Wild Horses of the Summer Sun

by Tory Bilski

  “You can stay on this side and wait for us to come back,” Disa says. “Or . . .” She opens her coat and gives us her dazzling smile with her twinkling wink. Her inside pockets are stuffed with small plastic bottles of booze. “. . . You have a choice: Cognac or Brennivín.”

  “I’ll take the Rémy Martin,” Sylvie says, and swigs it like a cowgirl. “This country is going to turn me into a lush.”

  Disa offers both the Cognac and Brennívin to whoever wants it. The takers are me, Sylvie, and Eve. I know alcohol is only a temporary fix, but the wind has picked up and is blowing off the cold lake, and a couple of sips warm me up and take my jitters away.

  The horses graze on sparse, scurry dune grass that does not look edible, but they are used to grazing on almost anything. Horses that live near the ocean will eat seaweed to survive if that’s all there is. After we let the horses rest and graze, we check their girths before remounting.

  Girth tightening is a safety precaution I take seriously. I’ve heard of many riding disasters caused by a loose girth and saddle slipping under the horse and the rider slipping with it, which frightens the horse, causing it to bolt. Horses bloat a little when you originally tack up, and when riding them their stomachs tighten from the exercise which will loosen the girth, and the weight of the rider can push the saddle back, which will loosen the girth even more.

  And after they’ve been grazing, their stomachs bloat again. I tighten the girth a few notches on Gnott and ask Disa to check it for me. She is still miffed about the earlier saddle mix-up, wondering aloud how that could have happened. She lifts up Gnott’s saddle and resettles it more forward since it has slipped back some, and then she finds ample slack in the girth and cinches up the strap a few more notches. It alarms me there was so much room in the girth. I would be under the belly of the horse, dragged in the water with my head under, without her help.

  As a precaution, Disa and Helga go around and check the girth on every horse before we remount. Then we wait for them to remount and the horses are edgy, prancing in place, so that we have to turn them in small circles. There is an undercurrent of explosive freedom in them as we wait. Horses give each other energy, and you can’t help but feel it spreading from one horse to another in anticipation of the crossing.

  “What if I fall in?” Sylvie asks. She feels what I feel. The Cognac has worn off and any temporary courage has faded.

  “It’s very important not to look down at the water,” Disa says. “If you look down, you get dizzy and lose your balance. Just look straight ahead all the time and follow behind me single file.”

  Helga adds: “And knot your reins and keep them up on your horse’s neck. You don’t want the horse to get tangled up in them. The horse needs its head to move freely to swim.”

  “Swim? You didn’t tell me we were swimming,” Sylvie says.

  Eve’s laughter rings out across the lake. “Oh, Sylvie, didn’t you know?” Here in Iceland, Eve is confident in the saddle, willing to take a chance with every horse and every ride, an attitude I never see when she is home, where she rarely rides and when she does, she never looks relaxed.

  We start off trotting in the shallows that are only a few inches deep. It’s difficult to keep my feet in my stirrups while in a trot. I do my best to keep a half seat and lighten my weight on the horse’s back. But I don’t ride enough in general to have those thigh muscles you need to grip the saddle without squeezing the horse’s flanks and I lose my stirrups often.

  I get behind Disa and focus strictly on her thick golden braids as if my balance depends upon it (it does). But then Eve passes me. I don’t look down, I try not to look down, I look down ever so briefly, and I don’t fall off. I go back to Disa’s braids, and I look at the shoreline far off in the distance. Viv passes me, as does Mel and Britt. Even Sylvie passes me, cantering slowly, comfortably, with a beatific smile. So I bring my horse into canter because everyone now is doing it and it is easier than trotting, less jolting, and I’m less likely to lose my stirrups. So much is said about the Icelandics’ special gait, the tölt, that I forget my favorite gait is the canter. It’s what sold me on Icelandic horses to begin with: It’s easy to ask for canter and it’s easy to sit to. It brings a three-beat mantra to the ride: I’m cantering, cantering, cantering.

