by Tory Bilski
It must be all this oxygen that gets to Sylvie. While the rest of us are being stirred by the mystical, seduced by nature, Sylvie is basically hooking up. After the walk, Ólof invites us all up to the second floor of the barn for coffee. It is a sign of a rich farm when there is not only a full-sized kitchen in the barn, but an apartment for the barn manager. The kitchen also has a picture window overlooking the indoor arena where we watch a trainer with her horse—it is a very nice farm indeed. While Ólof sets up the coffee maker, we watch as Sylvie works it.
She gushes on about the farm, “Oh the view, oh the horses, oh the tidal island.” One minute they are discussing a silver dun horse Sylvie has taken a liking to, the next minute she asks, “Can we come back next year?”
This is forward of her, but I like what she’s doing, and I always like those promising words, “next year.”
“Of course,” he says. It is hard to read if he is bewildered by her, amused, or just unfailingly polite. The coffee is poured and so is the heated fresh milk, a rich yellowy cream from the neighboring farm.
“Oh this milk is the best,” Sylvie says. “Oh this coffee is divine.” Sylvie drinks three cups of coffee and can’t stop talking and flirting with him. She jumps up when the coffee part of the tour is over to help Ólof clean up, as if she has already moved in and is hosting our visit with him, and we are the ungainly guests who look politely at the family photos on the wall and the books on the coffee table.
As we go back out to look at his horses in the fields, Sylvie hangs over the fence and picks out the horse she wants to ride next year, a dappled silver mare.
“How about that one?” she asks.
“No, that horse is slow and old,” Ólof explains.
“Then that’s the horse for me!”
She catches him off guard with her honest humor, never one for false bravado, and he sincerely appears to be enjoying her company, preferring her company over ours. We are the stepchildren getting in the way.
He has more to tell us about the farm and points out a few horses he hopes will go to Landsmót next year. The dark bay is an 8.9 in tölt; the palomino a 9.0 in pace. We make noisy sounds of being impressed. He isn’t just a farmer; he is a serious breeder. Landsmót is the biennial competition, the gold standard of horse shows, where the finest horses in the country are rated. Like Holar, it is for insiders of the Icelandic horse world, which we like to consider ourselves. Though back home a few more Icelandic horse farms have opened up, particularly out west, it is still a rare specialty interest horse breed. But out of all of us, only Eve has gone to Landsmót, and that was in the late nineties with Jack and one of the original horse importers. “There’s lots of pageantry and singing,” she told us, “you sit outside on the grass in the rain and whatever. You eat this dried haddock with butter and drink beer. You can’t believe how good it tastes. It seems to go with the rain and the horse show.”
Saying goodbye to Ólof, Sylvie trails behind and we wait for her in the car. When she gets in, she is humming, quite pleased with herself. “It’s all arranged. We’re coming back next year and spending two days before going to Helga’s. He’s going to provide the horses and we’re riding out to the tidal island.”
“How romantic,” we tease her.
“Was I that obvious?”
“Sylvie, you were hot stuff!” Eve says.
“You’re all invited, too. You can thank me now.”
And it does seem like a great plan. Two days in Snæfellsnes, Uncle Ólof’s farm, the ride to the same tidal island that is in one of the sagas.
Sylvie noisily does her intake of air. “He was soooo handsome, wasn’t he?”
“He was.”
“I don’t know what came over me. It was the coffee talking. I must have had six cups.”
“Three.”
“Only three? But I had a double espresso at the roadside Kaffitar—my heart is racing.” She’s quiet for a few seconds.
“He has a wife, you know,” she says cheerily.
“And you have a husband.”
Sylvie thinks about this for a while. “You don’t know me, I’m a terrible flirt. I make such trouble sometimes.” She screeches, pleased with herself, and then falls silent, leaving us to wonder what trouble she made before that she is referring to.
When we reach Helga’s, it is the first thing Sylvie talks about, while standing in the driveway, before we even bring our luggage into the guesthouse.
