by Tory Bilski
I don’t own one self-help book, and have never gotten farther than two pages into any book about a new age philosophy. So the language is strange to me and rings untrue.
Law of attraction? No, just an overproduced way of saying “like likes like.” The universe will provide? Sorry, fate is fickle, no overarching plan here. Manifestation of grief? Good god, give the woman a break—her husband dropped dead in front of her.
I don’t “journey,” I travel. I don’t “heal,” I get over things.
But the idea that horses can save you, that this big beautiful animal with a wild heart and an over-reactive flight instinct can teach you, connect deeply to your soul, mirror your intent, and lead you into an I-Thou relationship?
Oh, man. I was all in.
Horse History
You’ve been to Iceland before?” Eve asks me.
“Yes, in 2001. I signed up with an Equitour company. I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew I had to come to Iceland.”
“Wow, you were really called to these horses,” Sylvie says.
“Isn’t that funny how that happens?” Eve says. “Jack and I were riding Lusitanos and we were going to go to Brazil to buy some and start our horse farm, when someone said we should check out the Icelandic horses in upstate New York. And that was it, there was something about them. We never went to Brazil, we started our Icelandic farm. We never looked back.”
I finally had validation from these women. I am understood. My calling is their calling.
We take turns explaining our horse history, which is a lot like explaining our lives. Sylvie tells us that she was a high school English teacher who took an early retirement at fifty-nine, moved up to the Berkshires, and started taking riding lessons. “I didn’t know I loved horses until then.” Her first foray into the equine world was with big horses, English Hunter style, and was disastrous. “My riding instructor was so mean, she said I was hopeless. She called me ‘hopeless’! Can you believe that?”
Eve says she was always horse crazy. She grew up in Ohio and used to ride the pigs on a nearby farm and pretend they were horses. Her sister, Maggie, nods, confirming it was true. “She was always begging for a horse, but we didn’t have the room in our yard.”
“Or the money,” Eve says.
I tell them my horse history, how, yes, I was a horse-crazy young girl, but how desire bubbled up in me soon after turning forty and I started taking lessons at a local barn. Once a week I rode Charlie, a 21-year-old Thoroughbred, around and around the ring. Walking and trotting, fine, but I could rarely get him to canter. I loved the big, old gelding, but in a pitiable way because he had his freedom broken early in his life and he was deadened and shut down to humans. He was once an abused racehorse, now he was an overused school horse. I didn’t want to tax him too much. I took my lesson but spent most of the time grooming him, as if he were the most important horse in the world, as if he had won the race. But some days I would get to his stall and he was standing in pee-soaked sawdust with his body bumpy from infected fly bites or other horse bites. Old horses get picked on—it’s enough to break your heart.
Each one of our horse histories, our searches, ends with: “And then I found Icelandics.” But finding these horses, we would learn, was only the beginning.
“They are complicated horses, with all of the gaits,” Eve says. “There is so much to learn.”
Sylvie agrees emphatically with an audible intake of air, and on the exhale she says, “They’re sooo complicated. I spent my first two years just learning the walk and the collected walk.”
“So you went alone, without knowing anyone?” Eve goes back to my original trip.
“I had to ride these horses, nothing else would do, and I didn’t know anyone who wanted to go with me.” I wish I had known them.
After finding the Icelandic horse on the internet, I spent the next two years working myself into a tizzy over them, dying to meet one. But there were none close to me. I made a trip to an Icelandic farm in northern Vermont to test drive one shortly before I embarked on my first Iceland trip. As I expected, it only fed my obsession, because age bestows peculiarities of taste, eccentricities of desire. Or to paraphrase the duplicitous Woody Allen, “The heart does want what it wants,” and this one wanted these horses. Nothing else.
I randomly chose an Equitour company and specifically chose the longest and most difficult trip they offered. I was not much of a rider, mind you. But that didn’t concern me. I only thought of my mythical horse and the galloping we would do together.
