Our age of shifting complication is drawn to myths of rooted simplicity. Which city dweller, navigating between shallow digital profiles, could not be moved by the idea of a woman, once briefly a model in New York, who wanted nothing more than to run a sheep farm at one of the world’s furthest corners, and to save the valley she grew up in from imminent peril?
That is the modern Icelandic saga of Heida Ásgeirsdottír, who, at the age of 20 gave up on a potential career on the catwalk – she had been press-ganged into it by scouts and photographers, and by a fairy-godmother aunt who worked at the Elite model agency – to return home for lambing season; to become, as a recently published book of her life has it: “A shepherd at the edge of the world.” Twenty-one years later, she says she has never for a day regretted it.
Heida, that biography, became a bestseller in Iceland, and has just been published here. It undermines fairytales of all kinds. Ásgeirsdottír’s granitic father used to tell her, when she was a skinny kid trailing around after him in the hills, that she would one day take over the farm, just as soon as she found a husband to look after the land. That sounded a lot like fighting talk to Ásgeirsdottír. She never found a husband, never wanted to, but she took over the family farm anyhow in 2004, aged 26, when her father was diagnosed with the cancer that killed him two years later. She has run it alone ever since.
Ljotarstadir, “the farm where the light is”, has been in the family since the 12th century. It lies in the foothills of the central highlands of Iceland; neighbouring place names testify to the harshness of the winters: Snjoagil (Snow Ravine) and Snjodalagljufur (Snow Valley Gorge). Ásgeirsdottír farms 500 sheep, as her ancestors have done just about for ever. In 2010, however, this way of life was threatened by plans to build a vast power plant in the area that would depend on a 60-metre high dam in her valley, a wall of water “as high as the cathedral tower in Reykjavik” flooding her best pastureland, “where the grass grows first in the spring”, with a 10km2 reservoir. She made it her singular mission to prevent that happening, taking on corporations and politicians, and after seven long years of campaigning – she became a local councillor, a Green activist and a de facto planning lawyer – she won.
Victory has meant going on just as before. Her book – written with a journalist – is both a campaign diary and an account of her arduous year, divided into seasons. During the short days of late winter, when her own sheep are off pasture, Ásgeirsdottír travels all across Iceland scanning expectant ewes on other farms for signs of problematic pregnancies, a practice she has pioneered with her neighbouring farmer Ella Steinna. Over the course of six weeks, she will scan 1,200 sheep a day, each needing to be corralled in an iron cage. She starts at 8am and works for 12 hours, sitting low on the sheep house floor, forgetting to eat meals, sluicing the cage with ice-cold water, each time making her frozen hands feel like they will fall off before heading to a farmhouse at night for a shower and a hot chocolate. I spoke to her on the phone in a remote farmhouse one evening in February when she was just unwinding from this daily ritual. She sounded briskly cheerful – and exhausted.
She was, she insisted quickly, a reluctant subject for the book that carries her name. The only reason she agreed to do it, with the journalist and novelist Steinunn Sigurdardóttir, was that it was supposed to be a history of the struggle with the power plant. “And I had said I would do anything to support the cause. I did not realise it was going to be so much about my personal life. She said, well, no one wants to read a whole book just about a power station. And by then I was in too deep.”
Has the popularity of the book changed her life?
“Well, we have had a lot of people stop by the farm to see what it looks like,” she says. “But my mother has greeted them if she is there because I am always out in the fields working …”
And how about having her interior life on display?
She mentions how the first time her younger sister saw someone pick up the book in a bookshop she had to resist the urge to run over, snatch it from her and say: “How dare you pry into Heida’s life!” Ásgeirsdottír felt a bit the same at first, but, she says, in her matter-of-fact way: “It’s OK, because of course it is the top of the iceberg only, there is plenty I don’t talk about under the surface. No one would ever tell everything.”
Ásgeirsdottír remains involved in politics, as deputy to the local Green councillor in parliament. She says she can no longer devote the time needed for more involvement now that the primary battle against the power plant is over, because the farm work itself remains so overwhelming. If the power company ever returned with its plans though – and she believes it has not completely given up – then she would have no hesitation in returning to the battle.
I suggest to her that the impact of her book and her story lies not only in its green politics, but also in its sexual ones. Heida is frank about the lure of romance. Over the years since she has been running the farm, she has been the constant target of chat-up lines and marriage proposals: “Men offer themselves, they offer their sons,” she says. Drunk fathers call her up at midnight. “Do you need a farmhand?” “I can lift hay bales!” “I can repair your tractors …” One, knowing her reputation for independence and practicality, tried to court her with a present of a well-balanced hammer and a set of jump leads. None has ever got very far. “I often say, both jokingly and seriously,” says Ásgeirsdottír, “that I’m as romantic as a block of frozen cod.”
Ásgeirsdottír relates some of these encounters in “poetry slams” in the local bars, the Icelandic equivalent of rap contests. She makes up poems sometimes while she is out in the fields and they punctuate her book, not always surviving well in translation. “No husband? I’ve only myself to blame/Think it a shame – to me it’s all the same … Farming’s my game.”
Does she never get lonely?
“It’s OK to be alone for me, and it’s also OK to have someone. I don’t fear being alone and I don’t fear being in a relationship. I make my choices.”
Though her days are mostly solitary, she says, she retains a powerful curiosity about the world; in recent years she has been travelling to take part in sheep-shearing competitions, including last year’s world championships in New Zealand. What she is losing in strength as she gets a bit older, she is gaining in technique. Her shearing times are still coming down.
Her book makes it clear that some of her drive comes from that early desire not to be dominated or belittled by her father, who had an iron will. Does she feel she has become more like him over the years?
“He was tough,” she says. “But I still scare myself sometimes. I am 41 this spring. I’m still strong enough to do the work, but I can’t really work 24 hours like I used to. I get tired. I have a sore back sometimes and all of that …”
She worries about the climate, the way she sees the winters are getting warmer and the summers cooler, the retreat of the glaciers. She cannot comprehend a culture in Iceland that insists on importing bottled water for its supermarket shelves; that must have “all the fruits, all the berries, every season, by plane”. I wonder if she enjoys cooking?
She laughs. “My mother is a good cook,” she says, “but not me. When my mother is not here, I might cook a big piece of meat and leave it in the fridge and cut pieces off.”
I think I know the answer to the question of whether Ásgeirsdottír imagines how her life would have been different if she had taken up those modelling contracts in New York, but I ask it anyway.
“It was a short period of time and I suppose it was good for self-esteem,” she says. “But as soon as I was in New York I realised that this was not the life for me. It was fun to try, but this is my place.”
She says that last phrase with some enviable certainty. We talk for a while more, before I can hear in her voice that farmer’s sense that the following morning, as ever, isn’t so far away, and that she really should be getting some rest.
Heida: A Shepherd at the Edge of the World by Steinunn Sigurdardóttir is published on 18 April (Hodder, £16.99) To order a copy for £12.99, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6848
