Splendid Isolation

On a visit to Iceland, I discovered an island of primal landscapes and enigmas-and a sense that you are never alone

- Douglas Kennedy

It was 5 a.m. over an airport called Keflavík. It was dark. It was wet. There was an edgy wind that made my flight’s touchdown from Boston one of those Hail Mary moments where even a non-believer like myself asks for divine intervention.

None was needed. The Icelandair pilots negotiated this fleeting existential crisis with aplomb—as if such epic, crazed crosswinds were the usual welcome home.

An hour later, still in the dark and relieved that I had resisted alcohol during the last three hours of the flight—owing to Iceland’s low tolerance for booze in your system when driving—I was behind the wheel of a rented car, negotiating the 50 kilometers into Reykjavík. I couldn’t help but think that arriving in pre-dawn blackness, with the rain sheeting down like something out of Nordic film noir, was the perfect start to my August 2021 journey into geographic isolation.

Travel is always freighted with expectations. Coming to this distant outpost of human habitation—a one-time Danish dependency whose nearest landmass was that cartological tabula rasa called Greenland—I didn’t know what I would find in this vast, underpopulated (3,76,000 inhabitants) subarctic island nation whose global position and its cohabiting arrangement with the EU made it the balcony of Europe.