The Fishermen's Shrine in Reykjavik: The Blizzard of 1995

The Westfjords Hurricane

In Iceland, the sea is both our mother and our graveyard. In February 1995, an Arctic polar low slammed into the Westfjords with hurricane-force winds and sea temperatures barely above freezing. Avalanches buried towns in Sudavik and Flateyri.

Out in the open Denmark Strait, my husband Jon and my younger brother Einar were aboard the eighty-foot wooden longliner *Nordurljos*. At 4:30 PM on Wednesday, the Coast Guard received a fragmented Morse transmission: *'Heavy icing on deck... pumps struggling... losing steerage.'* Then the frequency hissed into white noise.

Four Days in Hallgrímskirkja

I walked through the blinding horizontal snow up the hill to Hallgrímskirkja. The basalt columns of the church were coated in translucent ice. Inside, twenty other wives and mothers sat in wool parkas, their hands trembling over beeswax candles.

For ninety-six hours, I did not sleep. I stared at the flame of a single yellow votive candle. When modern people pray, they ask for convenience: for promotions, for better weather, for minor comforts. When an Icelandic fisherman's wife prays, she bargains with the primeval forces of nature. You pray that the rudder holds. You pray that the men don't freeze to death chipping ice off the masts.

In that church, I felt the collective strength of five hundred years of Nordic women who had watched their men sail into the dark North Atlantic. We were not helpless; our prayers were the invisible anchor lines holding those boats to the shore.

The Black Hull in the Harbor

On Sunday morning at 6:15 AM, the foghorn sounded across Reykjavik harbor. The *Nordurljos* limped into the quay, its superstructure encased in two feet of solid sea ice, listing ten degrees to starboard, but engine still chugging.

Jon stepped onto the wooden dock, his beard white with frost, his fingers black from frostnip. He didn't say a word. He collapsed into my wool coat and wept like a child.

Jon died of old age twenty-five years later in his bed. But that church candle never went out in my memory. On Solas Haven, I leave this chronicle for all the sailors, miners, and frontline souls who face the brutal elements tonight: someone is on their knees praying you make it home.