Whiteblack Correspondent Erin Honeycutt has written a series of beautiful and thoughtful essays from her travels, living and work in Iceland.  Below is an exerpt from her latetst entry, call it in code, or by those birds. You can also read:

• Lava Landscape

• In the Belly of a Whale

call it in code, or by those birds
Posted on July 24, 2010 by Erin Honeycutt

On Tuesday morning, at 3 am we did the second line transect of the summer. During these, we only track the cetaceans that we see in our direct line, which travels in a zigzag up the bay, about six lines in all. One person is up in the crow’s nest, noting what they see, but without telling anyone else until afterwards in orderto see how many cetaceans the trackers might actually be

missing. Two others stand on either side of the wheelhouse and scan with binoculars, and one sits beside them and enters their tracks into the tracking program. I stretched out on the back bench during really long swells when I was on my break and read Moby Dick which gives all of this number entry and data collection concerning cetaceans an exciting and much needed narrative spirit; it’s definitely keeping things interesting when dealing with a lot of raw data. When Edda was also on break, she taught me a few new words in Icelandic. I learned ‘kanel snuðer’ which means cinnamon swirl, and ‘snuðer’ also is a pet name for something cute or petite, and ‘eg er veik’ which means ‘I’m sick.’ I learned a lot of Icelandic that I have no idea how to spell, but I usually need help with pronunciation when reading it anyway.Being surrounded by Icelandic is starting to give me more linguistic comfortability with how it sounds around you, and how it sounds coming out of my own mouth. People will usually come up to me and start speaking in Icelandic and I just open my mouth blankly for a few seconds before I remember that I don’t speak this language and I have to tell them something.  To read more, click here.

Two nights ago I awoke while it was still dark, enjoying the relative cool of early morning. Through the window I saw an orange-tinged crescent moon surrounded by a handful of stars. The sky was ever so slightly touched by color, faintly purple. I dozed and woke again to see morning light seeping into the darkness and listened to a lone bird greeting the morning. Stars still freckled the sky, but they were fainter, and the line of the Acteon Ridge glowed pink.

Dusk drains the landscape of light and color. Dawn reverses this emptying, refilling the sky, mountains, forest and meadows with blues, grays and greens that are chased by orange and pink: green seeps into the foreground; blue-gray soaks through the blue-black mountains in the background; and the meadows combine green with a sprinkle of reflected pink and orange.

I doze again this time when I wake my eyes smart from a burning circle of sun that is accompanied by a cacophony of birdsong.