  For the next ten or twenty minutes—I can’t tell how much time passes—this slow canter in the lake puts me in a dream state: the cold water splashing like metallic beads of light against the horses’ steaming breath, as we are all cantering the shallows. The other side of the lake doesn’t get much closer—it feels as if we are permanently in the middle of the lake, which is fine with me, more than fine, it’s where I want to be. I don’t ever want this ride to stop. It’s time out of mind.

  As we get out of the shallows and into the deeper water the horses naturally slow down as the water comes up to their chests. I knot my reins and push them forward on my mare’s withers so she can stretch out her neck. Taking a cue from the other riders, I pull up the stirrups and cross them over the front of the saddle. So that there is no drag, I hitch my legs up so that my feet rest on the back of the saddle. I lean forward and grab my horse’s mane for something to hold on to, and my face nestles in her horsehair. My breathing and my mare’s breathing are matched. She plunges into the deep water, submerging everything but the saddle, her withers, and her head.

  The coldness of the water is irrelevant; I barely notice. My horse feels like she’s swimming in slow motion; she’s underneath me working hard but the gait is unrecognizable and we’re floating together and drifting with the current. She’s carrying me on her back, as if she is a kind of hybrid marine centaur. I think of the Celtic belief of a thin liminal place where the door between this world and another is cracked open for only a moment, and this feels like that place for me, or the closest I will ever get to that place. I have fallen into a crack of watery light, and for one icy moment I have been allowed a glimpse into the transparency of the other world. I think, When I die this is how I want to enter the other world, on the back of a horse that is swimming in a cold lake. And I will cross over into myth.

  When we reach the other side of the lake, finally and all too soon, what greets us is a sharp climb up a short hill full of rocks. The horses in front of me begin to run up this 45-degree angled incline in a reactive herd panic. I hear Disa, amidst all the thunder of hooves and water and rocks, yell out, “Lean all the way forward,” so I flatten myself on my mare’s withers, hold tight to her mane, and give her all the knotted rein she needs.

  She miraculously delivers me in a hurry to the top of the hill, and then she stops. Just stops. Her job done. My life depended on her completely and she is looking for nothing back from me. She was breathing hard in the water, harder up the hill, but now she is breathing calmly and looking to graze.

  Disa calls out, “Everybody good?”

  Eve yells, “Woo, we’re good!”

  Viv says, “That was wild. A little too wild.”

  Sylvie says, “What did we just do? I can’t believe we did that!”

  Helga says, “Well, you did. I knew you could, too.”

  My heart is pounding so fast I can feel it in my throat. This is usually my body’s reaction to fear. But it’s not fear, it’s pure exhilaration.

  I slide off my horse and land on shaky legs. I loosen my horse’s girth and undo her noseband so she can eat all the grass she wants. I want to give her oats, riches, gold for that ride. But she is content with scurry grass.

  When I was young, my dentist used to give me laughing gas (nitrous oxide) when I needed cavities filled, which basically turned me into a stoned little nine-year-old. I had a scary loss of self in that dentist chair: Who am I? Where am I? I calmed myself down by repeating my name, my grade and teacher’s name, my school’s name, my mother, father, and brothers’ names. It is a similar sense after crossing Lake Hóp—a momentary loss of self, though not at all scary: Where am I? Who am I? Somewhere up North. Somewhere in Iceland. With
this group of women I both know and don’t know. With horses. That dream of horses.

  We are all sitting separately on the hill, ruminating, eating the sandwiches we packed for ourselves in plastic bags. The sandwich I made is lamb salami, cheese, and sliced cucumber, with peppered, flavored cream cheese on sweet brown bread. The Cognac is passed around. A light wind blows off the lake, Helga and Disa talk quietly in Icelandic, kittiwakes call, the horses puff out and snort with contentment. All too soon there are the small murmurings of movement, the getting up and gathering of things as we get ready to be on our way.

  Sylvie asks, “How do we get back?”

  She realizes what I have just realized. We’re on a spit of grassy land, surrounded by water.

  Disa points to the lake we just crossed. “The same way we came.”

