Wild Horses of the Summer Sun

by Tory Bilski

  “This is a great idea. I love this idea,” Sylvie says. “Margot could be one of the other people. She is a therapeutic trainer. She would be interested.”

  I offer up a number. “If I sold my house, I could come up with a couple hundred thousand.” In the back of my mind is the nagging feeling about leaving my mother behind, not to mention relegating my husband to a small, shitty apartment five days a week because his livelihood is in New Haven, while I live the horsewoman’s life up in the country.

  “I might be able to come up with $100,000 out of my retirement fund,” Sylvie says.

  To Eve, that’s chump change. With a few ominous words, she dashes all our spur-of-the-moment, admittedly in the infancy stage, change of life plans: “We owe the Chinese a lot of money. Millions.” She makes it sound like some gang is going to kneecap them if they don’t cough up the dough. “We need the money from the farm to pay off our debt.”

  Allie stays mum because she knows their business and knows the Chinese partners she is referring to.

  Sylvie and I remain quiet, too. We can’t come up with millions. We’ve never known millions. Pippa could, but she doesn’t offer anything. Thankfully, too. I would not want to share a horse farm with her.

  We are only five this year: Me, Eve, Sylvie, Allie, and Pippa. “Five is the perfect number of people,” Sylvie says, cheerfully. “Let’s not forget that. Five.” But it doesn’t feel perfect.

  For one, I am missing Viv. She went to meet her son who is on furlough in Texas after eight months in Iraq. She emails me about what it’s like to see him: they take him out to a restaurant and he will only sit at a table where he has full view of the room, meaning a corner spot where he can have his back to the wall. He’s vigilant every time a person walks in, Viv writes, and every fork or knife that mistakenly drops on the floor makes him flinch.

  And two, the idea of Pippa being my new best friend is not panning out. During the year, we all send each other emails, passing along pictures or articles about Iceland, cheerful reminders of summers past and promises of summers to come. She never once returned the friendly gesture, never once commented. More troubling is that she didn’t say hello to me at the airport. I said, “Hi, Pippa!” and she ducked into her bag to look for something, like a third-rate spy. And, now in the car, she never answers me when I ask her a question. She pretends she doesn’t hear. I have to repeat myself three times, only to finally get her reaction: that two-second upturn of her lips that I used to tell myself was a benevolent, if mysterious, smile, but which now looks an awful lot like a passing flick of impatience, or worse, intolerance.

  I know she’s only one-fifth of the company this year, but, unlike Sylvie, I’m wishing we had more people with us—the math is so much better. I’d rather have eight people, so that Pippa was only one-eighth of the company (and she could travel in a second car). I would take any of the oddballs Eve invited in the past to save their horse-deprived souls. But I remind myself that while Pippa has all the advantages of wealth, more so than anyone on these trips, she doesn’t have the ace in the hole, health. She hasn’t passed the five-year mark without cancer to label herself officially in remission. She may have more on her mind than social niceties and being my friend.

  The other person missing is Britt. “She grew up,” Sylvie says. “She’s twenty and at U Mass. Holar is no longer on her horizon. And you know what Helga said about her? She said Brittany would never get into Holar. She’s not tough enough. Those Holar girls are made of steel. Helga never forgot the time Britt got scared on her horse and started to cry. You can’t cry at Holar when you get into trouble.”

  “She’s a lovely girl,” Eve sighs. “And I’m glad we had all those years here with her.”

  I ask them about Lisa, about Mel, and the others who traveled with us in years past. I ask if they have any interest in traveling with us again.

  “You know Iceland,” Sylvie says. “For some people it changes your life, for others it’s just a trip.”

  Sylvie tells us her new house is finished and her husband has moved in. “It’s working out. It turns out he was tired all the time and wouldn’t do anything because he had a weak heart. They put in a pacemaker and he’s a new person. He’s building a man cave in the basement.” But then she blurts out to Eve, “Where am I going to keep my horse when you sell your farm?”

  Eve says, “Let’s not go there. We only just put it on the market.”

  “Maybe it won’t sell,” Sylvie reminds her.

