Wild Horses of the Summer Sun

by Tory Bilski

  I just want to canter with Allie, and keep asking it from Moldi, but he keeps trotting faster and faster and it’s a weird mixed gait. I can’t post to it and it’s too fast to sit to. I try my arsenal of riding tricks: leg on, leg off, sit forward, sit back, tighten reins, loosen reins, give and take reins. And then suddenly it feels strange and I don’t know what to do. Moldi increases his speed again without going into a canter. The gait is smoother than a trot, but it’s not a tölt and I am zooming.

  Frieda canters up next to me and says, “Tauwri, he’s pacing. You’ve got him in a pace!” She’s excited I got him into this gait; she thinks I meant to. The gait is better left to expert riders and I would have never purposely tried to pace. But Moldi offered, and I unknowingly accepted.

  Pace is the fifth gear in the Icelandic horse, the horse’s feet leave the ground laterally at once and the horse is suspended briefly in the air, flying over the ground. Pacing clocks in at 30 miles per hour. On a horse, it feels like flying.

  Not every Icelandic horse can pace. A lot of Icelandics are only four-gaited. This has always been a given with horse owners and breeders, and recent research has shown why. In order to be truly five-gaited, the horse has to have a specific gene, known as the AA genotype. This gene gives the horses’ limbs better coordination in lateral movements, so a horse with this gene would score high in tölt as well. And though 75 percent of horses born in Iceland have this genotype, they still need to be trained in pace.

  The other horses are mostly the CA genotype and only four-gaited. The CA gives the horses’ limbs more coordination in diagonal movements, and, hence, better suspension in trot and canter. Tölts in these horses tend to be somewhat trotty.

  There are many horse breeds that are four-gaited, generally referred to as the ambling gait. Think of the American Saddlebred and Tennessee Walking Horse with their rack, or the Paso Finos with their paso largo. In medieval days, light horses that were gaited were called palfreys. These horses all share the same genetic mutation, the DMRT3, that allows it the extra gait. DNA testing on ancient horse bones traces this mutation back to a horse breed found in northern England about 1,200 years ago. Coincidentally, the spread of gaited horses happened around the same time as the Viking age of expansion, so it’s very possible these two events are inextricably linked.

  And that is why Moldi doesn’t like to canter. He’s an AA genotype with a very smooth tölt and a natural pace. He could be trained to canter, but his training was cut short because Disa moved away, and there was no real reason to teach him to canter. He is the perfect trail horse. One could ride him at a tölt all day and even, by accident, get him to pace.

  “Þetta Reddast” (Life Will Work Out)

  Helga comes in one evening during our cocktail hour. Eve and I are sitting in the kitchen drinking beer and eating banana chips. Allie is drinking wine. Viv is reading Veterinary Medicine.

  “I have an announcement to make,” Helga says. Her announcements can mean anything from “Stulka is pregnant” to “there is a new exhibit at the Sea Ice Museum.” Except that Helga has a bottle of Champagne in her hand.

  Eve yells, “Helga has an announcement!” Sylvie and Margot come out of the living room, where they have been hovering over their laptops.

  Helga waits for everyone to join her in the kitchen. “Well, I thought you all should know that I am now the owner of a house in Selfoss. I have just signed the papers.”

  She looks so happy, exuberant, but our reaction doesn’t match hers. We don’t cheer or clap like we would normally. I don’t think any of us knew she was looking for another place to live. And even if she was, that it would be down south in a suburban town like Selfoss.

  Sylvie says, “You’re going to leave Thingeyrar?”

  “Not immediately. It will probably take another year to get everything together and make the move.”

  “So you’ll be here next summer?” I ask, after an awkward pause.

  We’re deflating her good news bubble. “Yes, I think so. I think you can depend on coming back next summer.”

  “How did this come about?” Viv asks. “I mean, I didn’t know you wanted to move.”

  “You know that woman you met the other night? My old friend who was staying here? It’s her house in Selfoss. She wants to move into Reykjavík; she is getting old and she doesn’t want to drive. It’s a very special house, built in the ’70s, and she and her husband were the first to try reforesting Iceland. So, there are many trees on the property protecting the house, keeping it warm from the wind and even extending summer for another two months.

  “And she is selling me the house for a reasonable price. She wants the house to go to someone who would appreciate it.”

  “Wow, what an opportunity!” Margot says, finally stepping up to be the first one to congratulate her. “Helga, that’s wonderful. I’m so happy for you.”

  “See, the universe provides,” Eve says.

  And the universe takes away.

  “You know I was looking for some place closer to Reykjavík where we could move. And then this house was offered to me and I’m ready to move. I’ve been ready to move for a while.”

  “Will you bring all your horses to this place?”

  “No, it’s not a farm. I might keep a few of my horses down the street, but horses won’t be my life anymore.”

