by Tory Bilski
Traveling in a pack of ten as we are, the horses bunch up together, like they would in their herd. I am knee-to-knee with Maggie, who is bouncing around a lot in the saddle, but she doesn’t complain. Eve has a big smile on her face (“Isn’t this great!”). Two of the teenage girls are very good riders and they know how to slow their horses down, turning them in circles to get back in line. I envy that ability. My horse is passing everyone and wants to be in front. She is young and has no manners, and my skills are too limited, my reactions not reflexive yet.
Perla catches up with Helga’s lead horse and at first Helga thinks I mean for this to happen. “Don’t let Perla get in front of me,” she says. She then starts chatting with me, asks me where I am from, how I know Sylvie. I get out a few words and then admit to Helga that my horse is getting away from me. She cuts a sideways glance at Perla and says in Icelandic, “Fet, Fet,” and her horse and mine magically slow down to a fast walk. It is clear from the start of this ride that my first trek in Iceland three years ago was old school. We rode farmers’ horses with a local farmer as our guide. There was little concern for our safety or our riding level—it was get on your horse and go. Helga is new school, a Holar graduate and a Holar instructor, who wants horse and rider safe. She wants the experience to be mutually beneficial. She trusts her horses, but she sees we have varying degrees of riding ability and confidence.
When the rest of the horses catch up to us, everyone checks in on Sylvie, who has been in the back of the line under Disa’s watchful eye.
“How are you doing, Sylvie?” Eve asks.
“Sylvie, you okay?”
Helga is most concerned about her friend and says to me, “Maybe this is too much for her.”
“I’m alright,” Sylvie finally peeps up. “But this is not like riding my horse at home. We do a lot of walking on the trail. Can we just walk for a while? I like to walk.”
So we walk for a while, but the horses are straining to go faster. Much like the Arabian horse and the harsh desert environment they sprang from, Icelandics have been bred for endurance in formidable weather and rough terrain. Iceland’s roads are a fairly new luxury. The main ring road around the country was not completed until 1974, and there have never been trains in Iceland. The horses needed to serve as long-distance carriers and most of the getting around pre-automobile was done on well-worn sheep trails. While the rest of Europe spent centuries breeding their horses to be larger and heavier for war or pulling carriages, or larger and leggier for sport racing, Iceland never had a standing army, had few serviceable roads for carriages, and never had the leisure time to use horses as sport. Instead, they purposely kept their horses small, quick, and hardy. And the tölt gait was key for comfortably riding long distances.
After a few minutes, Helga calls out, “Sylvie, do you think you can tölt some more?”
Reluctantly she admits that she’s up to more tölting. And we’re off again at a fast clip, through fields of lupine that graze our thighs, through dry paths where the hooves kick up yellow dust in our faces. I get used to Perla and am no longer just a passenger who can’t control the brakes. My legs fit comfortably around her girth, and after riding for an hour or so, I am beginning to use my leg yields and lighten up on my reins. I consider myself a novice rider because I am. I never ride consistently. I ride in fits and spurts. But when I’m on a long trail ride, I have time to do more than simply react to the horse. There is time to experiment with small cues and aides, to put together everything that I have learned.
A proper tölt should have a steady four beat footfall, similar to a walk but at a much faster speed. It is often said that each sequence, every four beats, should sound like “Black and Decker, Black and Decker.” To get a horse to tölt, it helps if the rider first collects the horse, that is, lightens up the front end so that the propulsion comes from the hindquarters. It seems like a contradiction in cues to collect a horse: you press your leg on the horse which tells it to go forward and faster, but then you give the reins a half halt to tell it “not so fast.” The idea is the horse will need to collect itself and instead of pulling forward from the front, it will rebalance its weight so that the power comes from underneath and the hind end when the muscles are engaged.
