The Bizarre Truth (3 page)

We cruise into some softer water about a quarter mile offshore and idle beside a giant, two-inch-thick wire coming from the house and disappearing into the water beside us. I learn that the only way to unload the gear is through a pulley system. Several years earlier, the family sank a giant anchor into the water, attached a two-inch-thick wire cable about 500 feet off the cliff, and then pulled the wire up to the house, securing it with block and tackle to a landing about fifty feet below the house’s platform. They lower the block and tackle down toward the water hooked up with a giant cargo net and we load up all our gear from the two boats. I watch it disappear as six or seven guys yank all the equipment to the top of the hill.

I assumed that while it looked tricky, that’s how we were going to be getting on the island.

Nope.

Even these latter-day Vikings find that method a tad dangerous. If the equipment disappears, you’re out the equipment. But people disappearing from that height, that’s another story. Here is the safer method of hopping onto Alsey: You run the little Zodiac boat at top speed, straight toward the rock face of the cliff. A split second before you smash the boat’s nose into the granite wall, Pall guns it into reverse. The boat freezes and you jump out at the last possible moment of sweet inertia, grasping, struggling to clutch the flimsy climbing rope dangling from some pitons high atop the cliff. As the boat pulls away, you hold yourself there, balance your feet on the slippery, wet rocks, and essentially pull yourself up, Batman Bat-rope style. Foot over foot, hand over hand, while other kind people (if you are lucky) who’ve arrived before you attempt to pull on the rope to make it a little easier for you. In comparison, getting back was a piece of cake: You just hang on to the rope, and when the boat comes in, you let go and fall (indelicately, I might add) into the Zodiac with a big thud. But leaping out of that boat onto the rock wall, aiming for this little piece of climbing rope about the width of your pinky, is one of those experiences that I will never forget. A literal leap of faith.

I knew that this great test of my manhood was not going to get any easier. Fortunately, Pall was a great coach and talked us through the whole thing. Our crew was wet, bruised, and scraped, but without Pall’s expertise, we didn’t have a prayer. Our success was directly related to the skill set of our leader, and he had gotten us all on the island.

We reconned on the top of the granite cliff and climbed our way to the top of the crest of the upper hillside, walking carefully along the cut-in path to the stone path at the highest part of the bluff, then up and over the last ridge to their hunting cabin. We walked about a quarter mile from the landing point to the house itself, where we changed into our puffin-hunting clothes, sturdier shoes, tough mackinaw jackets, hats, and hunting equipment.
Now, puffin hunting is done in a very specific way. You hide yourself in the rocks, holding on to a long and extremely unwieldy, twenty-foot-long, thick wooden pole that weighs at least forty pounds. At the end, they’ve attached a big net. I must admit that puffin, while beautiful to look at, are some of the stupidest animals known to man. When feeding time comes, millions of them are just flying around their nests, so scooping a few into your net is as simple as swatting mosquitoes at the Friday-night family picnic. You time it precisely, however. When you see a puffin flitting past you, you swing this massively heavy net at it and attempt to guide the net toward the puffin’s flight path. It’s an ungainly process; the stick is so heavy and awkwardly long, it’s like netting extremely speedy butterflies but on a much larger scale. The birds are so dumb that they don’t really know how to move out of the way. Once you get a feel for how the puffins react, you can be very successful, starting your long slow arcing swing, aiming at an imagined point where the bird’s flight path will intersect with the future position of your net. When you see someone with a lot of experience do it, it almost seems like they can will the bird into the basket. Pall’s eight-year-old nephew netted about four of them while I was just getting comfy in my spider hole burrow. Pall, his brother, and their kids are just whooping it up—everyone has their puffin net in full extension, swinging it around, going gang-busters on these birds. Pall’s youngest son nabs an additional two or three birds. His twelve-year-old son did the same, as did Pall and his brother. In an hour and a half, I netted one. It is literally as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, but only if you know how the puffins fly and aren’t completely preoccupied by the thought of slipping and plummeting to your untimely demise. I almost fell off the hill the couple of times I summoned the courage to stand and swing my pole. The hill is nearly vertical, pitted with puffin nests, covered in thick matted grass so you can’t see the rocks and ridges. That, in addition to the steepness, makes the terrain practically unmanageable to do anything other than squat on. In fact,
Gordon Ramsey, the famous English chef, went hunting with Pall’s family about three years after we did and fell into the water and almost died. It was horrendously scary sitting up there.

There was a charming aspect to it. You see, if you leaned out over the edge of the cliff just enough and looked down, you could see all the wild seals basking on the rocks, swimming to and fro and making cute seal noises. Perhaps waiting for someone to fall? Who knows. You could see the orcas blasting through their blowholes, rounding up krill, and all the seabirds diving into the water for their evening meal. It was glorious.

As the weather began to cool off, we started extracting the live birds from the net, snapped their necks, and breasted them out. Puffin meat looks a lot like wild Buffle Head duck: very dark and very purplish, with a small breast size. I’m accustomed to eating wild ducks and I’ve sampled sea ducks, which have some of the worst-tasting meat in the whole world—chewy, fishy, dry, and oppressively oily. I was expecting puffin to fall into this category, but the grilled puffin I ate on the deck outside the Alsey cabin was one of the most delicious meats ever to pass over my lips. It tasted like a delicately mild, finely grained piece of elk (or ostrich even) that had been waved over a pot of clam juice. The salty and sea life—intense diet these puffins have makes them naturally seasoned in a sense. Their musculature is such that they have a fairly small breast. You’d think it would be very tough from all the flying they do, but it’s actually quite tender. Not grilling them past medium rare helps. Pall and the lads sprinkled the meat with salt, pepper, and a dash of their favorite grilling spice from the local supermarket and we devoured the entire platter before we even got inside the cabin.

