Wild Horses of the Summer Sun

by Tory Bilski

  “You can’t stop in the middle of the road!” Sylvie panics.

  Viv says, “What are we supposed to do?”

  “Can anyone see anything?” I ask.

  “NO!”

  We are encased in the glare of the midnight sun, waiting for it to move just an inch on the horizon, to give us room to see. Time passes slowly waiting for the movement of the sun, especially when you think your life depends on it. But then a shadow passes low on the horizon, just long enough for Pippa to see the road, hit the gas, and drive us out of danger.

  The shadow might have been a cloud. But in those few moments, when blinded like that, I’m ready to see anything: an elf at the crossroad or a troll who sets himself down and turns into a boulder to block out the sun. We need our myths.

  Next Year, in Iceland?

  Viv waits until we have separated from Sylvie and Pippa in Keflavík Airport. On the line for the flight back to JFK, she says, “Let me tell you, I never want to go to Iceland again if Pippa is with us.”

  I nod in agreement. “That was not a good trip.”

  “I felt like I was in middle school and the mean girl was being mean again.”

  “She was really rude to us.”

  “She ruined the trip for me.”

  “I agree. You’re confirming everything I was feeling.”

  “And Eve wasn’t there as a counterbalance. And Sylvie . . . Sylvie acquiesced to Pippa,” Viv says.

  “Sylvie’s not the same in Iceland without Eve.”

  “The trip is not the same without Eve. I will never go without Eve again.”

  “I agree.”

  “I feel like I have to decompress from that trip that was supposed to help me decompress from my life. Double decompression.”

  Viv and I aren’t sitting together on the return trip. But we go through the long lines of passport control together, and wait for our luggage together in New York, still brooding about Pippa. We hug and say goodbye to each other as we get out of customs. We promise to get together soon.

  I wait two hours for the Connecticut airport van to pick me up at the terminal. I’m the last on his list of pick-ups. The driver heads onto the expressway going way too fast and the van’s windows are all open, giving the ride a rattled, reckless feel. I fear the tires will flatten on the next pothole if the driver hits it, and at this speed we’ll jump into the next lane and collide with oncoming traffic. He passes everyone on the road, mostly on the right, then quickly cuts into the left lane. He even goes up on the shoulder of the Van Wick to pass another car.

  I want to say something. I had wanted to say something to Pippa, but I didn’t. I weigh the benefits of expressing my concern to the driver. Should I confront it or ignore it? Should I back down and acquiesce, like I did with Pippa, never confronting the bullying aspect of her aggressive driving or her general meanness to Viv? Because I did notice that while Pippa gave me the proverbial cold shoulder, she downright bristled at everything Viv said and did. And I didn’t say anything. I didn’t step in to point out how harsh it all was. I let Viv be bullied. And I will not be bullied now by the van driver.

  “Excuse me,” I shout up to the driver. I am seated in the middle of the van. It holds about twelve people but there are five passengers, me and four men. “Excuse me, excuse me, but could you slow down! I feel like you’re going way too fast.”

  “You think this is fast, lady?” the driver snorts, challenging me.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it’s not.”

  A passenger speaks up, and says, “Lady, this isn’t fast. This is normal.”

  Another passenger, shakes his head, “He’s right, lady, this is not fast.”

  First of all, what kind of driver argues with a passenger when she asks to slow down and, second of all, what kind of passengers stick their noses in our disagreement to agree with the driver? Third, what’s all this “lady” crap? It’s being used in the pejorative to put me in my place, make me look nagging and my request silly, like I’m a daft and prissy middle-aged woman. Don’t they know I’m tough? That I ride fast horses in the wilds of northern Iceland? I am not afraid of speed; I am not afraid of recklessness. I just don’t like it in rattling vehicles swerving down the Van Wick.

  “He’s going eighty.”

  “He’s going sixty!” the first guy says.

  “He’s not going sixty, he’s going faster than sixty!” I’m not going to back down, even if I’m not sure of the exact speed. I am not going to let these guys bully me into acquiescence. I am done with that.

