A Life by the Ocean, Iceland

Submitted by Áki to the Women Mind the Water digital stories project, in conjunction with the Smithsonian's Museum on Main Street storytelling website and traveling exhibition "Water/Ways."

This story was recorded at Northeastern University Marine Science Center in Massachusetts.

"I’m originally from Iceland, a little island up in the North Atlantic. Growing up most everybody in my family had something to do with fisheries – fishing - even if that, not at all, was what they were attempting to do professionally. Both of my mothers, who were involved at various parts of their lives, either in processing fish or in selling fish at the markets. It was just something everybody was kind of involved with despite their generation gaps. My generation is, kind of, the first in Iceland to grow up and be completely removed from the industry. So almost everybody in my family that is older than me has some sort of, pretty direct tie to harvesting from the ocean.

And, my sort of involvement with the sea growing up was mostly recreational – walking down by the seashore and collecting random things that I found and sort of learning about all the fish and all the things, the creatures, that were harvested there, sort of second hand. Growing up I realized that most of the people could identify creatures and weather patterns just sort of intuitively based on how they had been exposed to it growing up and working. For me it became more of an academic pursuit, to try and have a similar sense. My grandmother especially, she came from a very large family.

She was one of 17 and a number of those people, at least her brothers, drowned at sea. That was something I learned many years later walking through the cemetery listening to family and having that pointed out. So, in a sort of odd, roundabout way, I’ve started to be enabled to sort of form my own personal connections to the ocean and to this family history of being deeply involved with sea creatures and working with the sea but through what is at times is very detached academic pursuit.

So, coming back around, and now when I visit Iceland after being in the United States almost 20 years now of studying the ocean from afar, I am able to reconnect a little bit more but perhaps a little remotely still to the sea and the people that are still connected with it from childhood memories and my family back in Iceland."

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