  But horses were her life. For the last twenty years, she had built up her bona fides in the Icelandic horse world as a trainer and breeder. She had established a brand name, a horse that was “fra Thingeyrar” meant it was sure to be of good confirmation, temperament, and training. Not only that, when she entered the training world twenty years ago, it was a man’s world. She was the first woman trainer and breeder of any note. And her training techniques were now being taught in equine schools. Helga was a big deal in the Icelandic horse world. And she was giving it all up.

  “What are you going to do in Selfoss?”

  “I’m going to take it easy for a while and see what interests me. I have this idea for a children’s book; and I might design knitting patterns. But I am not going to worry about making money, I am not going to worry about anything. I am going to start something new in my life. Þetta reddast.”

  Þetta reddast is an often used Icelandic saying, meaning life will work out somehow. It expresses a national come-what-may attitude toward fate and I can’t help but wonder if it doesn’t contain vestiges of the three wyrds of the old Norse faith.

  Eve says, “Helga, this is your next incarnation. You are recreating yourself.”

  “Yes, I believe that.”

  “Well, we have a big announcement to make, too,” Margot says, beaming nervously. “Our offer for the property has been accepted. We just got the email. Sylvie and I are the proud new owners of twenty more acres and now we will have a proper Icelandic horse farm.”

  I muster up a belated, but I hope genuine, congratulations to Helga on her new house, and a heartier congratulations to Sylvie and Margot on their new horse farm. Now there will be another Icelandic farm in the Berkshires. The three of them are giddy with their choices and fortunes, all talking about how they are all “transitioning” into the next phase of their lives, and how they “manifested” the good outcomes.

  “And we’ve already got a name picked out. Because today is the solstice and I got the email today,” Margot says, “so it’s preordained, I’m going to name the farm ‘Solstice Icelandics.’”

  Eve adds, “This is meant to be! The universe is coming together!”

  Not for me, I think. It’s falling apart.

  “Yes, it’s meant to be,” says Helga. “And you can all come visit me in Selfoss. It’s a big house with room for all of you. And it’s got lots of greenhouses and gardens. It’s almost tropical compared to here.”

  “That’s it then. We will all go to southern Iceland instead,” Eve says.

  We can, I think, and it will be treed and gardened. It will be tamed and civilized. It will be warmer and busier. But i
t will not be the windswept wild north of Thingeyrar.

  When all the toasts are made and the bottle of Champagne drunk, I walk outside by myself. I hike up to the church grounds where I have a clear view of it all: the farmland to the south and east, Lake Hóp and the Greenland Sea and the place where the rivers converge and Helga had her birthday bash, the whole vast valley with its endless sky on this day with its endless sun. I am losing Thingeyrar, the end is being written.

  We were forewarned, if we had been listening. Helga was ready for a change of life, and she was hatching a plan. Two years earlier, when she was visiting us in New York, she told us that she was giving up her position at Holar. “Yeah, it is time to leave. I am done teaching, and I am done with the long commute.”

  We were standing in line behind a rope to the Egyptian wing of the Met, when she said, “My sons are settled, they both have work and partners and children on the way. I no longer have to work full-time.”

  It was hard to pay attention to what she was saying because Helga was causing something of a commotion. Men were walking into the ropes to get a better look at her. Rich-looking men, with rich-looking wives on their arms, tripped over their own feet as they stared at her, mouths ajar. One man craned his neck around us, and impatiently motioned for us (Viv, Eve, me) to “step aside, step aside,” corralling us away from Helga, like Gauper nipping at the hooves of stray horses, all so he could see her better. I thought perhaps he worked as a guard there, the way he pushed us out of the way with such twitchy authority, but no, he was dressed business casual with a metal admission MMA tag bent on his lapel.

  All this was distracting me from what she was saying. I was aware that Helga was a momentary phenomenon in New York City, as if the aurora borealis had suddenly flashed over the tomb of Thebes on the Upper East Side. The people staring at her were not subtle, but they weren’t ogling her, either. The look was more quizzical, more of a sense of wonderment, “What is she?” “Who is she?” “She must be somebody.”

  She was fifty-three that year, wearing simple clothes: a red sweater, a leather bomber jacket. She had her jeans rolled an inch or two below the rim of her black lace-up boots. Her white-blond hair was cut bluntly and short to her chin; she pulled it back haphazardly with barrettes. She wore no makeup. It was unexpectedly hot—80 degrees and humid—at the end of October and her face was red from the heat and the sun. Her skin was flawless, unlined, as if the cold clean air of Thingeyrar neutralized the aging process. She was outstandingly beautiful and unusual looking, especially by New York standards. She seemed oblivious about the fuss she was causing. And if she were aware, she didn’t care.

  We were all there. It was one of our rare New York reunions: Allie was up from Georgia, looking at NYU for her son. Margot and Sylvie came in together on the train from the Berkshires and me from Connecticut. Viv came in from New Jersey. Eve was already in the city. We met at the Met, walked to midtown for lunch, and then took a cab to Soho for drinks.