  Another guy feels the need to get into the fray, “I don’t care how fast he’s going, I need to get home. I wish he would drive faster.”

  The van driver says smugly, “See, lady, you’re outnumbered,” and speeds up.

  These four men have ganged up on me. Confrontation is never as satisfying as you think it will be. In fact, it’s messy and unrewarding and for the rest of the trip I’m reduced to glaring at them, boring my eyes through their brains, like I’m batshit crazy mad and they should not have messed with me. I wish I were an elf, or a troll, and had special powers. I want to blast them all away.

  I am still tense and angry when the driver, who has seemed to have forgotten, or not even registered our confrontation, drops me off at my house. It’s midnight, and my neighborhood is hot, humid, and noisy from the scratchy racket of crickets. Walking up the path to my house, I feel the weight of the constant overgrowth of summer in New England. Big, leafy, deciduous trees, Norway maples and old oaks, line my street. Hundred-year-old pines stand watch along the back border of my yard. Dogwoods, rhododendrons, hydrangea, and mountain laurels ring my lawn. The night sky is obscured by the heavy canopy of the shade forest. For the first time in over a week, the sky above me is dark. There is no wind. No Arctic bite in the air. And I am already longing to return to northern Iceland’s cold vastness and endless summer light.

  2012

  But the Sheep Réttir

  I have become the de facto expert on Iceland in my local social circle. I get calls and emails from people I don’t know: “Hi, I am a friend of Tina’s and she said you go to Iceland every year and I’m planning on going and was wondering if you had some advice.” These inquiries come more frequently now as Iceland is becoming better known.

  I’ve learned over the years not to come on too strong, not to gush. And if someone is on the fence about going, that is, if they have not bought airline tickets yet, I start with a disclaimer: “I love it, but it’s not for everyone.” I do this because I once told my neighbor it was the best place in the world and she should definitely go there and she must, must ride the horses and, and, and . . . she came back unconvinced. “Eh? I don’t get it. It’s a strange place,” she said. “Cold and damp and I had a rough ride on a nasty horse in freezing rain.” I said, “Yeah, that happens, you have to get through that part of it,” but I could see she thought I had steered her wrong.

  So I have learned to curtail my enthusiasm. I field the typical tourist questions. What is worth seeing? Everything. What can be skipped? Blue Lagoon. I send long emails with helpful hints that can go on for pages. On a budget? Eat at the bakeries. Only have three days? Drive out to Snæfellsnes. I suss out whether they are animal people, and if so, I tell them to try out the horses on a short trek.

  And then I get a call from Holly, a friend of a friend. She tells me she stopped over in Iceland for three days last October and she wants to go back and ride the horses. She added, “I heard you go there to ride the horses every year. I want to do that.”

  I quickly invite her over for a glass of wine.

  Sitting in my backyard with Holly, I pour a newly opened cold white wine into our glasses. It’s the beginning of June and one of those days you wait all year for: the sun is gentle at 5:30, the trees have all leaved, the ornamental bushes are blooming, my garden is growing. Rabbits hop. Chipmunks scurry. Hummingbirds dart in the trumpet vines. Goldfinches eat at the bird feeder. The world around us hums in a
Beatrix Potter tranquility.

  But Holly sits on the edge of the chair as if she is going to flit away. She’s thin and sinewy, with no visible menopausal belly, a hard look to pull off at this stage of middle age. I get the feeling she isn’t trying for that look, that she doesn’t work for it, that it’s a combination of genes and high energy, mostly nervous. She tells me she took early retirement this year from teaching special ed and has a pension and she loves the freedom of not working. I would love that, too, the freedom and a pension.

  Holly switches to why she’s come over. She has been taking riding lessons, she tells me, and she is dying to go back to Iceland to ride. Her emphasis, not mine. “I should have tried them when I was there. But I didn’t see them until we got out of Reykjavík and there they were in the fields. And it’s hard to explain, but I saw all those horses and an old, odd excitement came over me. I thought, what is this about?”

