The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (35 page)

On paper, it looked like a good plan, and the plant was sown
as early as 1885. However, the wrong species was chosen for introduction. Some lupines are perfectly palatable, but other species are toxic, containing noxious chemicals. These plants even have a special poison named after them: lupinine. Symptoms of lupine poisoning, also known as lupinosis, include numbness of the feet and hands, nausea, drowsiness, headaches, and dehydration from diarrhea, leading to shock. Individuals have been known to experience hallucinations and convulsions after eating lupines, followed shortly after by death. Before you start feeding lupines to your pet rabbit, check with an authority—you may have purchased one of the nasty ones. Iceland made that mistake.

Nootka lupines, native to Alaska and coastal western British Columbia, are among the poisonous ones, making them pretty rotten fodder. Furthermore, the diversity of native Icelandic plants drops significantly where lupines grow densely. Although lupines have some value in controlling erosion in badly degraded habitats in Iceland, the country was increasingly under siege from a purple-flowered invader that many did not want.

W
HEN I WOKE THE NEXT DAY,
I found that our hotel room was furnished in pieces from next year’s Ikea catalogue. Smartly kitted out, it was a stark contrast to the earthiness of hotel rooms in Ethiopia. The room was so clean that it squeaked even if I didn’t touch anything. The lights worked and the drinking water was safe but smelled of sulphur. I tried to wake up slowly, but when Robin noticed a sliver of eyeball between my eyelids, he started reading passages to me from my guidebook which had, for all intents, become his. As I lay in bed, I composed a little poem about Iceland:

Suggestions for a much better poem for the book’s next edition should be sent to:

Reykjavík, Iceland’s capital, is home to about 115,000 people. Suburbs like Garðabær, Bessastaðir, and Hafnarfjörður swell the city’s population to 200,000, or two-thirds of the country’s total population. After breakfast, Robin and I strolled east along the waterfront, and I tried to form some first impressions of Reykjavík in full-blown daylight. Let’s see…. Well, it smelled a bit of fish. Not so unusual for a country almost entirely dependent on the sea’s bounty. Other than the fishy smell, the city was fantastically tidy and unpolluted. There were a lot of buildings, and so there must be a lot of people, but they had either already arrived at work or were still asleep after enjoying the nightlife that, famously, does not begin until people in every other part of the world have gone to bed. In either case, Robin and I had the waterfront walk pretty much to ourselves. Even though Reykjavík isn’t a skyscrapery sort of place, it certainly had lots of construction cranes on the go. What I could see of the city seemed either newly constructed or newly scrubbed. Well into the second half of June, there was a distinct chill on the breeze, and I was pleased that I had brought a fleece jacket.

I had met Robin a few years earlier while living in Scotland, but until now it hadn’t occurred to me that he was a habitual talker. As we walked, the chatter flowed—it was really quite amazing. I don’t know many people who are unable to tolerate silence, and I wasn’t entirely sure of my role. Even when his dialogues had run their course, Robin continued to talk, only more quietly and in sentence fragments.

This was a photographer’s holiday for Robin. It became quickly apparent that he liked to take his time setting up each photograph.
He even held up his thumbs and forefingers and peeped through the resulting rectangle like a 1940s film director. When he settled in to take some snaps, I found a place to sit. I discovered that there are few things in life more boring than watching someone else take a photograph. Watching someone listen to an audiobook might qualify. Having not yet succumbed to the allure of digital photography, Robin had soon finished his first roll of thirty-six shots.

“How many rolls did you bring?”

“About twenty,” he replied.

We walked to a city park around Tjörnin Lake, home to the world’s most optimistic ducks. I found Reykjavík so polished and pretty that I started to wonder what they did with residents who had had a run of bad luck. What happened if you ran short on cash and didn’t manage to maintain your home and yard to the highest of standards? Did they knock down your house, clear away the rubble, and put you on a flight to somewhere less pretty?

It would be unfair of me to say that all Icelandic men and women are beautiful. After all, I haven’t seen them all yet. Even so, I started to wonder what happened to those who exited adolescence a little less beautiful than the remainder of their cohort. Did they knock down your house, clear away the rubble, and put you on a flight to somewhere less discriminating?

