Listen to Robin Hemley read an excerpt from “Lost and Found in Iceland.”

If you placed all the lost gloves in Iceland end to end, I believe they would at least cover the distance between the north and south ends of the country, though probably not the circumference of the globe. On previous visits to Iceland, I don’t remember finding so many lost gloves, but this time I’m here for three months, and maybe the long duration of my stay enables me to look down rather than ahead all the time, to slow my pace and notice what a tourist would overlook. I spot the gloves everywhere, in supermarkets along the shelves as though on sale, a Manager’s Special; in entryways; on paths; in restaurants; in museums and classrooms; near every tourist spot imaginable. But is there anything more useless than one half of a pair left completely on its own? Perhaps this is where I might grow sentimental and compare myself to a lost sock or a lost glove. But I am not lost, even if I am alone, just as The Person I’m Often Missing is not lost. We have our own volition, and what some of our friends fail to grasp is that, unlike lost gloves, we know where the other is. Perhaps we are not the perfect pair—if we are to be compared to gloves at all—we might even seem mismatched to an outsider, but then for nearly twenty-five years we have been mostly happily mismatched.

She and I are separated this time by 8,154 miles and three months, she in Iowa, I in Reykjavik. We have been separated by longer and shorter distances and times over our marriage. We like to tell people that the separation makes us not take the other for granted and adds excitement to our reunions, but sometimes, truly, it just feels bleak.

Not long after my arrival, in late August, my friend Runar forwards to me a notice of a mushroom hunt open to the public. I clear all my appointments and planned adventures (I have none) to attend. Neither Runar nor his spouse, Gudrun, have ever been mushroom hunting but they agree to accompany me. Soon proving ourselves to be excellent spotters, we trudge through pine and birch woods and tundra on the outskirts of Reykjavik, finding an abundance of prized boletes that I have yet to discover in the woods of Iowa. I have found bitter boletes, but never the edible variety.

About an hour into the hunt, I spot from a short distance what looks like a very large orange birch bolete but which is in fact a heavy ball with a rope running through it. I show it to Gudrun, and she identifies this “mushroom” as a dog’s toy. Now it’s my problem, as it obviously doesn’t belong here, and I grew up with the dictum that you should leave places better than you found them. Gudrun and Runar don’t have a dog, and my dog, a combination shih tzu and bichon frisé, would be humbled by such a toy. So I bring it back to my small quarters in Reykjavik, along with a portion of the boletes we have found, imagining that in the coming months I will find someone with a dog large enough for this toy.

Not long after, I find another lost object, a scarf tied to the metal banister of a staircase outside the building where I’m taking twice-weekly Beginning Icelandic classes. Instead of memorizing the phrases we have been asked to learn by our teacher (a witty, misplaced Italian who, not satisfied with mastering a language that only 300,000 people speak, has decided to devote his life to Old Icelandic, a language that no one speaks), I wonder about the scarf for the entirety of the class. The scarf tied to the banister caught my attention because the person who found the scarf tied it there as a temporary lost and found department. In my experience, this is not common in the U.S., where lost bits of clothing are either turned into an actual lost and found department, left where they have fallen and eventually trampled, or picked up by a passerby if the objects have any value.

Nearly everyone in Iceland speaks English, but I have always followed my whims, because not everything in life should be measured by practical benefits. No good reason is reason enough for me sometimes. So it is with the orange dog toy. So it is with Beginning Icelandic. So it is with my Italian Icelandic professor who sometimes teaches us Icelandic with mnemonics that I still remember, while I have forgotten the actual phrase: Some old ladies, Go and die. So it is with the lost scarf. As soon as class ends, I rush from the warmth of the classroom, pleased to find the scarf still tied to the banister.

Alone in Reykjavik, I spend much of my day walking. Sometimes I find objects placed carefully in spots where they will be found, but that few people would want and/or that will never be returned to their owners. A lost hat hanging from the branch of a tree near a neighborhood swimming pool reeks of desolation, naked without its child to wear, its utility and existence no longer a given.

Not all objects in Iceland are treated with the tender regard of strangers who hope to reunite these objects with their owners. An infant’s mitten temporarily imprinting a sidewalk catches my attention one day as I pass it, and every day thereafter for a month, until it simply vanishes. I soon miss the mitten. In a sense, it waved hello to me every day. Has it been reunited with the tiny hand that it had once protected against the cold? Or has another passerby less sentimental than me grown tired of the subversiveness of a mitten that doesn’t know its place in the world, snatched it up, and thrown it in the trash? Every lost object carries a story that it keeps to itself. Every lost object is an ellipsis.

