by Tory Bilski
She asks me how much riding experience I have. I tell her about the Icelandic horses I ride every year. She hasn’t heard of them and doesn’t seem impressed. I don’t explain it any further. It is midday and about 95 degrees with no breeze from the ocean as we head into the hills. Away from the tourist beaches, the island has an impoverished hardscrabble terrain. We trek through scrub brush and sand, prickly bushes and gnarly mangrove roots. Insects whirr and tick around my head. Lizards flick in and out of the path.
My horse is white and tall, leggy and thin. I get him into a trot, but I’m too lazy to post to it. I try a half seat but bounce around in the saddle. I pull too hard on the reins, using them to reposition myself, which is wrong, bad riding, a disservice to the horse. When we head down to the beach, she asks if I want to canter and I say, yes, of course. She leads the way and my horse picks up the canter behind her, and we wind through a series of snaky turns on the path and low hanging bows of scratchy branches where I need to duck my head. I have a hard time finding my balance. I bounce hard in the seat. I oomph a lot. It is no fault of the horse that I can’t find its rhythm. I have narrowed my scope of interest to one breed. While I can find the rhythm of the canter on Icelandics instinctively, it doesn’t translate to other horses.
When we get to the shore, I am hoping to finally have a smooth go at it on the long beach. But it is the bay side with a narrow beach. We wade into the shallow, warm, blue-green Caribbean to cool off the horses. We only go as deep as their fetlocks. My guide asks me how I like my horse, and I tell her he’s a fine horse. And, he is. With all my clumsy inattentive riding and miscues, he didn’t think once of acting up or being pushy with me. Through it all, he was a horse with a generous heart, looking to please me. She nods, looks fondly at him, and tells me she likes him, too.
As we walk the horses along the bay, she lights a cigarette, and after lighting it, asks if I mind. Of course not, I tell her. Though she is decades younger than I am, I feel immature in comparison, and soft. Maybe it’s the visual of her scarred chest and the swagger she shows in not hiding it, of making people confront the non-pretty. She strikes me as impenetrably strong, someone who had to grow up fast, a hard won freedom. I have an affinity for these tough horsewomen. They have as much machismo as the men in their culture. And they can be found in any outpost, carving out their place in the world with their beloved horses.
She asks again if I want to canter, but I’m ready to take it slow. The sun, the smoke, the heat has put me into a torpid daze. I am sweating from head to toe. Friends jokingly call me a penguin because I walk around in flip-flops and T-shirts in the winter, like a Québécois. The tropics simply immobilize me.
“Can we just walk? I like to walk,” I request, echoing Sylvie on our first trip to Iceland.
In January, Sylvie sends an email with the dates for our trip to Helga’s. In her usual curt message, she writes, “You in?” as if she pays for her emails by the word.
I think of this as starting a charge. We are all in different states: Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Georgia. I imagine all of us looking up from working on our computers, with our sights drifting northerly, sniffing the wind like polar bears, summer is a’coming in. Other emails then start to trickle in from the group. Viv attaches a few photos of the trip from last summer. Allie uploads an entire file of 600 photos to my Dropbox. I send out a link to an island for sale off the coast of Breiðafjörður. “Can we all chip in and buy this?” I write in the subject line. It sounds like a preposterous proposal, but I mean it and I’m hoping that someone will take me up on it.
Eve sends a video link attached with the message, “What an adventure!” I open it up. It’s a short film of undulating broken ice, a place (not named) where Inuit men and women lower themselves down a treacherous ice chute to the bottom of a fissure during the low tide, risking their lives to collect pails of mussels, then climbing out by rope ladder before the tide comes rushing back in and sweeps them out to sea.
I get the message. We all get the message. The ice, the Arctic sea, the scary frigid turbulent water, the cry of the skuas, the endless white nights of the true North, Thule, Thingeyrar, Iceland.
I buy my tickets. “I’m in,” I type back.
BOOK III
THE TROT (BROKK)
A two-beat diagonal gait, faster than a walk. The horse lifts a hind leg and a front leg simultaneously, and in midstride has all four of its hooves suspended off the ground.
