Matchbox

The next entry from the Icelandic adventures of D. Heimpel has arrived:

Fire leapt from a blonde girl’s hands as she threw the burning matchbox on the velvet couch. I was in Kaffibarrin, one of the city’s most popular bars, and this girl was about to burn it down.

The next day I stole my yoga teacher’s matches. Well, she’s not my yoga teacher, but she is a yoga teacher and the woman from whom I rent an apartment. She has a penchant for incense (Nag Champa, bien sur), and I shuffled around for some matches to indulge the siren of Nicotine.

I pulled a match from the box on the porch and tried to light it but it wouldn’t catch. The thing had already been used. In fact, half of the box had been used. ‘Now that’s pretty weird,’ I thought. And as I looked out over the backyard where one squat, gray cat stalked imaginary mice, I mused.

Iceland is bare like a green peach; the only trees are newly planted, laid out in very clear rows. The prevalent belief is that an axe wielding Vikings chopped down every single tree to build Christian-burning pyres and longships. So, a number of organizations have been feverishly re-foresting Iceland ? to bring it back to the way it was ? a country of rolling hills and forests. The kind you can get lost. Here the joke is: “If you’re lost in an Icelandic forest just stand up.”

But I just can’t imagine the Vikings chopping down that many trees. Instead I think the trees were smart, and like most mammals (humans excluded) steered clear of this windy rock.

Maybe wood is at such a premium that to throw away a match would be a crime. Like all 300,000 Icelanders would come together with their collective burnt matches and build a matchstick edifice to rival the Empire State or the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur. Or maybe just build a town where if you threw a stone at a house it would go bonk instead of clanggg.

I brought my postulations to a group of co-workers near the amazing Swedish coffee machine in the kitchen of Heimur hf. (pronounced “how f”).

“Ingvar,” I said. “What do you do with a match after you’ve lit it?”

“I light a candle,” he said with a twinkle of his blue eyes. Ingvar spent a good deal of his life in Italy. Ingvar the romantic.

“No, after you have put it out,” I clarified.

“Oh, I put it in the matchbox.”

“Why?”

“So I don’t have to throw it away. And so I can be ecological.” No matchstick cities or townships I guess.

“If you go way back,” said P?l, the photo designer who mans a beautiful Macintosh on Heimur’s first floor. “The old days in the farms? these guys are probably all dead? but the farmers would smoke pipes and they would all save the matches.”

“Why?”

“To clean their pipes,” he said. “And maybe use them as toothpicks.”

Here I realized that Icelandic culture trumps Americana. Me – wasteful American – would throw the matches in the dirt, pull out a stick of gum and toss the wrapper, like a little blanket for the forlorn match. But in Iceland, even a matchstick is saved. And risking the ever-present danger of exploding matchboxes, maybe I’ll start shoving still warm sticks back into the box with their phosphorus-headed buddies.

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