REMOTE POSSIBILITIES

In search of a less touristed Iceland, ARTHUR LUBOW drives through the Westfjords region and discovers majestic waterfalls, surprising art installations, and winsome puffins.

- ARTHUR LUBOW

THE NAME ‘ICELAND’ seemed misleading when I visited in summer. ‘Waterland’ was more like it. On the Westfjords peninsula, which juts from northwest Iceland like a claw, water was everywhere. It cascaded in silvery filaments down green mountainsides. It rushed in streams alongside, and occasionally over gravel roads. It floated in clouds like thought bubbles above slate-blue fjords.

So it seemed appropriate that my companion Jason and I should begin our Westfjords road trip at the Library of Water (libraryofwater.is), which American artist Roni Horn created in 2007 in the coastal village of Stykkishólmur. Horn, who has a long-standing affinity for Iceland, placed 24 floor-to-ceiling glass cylinders, each filled with water from an Icelandic glacier, in a former library that overlooks the picturesque harbour. She also designed a rubberised floor inlaid with words that riff on the nation’s number-one preoccupation, its volatile weather: cool, wild, calm, foggy, dreary, oppressive, and so on. The cylinders are positioned seemingly at random, like trees in a forest—which reminded me that Iceland is mostly treeless. In the Westfjords, I didn’t see any butterflies, squirrels, or deer. Instead, there were birds and sheep. Lots of them.

Although I would have liked a few more animals, mainly I wanted to escape from the phone-clutching crowds in my New York neighbourhood. Fewer than 8,000 people live in the Westfjords. And it’s just out of the way enough to be beyond the tourist trail.