2009
The Situation
In 2009 tourists are getting more plentiful and Icelandair adds an extra flight that leaves at 2:10 P.M. I happily forgo the banging turbulence over the coast of Newfoundland of the midnight flight. Halfway through the day flight, I look out of my window and notice a few scattered icebergs. Then the few become many, white dots in a dark ocean, like stars in a night sky that amass into the larger ice shelf of the tip of Greenland. From 30,000 feet, it all looks like snow-covered mountains at first, but as we fly directly over, I can see the melted ice coursing through the valleys, dumping a cloudy, sludge-like green water into the Arctic Ocean.
My father would have appreciated the sight from the comfort of this plane. Or he would have shivered at the memory. My father died in January from congestive heart failure, and since his death, my mother has taken to dithering and forgetfulness fulltime. Either grief mimics dementia, or dementia sets in quickly when your spouse of sixty-six years dies. She now gets lost when driving, so I take her keys away. She has three checkbooks hidden in random places and hasn’t brought down the balance in any of them. She has been the victim of credit card scams and exorbitant fees and her debt is multiplying, so I take over her finances. I hire a woman to come into her condo three days a week to take her shopping and to bathe her. I still see her only once a week, but her conversation is reduced to a few repetitive sentences: “What day is it?” or “Did I eat lunch?” or “Where do your brothers live?”
The tall, large man sitting next to me in the aisle seat is a Texan who naturally settles in to tell me a story, his life story, whether I want to hear it or not (turns out I do, I’m always open to the stories of traveling strangers). He’s sixty-four, he says, and it’s his first trip to Iceland. He tells me he is half-Icelandic, and I tell him he looks it. “Yeah? Really?” He has light-blue eyes and the kind of blonde hair that doesn’t turn gray or silver, but rather turns into a lighter shade of yellow. It’s hair color I’ve only seen in Iceland. He explains he’s going to meet his extended Icelandic family for the first time. His father was stationed in Iceland during WWII when he met his mother. “Oh her family didn’t like that—that my mother was pregnant, that he was in the American Army. She was the black sheep of her family. After she moved with my father to the US, they never talked to her again.”
After his mother died, he wrote to his long-lost relatives in Iceland, and they were eager to meet him (being of a different generation and less judgmental). He researched the history of Iceland during the war and the Allied occupation. At one point, he tells me, there were 40,000 US troops in and around Reykjavík, and the native population was only 40,000. The Icelandic women who cavorted with these soldiers were cast out, considered prostitutes. Many were left pregnant by foreign servicemen, a condition euphemistically called Ástandið—the situation. “Luckily my father married his Icelandic girlfriend and brought her home to Texas, and she never looked back.” He might be half-Icelandic, but he acts so big-hatted Texan that I wonder what his relatives in Hafnarfjörður will make of him.
“You never know what men do during war,” my mother used to say. “You can’t hold them to their vows or anything like that when they’re going through a war.” Two of her favorite expressions were “ignorance is bliss” and “what you don’t know won’t hurt you.” These sentiments have sustained her. I’ve heard them my whole life, but lately she has been more specific. “Who knows what your father did in England when he was stationed there. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a girlfriend or if
he had a child over there.”
Who knows what he did. But if my mother has been holding on to lifelong secrets, I wish she’d been more forthright with me earlier in her life. Am I supposed to go searching for a possible half sibling based on my mother’s shoddy memory? Her doctor told me her carotid arteries are 90 percent blocked. Who knows if it’s not the arteriosclerosis talking?
What We Carry with Us
Over the past year, Iceland’s economy has tanked. Three bankers and three banks are being held responsible for the financial collapse. It sounds dire, but when we arrive in Reykjavík it doesn’t look like the chaos that erupted in Argentina when their system collapsed. It’s a nice, orderly, Nordic collapse: there are no runs on the banks, no one is standing in long lines to withdraw cash, cars aren’t being lit on fire. People did demonstrate against government corruption back in January, notably on the same day that Obama was being sworn into office and we were having our Camelot moment.
On January 20, thousands of Icelanders gathered outside the Parliament building banging on pots and pans, pelting the politicians with eggs and fish. They called it the Kitchen Revolution. That’s how you get things done in Iceland, demonstrate and clean out the fridge at the same time. And it worked: the prime minister was ousted and the bankers went to jail.