  There should be a specific phrase to capture this feeling toward Icelandic horses. In Icelandic, Gæðingur literally means “dream horse,” and refers to a horse that has great gait abilities, good temperament, willingness, charisma, strength, and expression. But there also should be a word that connotes that peculiar, particular, thunderstruck feeling that overwhelms some people when they first catch sight of Icelandic horses. Even pixelated versions, as mine was.

  Holly is jumpy and ill at ease, and I worry that I make her nervous. But I overlook this because, after she reveals that we share this strange attraction to Icelandic horses, I’m ready for her to be my new best friend.

  “I’m leaving for my Iceland trip in two weeks. Why don’t I see if there is room for you to come with us?”

  I have never asked to bring a friend along because I never had a friend from home who wanted to come. But Viv isn’t coming this year. True to her word, when she heard Pippa was coming again, she bagged it and booked a tai chi trip to China instead. But Eve is going, and Sylvie, and amiable Allie. Pippa will not be able to commandeer this trip.

  “Really? Because I’m spontaneous. I’d go,” she says. “That would be my dream.”

  I can barely tamp down my excitement at finding someone like Holly. None, I repeat, none, of my friends at home are the least bit interested in horses or Icelandics. And I am trilling like a cricket at finding a new convert to join our group.

  “Let’s look at some ticket prices then.” I get my laptop and she gets up to open the bottle of red that she brought. The white wine emptied quickly, and it vaguely registers in the back of my mind that I had only one glass.

  We find the ticket prices are expensive this close to the date. They are running over a thousand. “Oooh, that’s a lot. I’m on a limited budget.”

  “But we pay hardly anything to stay at Helga’s.”

  Then she says, “What I really want to do is—I don’t know what you think about this, if it’s crazy—but I found out you can join these sheep roundups.”

  Now she has won over my heart. It’s as if I am connecting with my long-lost soul sister.

  “I can’t believe you said that. I’ve always wanted to do the sheep roundup.”

  “I’ll do it with you. I mean it. I’m a risk-taker.”

  It’s called the réttir; it’s a once-a-year Icelandic tradition of herding up the sheep that have been grazing in the mountains all summer and driving them down to the corrals where they are sorted out. It’s long, hard days in the saddle, lots of galloping down hills and moving the sheep along while being pelted with wind and cold rain in early autumn. I have been dying to do this, but no one in the Sylvie group wants to do the réttir; they like it at Helga’s in the comfort of the guesthouse, and can’t make another trip back in the fall. I have never found anyone interested in the réttir, and here is Holly showing her chops, and whether she follows through or not, her eagerness is rare. She’s one of the few women I’ve met who hasn’t let life and age beat the wild heart out of them.

  “There’s also a horse roundup in the autumn.” I feel obliged to mention that, because it is also on my wishlist. And because that would be more challenging, wilder. “It’s the same idea; you round up the horses from the mountains in the fall and drive them down to the corrals to be sorted out by the farmers.”

  “I didn’t know about the horse roundup. I would do that. I would definitely do that.”

  Holly is more like what our group used to be like in the early days, up for challenging rides. The Sylvie group has been very timid riding over the last two years.

  Years earlier I had met Holly’s husband when he sat across the table from me at a dinner party. He was an unconventional, bearded guy—bearded before it became popular—and so full of opinions about everything, I mistook him for a New Yorker. He was from the Midwest. He was a RISD graduate, a sculptor, who had to make a living doing carpentry. Holly wasn’t there, but I knew through mutual friends that they had a difficult, contentious marriage. After a lot of drinking, he divulged the story of how they first met at a music festival. They were cooped up in a tent together because of the rain; the next weekend they got married at a courthouse, though they both were engaged to other people. After he had told this story, I realized I had heard it before. It had made the rounds in our acquaintance group because it was unusual.

