Wild Horses of the Summer Sun

by Tory Bilski

  The word vik means “bay.” The ing ending means “a people.” So the Vikings were the people who sailed into bays. But that was the term applied to them by others. They considered themselves Norse. Before Viking was a noun, it was a verb. To go “a Viking” was to go raiding; it was an activity, a choice of employment, let’s say, like piracy. Some Norse, though, were looking for places to settle and bring their families. They were the emigrants. They came in different boats, called knarrs, which were cargo ships. But the other Norse who went “a Viking” did so in the dragon-headed prow long ships that had shallow drafts allowing them to row into inlets and bays and up the rivers to sack towns.

  We were not Vikings, we were not settlers, we were not immigrants, but we were also not tourists. We were repeat visitors. And we turned it into a gerund, “going Iceland.” Viv and I were talking on the phone one depressing winter evening, and she was telling me about her horse’s illness, her one son’s antics, and the withdrawal of troops in Iraq that didn’t include her other son’s unit. She and her husband were besieged with these issues, when she said to him, “I’m sorry, Bob, I can’t take it anymore, I’m going Iceland on you.” He knew she meant not just that she had bought her plane tickets for the coming summer. She meant it mentally, to keep sane. She was going to Iceland in the summer, but she was going there now as a state of mind. “When it gets dark here, my minds goes Iceland. I’m walking in the midnight sun.”

  It became Viv’s and my refrain, a mental survival trick, for when we sought peace of mind, when we needed to emotionally check out. We never shared it with the others. It helped us withdraw from worldly or personal matters and gave us a mental destination. When life overwhelmed us at home, we went Iceland in our minds. For Viv, it was walking in the midnight sun by the Vatnsdalsá River. For me, it was being in the saddle heading out north to the sea.

  Sometimes I would be cleaning up my mother after having messed herself, and I would think, I gotta go Iceland. But it didn’t have to be during life’s difficulties, it could be when life felt static and dull, when I was sitting in meetings at work and had nothing to add to the conversation. I’d remind myself I was more than this person at a meeting: I’d ride North. I’d go Iceland.

  There’s a picture of us that someone took in the early years: we are on the sand dunes near the Greenland Sea. We’re giving our horses a rest, so that each of us has our horse loosely held with a long rein as we let them graze. We are in various stages of repose: I am next to my horse, my arms resting on the saddle, looking out at the sea. Helga has a stalk of grass in her mouth, studying the horses grazing. Sylvie is flat on her back, knees up, eyes probably closed. Eve is checking her horse’s bit and rein. The sparse scruff grass on the dunes is flattened from the wind. You can’t hear it, but you can fill in the background noise with Arctic birdsong, the gulls and the mating calls of snipe. In the early years when no one carried a cell phone to Iceland and no one knew where the hell we were, we were there, riding horses, resting horses, somewhere on the far northern shore, where the view of the world was so vast you could see the earth’s curve. And that’s where I went in my head, to that spot, when I was going Iceland.

  The MRI is over and it is read then and there—and it shows nothing wrong. Nothing. No MS, no degenerative disease, no autoimmune problem. They shrug and tell me that it’s probably viral, or a fish toxin, or a fly bite I got in the Caribbean. My symptoms retreat, ever so slowly, over the summer with a lot of recommended massage therapy and hot yoga.

  Since there is nothing wrong with me, my husband is relieved he isn’t going to lose me or have to spoon-feed me. He says, “I was really hoping you’d make it to Iceland, I know how much it means to you.”

  He now sees it as a part of who I am, and I know it’s become something he likes about me. “That’s my wife, she goes to Iceland to ride horses every summer.”

  He suggests a trip to Block Island where there are stables and I could ride on the beach. When I get better, I tell him. When I am fully recovered.

  “And maybe Holly will go with me on the sheep réttir this fall.” I catch a quick flinch from him, like, “let’s not go that far.”