It was a bright day, and the breeze was tasty. There was an abundance of park benches, and none of them had those depressing plaques that read: “In memory of Erik Johansson, whose miserable, lingering death put an end to his miserable, lingering life.” I sat on a bench while Robin took photographs of brightly painted corrugated metal roofs. I watched an older park worker scrape weeds from between paving stones with pride and enthusiasm, while his younger partner watered pansies to perfection while dancing to the music from his headphones.

We ascended a hill for a view of the city. We passed through fields of cheerful lupines to get to the top. As ornamental flowering plants go, lupines are rather attractive creatures. In describing their leaves and stems, experts use expressions like “petiolated,”
“densely pubescent,” “oblong-obovate,” and “glabrous.” It all sounded vaguely naughty. The flowers were even worse: “more or less cleft” with “broad calyx lobes.”

Robin took photographs while I leaned back on a rock and told him what I had read about the word “lupine.” That spelling is a little more common in North America, while “lupin” is more frequently used in Europe. The
Oxford English Dictionary
even credits the spelling “lupyne.” According to an assortment of dictionaries, the word can be pronounced “lü/pīn,” “lü / pin,” “lü / pin” or “l(j)u:pin.” Those same dictionaries gave me endless hypotheses about linguistic origins. There is no doubt that the word is derived from the Latin words
lupinus
and
lupinum,
meaning wolf-like, but the connection isn’t clear. Some said that ancients considered lupine seeds suitable only for consumption by wolves. Others claimed that lupines were considered to rampage over the landscape like a pack of ravenous wolves. Perhaps there was a feeling that lupines steal nutrients from the soil like a pack of ravenous wolves, even though we now know that lupines contribute to soil fertility. Take your pick, or make up something else.

That evening, Robin and I set off to find a moderately priced restaurant. Failing that, we found a nice-looking curry restaurant, and I tried to ignore the prices. I quickly settled on soup and a main course, but Robin repeatedly sent the server away because he was deep into a story about Canterbury and too busy to look at the menu. To be fair, I had asked him about his time in Canterbury, but by the time the story was finished, it was nowhere near where it had started. Robin changed his mind back and forth about what to eat and finally settled on fish soup and Arctic char. Our server gave me a conspiratorial shoulder shrug. The bill was $150 and should have come with the sort of offer I had been given at the hotel in Addis Ababa.

I
N SCHOLARLY CIRCLES,
lupines are a hot deal. Of the roughly 200 research papers that are published on lupines each year, most deal with their biochemistry. What sort of nasty chemicals do they produce?
What sort of useful chemicals do they produce? Can I make money from either? My database search for scientific publications on the Nootka lupine in particular returned an awful lot of articles about Iceland. These papers addressed three major questions. Is it possible to use lupines to help reclaim badly degraded habitat in Iceland? Can lupines help in re-establishing Iceland’s forests? Could Iceland grow lupines, chop them down, and then bury them as a way of sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere? Each of the papers I consulted carried the warning that lupines are invasive and unlikely to stay where they are put. It seemed like a good time for me to look for more lupines.

June twenty-first marked my fiftieth summer solstice. And since I was closer to the North Pole than I had ever been, it was to be the longest day of my life. It seemed like the sort of day that needed to be celebrated in a special way. Robin found a description of a hiking trail that fit the bill. The wildflowers and scenery sounded just right for Robin, and the rocky scramble from sea level to 780 metres seemed the right challenge for me.

Reykjavík sits on the south side of Faxaflói Bay; the Mount Esja ridge runs across the north side. We walked to Reykjavík’s bus terminal and caught the Number 15, driven by a man who detested piloting a bus that early on a Saturday morning. He blasted us with a radio station playing all of the worst music from the ‘60s and ‘70s. “I’m a Believer” was rattling through my head for the rest of the day, and I hadn’t liked The Monkees even when I was ten.

