I Found An Old Diary (1969) And An Old Photo From The Month I Wrote It

I was still searching for a photo of Otto when I stumbled across a letter-sized envelope from the City Hotel in Reykjavik. It was labelled “Howie’s Iceland Diary” but it turned out to be even more than that— a couple dozen pages of scrawl I wrote in early 1969 from Iceland, Luxembourg and Heidelberg. I also found my college diploma in the same draw. I was never sure if I had officially graduated or not. I left Stony Brook before the year was finished and I had made arrangements with all my professors to pass me… but who knows. Well, now I know; they did.

By my senior year, I was picking classes based on the professors who were teaching them. They were all clients of my drug business and I was on great terms with them so I was always pretty sure they had passed me and that I had actually graduated. And now I know for sure; I’m a college grad. Maybe I should have figured that out a couple of weeks ago when someone from Stony Brook called and asked me if I would participate in a Home Coming event in which I’m expected to talk about how my experience at Stony Brook impacted the rest of my life. Wouldn’t they only ask graduates?

Sorry for the tangent; let’s get back to Iceland. Back in 1969, you could fly from New York to Europe (roundtrip) on Icelandic Air for just $99 if you stayed at least one night in Iceland. That was about $800 in today's money but back then Transatlantic flights were very very expensive, so it was a bargain. But by "Europe" they meant Luxembourg, which wasn’t that far from where we were headed— the Volkswagen factory in Weisbaden to pick up the van I would be living in for the next couple of years. I sold enough grass and hash to buy the van— a special deal for American students if you promised to export it— and the airline tickets for me and Martha and enough money to travel around Europe for the spring and summer.

On the plane we met Mario and Frances who were a few years older than us and were teaching at a college and wanted to know if we would like to chip in with them for a rental car and drive around Iceland for a week or two. Sure, why not! So instead of a night in Reykjavik, we saw the whole beautiful empty moonscape of a country.

The diary itself is embarrassingly boring, the first half mostly about how square everyone was and how they were hostile towards us for being hippies and the second half about how everyone was so cool and really into us for being hippies. And then in the middle was how we coped with the bad roads and farmers. And the diary is even worse because I got stoned every time I sat down to write so a lot of it is gibberish I can barely make out with me marveling at how light it was at 10pm, how it rained everyday and how conservative and drunk everyone was. Everyone we met, apparently, asked us “Why are you a hippie?” I can’t imagine what I said and there’s no record of that in the diary, just the question. I also noted that everyone in town wore a shirt and tie and that restaurants required that too and that I didn’t have a tie so everyone pointed at us and grumbled.

We wound up in Akureyri, the 5th biggest town in the country (a bit over 10,000), way up in the north. From there we drove to Goðafoss, missed the turnoff and drove another hour to Lake Mývatn, and then to Dettifoss in the northeastern part of the country, the highest waterfall in Europe, which is where the photo was taken. We met a long-haired kid who was in an Akureyri band and he told us Akureyri was more lively on the weekends, when everyone came to town and got drunk after tending their sheep all week. He told me he had never met anyone who had smoked pot but he did have a bottle of whiskey in his jacket pocket which he showed me when no one was looking.

I’ll spare you the stories of running over a lamb and offering to pay the drunk farmer for his loss and how he basically wanted the cost of a car and how we later drove off the road and got two flats to avoid hitting a dog that decided to chase the car.

After about a week we headed back to Reykjavik and I looked up some friends (Sevar and Gunnar) of a friend who I had met in New York when she visited the head shop I worked in on St. Marks Place (Krishna Imports). We smoked pot with them and they got too stoned to drive (or walk) so they called up some bandmates to pick us all up on the way to a gig in Keflavik. It turned out they were the biggest band in Iceland, Hljomar (Thor’s Hammer), and hanging out with them is what changed the way the Icelanders related to us. Now they were star-struck and instead of laughing and pointing and grumbling, they would come up to us and say things like, “I wish I could be a man like you but my parents would kill me.”

One of the guys in the band, Runi, had been on Iceland’s all-star soccer team, was married to Miss Iceland and didn’t want her to know when he smoked with us-- which was basically all the time. We smoked in the living room of their house while she stayed in the kitchen making delicious food and bringing it out to us the whole time. Eventually we met all their friends because they all wanted to smoke “maryanna” and it was weird watching them get high, especially the ones who were doing it for the first time. Soon enough Martha was over it and said we should go to Luxembourg. First we hung out for a couple of days with a lonely, marooned Jamaican stripper named Beryl who I met on the street and who was hilariously funny and kept us in stitches with her stories on her adventures around Europe. I think Iceland was the end of the road for her before going back to Jamaica once she could afford a ticket.