  “I still like the idea of all of us chipping in,” I say from the back seat, sulkily and not quite willing to let the topic die just yet. But no one, not even Sylvie, will take up the subject again.

  Sylvie brings up an accident she and Eve had in the spring. “I was riding Snild and Eve was riding Glitfaxi out on the trail, and a mountain bike came up behind us, and it spooked the horses.”

  “Glitfaxi threw me immediately but Snild took off with Sylvie at a gallop.”

  “And then she threw me at top speed,” Sylvie says, at high volume. “I cracked my titanium helmet. You know how hard that is to crack? I had a concussion for weeks. But it could have been a lot worse. The helmet saved my life. I’m very nervous about riding now.”

  “I’m always nervous about riding,” I tell her. “I’m so nervous about it, I can’t even talk about it, because I think if I talk about it, I’ll talk myself out of riding or into falling. So, I don’t ever bring it up.”

  It’s like I’ve imparted some secret kernel of riding wisdom. Sylvie says, “Oh, I didn’t know that. You have the same fears, you just don’t say them out loud? That’s so smart.”

  Eve exclaims: “You are so right! We should never talk about our falls, our fears, or accidents. That’s brilliant!”

  I have difficulty believing my mind-bending game of pretending bad things don’t, can’t, won’t happen, has anything to do with intelligence. At best, it is delusional self-preservation.

  “Let’s do that! When it comes to our fears, let’s just not go there. Let’s never talk about our accidents. Let’s not dwell on the bad.” Eve is keen on this, but I thought I learned it from her—the negative attracts negative theory—and now she’s acting like she’s hearing it for the first time. She really is not quite herself.

  Snæfellsnes Revisited

  Outside of Reykjavík, the roads still have a white wispy layer of volcanic ash from the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. As we drive over it, it rises and disappears like smoke from a massive smoldering campfire.

  We are caravanning behind Sibba and Ljotur. We lost them as we went toward Mosfellsbær, but find them again at the bakery in Borgarnes.

  As planned, we head to Uncle Ólof’s farm. I’m hoping this will cheer up Sylvie. But last year’s plan for riding his horses out to the tidal island of the sagas, of Sylvie on his slow silver dun mare, of the lushly green and miraculous meridian center of the universe is upended when we get there: Ólof’s horses are in the middle of the flu epidemic.

  And Sylvie isn’t quite her usual loquacious self. In fact, she barely talks at all. A year has blinked by and changed everything. She hangs back, doesn’t push in front to get close to Ólof. She is—dare I say it—shy, especially without the three cups of coffee that, just one year before, so effectively triggered her precocious flirting.

  The rest of us have to fill in for the suddenly quiet Sylvie. And Ólof—as if knowing we teased her last year, perhaps hearing that her crush on him was our silly fun—tries valiantly to engage Sylvie. Since his horses are all sick and we can’t ride, he drives us around in an enormous four-wheel-drive Escalade and gives us a more thorough tour of his farm than he did the year before. From one end of his enormous property to the other, the big wheels ford rivers and muddy valleys as we pass his horses recuperating in the fields. We make Sylvie sit up front with Ólof, but she still won’t say much. Eve, Allie, and I, almost feeling bad for the lord of the manor, chat amiably, trying to make up for Sylvie’s bewildering shyness. We get stu
ck in the mud a few times, a metaphor I’m sure, and Ólof has to rock the SUV back and forth to spin us out of the muck.

  When we return from our drive, we are invited into his house, where his large extended family sits around the main room watching women’s soccer on TV. No one looks up as our group, five women, not in our usual raucous mood but certainly audible, enter the house and stand in the kitchen. No one comes over to speak to us to see who we are, and I wonder again about the general standoffishness of Icelanders. Of course, their reticence likely has nothing to do with us—Ólof’s wife, who was almost completely paralyzed the prior year from a stroke, is lying upstairs in her bedroom. No more teasing Sylvie about being a flirt. Instead, gamely, she painfully extracts the ages and names of Ólof’s grandchildren, but we are otherwise forced to talk amongst ourselves, and after the minimal amount of polite time spent, we leave. There are no plans made for next year when the horses would be better.