  It is not quite the origin story of me and my husband, but it bears some resemblance. A sense of impetuousness, of flight, of disregard for other committed relationships. I guess I should have been wary of hasty coupling, but I threw myself into it heedlessly. We made no sense to the outside observer. Nobody favored us as a couple, not family, not friends. And we didn’t so much meet as smash together and hole up in bed for months, flush with the discovery of each other. We committed instantly, wordlessly to each other, as if no other path were possible. It happens sometimes—from pretty much the first look, we were a fait accompli.

  I retreat from the laptop and looking up airfares with Holly and squeeze a rubber ball. I’ve diagnosed myself with carpal tunnel: my left, and sometimes my right, hand goes numb. My toes have also been having spasms where they stiffen and separate for a few minutes. I left a message for my doctor earlier in the day, and he manages to call back when Holly and I are discussing the finer points of which should we do first: the sheep or horse réttir?

  For privacy, I take my cell phone into the house, leaving Holly alone with a bottle of red wine she has already half-finished. I am so full of good cheer when I start describing my symptoms to my doctor—because I’ve been busy making réttir plans with Holly, and who has time to be a hypochondriac about fingers and toes acting weird—that when he reads back the description of symptoms I left with his medical secretary, I reassure him, “I’m sure it’s nothing but I thought I should run it by you.”

  I am watching Holly through my kitchen window as she finishes off the bottle, thinking, my new best friend drinks a lot, I didn’t even get a glass of that.

  My doctor asks how long and with what frequency I have been having these symptoms. I tell him the truth, but lightheartedly. I’m feeling stupid for calling him and complaining about my fingers and toes, and I’ve got the sheep réttir to plan. “Only for a few weeks and, yes, I guess it’s getting worse.” I hear him mutter, almost as if I’m not supposed to hear, “I hope it’s not MS.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “I’m sorry I blurted that out. You’re actually not the right age for it, you’re too old for it so I’m not worried. It usually strikes people in their thirties, but we should check it out.”

  It hardly eases my worry. He patches me in to his scheduler to set up an appointment for the next day. That’s unlike him. He’s an overbooked doctor and he doesn’t have you come in unless he’s worried. The secretary tells me, “He wants you in here right away,” and schedules me for the next day. Now I’m really scared.

  I don’t know what to do with Holly sitting outside. “That was my doctor. He wants to put me through some tests.” She takes in what I’m saying, but I don’t explain any more
except to say, “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  But she reads me correctly, I want to be alone. Talk of the réttir or horses is ruined. My mind is full of dread.

  In the next few days, I go through a series of scare-the-shit-out-of-me tests, and then wait a few days for results. My symptoms worsen. I can’t go to work. I can barely lift my arms and in ten days I am supposed to go to Iceland.

  All the tests come back normal. “None of the bad autoimmune issues,” my doctor says. I am elated with the news, yet I can barely walk now and I am to leave for Iceland in five days. I wait a couple of days to get better, but instead it gets worse. I get my doctor on the phone. “What’s wrong with me? I can’t get off the couch.” He sets me up with a neurologist for an appointment two days later. The neurologist can find nothing wrong with me in the initial examination. But he can’t be sure unless I get an MRI. The first one available is on the day my flight leaves for Iceland. I have no choice but to cancel my trip.

  I am asked if I want a tranquilizer for the MRI or if I just want to keep my eyes closed. I opt for closing my eyes and under the MRI dome, I try to concentrate on visions of Thingeyrar: the horses, the fields of lupine, the rivers and lakes. Through all the bangs and knocks of the imaging machine, I wonder if I will I ever get back there. What if the test shows up something dreadful and debilitating? What if I lose my facilities? Who will take care of my poor, sweet, demented mother? I toy with the idea that if this is our fate, I’ll take her for a ride in the car and we will drive off a cliff, Thelma and Louise style, rather than the two of us being a burden to everyone. My mother, myself! We’ll go out of this world together, how symbiotic. I am working myself up to tears, which is bad under the dome of an MRI. I must not cry, it will start a regrettable cascade of runny nose, short breath, and opening my eyes and confronting the claustrophobic dome.