The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (37 page)

And goodness knows there are a lot of valleys and fiords in this region. Boasting 35 percent of Iceland’s coastline but only 8 percent of its land mass, the northern fiordlands looked like the head of a dragon to early cartographers. To me, a map of the region looked like the head of a dragon puking up islands.

As we prepared to explore Ísafjöður, I prayed silently. “Please don’t let Robin bring his camera. Please don’t let Robin bring his camera.” There is no God.

Ísafjöður is beautiful in every meaningful way. Situated on a spit of land, it is surrounded by cliffs and water. The architecture is the perfect juxtaposition of warehouses and fish plants against brightly coloured single and multi-family dwellings. Not every building was slapdash, but there was an organic realness to the place.

The town’s tourist information office was situated beside a café. Robin got the first round of drinks in while I inquired about hikes. Then I noticed a poster for the Óshaíðarhlaupið. If I could trust my grasp of Icelandic—which I couldn’t—it seemed to imply that the town was going to host a half-marathon race two days hence. Checking with the endlessly friendly information staff confirmed my suspicions. A fellow showed me the point-to-point route on a map and offered to help me register for the race online. I asked his name. When his response finished rattling around in my brain, it came out sounding like a dirty word, so I thought of him as “Lars,” which probably isn’t even an Icelandic name. “You will be our only foreign runner. Prepare to be famous!” said Lars.

“Um, twenty-one kilometres is a long way…. I haven’t been
doing a lot of training over the past few months….” A half-marathon was bound to leave me feeling pretty stiff. There were two other distances, but surely the four kilometres was for children and the ten kilometres was for sissies. If I ran twenty-one kilometres, it would give me the chance to see more of the coastline—roughly twenty-one kilometres more, I should think. Oh, what the heck?

While getting in a second round of drinks, I spoke to the barmaid, who didn’t seem the typical blond-eyed, blue-haired Icelandic type. She explained that she was from the Philippines and had been a professional singer. While on tour in China she had met an Icelandic gentleman and had moved to be with him. That was eight years earlier, and she had to admit that she was still struggling with the language.

R
OBIN AND I SET OFF
for a hike. We passed through Ísafjöður, aiming for the closed end of the fiord. Several well-tended gardens sported lupines; they weren’t the nasty purple variety that infested large chunks of Iceland, but pink, red, cream, and white forms. Just beyond town, on avalanche-prone hillsides, grew wild invasive lupines with their toxic purple horridness.

We arrived at a very tall waterfall in the Tunguskógur region. A very pretty cascade indeed, the water took its time passing down various ledges, but did so in a nearly straight line, making it easy for Robin to get it all in one photograph. On some slopes, coniferous trees had been planted. In most spots, they were doing rather poorly. The ravages of winter, or perhaps an insect pest, had turned most of their needles brown. By the waterfall, the trees were a little more proud of themselves, many having reached the lofty height of four or five metres. However, it was clear that the optimist who had ordered the planting of these trees wasn’t fully committed to native species.
Picea sitchensis,
Sitka spruce to me and Sitkagreni to an Icelander, had been introduced from Alaska in 1951. Russia had contributed
Larix sibirica
in 1951, Alaska had provided
Pinus contorta
in 1958, and
Picea abies
had made the leap from Norway in 1961. We took a gentle hike through a very short forest.

Back in town, I picked up my race package for the following day. To that point, Robin and I had been blessed with continuous good weather, but the moment I was handed the package the whole scene changed. Dark clouds blew in, the temperature fell, and it started to rain. It was as though the Nordic weather gods were going to punish me for having the impudence to register for a half-marathon without sufficient training.

At 12:45 p.m. the next day, a bus took a few dozen half-marathon runners up the fiord to the small fishing community of Bolungarvík. As we piled on, only one runner wasn’t equipped with clothing appropriate for the weather, and he was clearly a lot more frightened than the rest. As we drove, a race organizer stood up every few minutes to give instructions about the course. In Icelandic. I was sitting at the front of the bus, and he couldn’t see the terror in my eyes. “I am going to get lost and die of hypothermia,” I thought.

We tromped off the bus in Bolungarvík, voted Iceland’s most depressing community four times in the last six years. The digital readout on the postal building claimed that the temperature was 5°C. I didn’t need the postal service to tell me that the wind was howling, rain was falling, and I was bloody cold. I was instructed to drop my jacket in a van that would be waiting for us at the finish line, for those of us who lived that long.

