Ten Years of Fear

Looking back at the relentless spread of biting midges

It’s early summer 2015 in Hvalfjörður, a deep fjord 30 minutes’ drive from Reykjavík. In summer houses good people grill their pre-seasoned lamb cutlets in the approved manner, not suspecting that they will soon be the first victims of a new natural terror, a terror that would eventually come to engulf most of Iceland: biting midges.

Biting midges are barely visible flies that live only a few weeks in summer. Their hateful scheme rests on the female midge sucking enough nutritious blood from innocent animals to lay her eggs, prolonging the cycle of violence. “Their mouthparts are well-developed for cutting the skin of their hosts,” says Wikipedia, sounding an unusually gleeful note. Never before had Iceland known an insect like it. How they got to Hvalfjörður is anyone’s guess.

Unstoppable spread

Cringing under covers, people leave electric fans running through the night, hoping to blow the insects out. They put out bottles of lavender oil and lather themselves in DEET, a repellent initially developed by the US Army for use in jungle warfare. They consider selling their summer houses, hoping that somewhere else, anywhere else, would be safe. But nothing could contain the midges to Hvalfjörður.

Pale and undersocialised bug experts shrug their bony shoulders when you ask them about containment or eradication. They’re not really bothered by this the way normal people are; to them Iceland never had its fair share of bugs. But for the rest of Icelanders, after a millennium-plus of smugly living without bloodsucking flies, it can prove hard to get used to them buzzing about the place.
“Biting midges are here to stay, and they will follow Icelanders long into the future, like chlamydia and nepotism.”

To add insult to injury the three windless, balmy days that Iceland provides each year are ideal for flies with mouthparts well-developed for skin-cutting. When Icelanders would normally be digging out the short shorts from the depths of their closet, they must now think twice and think hard about leaving their pale limbs exposed.

In the years that followed the midges’ arrival, more and more containers of anti-itching products were craned ashore at Reykjavík harbour. Newspapers announced the fresh arrival of biting midges in town after stricken town: advanced patrols cross Hellisheiði. Selfoss falls. Only the Westfjords seem to hold.

Can anything be done?

In the face of this pitiless evil, one starts to empathise with the desperate mentality that led Australian authorities to launch the failed and grotesque Emu War of 1932, a one-sided conflict that featured soldiers machine-gunning birds as if they were the Kaiser’s infantry. Once you’ve experienced the bites on your own skin and felt the maddening itch, you begin to take a warm and open-minded view of such insane pest control schemes.

“Buy up the world market of pesticides. Round up any opposition… and don’t waver: turn the south into a desert,” I would have screamed down the phone at my cowering lackeys, if only there was something to be done and if only I had lackeys. But there isn’t and I don’t, so the crazed bargaining collapses into grief: biting midges are here to stay, and they will follow Icelanders long into the future, like chlamydia and nepotism.

This is only the latest engagement in a long, drawn-out struggle between Icelanders and their oldest and most tireless enemy: nature. And it has to be admitted that nature really had us in the first half.

The history of Iceland is a series of starvation events and childhoods spent crawling on mud floors. After a rough thousand years, we’ve just about got the upper hand. We’re used to winning against nature now. Sure, we’ve been on the receiving end of recent eruptions, but there is something to be said for the terrible gurgling beauty of the earth splitting open.

We were warned

It’s been ten years since the first known bite, and it’s become clear that we’ve suffered a permanent reverse against nature. Standing just off camera, directing the biting midges is a tiringly familiar villain, modernity’s very own Moriarty: global fucking warming. You should have seen this one coming. Al Gore and company warned you about this one. They told you that we’d see large and unexpected changes to nature itself. Did you listen? Of course not.

When global warming isn’t busy erasing glaciers or stoking forest fires, it patiently creates the conditions that enable bugs of all kinds to settle down and raise a family. Now it’s possible to feel the hot bite of climate change on one’s own oily skin, each bite a bite for the needless flights and your monthly pile of plastic snus containers.

But maybe this is not such a bad thing after all. Icelanders can embrace nature-victimhood again. Being victims of climate change is, after all, easier on the conscience than being the perpetrators. Being punished can feel so good, especially since we’ve been so very bad for so very long.

P.S. Don’t forget to buy your silly little trinkets from the Reykjavík Grapevine Store (shop.grapevine.is). Each sale contributes a small but meaningful amount to the heating of our planet!