing on this land. His sheep should be grazing here after the lambing season; the best grass is beside the glacier where the lava now lies.
Many Icelanders are firm believers in irony and have faith that the volcano has been the best tourism advert for a country that most of the world knows little about.
As we drive down the mountain in a ball of dust, Hauksson is philosophical about Eyjafjallajökull and the glacier. “It gives us electricity, water, shelter, fertiliser. The glacier is always giving and giving, I am not angry with it.”
Elaine Byrne's report for Prime Timeon Iceland and the aftershocks of the recession will be broadcast next Tuesday on RTÉ1 at 9.30pm
