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'Summer At Little Lava: A Season At The Edge Of The World' by Charles Fergus

Author turned to Iceland to cool rage over mother’s death

Thursday, January 01, 1998

By Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Staff Writer

	Summer At Little Lava: A Season At The Edge Of The World By Charles Fergus North Point Press $24.00

I’d love to spend a summer in a remote cottage on the wild coast of Iceland, with nothing to do but hike and kayak and fish and observe wildlife and drink coffee brewed on a wood stove with water from an ancient spring while mulling the meaning of life.

But do I want to read a book about someone else doing it?

I was as skeptical as my dad is when he sees people on TV who devote their lives to, say, saving endangered seabirds, and asks, “Don’t these people have JOBS?”

Especially when author Charles Fergus told me that his escapade was planned to be a book.

And especially when he wrote that the summer and the book would be his attempt to heal from his grief over his mother’s murder.

Not to be callous, but it sounded like it could be contrived, tedious and self-absorbed.

I was even worried by the jacket photo of Fergus: A middle-aged, bespectacled, balding white guy from Pennsylvania trying to look rugged in an expensive Gore-tex rain parka (and looking a little too much like me!).

Sign me up to go to Iceland, but this is my guide?

Well, the fascinating northern island certainly made it easier for him, but Fergus won me over.

Some Post-Gazette readers might be familiar with the story of his mother, Ruth Fergus, a 73-year-old widow and civic leader in State College who came home from a grandchild’s birthday party on Sept. 3, 1995, to find a man burglarizing her home. The man stabbed her 32 times.

She was found on the floor by Charles Fergus.

Despite the almost incomprehensible shock at this unresolved crime, and a bit because of that, Fergus and his wife, Nancy, pushed on with their plans to spend that summer of 1996 in Iceland, where they’d both previously visited.

Their home would be a friend’s deserted family farm called, in Icelandic, litla (little) hraun (lava or lava field). Little Lava.

But big adventure, since it was accessible only on foot, at low tide, and had no electricity or plumbing or even, at first, a roof.

Seemed like that’d require some true grit, but still I wondered if Fergus was just a dorky “writer.” I thought I’d pegged him as I watched him make the Icelandic locals do most of the hard rehab work, then complain about it.

Later, I cringed a couple more times, as when he had their distant neighbor do their laundry.

And yet, I stayed with him through the long days, on his long walks and longer ruminations, because the landscapes were so compelling — that of Iceland as well as the inner one of Fergus himself. Woven with carefully chosen snippets of Iceland’s rich legends and natural lore, his observations impressed for being, mostly, perceptive and honest.

“I walked, and remembered,” he writes. “I let my rage burn. I would look at a rock in the lagoon and think not of the beauty of that chunk of the planet, or the small creatures that must cling to it, or the purity of the setting, but of chaining the man to it, the man who killed my mother. Chaining him to the rock at low tide and letting the sea drown him.”

He even manages to make the birds he dwells on interesting, as when he explains how the talons of eagles automatically clamp on their prey, even if their prey turns out to be way too big: Huge halibut have been caught with eagle feet grown into their flesh, the rest of the drowned bird having long ago rotted away.

Later that season, Fergus, with his family, faced more loss. But he also got to feeling better — about death, about life, about himself. You don’t have to have lost a loved one to tragedy to empathize with his ponderings about life’s pitfalls and growing old.

By the end, you don’t want to leave Iceland and summer anymore than he wanted to leave the rocky vantage point from where he can take in the bay, river, islets, mountains and volcanoes.

As he puts it, “There was no place in the world I would rather have been. But the tide would not let me stay.”

(Postscript: In June 1997, a Centre County jury sentenced Charles Chruby to life in prison for the murder of Ruth Fergus.)