This is the story of when I sat on top of the church tower cross at Hallgrímskirkja Church.
Many years ago when I was full of teenage freedom, AC DC, Guns n’ Roses and masculine buildup for the life ahead, aka 17 years old, I was working for a large construction company as a regular laborer. This is the summer of 1989 and that summer was mostly shy of sunshine, but it kept warm at least. I was working at a site in Öskjuhlíð in Iceland, where we were building a gas station for Schell. The work started by digging the ground to place the huge storage gas tanks underneath the ground and digging the the cellar underneath the gas station building. I was very young so I got all the shit jobs that no one wanted to do, which was fine, because the job paid well in comparison with my friends. Also, it was a hard job both physically and technically, so I got stronger and I learned a lot by doing difficult things.
One Friday afternoon in June it became a sunny day and spirits were high among the men, because of the good weather and because it was a Friday. Our foreman was in great mood himself and he telephoned another foreman on another construction site for us to visit them and he said yes to our visit. Ordinarily the workmen would not have wanted to visit another worksite on a Friday, but in this case the worksite was the top of tallest church tower in Iceland at Hallgrímskirkja church. They had built a wooden structure around the tower top, to fix damages to the tower over the decades, including fixing the cross on top. That’s was were we were all going on this great sunny day. In preparation a few of the guys has snuck off and bought a few beers to drink on the way to the church. We all stuffed ourselves into a few work cars and headed to district where the church was. The moral of everyone was the highest it had ever been, and I think I have not since seen a workplace moral reach the mood it was for that day.
We reached the church at around 15:00, where we took the elevator to the top of the tower. From there we stepped through the windows of the towers and unto the construction platform outside the tower. We walked up the steps outside and all the way to the top of the church tower where the Christian cross was. There we stopped and admired the amazing view in the sun and talked about what a great day this had turned out to be. We felt like kings for sure and I was so grateful to be allowed to go with all the men to the tower. Then one of the guys said: “Who wants to go and sit on top of the cross?” and I asked “Can we do that?”. A guy said “No one will know” and I volunteered, and so did another guy. And so it happened that I went up on the cross and sat on top of it in the summer sunshine and with the view of a lifetime.
A.G. Munson