  Driving away from the farm, we ask Sylvie what’s up, why was she so quiet? “Oh, he’s married. He’s a family man. And I’m married.” She stresses, “I was just being silly last year. Anyway, the good news is that it doesn’t matter, I’m over it. I’m post-men. You know what Buddha says, life is about letting go.”

  We follow Sibba and Ljotur to Stykkishólmur, an old, formerly Danish town on the Breiðafjörður. Like many Icelanders, they spend their summer vacations driving around the country in a small camper. They have both retired from Icelandair (she as a flight attendant, he as a mechanical engineer), and their camper van is, fittingly, packed as tight as a plane. We stop near the dock for a picnic and from the overhead cupboards they bring out our lunch: reindeer meat pâté, salmon smoked in sheep dung, gravlax, cheese and flatbread served with a homemade jam of local currants, and hothouse cucumbers and tomatoes. They give us plastic cups of tea with sugar cubes or Nescafé instant coffee with milk. It is utterly, indescribably delicious, like all the simple, unexpected, unpretentious meals that you somehow remember for the rest of your life.

  We part company with Sibba and Ljotur on the eve of the summer solstice. Ljotur is full of jolly, midsummer mischief as he tells us about the Icelandic tradition on the longest day of the year, that the man of the house must run around his home, in this case a camper’s van, naked, at midnight, and then roll in the dew of the grass. He omits what happens next, and Sibba is laughing and nodding agreeably with him. We have to be at Helga’s by dinner, so we regrettably have to leave, missing his midnight naked run ’n roll.

  The minute we turn off the Ring Road to Thingeyrar we become pensive. We’re not even sure we will have horses to ride. Helga had emailed Eve and Sylvie that a lot of her horses were sick, but that some may be well by the time we arrive.

  Helga greets us in the driveway. “And . . . how was Uncle Ólof’s?” She has taken to using the title “uncle” facetiously.

  And out it pours from us, all talking at once: we couldn’t ride because of the horse flu, we drove around in his big Escalade instead. Sylvie becomes the most animated, as if she hadn’t spent the entire time with him completely mute. She shows Helga a photo book of the farm that Ólof gave her, and spills her story to Helga, like Dorothy telling Auntie Em about Oz. “And he has eight stallions and 4,000 acres and owns the farm next door, too, another 1,200 acres. He has over 100 horses. He also has a river teeming with salmon!”

  “Huh,” Helga says. “So did sparks fly between Ólof and you?”

  Sylvie brushes it off. “Oh, that was so last year. I’m off men. Didn’t I tell you? I’m post-men.”

  I hope not. I appreciate Sylvie’s love of love, one that denies it’s ever too late in life for a summer crush, for a moment of pure whimsy and unlikely possibilities. Even if it is only an affair of the imagination (often the best kind). I like the fact that Sylvie doesn’t capitulate to age, or practicality.

  Herd Instinct

  All is not well at Helga’s farm. Most of the horses are sick with flu and can’t stand up in their stalls. Thoka is in the throes of the worst of it. Lying in her stall, covered in her own muck, her white coat dirtied to a matted brown, she struggles for breath, wheezing and coughing. She looks to be near death, but Helga reassures us that the flu hasn’t killed a single horse yet in Iceland. They get terribly sick, but they all seem to be surviving it.

  We have to wait a couple days to ride until a few of the horses get better. We drive around a lot, but this makes me restless. Iceland to me is horses. I am almost regretting coming this year. It breaks my heart to see the horses so ill, and it’s affecting the group, too. Riding gave us a common purpose. Our treks were our collective narrative, our team sport: something to revisit, retell, and exaggerate over a beer. Otherwise, we are a disparate group.

  I think of Thingeyrar as Helga and Gunnar’s farm, but they only have title to half of it—the other half is owned by the Icelandic ambassador to Japan. The two families share a two-story duplex. No matter how empty the countryside is, or how much room there is to build a bigger house, Icelanders prefer to live in small spaces. This 2,000-square-foot house, split evenly between the ambassador’s family and Helga’s family, is deemed more than sufficient.

