When I was 20 years old my good friend Siggi from school died in a plane crash. He was flying the plane himself. I first met him when we were 16 years old starting a new school. Siggi and his friend Andri were buddies from another part of town, and they started at the same school as me and my two friends Gunni and Jónas. The five of us bonded fairly quickly and formed a close nit friend group in the next years at school. We were always together and did a lot a crazy shit together too. Among the things we did was to try out cars to drive, but the problem was that we were only 16 years of age and you could not get your drivers license until you were 17 years old. Well we didn’t let a small problem like that stop us at all. What we did was go every Friday afternoon to test drive old BMW cars from several car dealerships close to our school, of which they were many and say that we were thinking of a purchase. We took turns and did this all winter. One time we took a car to a mall and Siggi drove the car so fast that from the second floor of the parking lot and unto the third floor, that the car flew in the air, with all five of us in the car. It felt like a cop movie in San Francisco and it was awesome. Well we all had a a lot of fun at school, like drinking and dancing with the girls. However after the second year Siggi did not do so well in school anymore, his father company had gone bankrupt and Siggi lost his footing. He could not pass the exams at the end of the second year and dropped out of school. We all kept in touch a little bit after that, and Siggi got a job at a lumber sales company. We met up from time to time. When we were 20 years old and had finished school in Iceland, Siggi and two of our friends Andri and Jónas went to a music festival in the country at Þórsmörk. Siggi had a amateur pilot license at this time and he flew my friends from the capitol and to Þórsmörk in the afternoon. I did not go with them because I was working that weekend in the capitol. The next morning the news said that a private plane was missing and had not returned back from the day before. I thought nothing of it. Later my good friend Gunni called me on the phone and was thinking that it might be Siggi, but I thought not. Later in the day it was confirmed that is was Siggi’s plane. I still thought that Siggi would has just have landed in sone farm field and that he was fine, because he was always lucky with girls and danger. The day after that, his plane was still missing and still no word from Siggi. Now I was getting concerned and hoped that he would get off his ass and get in touch with his parents and others. The news radio announced later that day that a plane had been found crashed into the volcano Hekla. This was far away from the fly route to and from Þórsmörk. I did not know what to think at this point and I drove to his girlfriends house to find out. Her parents opened the door and I asked the right away if it was Siggi’s plane that was found crashed. They said yes. Then Siggi’s girlfriend came down and I got to talk to her a little bit. There was nothing to say really and we were both in shock still, so I hugged her and left. Siggi had evidently drifted way of course to the north and crashed into the high hills of mount Hekla in a big petrol explosion, and he died right away. No one knows how this could have happened. Mistake or suicide, we still don’t know. I wrote in the morning paper about him the day he was buried. I and all our friends were asked to carry his coffin to and from the church and lower him into the grave, which we all accepted of course. It was a strange thing being just 20 years old and lowering my friend into the ground. I visit his grave sometimes. Life is not fair.