The financial disaster is, literally, altering the skyline: all construction in Reykjavík has stopped. Skeletal remains of office towers stand half-finished. The much ballyhooed opera house, Harpa, was started and put on hold.
This year there are seven of us and we’ve split up into two Jeeps. Me, Eve, Sylvie, and Viv in one car; Allie (Eve’s former business partner from Atlanta), Britt, and a new person, Pippa, in the other.
Sylvie gives me the lowdown on Pippa, who is recovering from a blood cancer. Up until her bout with cancer she was a senior VP for a financial investment firm. She told Sylvie that the stress of that job caused the cancer, so she quit. I’m guessing she’s the person that needs saving this trip.
“She’s a friend of a really good friend of mine who asked me if Pippa could come to Iceland with us,” Sylvie says.
“It’s great she realized that the stress was killing her and that she quit. I hope she gets to heal here,” Eve says.
So far, from the one day I’ve spent with Pippa, I’d say her healing program is heavily dependent on the strength of her credit card. When we stop at Astund, she easily drops $2,000 on riding apparel and gifts, and another $1,000 at the women’s wool co-op in Borgarnes. She is single-handedly reviving the Icelandic economy.
There’s another conversation going on in the front seat between Sylvie and Eve. They are talking in low tones as if they don’t want anyone to hear, but I am a skilled eavesdropper, able to hold a conversation with one person and simultaneously listen to another conversation. Eve’s farm is in financial trouble. The costs of running the barn are “untenable: the stable manager’s salary, the vet bills, the electric bills.” Sylvie says, “people who board their horses should pay.” Eve makes excuses for the freeloaders: “They can’t afford the cost of the board and I want to be able to give it to them.”
It is not only the farm: Eve and Jack’s business is in trouble, too. The recession has affected everything. Eve tells Sylvie, “It’ll work out, it’s gonna work out, you’ll see. The universe will provide. And we’ve got these Chinese investors interested and Jack is over there now meeting with them.”
As if on cue, Eve’s phone rings and it is Jack. “Hi, honeeey,” Eve sings out. “We’re on our way to Sibba’s uncle’s farm in Snæfellsnes. Yeah, they’re good. Yeah, it’s beautiful, you know Iceland, it’s like nowhere else.”
Instead of listening in on the conversation, I take out my phone and make my “pill reminder” call to my mother. As we are passing Hvalfjörður and the sun is sparkling on the bay, I hear my mother put the phone down and get her pills. Then I hear them spilling on the floor. I tell her to leave them on the floor and call one of her condo neighbors and ask for her help. Then I call the pharmacy to call the neighbor to give out directions for my mother. After many phone calls between pharmacist and neighbor, and back to my mother, it is straightened out.
In the five years we’ve been coming here, we’re depending more and more on our cell phones and laptops. It used to be we couldn’t communicate with people from home that often, especially not from the car. But the “world is too much with us” and we are spending more time in Iceland connected to home and to work. That old feeling of escaping to Iceland is disappearing. We are carrying everything in our lives along with us.
When we get off our phones, Eve is more upbeat, and her voice is louder as she tells Sylvie that Jack is making good deals over in China. “It’s the law of attraction; it will all work out.”
Viv has been texting with her husband. She snaps her phone shut. “Well, it’s worse than I thought. Jonathan is being deployed to Iraq sooner than expected.” Her son joined the army after finishing college because he could not find a job. “We knew it was coming, but we didn’t know it was coming that fast.”
“Oh shit, Viv,” I say.
“Yeah, oh shit,” she says.
But then the conversation dies. Americans can talk about the war as a generic horror, or a political travesty, but at least in my pocket of the Northeast, they seem to have difficulty talking specifically about the men and women in the armed services. We are embarrassed that our country is in the war; that people like Viv’s son, who we presume has other options in life, has joined nonetheless. Maybe, for our little group, the juxtaposition of green and peaceful Iceland with the desert of Iraq would just make any conversation seem trite and petty. And the universe does not provide equally for everyone. Or rather, it is limited, picky, and fickle about its provisions. I’m not sure why no one says any of the appropriate things, or what the appropriate things are to say. Maybe there’s not much you can say to a mother whose son is about to head off to a hot and deadly desert war. Still, I am embarrassed that this entire carload of chatty women can’t come up with anything supportive to say and that Viv is left with our uncomfortable silence.