  2006

  The Wind in Those Places

  My father has been in a nursing home for five years, after suffering a major stroke. My mother visits him twice daily, eating lunch and often dinner with him in the home’s dining room. When I visit my mother, which is almost every Sunday, she insists I go to the nursing home with her. It dictates a reluctant pattern to my weekend: an hour-long drive up to my mom’s condo, an hour-long visit at the nursing home, an hour alone with my mother, an hour-long drive home. It’s four hours out of my forty-eight-hour precious weekend.

  My mother is loyal to my father, as befits her generation. When he was eighty, before he had his stroke, he served her with divorce papers. She told me about it then, but I didn’t push for details and she didn’t offer. I knew it hurt her terribly, but she trudged on, shaking her head, called him a “crazy man,” and refused to sign them. He accused her of all sorts of collusion with all sorts of people. But looking back on that paranoid episode it was probably the arteriosclerosis talking, although given his history, it was hard to tell his regular craziness from thickening-of-his-arteries craziness. My grandmother, his mother, had it, too, and a few months before the stroke that killed her, she used to walk the two miles from her apartment to our house and prostrate herself on our front lawn, “Crucify me, go ahead, you’re killing me, like Jesus.” (She was a hardened Polish Catholic, first-generation, from a world we knew nothing about.) We’d look out from behind the living room curtains and laugh at her and hope the neighbors weren’t watching. “You would laugh at Jesus,” she’d say and shake her fist at us.

  One warm day in May, I push my father’s wheelchair out to the sunny spot where I often take him. He was once an athletic man with a natural musculature that few people are lucky enough to be born with; his body was cut like a rock. He played basketball when he was young and in college; boxing when he was in the Army Air Corps; tennis for the rest of his mobile life.

  His left side is paralyzed, and he can’t walk at all. His right hand shakes, but he can use it to feed himself. Even though all his food comes mashed, including beef, and his water and coffee is thickened with starch powder, he hasn’t lost his appetite. He gets heavier and heavier and his body becomes a different kind of rock. It takes two aides to move him off the bed into a wheelchair or to the bathroom. He takes out his anger, his helpless immobility, on the aides, and verbally abuses them. My mother tells them, “That’s not like him, he never spoke ill of women.”

  And it’s true, my father had courtly manners when it came to women. Growing up poor with a single mother in New York City, he made it to Villanova on a scholarship. There, they groomed him to be a chivalrous young Catholic man. Their mission was “to take the peasant out of the slum-dwelling Pollack” (his words, not mine). There were weekly teas with white-gloved young women from Rosemont College. He was taught to stand when a woman came into the room. To pull out a chair for a lady. And, on the street, to walk on the outside of a woman to protect her from traffic. My father did this until he could no longer stand on his own.

  I know he is miserable in a wheelchair in a nursing home, but his helplessness has selfishly provided me with an opportunity to know him better. His guard is down now, so he’s more honest about the past. Before his stroke he only told me his selected war stories, cherry-picking a few combat details and bragging about his beloved B17. After his stroke, he fills in the blanks, sometimes unknowingly. Once, when he had a fever from pneumonia, he looked at me and started weeping. “I’m sorry for losing your husband, I’m sorry we couldn’t save him.” I started crying. “Dad, my husband’s fine, he’s home with the kids.” It unnerved me so, like it was some kind of prophecy. But he kept shaking his head and wiping his eyes and repeating his apologies to the widow of a ball turret gunner that had died in 1944.

  Though I initially resented all these forced filial visits to the nursing home, I no longer regret them. I know more about his missions, blowing up munition factories and train transports. I know what the odds were of his coming out alive: 25 percent of the planes on each mission never came back. I know that flak hit his plane and it went down in flames and the ball turret gunner died, but the plane landed in allied territory. That his job as a radio operator doubled as a side gunner during battle. He once told me that under fire, courage is spontaneous, it’s nothing glorious, but more like a knee-jerk reaction. I know that his bomber squad gave cover to the ground troops on D-Day. And I also know that he blames his stroke, nearly sixty years later, on his second to last mission. Though he has been an atheist his whole adult life, he thinks God is punishing him for what he did in the war, specifically for being part of the firebombing of Dresden.