  As for Holly, I should know by now I am never good at making fast friends. I imagine I see too much that isn’t really there. While I was going through all the numbness of limbs, all the testing, all the uncertainty, we kept in touch by email, but I downplayed my fears. I could not bear to put a chink in my physical armor—my strength and vitality were pivotal to seeing myself as tough, as someone who could ride horses in Iceland.

  When fall came and I said to Holly that it’s the time to go “a réttir-ing,” she backed out. She said she couldn’t spend the money, that they needed a new washer and dryer and that the cost of that alone was the price of the plane ticket. I get this, I do. I lived on the cheap for so many years. But things have eased up financially for us, enough so that money issues are no longer on our marital argument docket. But Holly was on a pension, and her husband was subject to seasonal work. So that freedom of retiring she talked about, of no longer having to show up somewhere, of making your own days, also meant that they were bound by the manacles of living on a restricted budget. And gradually, as if I represented some kind of lost opportunity, an adventure that passed her by, she stopped answering my emails and texts.

  We Went Some Places

  My mother is down to living in one room with five pieces of furniture: an armchair, bed, coffee table, credenza, and a dresser. When she’s not in bed sleeping, she is sitting in her armchair, often sleeping there too. She eats her breakfast and her lunch in her armchair. She uses the seat in her walker as a table.

  I moved her to an independent, assisted-living place in New Haven so I could see her more often, be able to drop in on her, shop for her. She barely talks now, and my relationship with my mother used to be all talk. We would talk about everything for hours, leaving off our conversation one day and picking it up three days later midstream, as if the days that passed were just dutiful interruptions of our conversation. Now she repeats the same questions out of habit: “How are the kids? How old are they now?” I tell her, and she acts surprised each time, as we repeat this question and answer at least half a dozen times during a visit. And that’s a good visit. A bad visit is when she asks if she is married and how many kids she has. A really bad visit is when she asks if I’m her mother. And then there are those visits after she’s been sick and feverish, when she hallucinates and thinks her husband, dead for many years, is living next door with the “kitchen lady.”

  The golf channel is on. It is the only channel she watches. She used to play golf, it was her only sport, though she doesn’t remember that. She watches it blankly as I cut her nails and tweeze her facial whiskers. I brush her hair repeatedly, trying to tame the stubborn cowlick that sticks up like a straggled bird feather now that she spends all of her time either lying in bed or sitting in her chair. I buy her Ensure. I buy her Depends. I shower her if she smells too much in between the showers the aides give her. I dish out ice cream to put her in a better mood. I care for her like an old baby. Her memory has been failing for six years, as the disease shrinks her brain to one third her normal size. Dementia is like watching a mental illness slowly overtake someone’s mind.

  I am her anchor in this world. I don’t tell her when I’m going away. I used to, but it caused her too much distress. For weeks before I would leave and weeks after my return, every time I saw her she would break down and cry, “You’re back. I thought you were gone for good.” It is easier to keep my travels a secret from her. But sometimes in her foggy mind, she has eerily prescient moments. “Are you going to Finland soon?” she’ll ask me, only days after I booked my Iceland flight. Or on the very same day I booked a flight to Newfoundland, she asked me, “Why do I think you’re going to Nova Scotia? Are you?” She isn’t exactly spot-on about the location, but she nails the general area.

  Once she was an avid reader, but now she is down to two books in
her apartment: A Bible that an evangelical nurse’s aide dropped off and a collection of the Best American poems that I brought her. She hasn’t picked them up in years. On her coffee table that she bought in Hong Kong—glass top, mother of pearl inlay, hand-painted, carved dragon legs—she has twelve photo albums from her trips abroad. Though it was a big part of her life for many decades, she doesn’t remember where she traveled anymore. And the photo albums don’t help. They only seem to confuse her. If I point to a picture and say, “You’re in Bangkok here,” she’ll say, “Was I really? Huh.”

  Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, when my mother was in her fifties and sixties, she traveled with her two friends Rosemary and Edie. They went to Greece, Turkey, Hong Kong, Thailand, Egypt, Morocco, Tanzania, Brazil. They were not fainthearted travelers. For the time, their age, their social class, their gender—they were mavericks. I liked this trait in my mother, though I never had much interest in the funny stories she told when she came home—I was too eager to open my gifts. And if my daughter only half listens to my funny tales and gives only a cursory glance at the videos of horses on my iPhone, with me narrating, “And this is Loki tölting,” I understand. It’s Loki tölting, where are the presents?

  I knew my mother’s two friends well; I saw them often. Rosemary was the giddy, flighty one. Irish background. She was a spendthrift, which irked my mother’s frugal mind. “She has a problem with money, that one.” When Rosemary’s husband left her for another woman, my mother said, “He probably found someone who doesn’t spend money like water.”

  Edie was the dark, voluptuous one. The term used back then was “sexpot.” Twice divorced. Jewish. She picked up men on vacation. “She has a problem with men, that one,” my mother summed her up. It irked her Puritan mind. Then Edie picked up a third husband on a Greek island. He became her third divorce. “She married him after knowing him for about a week. He married her to get a green card.”

  The three women met while they were getting their psych nursing degrees. Psych training was still heavily Freudian then, and they were prone to throwing out the terms like weapons. “That’s so oedipal.” Or, “She has no control over her Id.” Or, “It’s anal retentive of you to do that.”

  Each era has a belief system or two that influences our view of things. We stake everything on it and pity the poor antiquated people who came before us and didn’t have the benefit of this enlightenment, this bright new wisdom. Welcome to a whole new theory of life, a new religion to replace the old order. And then it too is deconstructed and tossed, deemed worthless, or, worse, dangerously wrong.

  In their Freudian exuberance, I believe my mother and her friends went too far and said some things—diagnosing each other—that they could not retract. The three of them had a falling out. According to my mother, Edie “never forgave me for saying that to her.” I never found out what the “that” was because my mother regretted it, but also defended it as something Edie needed to hear. And with Rosemary, it was something Rosemary said to my mother. “She had no right saying that, she of all people.” Again, I had no idea what “that” was about, either.

  They made efforts to patch things up, but they were tepid and temporary alliances. My mother moved to Connecticut to be close to me, and Edie and Rosemary eventually retired elsewhere. The three of them never got together again.

  But toward the end of my mother’s cognitive-aware life, before the gaps in her memory gradually grew larger than the memories themselves, these were the women last on her mind. Not her sister-in-law, my aunt Anne, whom she lived near for close to thirty years; not her early friends in our neighborhood who she went through young motherhood with; not her later “condo” friends she met and golfed with in retirement.

  It was Edie and Rosemary she asked about when we’d take walks around the duck pond in her condo village. The women she traveled with in her fifties were the women she talked most about, who figured in greatly as she was summing up her life, trying to make sense of all the years. “We had a lot of fun together. We went some places. I wonder where they are now?”

  2013

  Welcome to Iceland

  Arrival in Keflavík is always a dreary affair. Maybe it is because we arrive just before midnight, but it is eerily quiet for an airport, even though five flights have deplaned one right after the other, and there are new shops brightly lit and open for these arrivals. And even though the sun is on the horizon, peeking out now and then between the rain clouds, and it is the longest day of the year, the light is gray and dusky.

  At the passport check, the uniformed men and women ask us the usual questions with poker-faced officiousness: How long are you staying? Business or vacation? Iceland, with a population of 320,000, is expecting a million visitors in 2013. But all this attention to their country seems to leave Icelanders apathetic. When Viv steps up to the passport booth, she tries to awaken them with a loud, “Hello!” Then they take an especially long time looking at her passport, flipping the pages back and forth. “It’s like a book of Iceland, with one trip to China,” she says. Their response is deadpan. It means nothing to them that we suffer from Icelandophilia.