Once we get up to Thingeyrar, Viv and I walk every night and she talks it out. “I feel like I got punched in the stomach. I can’t breathe,” she tells me. “What did I do wrong? I gave my kids a typical upper middle-class upbringing, and one joins the army and the other can’t get his life together. Why couldn’t I get the sons who go to MIT?”
We pick up and pocket the magic red rocks down by the lake, paying extra attention to the shape and the power they might impart. We avoid the Arctic tern nests so as not to unintentionally harm them. Her walking speed is brisker, her nervous energy inexhaustible. We go the full six kilometers to the Ring Road and back. I watch over her on these walks the way she watches over me out on the trail. We walk and walk and the midnight sun follows us. And she tells me, “I have to keep this place and this sunlight with me all winter. It’s going to be a long winter.”
Sylvie in Love
A funny thing happens on the way to Thingeyrar this year. Sylvie falls in love. She falls oh so hard and oh so briefly, in Snæfellsnes, where else, the mystical Jules Vernian center of the earth and, according to new age mythology, the center of a feminine energy vortex that causes supernatural phenomena. How appropriate.
In Borgarnes, we meet up with two of Eve’s Icelandic friends, Sibba and Ljotur, and we follow behind their van as they lead us to the peninsula of Snæfellsnes. Sibba’s uncle Ólof owns, what else, an enormous horse farm here. We drive west down the straight, two-lane road that cuts through the valley, acres of bright green farmland on either side, a lonely farmhouse or out building dotting the otherwise empty fields. To our left, the farmland ends at the ocean; to the right, the fields back up to tall cliffs etched with silvery waterfalls. Straight ahead, but miles and miles in the distance, is Snæfellsjökull, a purple-hued, snowcapped glacial mountain. We have never been to Snæfellsnes before, though it is not far off the Ring Road.
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br /> Viv says, “This place feels different.”
Eve says, “Yeah, what is it about this place?”
“That mountain in the distance makes it look like Shangri-La.”
“It casts a different light on everything,” says Viv. “It’s serene.”
We meet Uncle Ólof in the driveway and we start with the introductions. All seven of us. Allie, who is friendly and forthright, begins by telling him her name and sticking out her hand to shake, so we all follow suit. But by the fifth person, we all wish it would stop, exhausted by the introductions and sure the polite Ólof wants to bolt. But he is Sibba’s uncle, so he gives us a tour of his farm.
He is a tall, lean, elderly man with a handsome weathered face. He has courtly manners, like a rare and long-lost breed of gentleman. Naturally, his English is perfect with that utterly charming Icelandic lilt. He has been an aeronautical engineer, a businessman, lived all over the world, including Connecticut, and in his retirement bought this farm.
We tromp all around his farm, following him single file over the rocky tussocks. But Sylvie, like an alpha mare, quickly pulls up front and has a conversation with Ólof that the rest of us can’t hear, though we can hear she is making him laugh. He shows us his prized pregnant mares out in the fields and explains how he is building up his breeding stock. He owns eighty horses. Sylvie sticks close to his side. When he takes us into a barn full of shiny new tractors and farm equipment, Sylvie raises her eyebrows and whispers to us while he is getting on a tractor, “He likes big toys. He likes spending his money on big machines.”
It is a typical summer day in Iceland: cloudy with intermittent rain, then head-splittingly bright and sunny for a minute; then a fog rolls in from the sea, enveloping us briefly before settling in around the snow at the top of Snæfellsjökull. When the fog lifts, we whisper to each other in astonishment, “Wow, oh wow, oh my, oh wow.” I feel as if a spell has befallen us that makes us see only beauty—the sea is a glassy cobalt blue; the famed volcanic mountain is wreathed in wispy clouds; the farmland is a deep and verdant green. When Iceland is green in the summer, it is a rich, bright color-of-life green that your senses can barely take in. Your lungs expand as you breathe it in, full of extra oxygen.