“Helga, we went to this Uncle Ólof’s farm. He has eighty horses, over a thousand hectares, whatever that translates to. And he has a barn just for his tractors and other machines. He likes his big machines, you know, he’s one of those men with their big toys . . . ha! And next year, we’re going to ride there for two days before we come up here. There’s this tidal island . . .”
Helga takes it all in with a wise, bemused look—Sylvie’s enthusiasm for the man, his farm, and horses.
“It looks like you are a little in love with him, my friend,” Helga says, slyly prodding her.
Sylvie lets out her parrot’s screech. “Ha, you know me so well. I’m such a flirt.”
“I guess you are.”
“But he’s married,” Sylvie admits.
“Uh-huh, and so are you.”
“I don’t know what came over me. I was out of control, wasn’t I?”
We chime in:
“You were smitten,” I say.
“You were hot stuff, Sylvie,” Eve says.
“Sheesh, she pushed us all out of the way so she could get close to him on the trail,” Allie says.
Sylvie shakes her head. “You know what? There are all different kinds of love. Maybe this is one of those romantic friendships, okay? Let’s call it that.”
It could be Sylvie’s caffeine level was near toxicity and that made her so forthright. And it could have been Ólof’s handsomeness or his hectares of green valley and his oh so many horses. But I like to think it was a spell cast by mystical Snæfellsnes, a center of the feminine energy vortex, a source of supernatural phenomena. And that at a pivotal point in their dalliance, there was a moment of enchantment as the fog lifted and the sun broke through and the ice-covered mountain seemed to be smiling on us all.
Am I starting to believe in all this? The more time I spend in Iceland, the more I like to hold it as a place in my mind where reality and magic are conflated, and where worlds I don’t know of, lives beyond empirical reach, are possible.
The Herd Changes, the Herd Charges
Disa isn’t with us this year. She is living in Berlin with a rock musician. “Disa is in love,” Helga tells us over dinner the first night. “And she left her horses here.”
“Disa in love?” I can’t imagine it. She always said she traveled so much, she would have to find a man like those little bottle of shampoos, that she could pack up in her suitcase.
“Yes, it happened finally. She was at a rock concert in Reykjavík and she was near the stage dancing . . . you know how she dances? It’s hard not to notice Disa when she dances. She’s a wild dancer and makes these big movements and the guitar player noticed her, and the rest is history, as they say. She moved to Germany with him.”
Disa has been replaced by Frieda, a serious, petite German woman, only twenty-two years old, one of Helga’s interns from Holar. When we first meet her in the barn, we ask her questions all at once, barraging her, as is our way. She gets flustered and takes a step back, looking to Helga for help. She later tells Helga she has too much work to do and can’t join us for dinner.
And our first dinner is with Helga and Oli, who has cooked a welcoming feast: leg of lamb, boiled and buttered potatoes, salad, and peas. Oli calls it “the typical Sunday dinner” when he was growing up. Pippa helps herself to a stingy portion of only the salad and peas. Unlike many Americans who will proudly tell you right off that they are a vegetarian and vehemently express their complete distain for carnivores, the British Pippa waits to be asked. And then, all she says, is that she no lo
nger desires any animal or animal product, that she’s a vegan.
Pippa hasn’t said much at all so far. She has that stereotypical British reserve that I generally only see in movies, and whether she is approving or disapproving, she gives you the same reaction: the merest of smiles, which dissolves in a few seconds. You have no idea what she’s thinking. But being a typical BBC and Masterpiece Theatre devotee, tamping down my tendency toward Anglophilia isn’t an option. And it doesn’t help that Pippa looks straight out of one of the shows I like to watch—like she’s the aunt of one of those beautiful, but bedeviled-by-love young heroines, who turns to her aunt for sage advice and is bustled away by a distracting tour of the continent to get over the perpetrating cad. She even has the received pronunciation thing going on. I think to hell with my usual tendency to be cautious with fast friendships. I am eager to befriend her. She will have lots of dry, witty perceptions of life to impart while we laugh over drinks or tea. I can’t wait to say, “My friend, Pippa.”