The Croatian author Predrag Matvejavic, in The Other Venice: Secrets of the City, writes about one of the world’s most memorialized cities through the lens of unnoticed and unnotable places and objects: a pet cemetery, discarded glass in the bay, moss and lichen growing along the canals. Why write about the pigeons of St. Mark’s Square for the gazillionth time, or Peggy Guggenheim’s villa, or the Biennale? Why photograph the northern lights, a volcano, a receding glacier?

Why not seek astonishment instead in what has been overlooked or discarded or lost? The lost objects of Iceland might better serve as my own private album of my time here than a photo of a me standing in front of a geyser or Gulfoss Falls or on a black sand beach in the windswept town of Vik. Of the 2.3 million tourists who will visit this year, I imagine there are only ninety-nine of us eccentric enough to intentionally train our phone cameras on lost objects. I say ninety-nine, but it might be more. With eight billion people in the world, if you decide to walk backwards on an escalator on any given day, you can be certain that ninety-nine people (plus me) have had that same urge on the same day. So it must be with photographing lost objects.

Normally, I don’t take many photos at all, except when The Person I’m Often Missing wants me to take a photo of her in front of this or that attraction. I don’t love being in these photos, though I try not to act grumpy or snobbish about it. Still, these tourist photos aren’t real to me, not the one of us and our two young (at the time) daughters in front of the Taj Mahal, and not the one of us posed in front of the pyramid, Chichen Itza, in Mexico. I inherited this disdain from my mother, who was a writer as well as a photographer. I can’t remember posing with her in front of anything once in my childhood. If you sensed she was taking a photo of you and turned to smile, she would lower the camera, uninterested in anything less than “candid.”

Still, like most people when tasked with taking a tourist photo, I will wait for the moment when I can take a shot with no one else in the frame, as though I have been given VIP access to the Taj Mahal or Chichen Itza. But when I glance upon these photos, I most often remember nothing of the moment they’re supposedly memorializing. I remember the crowds. I remember those eccentric events that don’t require a photo to recall: the ride in a car without seatbelts from the Taj Mahal back to Delhi, the cab driver weaving dangerously through traffic at night, me in the front seat, my terrified family in back; the Mexican tour guide begging our group not to buy the ridiculously massive sombreros for sale, and a fellow tourist smugly buying one anyway and taunting our guide about it on the way back from the tour. These are what I remember, moments unposed, random, ridiculous, terrifying, sometimes sublime.

Soon, I’m spotting lost objects everywhere. The most common lost objects I find in Iceland are gloves, followed by hats and scarves. A crow feeding on trash outside of the apartment complex where I’m staying seems vaguely related to me, through marriage (of ideas). What the crow has found was tossed willfully. What I find was left by accident, so I usually leave the object where I find it, even when I’m tempted to claim it for myself, its unrightful owner.

Some items I photograph cannot properly be called “lost,” but merely “misplaced,” such as the gathering of drunken shopping carts that have escaped the Bonus Supermarket several hundred meters away, to glimpse a view of the sea and mountains. Undoubtedly, a store manager will search for them eventually and herd them back into their stables.

A crystal platter, its metal rim rusted, rests on top of a natural stone pillar by the bay, reeking of desolation, if not tragedy. Two volcanic rocks and a tiny shell sit like death’s appetizers on the platter. No, this is not the remains of a “Canapés and Spouse-Swapping Cruise” from Sweden, circa 1979, but more likely a piece of ephemeral found art. This is the lost object version of a posed photo, and I strongly suspect it was placed here purposefully, though it takes me a while to arrive at this suspicion, as I’m extremely gullible. Icelanders are not above such shenanigans. Quiet irony goes over big here. Further down the walk is a small plaque between boulders that reads, “In a crevice by some large rocks by the Atlantic Ocean in Reykjavik.” These Icelanders are people after my own semi-thawed heart.

The object I most often find in the U.S. is money—all my life I have found not only lost coins (including antique coins) but bills in denominations of a dollar, five dollars, ten dollars, twenty dollars, and once in a Milwaukee parking lot, a fifty-dollar bill. I have never turned in one of these bills to a lost and found as I sang in my mind the somewhat mean-spirited and rationalizing rhyme, Finders keepers, losers weepers. I feel some shame at having walked away with someone else’s lost item at least a couple of times in my life, especially as I have been generally (though not always) spared such losses. Once, I left a small satchel on the sink counter of a men’s room in a crowded mall in Manila. The satchel held my wallet and my passport. When I noticed their absence only fifteen minutes later, I rushed back to the men’s room, berating myself for my stupidity, and was amazed to find the satchel exactly as I had left it, its contents untouched. I have tested the universe in this way on many occasions, unwittingly, leaving my passport, the passports of my family, and our residence permits on a crowded restaurant table in Singapore, forgetting my backpack at a busy port in Manila, leaving my hand luggage inside Customs in Chile, losing an expensive pair of sunglasses in a forest while mushroom hunting and finding them the next day beside a random tree on a hillside that I had no memory of climbing. Of course, I have suffered irretrievable losses like everyone in the world, but where objects are concerned, I have mostly been fortunate in ways that stretch credibility. The superstitious part of me wishes not to make such a statement public, for fear of losing my special status as a lost object magnet.

