Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #2 "Life Is Rescues"

Benjamin Lowy's photo illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "Life Is Rescues"

Nick Paumgarten has a taste for danger. It’s an ingredient in several of his best pieces, e.g., “The Descent of Man” (downhill racing), “Dangerous Game" (extreme skiing), and “The Manic Mountain” (mountain-climbing). In his great “Life Is Rescues” (November 9, 2015), he rides with a search-and-rescue team on patrol in Iceland’s southern plain. The team is part of Iceland’s renowned Slysavarnafélagið Landsbjörg – an extensive system of emergency-response volunteers. 

The piece brims with gripping search-and-rescue stories. The opening section is a riveting account of Landsbjörg’s attempt to recover the body of a woman who’d apparently fallen into a “completely unsearchable” pool at the bottom of thirty-metre high waterfall  
(“ ‘Divers went in but couldn’t get close enough. Three or four metres from the waterfall, it was a total washing machine’ ”).

But, for me, the most enjoyable parts of “Life Is Rescues” aren’t the rescues. What I like are the seemingly mundane in-between scenes showing the Landsbjörg crew in non-rescue mode, traveling, camping, kibitzing.

For example,

Rebekka called shotgun. The convoy hit the highway, passing big-box stores and meadows of purple lupine. Within minutes, it pulled into a gas station, where members of another Landsbjörg team were loitering on the grass, and warning approaching motorists against the country’s dangers. The Garðabær crew got out and mingled. Elva went inside for gum, and when it was time to go, Einar, unable to find her, drove the van in circles around the station lot. The week’s first search: they found her after a few laps.

And this:

A while later, as the road cut through foothills of steaming fumaroles, the team came upon a three-car fender bender. They all got out, but no drivers or passengers were hurt, and the police were supposedly on their way. Onward. The next stop, not much farther east, was a KFC in the town of Selfoss, home to the team handballer Þórir Ólafsson and the grave of Bobby Fischer. Afterward, having forgotten to get gas, they had to backtrack a few miles, to a station that provides Landsbjörg vehicles with discount fuel. Now they got caught in traffic heading back through Selfoss. One began to get a sense that this wasn’t SEAL Team 6.

And this:

In the morning, Rebekka summoned everyone to the kitchen tent: “Beikon! Beikon!” The rescue team huddled around a propane wok, chattering and laughing in Icelandic. Palli was the worst snorer, they all agreed. On a pair of folding picnic tables they’d set out cans of Heinz beans and juice boxes, and they drank coffee out of clear plastic cups, on which each team member wrote his name with an indelible marker. The team passed around a box of kleinur—Icelandic doughnuts—and spread butter on slices of white bread. There were scrambled eggs and beikon, donated by Nýherji, the I.T. company Elva worked for. Day One of highland watch is the high life.

Paumgarten is a superb noticer. He notices the “strange salty licorice candies called Dracula Mega” that one of the crew members hands around. He notices the card game called skitakall, “which they said meant ‘shitty man’ ” that some of the members play. And, in my favourite passage in the piece, he notices … bananas:

I wandered out into the rain and then into the kitchen tent. On a row of plastic hangers someone had hung the team’s bananas. Each hanger held two bunches. I stood looking at this, in admiration and wonder. Iceland.

That bit about the bananas in the kitchen tent is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of Paumgarten’s very best.