Our hosts served up some smoked puffin once we got indoors. Smoked puffin is the most popular preparation you will find in Icelandic restaurants, mostly because it is so stable at that point and can sit in the fridge for weeks at a time without degrading in quality. We sliced it paper thin, pairing the meat with sweet Galia
melon. Here is yet another oddity of Iceland: They have no growing season. Sure, they have some hydroponic stuff that is coming out of local greenhouses, but not much of it. A bag of carrots in Iceland costs $10, but a pound of lamb or a pound of crayfish costs next to nothing. It’s the exact reverse of the way it is in the rest of the world. Imagine a culture with plentiful meat and fish that are very cheap, but where all the vegetables are very expensive because it’s all shipped in from other places. So while I was all gaga about the puffin, Pall’s family swooned over this melon.

As we wrapped up dinner, I took a moment to explore the cabin and was completely fascinated with the setup. It was a shack without central heating, just a few electric heaters used only on especially cold nights. Pall’s family engineered a water system, securing a PVC pipe 200 feet up the cliff from the cabin, topped with a large 100-gallon drum so they could collect the rainwater and glacial runoff. The pressure feed that resulted allowed them to shower and wash up with rainwater, which they also drank. Now, where in the world can you do that? It was one of the most inspiring, self-sustaining environments I’ve ever experienced. In a world where green living and sustainability is something we are all trying to force into our lives in dribbles and drabs, this family was living in almost perfect harmony with their surroundings, despite the fact that it is only a place where, once a year, these guys get together for the family hunting experience. Over the decades, it’s grown from a lean shack to more of a modern lodge, now outfitted with two big community rooms, a living room, a couple of bunk-bed-filled bedrooms, and a bathroom, complete with slickly engineered, gravity-fed plumbing. They built a deck around the outside of the house, and they primarily cook and eat outdoors on the grill. It’s a very macho, manly experience, and to be perfectly frank, it’s a little unsettling spending time with people whose eight-year-old kid can kick your ass. I’ve never felt wimpier in my life.

Despite the fact that I could have been hung out to dry by the smallest of these guys, the camaraderie of it all was very familiar. I’ve spent a lot of time with friends and family duck hunting in New York and Minnesota, and the easygoing vibe of sitting quietly with the people you love in the great outdoors, with a gun on your shoulder or just a camera, is a contentment-inducing experience in the extreme.

The puddle jumper we’d chartered was leaving the airport in a few hours, and we knew that if we didn’t get off the island fast, we’d miss the flight. We said our good-byes, scampered down the path we’d arrived on, climbed down the ropes, and dropped ourselves into the Zodiac, falling into the wet bottom of the dinghy. We ferried the crew out to the big boat and took our equipment off the zip line as Pall’s brother and his kids sent it hurtling down from the house platform. Before heading back to the cruiser to drop me off, Pall took the Zodiac around to some of the caves where we had spotted some seals. He held the boat steady while huge waves broke on the rocks just in front of us, and I got a chance to stand a foot or so away from the wild seals before he took me back to the crew on the cabin cruiser, where we continued back to the main island.

Pall orchestrated a nice send-off for us, popping wheelies with his Zodiac against these giant rolling waves as his whole family gave us the Alsey cheer from the deck. They shouted, “Alsey, Alsey, Ah-Ah-Ah!” as we puttered off into the sunset, killer whales trailing us, cresting the surface of the water around our boat. It was probably the most exhilarating day of travel that I’d ever had in my life up to that point, the charm of the simplicity of another way of life quickly squashed by the immediacy of the modern-day fact that we had to race to catch a plane. We arrived at the harbor in the darkness and had to hijack several locals, begging them for a lift to the airstrip to catch our plane, almost leaving our guide, Svein, behind in the chaos.

The sense of accomplishment I felt after that day was incredible. The food was singularly fantastic; I have never had any eating experience like that. It’s the type of eating that, as a collector of these moments in life, I find so unique, it’s hard to measure it against anything else. I have yet to bump into any other group of people in my world that have hunted wild puffins and eaten them. I know there are some out there, non-Icelanders, but we are a rather small bunch.

There is a postscript to all this. The little boat that took us home, the cabin cruiser—well, the morning after he drove us home, it hit a rock and sank. Because of all the volcanic activity in the area, and the shaley nature of the rock in that part of Iceland, the rocky bottom of the ocean is always in flux. Say you are 100 yards offshore—you could be in 100 feet of water one day and in five feet of water the next. A rock can come up from the bottom of the sea or rocks can fall off the sides of the mountains into the water, which makes depth charts in that part of the world about as useless as the
Random House Dictionary
is at Harpo Marx’s house. We were very upset the next day to find out that the boat sank, but looking back, I realized that at the point and time that I felt the most safe and secure was, ironically, the time that we were actually the least. Funny world.

raveling from American Samoa to Samoa is a shot in the arm. It’s like driving from Newark, New Jersey, to East Hampton, Long Island. Yes, it’s the same part of the world, and to many observers there may not seem to be any difference between the two, but nothing could be further from the case. American Samoa is an overgrown military installation of an island with a modicum of beach tourism: a gorgeous island once, now wiped clean and free of accessible native culture. Land in American Samoa and you come face-to-face with the least appealing aspects of America’s greatest contribution to world culture, the miles-long strip of Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, McDonald’s, and Hampton Inns. The local culture has been bulldozed underneath the tidal wave of mud that the modern-day developing world has sent their way.