The lost object that saddens me most is a painting by an artist inspired by my older sister, who died at the age of twenty-five when I was fifteen. My sister’s interests were not in misplaced objects but in realms that were unobservable to me, but which were part of her everyday existence. When I was younger, she told me stories of fairies and myths from around the world. She would have loved Iceland, not for the tourist attractions, but for the invisible little people that Icelanders, many of them at least, believe in. Material objects bored her. She quickly recovered from their loss. I know because I once stole a Cleopatra bracelet from her when I was eleven to give to a neighborhood girl. When my sister discovered it missing, she accurately pointed to me as the culprit, but she didn’t seem particularly upset by my theft.

Painted on a large canvas, about four feet tall and three wide, an abstract rendition of my sister stares intently at a bird in her hand. The woman looks nothing like my sister, but I see her when I look at it. Or, I should say, saw her when I looked upon it. The woman is brown, the bird a grayish white, and the simple dress she wears has a bit of a hairshirt quality. The brush strokes suggest a whirlwind about to commence, carrying away both woman and bird. The painting vanished several years ago, when or exactly where, I have no idea. I lived with my family for several years in Singapore, and I suspect the painting was lost in a move, but I’m not certain. I have looked multiple times in our attic. I have asked my family members if they remember seeing it, and when, but it has disappeared like my sister. It is the object I mourn the most: in my eyes, it is a second death.

After six weeks alone, The Person I’m Often Missing visits me. I have rented a car and we take off the day after her arrival for Vik, a town on the southeastern tip of the country, known for its black sand beaches. “Vik” means “bay” in Icelandic, I tell her, as though I’m giving her a precious life hack that will improve her stay in Iceland. Our first day together is an information dump as we relearn how to talk to one another and be together after a two months’ absence. I pass along loads of self-evident or useless bits of information, and she tells me horrific stories about her patients at the hospital.

“They tell you about the cold here, but no one tells you about the wind,” I say.

“And when we come into her room,” she responds, “she’s naked and screaming, ‘I want my meds. I want my meds.’ We had to call Code Green on her.”

And then we’re silent for a while, not because we’re upset but because the landscape we’re passing through once we leave Reykjavik is louder than the things we think we want to tell one another. A power plant astride a mountainside shot through with pipelines tames the pressure underneath only a little, the excess escaping through seams in billowing blankets across volcanic plains.

If you ask your device to tell you how long the drive from Reykjavik to Vik takes, it will tell you a little over two and a half hours. Certainly, to travel the same distance through Iowa on I-80 would take you that long, or likely less time. But while we have some forests and hills in Iowa, contrary to popular belief, we are woefully short on dramatic landscapes.

Over the next two days, we stop at every waterfall, every scenic overlook, and every geyser and turf house, and I take the requisite photos of her beside an Icelandic pony, in front of crashing falls and crashing surf and on a windswept beach, next to a geyser shooting into the sky, in a church overlooking the sea, in a lighthouse overlooking the sea, in a parking lot overlooking the sea, and wedged among the rocks along a black sand beach notorious for sweeping tourists out to sea and their deaths. The same person, almost the same pose, the same tongue that I bite each time, the same thoughts I keep to myself.

As usual, I find lost objects along the way, and more miraculously, she too finds lost objects and points them out to me, an indulgent gesture I take as proof of her devotion. At the famous Gulfoss (Golden Falls), I marvel not only at the breadth and thunder of these falls, but at the story of how they were saved from being lost to the construction of a hydroelectric dam in 1907, by Sigríður Tómasdóttir, who staged protests and threatened to throw herself into the falls unless the project was stopped. As impressed as I am by the falls and the heroism of Sigríður, I have visited these falls before and heard her story, so it is a packet of Sweet’n Low that has fallen into a grate that captures my immediate attention. To some, this packet would qualify more as trash than a lost object per se, but the moment it fell, the person (an American, almost certainly) pouring the chemical contents of the packet into their cup of coffee likely felt a pang at its loss and its irretrievability. But perhaps they had grabbed two packets, thus erasing the loss and disappointment they felt in the moment. Did those who wanted to ram through the hydroelectric dam here make similar rationalizations? After all, we have many waterfalls in Iceland. What’s the difference if one of them slips through the grate, as it were?