I flew into Keflavík, took the bus to the national airport and a prop plane to Akureyri, completely bypassing Reykjavík. I waited for a couple of hours at the Akureyri Airport to be picked up by someone from the farm. It was a one-room terminal and after the first few minutes, I was the only person there. I read Being Dead, a novel by Jim Crace, which goes into great detail about how a corpse rots after a couple gets robbed and bludgeoned and left for dead. I looked up every so often for my ride, and thought, What am I doing here? I flew all the way here to read a book in a deserted airport? It hardly felt like the appropriate beginning to an adventure. I should have chosen a northern-bound book, too, a Shackleton tale, at least. But this is what happens when you are bored at work and let your daydreams get the better of you. What if this whole trip turns out to be a dud? I thought. After two hours, a young woman showed up, an intern at the farm, and she gave no excuses for her lateness—my first experience with “Icelandic time,” which is well intentioned, but noncommittal.
But the trip was hardly a dud. On the contrary, the riding was more challenging than I expected. We started out with twelve riders. One, a young woman from Chichester who embodied everything I loved in an Englishwoman (cheery, chubby, with a trilling laugh), got thrown the first day and dislocated her shoulder. Her trilling laugh turned to whelps of pain, lasting until an ambulance, which took an inordinate amount of time coming since we were in the hinterlands, drove her away. It was a bad start and then there were eleven . . . .
Two Americans, a couple from Arizona, were the next to drop out. She was a big blonde, and he was her lanky cowboy-looking husband, an army vet who worked in the defense industry. After the second day of riding, Ms. Arizona, lowered her voice and said, “That’s it for us, after what happened to the English girl. I’m fifty-nine, I can’t bust myself up like that.”
I spent the remaining six days with nine Germans, of all different ages. They were jolly and laughed a lot, and during dinner would translate their jokes for me and then I would throw my head back and laugh, like them, feeling like a jolly German. But unlike me, they were all experienced riders. In Germany equestrian courses are offered in high school.
And then there was Jonki, our tour guide, a big, young, bald, Icelandic fellow, who ignored all his foreign charges because he was busy romancing his pretty girlfriend, who he had brought along for the ride. When he paid attention to us, I wished he hadn’t. He was one of those laughing sadists—when I told him I was nervous about riding over a narrow mountain pass or a high bridge without a railing crossing a rushing river, he clucked at me and picked up the pace. He took us through thrown-up ground—frost heaves, a moorland of tussocks. We never slowed down. We would stop only to give the horses a rest.
One day, he handed me the reins of two horses to pony alongside me so he could go off to smooch with his girlfriend in the back of the line. At first, I was flattered. He thought I was a good enough rider to pony horses. So I didn’t hesitate. I took the long lead ropes of the unsaddled horses, and along with my horse’s reins, held all three pairs in my hands. I did my best to keep them from tangling and keep the ponied horses in some semblance of a line off my right side and slightly behind my horse. I understood ponying more in theory than in practice—it should look like half a V formation—and for a while I kept it all together. When we cantered downhill, though, I lost my stirrups and lost my seat, and struggled not to lose the horses. It was hard work, out-of-my league riding, bapti
sm by fire, but I was in my glory riding like a cowgirl.
On the last day of our journey, out on the tip of the Eyjafjörður peninsula, we turned the horses toward home. My horse decided to run home and for a few miles, I led the team or left them unintentionally in the dust behind me. Not of my doing, or desire, of course—I had no idea how to stop the horse. When they caught up to me, Jonki was smiling. “Now you want to go in a hurry?”
I feared I had spent most of my good fortune and fessed up: “This horse has gotten the better of me.” I switched over to the pack horse, who had two gaits—a plodding walk and a slow gallop—a true pack horse, no matter what country he lived in. After twenty miles of riding like this, I got off for the last mile and walked the horse back to the farm. I was sore and relieved, proud and happy. I could do it, I did do it. And I couldn’t wait to go back.
But I did wait. It took a couple of years to find Eve’s farm in the Berkshires. And it took another year before Helga invited Sylvie to Thingeyrar, and for me to invite myself, and for Sylvie to say, in effect, hop on board.