Leaving the Number 15 at Mosfellsbær, we got on the Number 27, driven by the only person in Iceland over the age of six months who didn’t speak fluent English.

“Does this bus go to Mount Esja?”

“Já.”

“Is the ticket we bought in Reykjavík good for this part of the ride, or do we need to buy another ticket?”

“Já.”

“Could you tell us where to get off for Mount Esja?”

“Já.”

“Is there a troll in your trousers?”

“Já.”

Luckily, there was a young woman from China who was studying at the university in Reykjavík (which sounds like the start of a limerick) who spoke perfect English and was able to show us where to get off. We never got to see the troll.

And then I ran into a little problem. Just one minute down the trail, Robin stopped for several minutes to take a photograph of a creek. After another thirty seconds of hiking, he stopped to take a photograph of the same creek from a different angle.

“Did you bring enough film today, Robin?”

“Six rolls of this, two rolls of that, and two rolls of the other; I should be fine.”

“Well, Robin, I don’t want to rush you, so how would it be if I go on ahead? I’ll push on for the top and pick you up on the way down. All right?”

Stunted pine trees and birch bushes decorated the lowest portions of the trail. These quickly tapered off, and I was surrounded by fields of cow parsley, which were equally quickly replaced by dense stands of lupines. The shiest lupines came to my hip, and the bolder ones reached my ribs. About half the plants were in flower, and it was clear that we had timed our trip perfectly to see them. A week earlier and the flowers wouldn’t have yet unfolded. A week later and the flowers toward the bottom of the spike would have been dropping off.

I plucked a spike to examine the flowers in more detail. Each spike had eight or ten nodes, each with a whorl of eight flowers. Flowers evidently matured at the bottom first, and later near the top. The lower petals of each flower were indigo, and the upper ones were whitish. When I stood back to look at thousands and thousands of flowers swaying slightly in the breeze, I found that some trick of perception meant that I couldn’t focus on any of them. It was like watching a documentary about bumblebees with the projector slightly out of focus, or an amateur stage production of
The Sound of Music.

As I climbed, even the lupines couldn’t hold on, and the vegetation turned to ground-hugging tufts of green fuzz dotted with the tiniest flowers in yellow, white, and blue. The soil got thinner and the boulders became more abundant, and I tripped several times. The trail officially ended after a particularly steep bit, and most people had signed their name in a guest book before heading back down. Not being “most people,” I continued on over loose rock and rubble, pushing for the very top. I tried to walk but felt the need to tackle the last bit on all fours.

If the summit of Mount Esja is 780 metres high, then I got to 765. Beyond this point, progress was less a matter of hiking and more a matter of climbing and possibly plunging. Instead I found a nook between two rocks, plonked my bum down, and admired the stunning view below me while enjoying a good long think. And the thoughts came easily. Among them: (1) What a lucky sod I am; and (2) For the cost of last night’s meal, I probably wouldn’t have too much trouble getting someone murdered. On the descent I found Robin and heard all about his photographic adventures.

Over a pizza dinner, the cheapest restaurant option in Reykjavík, I asked Robin what he wanted to do with the following day. He had found a brochure describing a guided excursion to some of southern Iceland’s greatest geological attractions. It included a series of geysers and a visit to a giant rip in the earth. Robin was particularly keen to see the spot, having watched a television show about it a couple of months earlier. He passed me the brochure.

“I see it’s 8,500 krona,” I said. “And that’s about … well, it’s a lot of money.”

“Yes,” Robin replied. “But it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

A
VAN FROM REYKJAVíK EXCURSIONS
picked us up outside our hotel and dropped us at its bus terminal. Making the fundamental error of being prompt, polite, and organized, the firm was now suffering from its own success, with ever so many clients, drooling in anticipation of seeing geysers and other holes in the ground. The
first bus with an English-speaking guide filled up, followed by a bus with a guide who could give commentary in both French and English, leaving us to board a bus with Péter, a guide who didn’t exactly speak English or French, but didn’t quite speak Icelandic either. Fifty-seven clients times three buses times 8,500 krona … I suspected the company could easily afford the outrageous cost of gas in Iceland.