  This year, Helga has put in a hot pot midway between the guesthouse and her house. A hot pot is a hot tub without the jets. Because Iceland is volcanically active, it is quite easy to get natural, steamy mineral water by drilling geothermal boreholes in your backyard. Around the hot pot, they have built a wooden deck with towel hooks and chairs scattered around, though it’s always too cold to sit around in a bathing suit and towel after getting out of the pot.

  One day I join Pippa in the hot pot, and she doesn’t immediately get out. This gives me hope that maybe she is finally acknowledging my presence. She stays for a little while and actually says a few entire sentences to me, just to me, directed to me. I am not invisible! “Iceland is one of those places where the geography influences everything, the culture, the people,” she says. “I’ve only found a few places in the world like this. Iceland, India.” I heartily agree with her, though I’ve never been to India. But I believe I am finally winning her over, why else would she talk to me? Then she gets out. Maybe she is really deep and it is a Buddha smile after all.

  By the third day, a few of the horses that caught the flu early have recovered and are ready to go out on the trail. I’m raring to go. I don’t care what horse I get, what saddle I use. I eagerly saddle up a horse that normally would qualify as “too much horse” for me. It’s one of Disa’s horses that she left behind when she got married. It’s the horse she rode when she challenged the bulls.

  Helga takes us on a trail we’ve never been on before. It is narrow, muddy, and rutted and runs close to the river. We are at a walk most of the time. The terrain, too muddy for tölting, sucks the hooves into the ground, so we trot.

  Helga points out large mounds in the land and says that back in the Settlement Era this used to be a ship-building area. She tells us that the area is called Húnaflói, meaning “bear bay,” because every so often an iceberg arrives from Greenland with a stranded polar bear floating on it.

  “Bears,” says Sylvie, “in Iceland?”

  “Yes, every so often, but they’re shot pretty quickly. We can’t have them terrorizing our domesticated animals,” Helga says.

  “I wouldn’t want to meet one of those,” Eve says.

  Except for the stray polar bear on the drifting ice floe, there are almost no wild mammals in Iceland. There is the arctic fox, and reindeer that roam in the east provinces, though those were imported two hundred years ago as a source of meat. No beavers, otters, coyotes, wolves, fox, brown bears, or black bears . . . nothing. Nothing that can unexpectedly spook the horse and unseat you.

  We are down to a walk again. “Helga, I just gave my horse the leg yield, and she didn’t move over,” Sylvie says. She is riding the mare that took me across Lake Hóp. It’s the easiest horse in the bunch, easier than her Stulka who is back at the barn, sick with the flu.
>
  Frieda, who is helping Helga again this year and riding at the back of the line, explains to Sylvie that it’s a farm horse. “This horse isn’t trained in dressage, aware of every little aid, it’s more of a work horse used to herd sheep.”

  We keep riding in the sucking mud along the riverbanks. Helga starts telling us another story that took place around this area. “It’s a famous love and murder story that everyone in Iceland knows. There was this man, Natan, and he was like a very progressive man in his time and into herbal medicine and he was in love with a famous poet at the time, her name was Rosa . . .”

  Eve interrupts, “Helga, my horse coughed, do you think it’s okay?”

  “Helga, Eve’s horse coughed,” Sylvie repeats, unhelpfully.

  Frieda rides up beside Eve’s horse, looks at her, and shrugs, “She’s just snorting, blowing out dirt to clear her nostrils. She’s okay.”

  Helga continues with the story, which seems important to her. “And Natan and Rosa have a daughter together, though Rosa is married to someone else.”

  This sounds like a typical Icelandic love story. The sagas are full of women who have children with many different men. In pre-Christian Iceland, when women divorced their husbands, which was not unusual or difficult, the shame was placed on the husband. And in modern Iceland, nearly 70 percent of children are born outside of marriage. Couples often have two children together before they consider getting married.

  “When does this take place?” I ask.

  “In 1828.”

  Eve interrupts, “Helga, my horse tripped. Do you think something’s wrong?”

  Eve is crooked in her saddle, pitched awkwardly forward, her shoulders rounded and hunched with all of her weight on her right hip. There is a saying: “Horses are a mirror.” If you are nervous, they think they have something to fear. If you’re unbalanced in the saddle, their walk is uneven and they trip.