At a receding glacier, we find another purposefully placed lost object, though I wonder who could possibly have had the foresight to place an object-as-metaphor in the exact spot where it would capture my attention and make me contemplate loss in the larger sense. It’s a piece of ice placed on a rock near a receding glacier. The ice shard rests perhaps half the distance between the glacier’s current position and where it once ended, mere decades ago. The distance is substantial, perhaps a ten- to fifteen-minute walk. I swear that I did not place the ice shard myself, though of course I would not blame you if you doubted my honesty. Still, the most convincing assurance I can give you is that posing objects and pretending I have just found them defeats the purpose of my project. Perhaps the person who placed this shard of ice in front of a now-distant glacier was making a statement. Perhaps they were memorializing the glacier with a kind of impermanent cairn, like the placing of a stone on someone’s grave, as a token of respect and remembrance.

I believe that I have been cheated out of a full week when it’s time for her to leave. Yes, the calendar insists that she has been with me in Iceland for a week, but we all know that calendars are insolent bullies. She has been with me for three days, tops. While she was here, the Northern Lights, which I had only spied once before her arrival, tie-dyed the sky above Reykjavik for three nights in a row, and by day she was granted clear skies and no rain. Now that she’s gone the weather, sensing my mood, has turned cold and rainy, the nights visibly longer.

But I will see her again sooner than I had planned.

On a weekend jaunt out of the country, a border agent looks at my passport and asks me if I live in Europe.

“Just visiting,” I say. She hands back my passport and informs me that I’m right up against the number of allowable days I can spend in Iceland. In fact, this is day ninety.

I don’t understand. I haven’t spent ninety days in Iceland. I still have three weeks left.

She’s both patient and friendly, but she explains that I spent three weeks within the last six months in another Schengen State: Croatia. It was a glorious trip, and almost worth the debt, sailing with my family and close friends on the Adriatic. I had not even considered that Iceland is a Schengen State (a confederation of European States that observe common border policies). I thought I was in the clear because Iceland is not part of the EU. But if you enter one Schengen State, you have in effect entered them all, and you had better not spend more than ninety days in the Schengen Zone in any 180-day period. If I try to enter beyond my allotted time, I will be refused entry. If I overstay my welcome, I will be banned from Europe for two years. I can’t even turn around, gather my belongings, and wait until tomorrow to leave. My only good fortune in this moment is that by dumb luck I scheduled this trip when I did.

And so everything in my apartment stays in Iceland for the time being. I will not be able to retrieve it for several months. Alternatively, my friend Runar could pack up everything and ship it to me but not only is shipping too expensive, it’s too much to ask. Everything would need to be catalogued and given a value for customs to ship a suitcase.

While this unexpected change of plans is a bit of a shock, I try to take it in stride. After my many travels, I know that there is an X factor to it all. Being an organized traveler counts for nothing sometimes. My travels have been foiled in the past by freak weather events, a volcanic eruption, a transportation strike, mechanical failures, my misreading an arrival time as the departure time, a terrorism incident, a pandemic. Consequently, I have learned to adapt. In this case, I spend a pleasant several days in Cardiff, Wales, followed by an even more pleasant three days in London, and then I fly back to Iowa.

Throw a coin in Trevi Fountain and you will return to Rome, so legend has it. Leave a suitcase in Iceland and you will return to Iceland, so experience has it. When it’s safe to return, four months later, I fly back to Iceland to retrieve my luggage, which Runar has packed for me and stored in his garage. There are so many things I left behind that I had completely forgotten about, including an expensive watch. If Runar had nicked it (he never would), I wouldn’t have noticed, which says less about my memory than about my attachment to things that I might lose. But the object that surprises me most when I open the bulging suitcase (Runar really had to cram things in) is the large orange dog toy I found back in August.

A few days after I arrive, Runar drives me back to the area where this all began, and we walk along a trail to find the perfect spot to place the toy, where either a person or a dog will find it. My thinking has evolved on this matter—sometimes leaving a place better than you found it means placing something that doesn’t belong in the landscape there, at least temporarily, for others to find. After trying out several spots and rejecting them, I spy a group of boulders twenty feet off the path, and I climb atop them, placing the toy carefully on top of the highest rock. Runar snaps a few photos of me beside it in time-tested tourist fashion and then I photograph it by itself. Runar and I are confident that some person or some well-suited dog will find it perched there on its rock, another lost token of life’s many mysteries. ■

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