Why I spent 10th grade learning to order cheese I’ll never buy
It’s the question everyone asks, right after I tell them I studied Icelandic for two years of high school: If you know you’ll never go to Iceland, what’s the point? To be fair, the question makes sense. I live in a tiny town in southern Ohio, the closest I’ve ever been to an Icelander is the container of skyr in the Whole Foods an hour away. I can’t afford a $1200 plane ticket across the Atlantic, and even when I get to college next fall, I’ll be working 20 hours a week at the campus coffee shop to pay rent. Reykjavik isn’t on my bucket list. It’s not even on my “someday maybe” list. So why bother?
I didn’t even pick it for some deep reason, honestly. I failed middle school Spanish twice, and every kid I knew who took high school Spanish complained about how boring it was, how all we ever did was conjugate verbs to talk about going to the market. Then one day our assistant principal announced that one of the part-time office aides, Mrs. Hansen, was offering an independent study Icelandic, because she’d spent a year living with her sister outside Reykjavik and wanted to share it. She only had room for two students. The other kid dropped out after the first month. So it was just me and Mrs. Hansen, meeting every Wednesday after school in the old chorus room that smelled like lemon Pledge and decades-old sheet music, working out of a 1992 textbook she pulled out of her basement that still reeked of her late cat’s litter box.
I still remember the awkward first month, when I was trying to get the trilled r around the back of my throat that Icelandic has. I’d sit there making these weird guttural growling noises over and over, until one Wednesday the janitor walked in to empty the trash, stopped, stared at me for three full seconds, and backed out without saying a word. I was red as a tomato for the rest of the hour. Mrs. Hansen just laughed and said that’s how everyone starts.
My guidance counselor pulled me aside after the first semester. She told me straight up that the independent study wouldn’t weigh as much as a regular language on my college apps, that it would look weird, like I was trying to be quirky for no reason. “What are you gonna do with Icelandic?” she asked me. I couldn’t answer her back then. I just shrugged and said I was having fun. She shook her head and let me stay, but I could tell she thought I was wasting my time. And honestly, sometimes I thought that too. By the end of the second year, I could order a meal at a restaurant, ask for directions to the nearest bus stop, describe my family and my cat, and read a basic news article. I couldn’t hold a conversation longer than five minutes, and I still mispronounce half the words. I’ve never had a single reason to use any of that, except for when I walk past the skyr at the grocery store and can read the ingredients on the label. I don’t even buy skyr. It’s too expensive.
Last fall, I was at the public library in the next town over, and I passed a couple standing by the map rack, talking in Icelandic. I stopped for a second, just to listen, and I realized I could understand most of what they were saying. They were trying to find the trail to the little waterfall at the county park, and the map was torn so they couldn’t read the marker. I stood there for a full minute, working up the nerve to go over and say something, anything. But then I got shy. I remembered I couldn’t actually string together a full sentence without fumbling for words, that I’d probably sound like an idiot, that they’d be confused why some random kid from Ohio was speaking broken Icelandic to them. So I just kept walking. I never said anything. So that was my big chance to use the language, and I blew it. So now what? What’s the point, really?
I think about this a lot these days, because I’m a senior, and everyone’s always asking me what I’m gonna major in, what job I want, how every class I take now is gonna prepare me for that. Everything has to have a point, a use, a payoff somewhere down the line. I get that, I guess. I’m not saying we should all just quit learning useful things. But what if the point isn’t using it? What if the point was that for an hour a week, for two years, I got to learn something that no one expected me to learn, that didn’t have to count for anything, that was just mine. I got to learn that there are 17 different words for different kinds of snow, that the language still uses letters that most other European languages got rid of hundreds of years ago, that people who live on an island in the middle of the cold Atlantic think about snow and the sea and the Northern Lights in a way that I never would have thought of before. I can’t go to Iceland to stand in their snow, but now when it snows here, after the plows have gone through and the kids are out sledding, I look at the soft sticky snow stuck to the pine trees and I remember the word for that kind of snow, and it feels like I have a little secret that no one else around here has.
I’ll probably forget most of it in ten years. I’ll probably never step foot in Iceland. I’ll never need to order that sharp sheep’s cheese I learned how to ask for, or find a bathroom in downtown Reykjavik, or talk about the weather with a local. But that doesn’t mean it was a waste. Sometimes, when you’re 15 or 17 and everyone’s telling you every minute what you need to do to get ahead, the most useful thing you can do is something completely useless. I don’t know. That’s just how I feel.
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