It’s like when I go out for a run: sometimes I flop around out there lazily with my stomach loose and leading the way, shifting my weight side to side, hip to hip, and it’s difficult. After the first mile, I want to quit. But then I remember to pull up my sternum and suck in my belly, and by doing that I engage my running muscles and my step changes. Horses can be like that, too. If not ridden properly, they can resort to being a lazy runner.
So I wiggle her into a smooth four-beat tölt by leaning an inch or two back to take the weight off the front, giving her shoulders room to lift her front hooves and her head up.
Perla has a smooth tölt. The trick is to keep my legs still but my hips loose in the seat so that I follow the cadence of her movement. Icelandics are ridden with a slightly longer stirrup so that there is less bend in the knee, which helps in tölt but not necessarily in trot. When the ground is too rough, I move her back to a trot by giving her more rein and sitting slightly forward in a light seat. Tölt, trot, tölt, trot: I find the rhythm more than I lose the rhythm—that’s a good ride for me.
I check frequently on Perla’s ears to see if they are flat back annoyed at me or eagerly pointing forward. Horses’ ears are the barometers of their mood. But Perla’s are somewhere in between, not easily decipherable. They do get twitchy when she senses another horse might pass her, and I feel her power tick up a bit, as she wants to race against the other horse. I give her some rein and let her keep her lead.
This is what I am here for: full concentration on the horse’s gait, mood, speed, collection. My mind clears of all else to focus on the ride: staying on, staying balanced, feeling the horse’s rhythm, looking ahead at the path, the rocks, the lupine, the tufted grass, the burry calls of the terns flitting in front of me. I can ride Icelandic horses in the States at Eve’s farm, but it is contained. It is a completely different experience to ride here in this endless treeless expanse, to ride in the place these horses come from, where they have been birthed, where their ancestors have run for a millennium on this rough terrain. It’s like nowhere else on earth.
When the Norse first arrived in Iceland in the late 800s, it was uninhabited by people, though there are saga accounts of hermitic Celtic monks living on the island. And it was uninhabited by other mammals, too, except for the arctic fox and the stray polar bear taking a ride on a wandering ice floe. So the settlers brought all the people and animals with them. The settlement era occurred at the height of the Viking era. In other places where the Vikings seized power, they mixed and assimilated into the country and intermarried. Think of the French Normans (they were the raiding Norsemen a century earlier) who in 1066 invaded the Danelaw borough of England, which had been settled by Vikings from the previous century.
But in Iceland there was no one to seize power from, no one to assimilate with or marry. And though some women from Norway also came to settle this new land, the early population was mostly men who picked up women from Ireland and the Scottish islands en route to Iceland. (Iceland’s deCODE, a genomic biobank, collected DNA from every Icelander in the 1990s, and found the women were 63% Celtic, the men 80% Norwegian.) And by “picking up” women, I mean stopping off to buy women on the slave market. Dublin was established during the Viking Era as a slave trading post. The profits from selling captured men, women, and children from the British Isles and Eastern Europe enriched and established many Viking chieftains’ power.
Horses were traded, too. The Icelandic horse is a DNA map of the Vikings pathways and conquests. The breed is a genetic mix of the Norwegian Fjord horse, the Shetland pony, the Irish Connemara, and the Fell and Dales Ponies of Yorkshire. There is even a dab of Mongolian horse in it.
The difficult journey these horses took in the boats, and their lives in the new har
sh land, culled out the weak and left only the hardiest and healthiest horses to survive and interbreed in isolation in Iceland. Like the Yakut horse in Siberia, it quickly evolved into a breed with a second winter coat, a thick mane, stout trunk, short thick legs, a low set tail, and the ability to survive without shelter. In 930, the Althing, the early Icelandic parliament, did something unusual: they passed a law banning all other horses from coming into the country. And any horse leaving the country could not be brought back. These laws are still in effect today, making this a breed that has remained isolated on this island for over a thousand years.