Arrival in Thingeyrar
Back on the road, Eve asks me what I do. I tell them about Yale and my job editing the journal. It sounds so dry and dusty. I picture my office in the third-floor attic of a Victorian-era house. I see myself in third person, a woman sitting alone, in a semiautonomous job. Taking a break from tedious proofing with its arcane editing shorthand in the marginalia, she dreams of riding horses in Iceland again. Her desktop computer makes it too easy to leap into other worlds, which includes not only Iceland but places like Greenland and the reindeer country in Lapland. Maybe if she had a more outgoing, social type of job, she would not have the time or need to fantasize about far-flung cold places. But then she wouldn’t be in the back of this van in Iceland.
They ask me about my children and I tell them my son, who is going on fifteen, studies classical piano and jazz guitar. My daughter, who is eleven, is at ballet camp. “She only likes classical ballet.”
“They sound wonderful,” Eve says.
And they are, and my life revolves around them and my husband at home. We’re like four limbs of a body. I can’t go to sleep at night until I know we are all home in our beds, though with my son, now that time gets later and later. He has hit an age where he has emotionally detached from us, and it’s an odd estrangement. He has attached himself to a pack of five guys; they move together on the sly like a pack of wolves. It’s normal, I tell myself, but he drifts away in front of us. I suspect he comes home high or drunk, though it’s hard to tell how much and how often. He knows how to hide things.
Until asked, I have not thought of my family since I entered the van. And I realize that I barely thought of them in Reykjavík, except to send off a few emails from the hotel’s computer. The very act of traveling and always having to take the temperature of a new place and unknown people is completely consuming. Maybe I’m assuaging my guilt here, but traveling requires at least a small amount of survival skills by navigating language, people, and places, and keeping your eyes on what’s up ahead.
Thingeyrar is what’s up ahead. After nearly six hours of food stops and getting lost, we turn off the Ring Road where the sign tells us it is just six kilometers down a dirt road. The rain and snow and wind have stopped. The sun is high. We pass one farm after another, each spaced out every couple of miles, with hundreds of grazing sheep and horses.
At the end of the road there is an iron gate that says THINGEYRAR on top.
“This is it.” Sylvie is squirmy with excitement. “We’re actually here! Look at all her horses! Oh! Look at all those babies.”
Maggie gets out and opens the gate. We drive through and she closes it. In front of us is our farm for the week, at the end of the road, with a 360-degree view of the green valleys, the glacial mountains, two rivers that converge, and a large lake with black sandbanks that empties into the sea.
At the end of the driveway, we park next to what must be Helga’s house, a modern two-story duplex, and what must be our guesthouse, an older house, behind which looms a large black stone church.
Someone comes walking up from the barn to greet us—it must be Helga. She is stunningly beautiful in a way that is mundane in Iceland. Light, almost white, blonde hair, ruddy cheeks, dazzling blue eyes, high cheekbones, flawless skin. She looks to be in her early thirties, though I know she is closer to my age.
“So we’re here. Did you think we’d actually come?” Sylvie says.
“Well, I didn’t know, but here you are.” She laughs at Sylvie and hugs her. “Good to see you, my friend.”
Sylvie beams, as if this is all she’s ever wanted, to be Helga’s friend. And I find myself emotionally reverting back to middle school, oddly envious of their friendship, as if Sylvie hooked the cool girl in school to be best friends with.
An hour later, we’re down at the barn. Dora does not join us because she has a headache, which is a relief to me and Sylvie. As much as I want to ignore Dora, her quiet presence is still a presence, and it’s troubled.
Eve says, “Maybe it’s best she doesn’t ride with us anyway, in her state, you know.” Eve doesn’t have to fill in the rest: People who are down attract calamity, and we would all be riding with her and, hence, we’d all fall down or fall off. It’s very easy for this thinking to devolve into superstition.
