WE RENTED A CAR. DAN WAS KEEN TO DRIVE TO Reykjavík, the capital, 40 minutes out of the way, to hunt up some breakfast. Dad and I were not. We had an itinerary: first the Vatnajökull, or Water Glacier, Europe's biggest, five hours to the east; then we'd double back to the black-sand beach at Vík; then tent out in the town of Thorlákshöfn for the night; then catch a morning ferry to camp on Heimaey, one of the Vestmannaeyjar, or Westman Islands, off the southern coast. We'd hit Reykjavík in three days.

"That's great," Dan snapped. "It's pretty clear you guys aren't going to listen to a goddamned thing I say."

"Oh, go to hell," I said, fists tensing.

"Ah, family vacation," our father said. "It's too bad we don't have any brownies to fling at one another."

Dad was alluding here to a fabled unbrotherly skirmish. Long ago, while in a canoe in the middle of New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee, I napalmed, with hot brownie batter, the chest of a shirtless Dan, who was circling my craft in a rage in a motorboat. I later broke my forearm on the paddle he was wielding. I could feel the old fracture twinge forebodingly as we drove out of Keflavík in the early-morning drizzle.

The airport receded as I steered our rental onto the Ring Road, the two-lane highway that traces the country's perimeter. Iceland's population is a mere 302,000, spread out over a landmass a little bigger than Indiana. We were more or less alone on the narrow highway, which carried us through the desolate magnificence of the coast. To the south, undulant fields of hardened lava, flocked in mosses of a tender, watery green, sloped down to the sea. A dark palisade of mountains towered to the north, brightened here and there by silver bursts of glacial melt cascading from the peaks. Pale boulders of sheep browsed the lowlands.

"My God," said my father, gazing at the moonscape flashing past the window.

"Amazing," I said.

Dan, still fuming, was less taken. "How often do you think people kill themselves out here?" he wondered as he thumbed our travel guide. "I don't understand why people don't just start screwing like rabbits and build this place up. I mean, there's supposed to be some hotties here. They won Miss World three times. You could probably do pretty well hitting on chicks here. You've already got a great pickup line: ‘I'm from America. We've got these things called trees and grass. It's killer.'"

My father leaned forward from the backseat. "Dan," he said in a tone of quiet concern. "How can we cheer you up? Is there anything we can do for you, my son?"

"I told you what you could do," Dan said darkly. "Go to Reykjavík."