Nehaveigur

Most winters, the ice was strong enough for skating, as long as you avoided the fast flowing sections where it was much thinner. As a safety precaution, or so I told myself, I would first go out on a sled, reasoning that it’s impossible to fall through the ice that way. If it didn’t crack, I judged it as strong enough to skate on it. This reasoning turned out to be faulty, as I found out a few times when the ice started to disintegrate below my feet. Miraculously, I never fell through.

Before I learned to swim, I was strictly forbidden from going down to the river by myself. One of my older sisters, with the intention from scaring me into being safe, told me that there was a fish-man living in the water that preyed on small kids who dared to come too close. Even as a six year old, I knew that wasn’t true.

Once I knew how to swim, no-one tried to hold me back. The water was coming off the snowcapped alps I could see in the distance on clear days and it was correspondingly cold. If you ignored the stinging sensation for the first minutes, your body adjusted and you were fine. By late summer, the water had warmed up enough to be pleasant. As I got grew older, I spent lazy afternoons floating on the river with friends. This included a boy a few years younger who couldn’t swim, which wasn’t a problem because we had an inflatable air mattress. It supported both of us until one day the valve blew while we were in the middle of the river. It only took a few seconds for the mattress to deflate. He put both of his arms around my neck and I started to swim. It didn’t go well. I swallowed water and the headline of the local newspaper appeared in front of my mind’s eye: “Two boys drowned in river”. Even as I struggled to keep my mouth above the water, I felt my vision darkening. At the last possible moment, I felt a rock under my feet and we pulled ourselves ashore. For the rest of the day I had a headache from the exertion. Neither of us ever told anyone.

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