But so far, she’s impenetrable. My conversations with her end abruptly in hard silences as soon as it’s her turn to ask me what I do for a living, what I like to eat. Her quick little smiles evaporate as soon as they appear, and I’m left wondering if I imagined them. She is traveling with the wrong group if she wanted a week of silent retreat. I try to channel my inner Eve, and chalk this up to her recent bout of cancer and a meditative state of mind. Maybe she’s just happy to be alive, happy to be in Iceland and she is finding her inner peace.
Mares give birth in the fields here, unaided, unsheltered, without a vet on call for medical intervention. Foals have to adapt to the environment, and horses have evolved so that foals stand within minutes of their birth. A foal is summed up immediately upon birth for its gait and size. And later a yearling will be evaluated again for defect, whether in conformation or attitude, or anything that compromises its usefulness. An Icelandic farmer has no compunction about weeding out the weaker horses. Horsemeat is still eaten in Iceland.
A set of adorable twins were born two weeks earlier on the farm. They are very small and Helga wonders out loud if they can serve as children’s ponies. What she doesn’t say out loud is that she is equally weighing the possibility of selling them to a butcher.
This is hard for our group to understand. Back home, we give every animal a chance. Dogs have $5,000 surgeries for hip dysplasia or $10,000 cancer treatments. There are retirement farms that take in lame, sick, too-old-to-ride horses with their list of prescribed medicines like someone in a nursing home. Most horse owners I know can’t put their horses down and will spend all their savings so that their horse can hobble out the rest of their days in a field. But horse rescue sanctuaries in Iceland aren’t a thing. Animal cruelty is considered despicable for sure, but saving hurt, damaged, or very old, unproductive horses is deemed crueler, and selfish.
At the same time, Icelanders are very protective of their horses. One of the benefits of banning entry of other horses for all these centuries is that they are disease-free. Horses don’t need to be inoculated in Iceland because there are no equine diseases in the country. They have strict rules for visitors who ride while in Iceland. If you are visiting a horse farm, used leather boots, gloves, helmets, or saddles cannot be brought in. If you must bring them in, you need a vet’s certification that they have been disinfected properly. Though lately I have noticed that this rule is lax, and it is basically the honor system for visitors. I am never checked at customs anymore.
After dinner, we walk out to the pastures with the mares and the foals. I have been told, we all have, that we should leave the foals alone to avoid imprinting the human touch on horses at so young an age.
It’s hard to resist petting the foals with their brand new bodies on stilt legs. We scratch their ears, touch their little withers, then quickly pull our hands away as if guilty of horse coddling. We wander over to a less crowded pasture and Allie takes a bunch of pictures of us. She has us pose in a line, one way and then another. As we are posing and she is taking photos, we hear a growing thundering of hooves. A herd of young horses, maybe thirty three-to-four-year-olds, are galloping toward us.
“Is this a stampede?”
“I don’t know.”
We can’t move; we stand transfixed as they gallop full speed toward us.
“Are they going to run us down?” I know, from my extensive reading of National Park pamphlets, never to run from bears, wolves, or moose. I’m a little less sure about a rambunctious herd of three-year-old horses.
Allie, always sensing a photo opportunity, focuses her camera on the horses.
They get closer and closer, gaining speed, and we keep asking each other, “Should we move?” But we don’t. We stand frozen together, in awe, while Allie continues taking pictures.
The horses get about ten feet from us, and suddenly veer off right and left around us, like a school of fish. Then, having shown us what they can do, they circle back to us at a slower pace, curious about us. They move in between us and close up tight against us, so that we are squeezed in by their bodies. They nuzzle our jackets, nip at the pockets, snort in our faces, imprinting us into the herd.