  What welcomes one to Iceland now are the billboards that line the airport corridors. They are friendly, pretty, and culturally informative. This year it’s a campaign that includes Icelandic sayings. “As we say in Iceland: Everything that is nice is green.” “As we say in Iceland: They who splash the skyr own it.” At least the tourism industry is trying.

  The geographical placement of the airport is not exactly welcoming, either. It is on the western tip of a rocky, brown, inhospitable part of the Reykjanes peninsula. Nothing but volcanic rocks, a lunar-like landscape on which our first astronauts practiced their eventual encounter with the moon. This is the first look at the country and it is not pretty. Certainly no green and pleasant land, no matter what the billboards say. Just hardscrabble lava turf and a scattering of rough grass. And rain. I have never landed in Keflavík without it raining.

  So upon arrival my enthusiasm initially wanes: Um, why am I here again? Even after missing last year and vowing I would never miss the trip again, I arrive and I wonder: Why this otherwise forgotten island thrown up by volcanoes in the North Atlantic Ocean? Do I make too much of this place? Do I get carried away with enthusiasm and expectations that it can never live up to? Iceland—the country, the land, the horses, the people, or the people I travel with—owes me nothing. Horses misbehave, people can be irritating, and the weather is subarctic. Immediately upon my return, I am filled with such doubts.

  I got into a conversation on the plane with the woman sitting next to me, who sheepishly admitted that she had been to Iceland three times already and people can’t understand why she keeps going back. “Welcome to my world,” I said, “This is my eighth trip.”

  Viv has come this year, warily so, at my urging. “Eve’s going, Pippa’s not,” I told her in the middle of the winter. We bought our tickets in February. In April, we found out Pippa was going and bringing two others with her, a friend and the friend’s fifteen-year-old daughter. I had to talk Viv out of backing out. “Why should we let her dictate our trip to Iceland? Why should she take Thingeyrar away from us?”

  As we wait for luggage, I have to cheer up Viv. “Eve says they’re getting their own car. Sylvie says they are doing their own trip.” When Viv shakes her head, I say, “Let’s make a pact, we won’t let her get to us.”

  Viv shakes her head again. “I don’t know, I don’t know. I’ll try.”

  “C’mon, we’re in Iceland, let’s leave all worries behind.” But I know it’s not that. Although we can leave our home lives behind us, if Pippa is snappish with us here, we’ll be forced into a self-protective stance, and that is the opposite of everything we come here for.

  It has been two years since we last saw Pippa and I know from Eve that she has had more medical issues. Last year she came with her own breathing apparatus and Eve said she stayed in her room the whole time. “She looked close to death
. I thought she was going to stop breathing, I thought she was going to die on us. I’m not even sure why she came,” Eve said.

  I’ll give Pippa the benefit of the doubt: She comes to Iceland for the same reasons, for the same validation, as I do. When I was going through my medical scare last year with its imminent threat of chronic ill health, everything in my mind became last wishes. If only I could get to Iceland again, if only I could ride again. This must be how Pippa feels, and she goes through medical scares and medical procedures more frequently than I do. She must think of this place as an antidote to her malfunctioning body.

  Viv and I meet up with Eve, Sylvie, and Margot coming in on the Boston flight. It’s Margot’s first trip to Iceland after a five-year hiatus. She greets us most enthusiastically. “Hi guys!” Eve goes off to pick up our rental car and we wait and wait some more. We meander into the airport’s food mart and buy yogurt and chocolate-covered cookies and pretzels. An hour or more later Eve comes back with a set of keys to an older model SUV. “Our luggage should fit in this.”

  Five of us are traveling in one car this year and we don’t know how to pack light. We need our Wellies and riding boots, our helmets, chaps and riding pants, plus multiple jackets, fleece and rain, which require many suitcases and bags. We stuff, push, jam our bags in the back of the SUV and slam the hatch door shut. The latch catches and we cheer. Then, with the overflow luggage at our feet or on our laps, we head merrily to Reykjavík. And I mean merrily, too. All of us are talking at once in a voluble banter.