Augustana, Junior YearAugustana was a small college, so there weren't many choices for Modern Language Majors: Spanish, French, German, Swedish, Latin, Greek, and occasionally Russian. We had to "become fluent" in two languages and "competent" in a third, so I chose Spanish and French, which I studied in high school, and German, because I spent the fall quarter of my sophomore year in Regensburg.
We also had to participate in at least one language club, but the Spanish, French, and German clubs were kind of boring, with bake sales, foreign-language films, and field trips to the Goethe Institut or the Alliance Française in Chicago.
Everybody joined the Scandinavian Club -- they had an endowment from a wealthy alumnus, and paid most of the way for members to go on annual field trips to Scandinavia! A different country every year, alternating between Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland.
In my junior year, it was Iceland. I would have preferred Norway, but I wasn't about to turn down ten days in the land of the Old Norse sagas and Nordic hunks.
There were 12 of us, eight boys and four girls, plus two chaperones. We stayed in a youth hostel, four to a room, but everyone got a single bed, so there wasn't any late-night fondling, just a couple of less-than-spectacular sausage sightings.
No one came out willingly in the 1970s, so if any of the other guys were gay, they didn't let on.
Iceland was interesting, but not quite interesting enough for six days. After you see the National Museum and the Árbæjarsafn, an open-air museum of Icelandic history, there's nothing but glaciers, geysers, rocks, and scraggly mountains. I've never found natural wonders as interesting as museums.
We never made it to Akureyri, famous for its annual strongman contest.
One day we took a bus to Hveragerði, about 45 minutes from Reykjavik, to visit Reykjadalur, "Steam Valley," an unearthly-looking region of volcanic boulders, spurts of steam, rocks, waterfalls, pools of water, and hot springs with wooden footpaths around.
Our guide told us that some intrepid souls jumped into the hot springs, but you had to be careful -- in some of them, the temperature got up to 80 degrees (175 fahrenheit), and would scald you.
None of us was brave enough. Besides, it was cloudy and damp, with a cold wind blowing -- who wanted to strip?
When it came time to get back on the bus, we discovered that Erik was missing!
He was a junior Scandinavian Studies major, short, slim, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, with a round handsome face. We had known each other since high school, but we didn't interact much: he was a fratboy, several levels above me on the social scale.
We went up and down the paths, calling his name. No answer.
He couldn't have fallen into a crevice. It was all open -- we would see him.
Could he have wandered off the path, into the wilderness of volcanic rocks?
We searched for 45 minutes. Then, just as our chaperone suggested we drive back to town and stop at the police station, Erik appeared -- on a path we had just searched!
Seeing our anxious and angry faces, he said "What? Chill out -- I was just looking at something. We're only in Iceland once, right?"
He didn't believe that he had been gone over 45 minutes: "I guess I lost track of time. Sorry."
More after the break