“Are you from Canada?”

“What? Oh, right. Um, yes I am.” My country of origin was printed in large friendly letters on my shorts.

“Did you come here just for the race?”

“Honestly, until two days ago, I didn’t know that there
was
a race. I just saw a poster,” and part of me wished that I hadn’t. The clock thermometer indicated that the temperature had fallen to 4°C.

We were called to the starting line. A man on a phone was in contact with the official timekeeper at the finish line.

“þrír fundargerð!”
he called out. The rain was turning to sleet.

“Tveir fundargerð!”
Does that mean we are almost ready to go?

“Einn fundargerð!”
Just don’t get blown into the fiord.

“þrír, tveir, einn, fara! Góða ferð!”
This is it. I am definitely going to die.

We were off. Eight seconds passed, and a delightful thing happened—I became strangely and completely calm. Having run somewhere between 250 and 300 races, my brain and body had long since learned exactly what to do when the starter’s pistol went off. I relaxed.

Five young men shot to the front of the pack, and I knew that I would next see them at the finish line. After a couple of minutes, as the first spike of adrenalin disappeared, runners ahead of me started to slow down, and suddenly I wasn’t at the back of the pack. By the one-kilometre marker, I was trotting along at a comfortable pace, completely within myself and doing quite well, all things considered. At the two-kilometre marker, I passed an Arctic Tern colony, and a few of them decided to have a go at me. I was later told by a runner behind me that I was the only runner who got dive-bombed.

The great fiord to my left was decorated with whitecaps. The cliffs to my right were decorated with nesting kittiwakes. Not expecting pedestrian traffic, the highway had no shoulder, and we were running on the right with the traffic at our backs—not exactly what I had been taught about road safety by Elmer the Safety Elephant. I passed a cross and memorial plaque, probably for one of last year’s runners.

On I dashed, past hillsides covered with blooming lupines, feeling happy about life and hypothermia. Four kilometres, five, six. Less than four months from my fiftieth birthday, and I was doing quite well in a long footrace in Iceland. Seven kilometres, eight, nine. At the halfway point of the race, I was sitting in about tenth place.

On and on. And then I saw Ísafjöður looming ahead. That can’t be right. We still have six kilometres to go. Oh, now I remember. We have to run past the town, turn around at the end of the fiord, and then run back to Ísafjöður. This meant running the last couple of
kilometres into an almighty headwind. I was forced to mix running with walking.

But none it of really mattered. Most of the people in the race were a lot younger than me. I was the only person in the race who hadn’t had a home-cooked meal in two months. The vomiting and diarrhea in Ethiopia had probably slimmed me down a bit, but I couldn’t claim to be at the peak of health. And who cared anyway? I was going to finish well, and felt pretty proud of it. Robin proved himself to be a star in the clutch. He had been standing at the finish line for twenty minutes and snapped my photograph as I crossed. He and I snacked on the banana, bagel, and chocolate bar in my finisher’s goodie bag, and I swung the finisher’s medal around my neck.

T
HE CLERK AT THE íSAFJÐR AIRPORT
check-in counter took our luggage and issued us boarding passes. Then he turned to me and said, “There is a man looking for you.”

“Did he say anything about his wife?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just a bad joke. Where is he?”

It was Lars from the tourism office. He had driven out to the airport because I had won a small trophy for placing well in the forty to forty-nine age class. I had also won two draw prizes—a training jersey and a cap.

Robin asked Lars why a truck with a flashing light was driving up and down the runway. Lars explained that the driver was trying to frighten Arctic Terns away from the runway so that they wouldn’t smash into the plane’s propellers. We watched the incoming plane swoop down into Ísafjöður and make a heroic turn the moment before touchdown. Robin and I both said “Shit!” when the left wing almost hit the tarmac.

But our plane got away safely, and fields of purple lupines fell behind. I drank a complimentary glass of water and sucked on an Air Iceland chocolate wafer. I have been told that the single worst cliché in the world of travel writing is “Iceland is a land of fire and
ice.” While watching the back of Robin’s head, I struggled to come up with a replacement. I settled on “Iceland is a land of lava and lupines.” The royalty cheques should start arriving from the Iceland Tourism Board any day now.