Stallions and Mares, Oh My
Summer is mating season on the farm, and the horses, no surprise, do it au natural. No turkey-baster artificial insemination for these mares. And though the farmers may let them breed and birth naturally, they still choose the sire carefully. They bring a prize-winning stallion to each farm and fence him in with a herd of mares.
So one evening after we’ve put our horses out to pasture, a truck pulls up to Helga’s and backs into the driveway. We can hear a horse kicking the sides of the wooden trailer. Gunnar and the other men unlatch the back of the truck and slowly go in and carefully bring out the stallion on a halter and lead rope. It looks like a dangerous job.
The black bay stallion comes out stomping his hooves, throwing his head around, nostrils flaring, neighing with a nervous wild energy. He is ragged looking, crazed and skinny like a coke-addled rock star, like Mick Jagger in his heyday, full of sexual swagger. Helga explains to us that he is a very highly ranked stallion who spends his summer touring farms. She has ninety mares, so the stallion gets a week with thirty mares each, and rotates with another thirty, and then another thirty. This is the stallion’s life for the three months of his summer tour.
“Poor guy, strung out on too much sex,” Sylvie says.
But Helga says, “Yes, but it’s not an easy life for stallions. They spend their lives separated from other horses except for mating season. It’s a very lonely life.”
Eve says even on her small farm in the Berkshires, her stallion leads a desperate solitary life. “My Glitfaxi, he spends all day in his stall kicking at the walls. He spends his time outdoors alone in the pasture, except for the few times I let him mate with my mares. It’s sad to watch. He’s like a kept man confined to solitary with the occasional conjugal visit. Only the barn manager can ride him.”
Sitting at the dinner table that night we have a perfectly framed view out the window at the unfolding mating scene. The stallion goes from one mare to the next, barely taking time to graze in between trysts.
“No wonder he’s so skinny.”
“Doesn’t he get exhausted?”
“He’s quite good at his job.”
We’re exhausted simply from watching all this rampant hormonal activity. Periodically we put our forks down to declare, “He’s still at it.”
When he isn’t mating, he’s watching over his harem. When Allie goes up to the fence to take pictures of the new foals, he is immediately suspicious. He quickly trots over to the fence and neighs threateningly in her face.
Allie comes back in. “Sheesh, not only is he horny, he’s possessive. He’s got thirty mares to keep him busy and he gets mad at me for taking a picture.”
Viv says, “I was watching. He saw you from way over on the other side of the field. Stallions are super vigilant. You could see his head swivel alm
ost the entire 360 degrees.”
Helga comes over and leaves a dessert with us that Oli made: a still-warm marriage cake with berries that melt into the buttery crust and the ever-present bowl of fresh whipped cream. Eve takes a tiny piece of cake. Then another tiny piece, then another. She licks the back of her fork. I go back for a second slice, not tiny, and extra whipped cream, heaping. It’s only the fourth day and I can’t fit into the jeans I wore on the plane and I can’t stop helping myself to seconds or thirds and an extra scoop after all that.
Now the stallion is closer to the fence, closer to our window, and he mounts another mare. But the cake has taken our interest away and by this point we’re like ho-hum, horse sex, is that all this guy ever does? Pass the pot of tea, please.
Except that one horse, a pretty white mare, goes down after he is finished with her. “Is she hurt?” Eve rushes to the window and we crowd around her, staring out. “She’s not getting up.”
“We need to tell Helga,” Viv says.
The stallion is hanging over the mare, sniffing her, nudging her gently with his nose. Suddenly, to us, this is an equine love story and we go all gushy, anthropomorphizing our horsey hero.
“Oh, will you look at that.”
“I think we should tell Helga,” Viv says.
“He’s making sure she’s alright.”
“C’mon honey, get up,” Eve says. “She’s the love of his life.”
“Yeah, the others were just procreational flings. Tell her, they meant nothing.”