The Guests in the Guesthouse
The guesthouse is a small two-story, but it also sprawls. The older part was built in the early 1900s, and a new addition was tacked on in the 1960s. It has four bedrooms on the first floor, all with multiple beds. The three bedrooms in the front of the house all face south. The small bedroom in the back of the house is dark and paneled with a window covered by a dark curtain that blocks out the light. Dora takes that room immediately and no one questions her need for privacy. She goes in, shuts the door, and except for coming out for a smoke every hour, we don’t see her much.
“She’s getting a lot out of this trip,” Sylvie says.
In the back of the house is an old-fashioned parlor room with a couch, but it’s also big enough for a full dining room table. In this parlor room/dining room there are four built-in bed cubicles, about as long as I am, five feet six inches. Each cubby comes with a floral curtain you can draw close. The house was built for large families that lived in close quarters. It looks like the old baðstofas in the Icelandic turf houses from a century ago, which look like the old bed-boxes in the recreated Viking longhouses of a millennium ago.
The kitchen is large enough for a table that sits ten. The view from the kitchen window is of the church and the church’s graveyard. But also, much closer to the guesthouse is a curious cluster of gravestones slammed up against each other, way too close to each other to be actual grave sites. And someone thought it important to fence these gravestones in, as if to prevent them from wandering around at night and bothering the clothesline next to it.
In the refrigerator, we find nýmjólk (pasteurized milk), súrmjólk (like kefir), AB mjólk (like sweeter kefir), skyr (like Greek yogurt), bland cheese (like Emmentaler), lamb salami (like nothing else), soft yellow apples, hard-boiled eggs, flat hearth-baked bread, brown sweet bread, peat-smoked salmon, pale hothouse tomatoes, and smjör (sweet butter). Also, two six packs of Gull, Icelandic beer (like Coors). This is my diet for the week, and no food makes me happier.
The pantry is stocked with coffee from Denmark, Harrods tea bags, sugar, muesli from Germany, chocolate covered raisins, a box of Franzia red wine, and mismatched dishes, cups, and mugs. The big gray phone box hangs on the kitchen wall next to a fire extinguisher.
The stairs leading up to the second floor are narrow, the treads and risers each only about four inches, so you need to turn your foot and body sideways to go up and down. Two doorless bedrooms are upstairs, and both have deeply pitched eaves, so we can only stand up straight in the middle of the rooms. Once we check out the upstairs, no one wants to sleep there, no one ever wants to go up there again.
We choose our rooms without any fuss. I take the bedroom with two twin beds. It has two large windows, each covered with sheer white curtains. One window looks south out onto the barn and the pastures, the other west. The beds in this room, in this house, and pretty much everywhere in Iceland, even the hotels, come with just a fitted bottom sheet and a comforter, folded in half lengthwise. And one pillow. No more, no less. No complaining.
The four teenage girls take the large room with a set of bunk beds across the hall from me. Eve, Maggie, and Sylvie sleep in the room on the other side of the girls.
The first night we all turn in around eleven P.M. The sun is bright and the sheer curtains don’t block out any of the light. What use do these curtains serve? It feels like two in the afternoon in my bedroom. Even when I put my blackout mask over my eyes, I can feel the sun from the western window, keeping me awake.
It is impossible to sleep. I read for a while, put the book down, cover my eyes again with the mask, and try to fall asleep again. But the teenagers have decided that it’s a good time to run in and out of the house. I put my earplugs in. But they get more boisterous. I try wrapping my pillow over my ears. They start slamming doors, stomping down the hallway to the kitchen, laughing, and in general making a regular racket. Four girls can sound like twenty in the middle of the night.
They didn’t seem to be rowdy types. They have been easy to travel with, if easy means they stick close to each other in an age-linked pod, oblivious to everything else, but sensitive to each other’s approval. So far, they have been mild mannered fourteen-year-olds. I chalk that up to Brittany being from a small town—she lives down the road from Eve and keeps her horse at the farm—and Eve’s nieces being from Ohio, and what I know about Ohio is zilch. Less than zilch. But in general, horsey girls tend to be their own breed, resilient and introspective. At their age, you seek in horses what you can’t get in humans. Maybe that’s at any age.
