“You are here at your own risk.”

Clearly, I thought. The Strokker Geysir, a giant plume of steaming water that erupts from the tundra every few minutes is an impressive sight, if you’re into that sort of thing, or the boiling streams that tourists hover their fingers over, unable to resist. Personally, I preferred the excellent, deeply Icelandic warning sign that stands demurely in the background. It tells you everything you need to know about this country. After the initial warning, the sign persists:

“Remember, the water is 80-90C, it will burn badly.”

And then: “The nearest hospital is 62 km away.”

It’s an excellent sign, and well worth the trip to Bláskógabyggð—wherever that is.

I had big plans for my trip to Iceland. I would come back and regale my audience with tales of glaciers and waterfalls and elves and geothermal pools and jaw-dropping vistas that have been beheld by Vikings and Kardashians alike. I would venture North of the Wall—or, at least to the location where Game of Thrones filmed it—and I would come back with something profound to say. My desire was to see something that no one’s seen before, but, like the two million other travelers who visit Iceland every year, I settled for a location that merely felt foreign and remote to me. I scoured my guidebook and put together my itinerary somewhere in the air over Greenland, and I felt pretty good about it. The lava fields and geysers would soon be mine.

I saw all of those things in Iceland, and so much more. The tour books don’t lie. It’s a spectacular place. You should go there, really. The scenery is as breathtaking as I imagined it would be, but frankly it would be a waste of our time for me to dwell on that here. Instead, my most memorable experience in Iceland—weirder and stranger than I ever could have hoped for—materialized right next me in a damp lecture hall at the University of Reykjavik. So here goes: it all started when I noticed the giant ball of human hair.  

I was attending a conference panel about obsession. The lecture hall was smallish—it seated maybe 60 people or so, and it was packed with European, American, and Australian academics and writers. The accents floating around the room were very good. At first, I didn’t really pay much attention to the woman who arrived late and claimed the only remaining seat—the one right next to mine. She sat a little closer to me than I would have preferred, but most people do. She was small and thin and disheveled but not disturbingly so; she looked mundanely academic, with the exception of a battered National Geographic gift shop bag. She placed it on the table in front of us in the spot where a normal person might put her laptop or notepad. It was an old plastic bag, but I didn’t give it too much thought right then because the first speaker had just revealed that she wrote an entire book about socks and I really wanted to figure out what her damage was. But the dirty old shopping bag was in my proximity, too close for comfort, and therefore on my radar.

The next speaker launched into a wonderful discourse about his obsession with trash. Like Sock Lady, he had devoted an entire monograph to his ruminations about garbage: what it consists of, where is goes, what our refuse says about us. It was interesting enough, until the woman next to me started rustling around in her graying plastic bag. I had been wrong not to be more troubled by it. I watched as she removed a stained napkin that had been unfolded to a single ply and wrapped carefully around the largest ball of hair I’ve ever seen. It was bigger than my fist. I have longish hair, and I know from experience that this amount of hair must have been accumulated over the course of a multitude of separate brush-cleanings. It was years’ worth of discarded hair camped out on the table in front of me like a furry little gremlin. I stared at it and felt dizzy.

As the final two speakers gave their presentations—about what, who knows?—I sat there, spellbound, paralyzed with horror and fascination, as the woman calmly stroked the ball of hair (hers? Someone else’s?) and nodded along in agreement with the panelists. She occasionally spoke to herself or conferred with her ball of hair—could that really have happened?—as I debated whether or not to flee the lecture hall, or maybe Iceland altogether. I couldn’t do it, of course; I had to know what happened next. In my scholarly research on literary tourism, I argue about the impossibility of having a truly unique and authentic experience as a tourist during the age of commodification, but, clearly, what the hell do I know? There I was, at last, in the uncharted territory that I’d so badly wanted to see, though far from the lava fields and the midnight sun. Now what?

It got weirder, fast. It was like a dream sequence, or one of those moments when it feels like the universe hiccups, merging our world—just for a flash—with a slightly-damaged replica. Had the firmament torn? Had we slipped through a wormhole into a place where people held onto remnants of themselves? Had she actually spoken to the ball of hair, or was I perhaps in the midst of my own medical emergency? Anything seemed possible. As I reviewed my knowledge of stroke symptoms and wondered about my insurance company’s policy on international healthcare coverage, the woman squeezed her ball of hair, raised her free hand, and jumped into the Q&A portion of the panel.

Like any academic worth her salt, she apparently posed a question that she alone could answer, because she held the floor for several minutes. I desperately wish I could remember more of what she said, but as she brandished the wad of hair in the air for all to see, my brain just stopped. What I do know is that the ball of hair soon took center stage in the conversation about obsession.

 “Our obsessions, we carry them with us,” she said at one point, holding the hair high above her head. There were no screams or gasps of horror from anyone in the room, just detached curiosity for the most part. Seriously, academics? Not even a raised eyebrow for the hairball leading the conversation? “This is the truth, and I carry it with me.”

And then she sat down, and the Q&A continued, just like that. There were no follow-ups for the hair lady, no requests for further information or an emergency contact. There was no movement to rope off the place where she was sitting to commemorate the spot where something deeply weird and strange just happened. The panel finished up and the woman rose and gathered her things. She wrapped the hair back up in the filthy napkin and placed it in the bag—so casually, so fearlessly.           

 “That was a good panel,” she said, “Do you know where they’re setting up lunch?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know anything.”  

– Courtney Watson