Disa, a young woman from the equine college Holar, is at the barn to help us. She will ride sweep while Helga rides in the lead. She is twenty-six and even more beautiful than Helga: her cheekbones are higher, her hair is thicker and parted into two long golden braids, her eyes are deep set and cat-shaped. She is all this, plus cheery, outgoing—she says everything with half a laugh and a big smile. In Eve-speak, she beams radiant light, attracts positive energy. Her teeth are even dazzlingly white. At six-feet tall, thick and powerfully built, Disa dwarfs Helga and the rest of us. She exudes an Amazonian size and strength, like she could easily throw an average-sized man over her shoulder. Hell, she looks like she could wrestle a bear and come out a smiling victor.
Disa hands me the reins to a pretty chestnut mare named Perla, and has me test her out in a nearby paddock. When I first get on a horse, if I haven’t ridden for a while, I’m always looking for the seatbelt. I want to strap myself on, though I know that would be worse. I know it would be much better if I learned how to fall, which is what jockeys and event jumpers learn how to do.
As I walk my horse around the paddock, Helga tells me Perla is five, but very steady, and that the Holar interns trained her this winter. “She’s a very good horse and you look good on her.”
I want to tell Helga, don’t be fooled. I’m not such a good rider. And five is green for an Icelandic horse. Even in the paddock I can sense that Perla is too much horse for me. I feel as if I’m atop a revved-up motorcycle that will explode when we ride out from these fences. Eve backs Helga up though, and says that I look “great” on Perla, and tells Helga that I’ve ridden in Iceland before and that I’m a pro. So, of course, I don’t mention my fears. I’d rather look great on a pretty horse than risk looking like a wimp in front of these women.
“And for you, my friend . . .” Helga turns to Sylvie. “Let’s put you on . . .”
Sylvie looks as if she’s going to collapse from fear and starts babbling: “Remember the kind of horse I ride at home, the kind of horse I’m used to. Remember, I ride Hátið [pronounced “How-teeth”]. That’s the level of horse I’m used to, remember? Hátið is so old she’s practically toothless. You know Hátið. That’s my level, Helga.”
“Yes, I know. I’m going to put you on Thoka, she is my very special old mare. She is the horse I take when I’m going to the neighbor’s and I know I’m going to be drinking a lot of beer with my girlfriends. Thoka just takes me home.”
Thoka is a small, white mare. Her coat is still shaggy from the winter, and it makes her look older, bedraggled, and docile, like a kid’s pony at a birthday party.
Sylvie uses a mounting block t
o get on. She plops down heavily on Thoka’s back and sucks in air. “This horse scares me.”
Sylvie knows a lot more about horses than I do. She rides daily at home, while I ride maybe a few times a year, if that. But having someone to worry about takes my own worries away. “You okay?” I ask her.
“I’m okay, but I’m not okay. I took half a Valium, so once that kicks in I should be fine.”
“Is that safe to do?”
“My doctor says it’s fine. Oh, I’m crazy, didn’t I tell you that?”
Now we both have to wait in the saddle, in the paddock, for everyone else to mount. My horse gets antsy and I walk her around in circles. Sylvie talks to her horse, “Whoa, whoa, shh, shh,” but her horse is standing stock still with closed eyes, basically napping.
When all eight of us are up, we wait for Helga and Disa to saddle up. This is it. This is what we’ve come all this way to do: ride. This is what I sit in my office all year long dreaming about—being in Iceland, riding. But I know something Sylvie doesn’t know but obviously senses: that riding in Iceland is much more rigorous than riding Icelandics in the Berkshires, where we plod along, purposely keeping them slow and safe.
“Everybody ready?” Helga asks.
“Alright,” Sylvie says. “Let’s get this over with!”
“You came all the way to Iceland just to get it over with?” Helga asks.
“Oh, that is so Sylvie,” Eve says as a way of explaining to Helga.
And off we go, out through the main gate to the outer lands. The horses pick up the pace immediately. They vie to be in the front of the pack. This is what horses are like in Iceland because they aren’t coddled like pets. They are brought up under semi-feral conditions: the young and the mares are set free for many months, driven into the mountains to live off the land with no human care. Since they are left to forage for food and water on their own and figure things out for themselves, they grow to be healthy, sturdy, and, for the most part, sane. If a horse is not right in the head, Icelanders have no compunction about putting it down. Or selling it to Americans.