So even though they have been quiet and considerate all day long, they choose midnight to get rambunctious. Maybe I don’t remember fourteen that well. I don’t want to seem like an ogre, and I don’t want to ruin their fun. It’s the midnight sun, the summer solstice, why shouldn’t they run around and party all night?
Except that we are getting up early to ride. And I need my sleep. The scenario that keeps replaying in my head is that if I don’t sleep I’ll make stupid mistakes in the saddle. I’ll fall and hurt myself and it will all be because the teenage girls kept me awake. In Eve-speak, I’m thinking negatively down, not positively up.
I toss, turn, and silently fume about how much racket they are making. I debate with myself: How much time should I give them to settle down? How much of a spoil sport do I want to be? But the door keeps slamming and their feet keep stomping, like they are kicking mud or snow off their boots every time they re-enter the house, and they keep laughing uproariously as they run up and down the hallway.
Finally, I take my earplugs out and my eye mask off, get up and storm into the hallway, sure I’ll encounter them coming in and out of the house. I’m ready to roar at them, but the hallway is empty and quiet. Their bedroom door is slightly ajar and I peak in. Brittany is lying on the top bunk, reading quietly with a bedside lamp on. The others are all in their beds, sleeping or half-asleep.
“Have you all been here the whole time?
“What do you mean?” Brittany asks.
“You weren’t just running up and down the hallway, slamming doors, going inside and out?”
“What??” she says.
“I heard this racket, like you were all running up and down the hallway, having a party. You’ve been in your beds the whole time?”
“Yessss,” she says.
“You didn’t hear anything?”
“Oh my God,” she says, and the other girls hear her.
“What’s going on?” They want to know.
She points at me, like I’m a witch. “She heard the ghosts!”
“What do you mean, the ghosts?”
“You heard the ghosts! We were warned that there were ghosts in this house!” Brittany and the other girls scream but in a hoarse whisper, so as not to wake up the others, or alert the ghosts, or because they’ve scared themselves so much they can’t get their louder screams out. It’s like they’re in a horror movie and they’re afraid their heads are going to be lopped off.
I can’t calm them down, and I’m sure of what I heard. I was awake; I wasn’t dreaming. I hadn’t even lapsed into the jumbled mind of pre-sleep. I heard a racket, the doors slamming, feet stomping, and lots of voices, like they were muffled in scarves.
The next morning, Helga blithely confirms that of course there are ghosts in the house. “Oh yes, they are in the front of the house. In the old
section. But they don’t bother anyone.”
It’s funny how some cultures just accept things other cultures scoff at. Maybe because Iceland’s scenery is starkly beautiful and otherworldly, it lends itself to the supernatural. Icelanders talk about the elves and the trolls as they would talk about someone they know, like their cousins or neighbors. I’m never sure if they’re trying to hoodwink tourists or not. Or if they’re trying to hoodwink themselves, to keep the folklore alive. I notice that they never completely confirm or deny it.
But if you spend enough time in the country, in the grassy, misty moors, in the boulder fields of volcanic rock, in the actively steaming areas that bubble up mud and sulfur like a cauldron in Mordor, you might start seeing things, too.
Anyway, I heard ghosts.
Where I Want to Be
At the end of Laugavegur, the main shopping street that runs through the heart of Reykjavík, Sylvie and I head toward the wharves. The rest of our group has left, but I booked my flight home a day later because it was significantly cheaper, and Sylvie booked her flight home three days later to see the sights of Reykjavík, though there aren’t many sights to speak of. There is no glam, no glitz, nothing fancy, nothing luxurious. No grandeur—definitely no Versailles. The country has a history of colonial rule and natural disasters that never allowed it to accumulate immense wealth. When wealth finally came to the island, the government did a good job of spreading it equally through the population, and democratic socialism is said to flourish more easily in small populations that all share the same culture, religion, and ancestors. Hence, the modest cities, modest homes.