  When I tell him that I’m going back to Iceland soon, I’m hoping it will shake loose some memories and I’ll learn more. I am not so much of a peacenik that I don’t find his war years the most interesting and important part of his life. I don’t want to forget what he did. But it’s not just the personal imprint those years left on my father and, in turn, on our family. It’s also the way that war, that he knew firsthand, altered every inch of the world and the repercussions are the political power plays that still operate today.

  Iceland became a strategically located island, stuck up there in the northern sea with German U-boats swarming around it. Though Iceland claimed to remain a neutral country, there was a worry that they would side with the Germans. In 1938, in W.H. Auden’s Letters from Iceland, he writes frequently of bumping into Hermann Göring’s brother and cohort, who were touring the country in search of the pure Teutonic roots. Fearing Nazi sympathies and Hitler taking hold, the British invaded the country in 1940 and set up the Allied occupation. The US, Canadian, and British forces built Iceland’s airfields, giving the country a jump on modern aviation before they pulled out.

  “You used to stop in Iceland, didn’t you?” I ask my father, urging him to retell me.

  He nods his head. “We used to stop to refuel. We had to stop in Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland before making it to the base in England.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “We froze. There was no heat in the planes. It could get to forty below. We had lined suits that were supposed to be electrically heated but they never worked well. So we froze in the air and then we landed and we froze on the ground.”

  A fundamental difference between our generations: What was a frozen hell to him is desolate beauty to me. What he wants to forget, I feel called to return to. What was his hardship is my comfort. He stopped in those places for survival: to refuel to make sure he made it home. I look out on those same horizons and see adventure, a place to comfortably get lost for a little while, to get away from my real life. And sitting with him, I realize that I also go so that I can forget about him and his life’s suffering for a while, and forget that my mother is at the nurse’s station trying to calm down one of the aides because he called her a “fat ass.”

  “I can’t understand it . . . why you go there,” he says. His foggy blue eyes look off into the tall maples that surround the nursing home. May is soft and green and gentle in Connecticut. But he doesn’t see that: he is looking at his memories of those frozen places.

>   “The wind, the wind in those places,” he says, shaking his head. “It could rip you apart.”

  And that, for me, is the defining weather characteristic of Iceland: Wind. It is the whistling background, the white noise machine in my ear the entire time I am there. It gets into my ears so much that it becomes an almost silent, yet constantly audible, partner to my inner narration.

  Even in the summer, the wind often has a brisk Arctic bite to it. Fresh off the ice caps of Greenland and Iceland, it smells as clean and pure as snow. Most of Iceland is treeless, so the wind isn’t filtered through or slowed by shaking leaves. It has no buffers. There has been an all-out government effort to plant trees in Iceland to avoid erosion, so driving around you do see fledgling pockets of brave saplings. But the common joke is: “If you get lost in the forests of Iceland, just stand up.” It is hard for the trees to grow tall, particularly in the north of Iceland; the relentless wind stunts their growth and the trunks are bent with what looks like arbor scoliosis.

  Up at Helga’s farm, there is often a roaring wind, like an ocean wave that never breaks. When we are out on the trail riding and the already brisk wind picks up a notch, it brings an added dash of adventure to the ride. The horses, already peppy, pep up more. The wind gets their blood up, too. It’s all we can do to keep them calm. When we get to the sea with the din of the ocean waves added to the growling wind, we often dismount. The horses get too wild to ride.

  I have witnessed a few sunny and still days in Iceland without wind, and it disorients me. It’s like the music has stopped, and I miss it. I see other people slow down, too. Icelandic women lay out in the sun, impromptu, taking off their shirts to lie down in the grass with their bras on. You can hear a conversation ten feet away. The sun bears down full strength. I need sunscreen. I need a brimmed hat to keep the heat off my face. It just doesn’t feel right.