REASON NUMBER FOURTEEN FOR INTRODUCING A FOREIGN SPECIES: SOMEONE MUST HAVE GOOFED.

W
HEN I FIRST SAW ROXY,
she was swimming lazy laps of her indoor swimming pool. She wasn’t looking well, and the tumours all over her body didn’t add to her appeal. It was time to drag her out of the pool for a closer look.

Roxy is a green turtle, one of seven species of sea turtle recognized. All of them are doing very badly. The IUCN considers loggerheads and green turtles to be endangered, implying that both species are doomed unless the causes for their decline are reversed. Three other sea turtles, the leatherback, the hawksbill, and Kemp’s ridley, are critically endangered—doomed, only more so. The olive ridley turtle is doing slightly better, with the designation of vulnerable to extinction. This leaves the flatback turtle, about which we know so little that we can’t even assess how doomed it really is.

For a year, Roxy had been in the care of Dr. Ellen Ariel. Ellen is Senior Lecturer of Virology at the School of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. She had long been interested in diseases of wildlife, and her recent efforts had been directed at viruses of turtles. Roxy had been brought to Ellen because her condition was so dire. If she had been left in the
wild, she would have met her end rather quickly. Other facilities in the region were already full of turtles in need of aid. During her spell in captivity, Roxy’s condition had waxed and waned.

Most members of the scientific fraternity were working on the assumption that the tumours sometimes seen on sea turtles were the result of a virus known as fibropapilloma-associated turtle herpesvirus, mercifully abbreviated as FPTHV. The virus had been isolated from turtle tumours, but some researchers felt that the association between growths and the infectious agent was a just a coincidence and that some other causative agent was involved.

Some of Roxy’s tumours were as small as marbles, but others were the size of billiard balls. Growths that I took to be the youngest had small, pink, finger-like projections, hence the name “papilloma,” from the Latin word
papilla
for “nipple.” Others were smoother, in various shades of cream through grey. Some of the tumours toward Roxy’s backside looked as though they were necrotic, dying, and Ellen speculated that the tissue might have been attacked by a bacteria. Most of the tumours had a good grip, but others were attached by only a thin stalk, and I wondered if this separation might progress to the point where they might simply fall off. The tumours around her eyes were not the biggest, but they were among the most debilitating. Like blinkers on a racehorse, by creating a barrier they partially blinded her. After smelling food in the water and narrowing down the spot where she knew it must be, it took her several attempts to grab it.

Ellen said that she had named the turtle Roxy because she thought that it needed a strong name. She could only assume that Roxy was a female. Currently in middle age, with a carapace length of forty-eight centimetres, he/she/it will have to grow to eighty-six centimetres before it will be possible to determine its sex without an autopsy. At that point, Roxy will be nearly twice the size, so almost eight times the mass. If she lives long enough, she might grow to a length of 130 centimetres and could weigh between 140 and 160 kilograms. Green turtles have been known to grow to 230 kilograms.

Since she had been taken into captivity, Roxy had periodically been taken out of her tank so that blood samples could be drawn and photographs taken to chart the progress of her condition. On the day of my visit, Roxy was booked in with JCU’s Veterinary Emergency Centre and Hospital so that she could be X-rayed. As bad as Roxy looked on the outside, her future would be far bleaker if the tumours were also internal. I had volunteered to assist with some of the dirty work.

Ellen and I donned dark blue, heavy-cotton lab aprons and surgical gloves. Ellen was tiny enough that she could loop her apron strings twice and tie them in front; I had to knot mine in back. We laid a third apron on the floor. I got my instructions. The trick was to get the turtle safely out of her swimming pool and on to her back on the apron without breaking any bones—hers or mine. I stood quietly beside the waist-height pool and waited for Roxy to swim past me. I then reached in, took hold of her front flippers gently but firmly next to her armpits (flipperpits, I suppose), and scooped her up. In doing so, I had a good grip on a couple of tumours; there was no way to avoid them. I laid her down on the apron, and we ever so slowly and gently reflected her front flippers to her sides. We then used the margins of the apron to secure her. We loaded Roxy onto a large top-loading scale, and Ellen was displeased to see that the turtle had lost mass since her last weighing. Well secured for the short walk to the veterinary clinic, Roxy lay in my arms completely docile. I took each step with no less caution than I would use for a small, sick child.