  “I just figure it’s my time to move on,” she said over cocktails at Fig & Olive. The woman bartender was staring at her and continued looking at her when the rest of us gave our drink orders. She didn’t pivot to us once.

  And Helga tried to put the question to us, too. “Are you satisfied with what you’re doing with your life?”

  The question went unanswered by all of us; we took it as rhetorical.

  On reflection, she said, “I’ve never cared about money. I’ve never wanted that to guide me. I figure that part of my life will just work out.”

  We were listening to her, but at the same time we weren’t. What I heard was that she was dissatisfied, but I assumed that she had found an easy fix—she was going to stop teaching at Holar, because it was a long commute and she was tired of that age group. But she was talking about something larger. If we had been listening closely, we would have realized she was testing out some ideas on us, thinking out loud and revealing the kind of questions that you share only with certain friends like us—long distant friends that don’t figure into her day-to-day life in Iceland. She was done being the horsewoman of northern Iceland. She was telling us that, but I couldn’t hear it because it didn’t make sense to me—why would she leave what I saw as a perfect life in a perfect place?

  I had always asked myself, how long will our trips go on? The other question I should have asked was, how long will Thingeyrar be there for us?

  Finding Our Way

  We are heading out to Lake Hóp. I am riding Skjoni, and because he is a tall gelding the water doesn’t come as up as high on him, and the lake is low anyway. The horses can walk the last part. Skjoni is the perfect horse, an easy tölter, a sturdy, thick horse. He seems to intuit my needs, and I don’t have to focus much on giving him cues. The entire ride so far has been quiet and dreamy, as if I am being led by a collection of memories.

  While we eat our lunch on the other side of the lake, Helga looks concerned watching the sky and the lake. “We should get going, I don’t like the way things look,” and she hurries us to saddle up.

  A misty spritz of rain and a light fog descend on the lake as we enter it. We get through the deeper part fast enough, but that is the short part. Helga is riding fast, leading us to the shore as quickly as she can. But the fog becomes denser and I lose sight of Helga. Everyone else, horse and rider, become a smudge in this great white expanse. I only see Eve, who is closest to me. Helga tells us to slow down, and then to stop. We can hear each other’s voices, but I lose sight of even the horse and rider smudges.

  I even lose sight of Eve. “Eve, are you there?”

  “I’m here.” She doesn’t sound far away.

  “Is everyone okay?” Helga asks. There is no panic in her voice, but I can tell this is not good. I hear everyone’s voice say, “I’m okay.”

  We’ve lost all sense of direction. We could be heading out to the sea. Allie’s voice says, “Wait, I have my phone in my pocket and it has a compass.” I hear her jacket pocket unzipping, the fumbling, the swearing. “It’s dead. Did anyone else bring their phone?”

  I can hear Margot and Allie discussing the merits of “sitting it out” in the middle of the lake, waiting for the fog to lift. “But what if the fog is here for hours? And the tide comes in quickly?”

  Sounds are magnified: the horses breathing, the plop of a horse’s hoof lifting and then dropping in the water. Since we are stalled, the impatient horses are stepping in place.

  I’m not worried yet, but I remember Ljotur saying, “Iceland is a safe place in town, but the countryside is different: people fall off cliffs, they get swept away by a single wave. Nature is dangerous here.”

  With every air molecule fat with water, the edges of the world are gone. I am suspended in this place, as if time has stopped. I have come to expect otherworldly moments in Thingeyrar, and especially in Lake Hóp, the thinnest place in this world. If there is a crack where the light gets in, this is one such crack, but instead of a metaphorical beam of light, it is a pause in time, a temporary hold. In the fog, in the middle of the lake, on my horse Skjoni, with no up or down, north or south, no east or west, I sense myself floating in the world and filling up on it—it is enough, all, everything—it is the essence of an oceanic oneness.

  The spell is broken, and I am awoken when someone calls out, “Sylvie, are you alright?”

  For what seems like a very long time, there is silence. Then finally, “Yes.” Her tone is gruff and unhappy.

  Helga says, “Let’s all get very close to each other, within sight of each other.”

  And by call and response, we find each other and cluster together.

  “Look,” Helga says, “My horse is very good in the water and he will lead us out, I trust him. But don’t lose sight of me.”

  She is riding her gray dappled horse. In the sagas, gray horses are endowed with special powers, able to run through the air and over the sea. In the Eddas, gray horses are water horses, they emerge from rivers and lakes; water is often in itself a l
iminal element and gray horses are the connection. Odin’s horse, Sleipnir, was a gray stallion, and capable of passing through divine places. Heroes ride horses, gods and goddesses, kings and queens ride horses—in so many myths they are the transport, the medium, the carrier between the worlds, and in so many cultures are buried with their masters when they die to carry them into the next world. We need our myths.

  Helga urges her gray horse on with the slightest forward motion, to pick out the course, the same way she did when we crossed the river after Sylvie fell. The horse is cautious at first, and we follow her very slowly, careful not to lose sight of each other.

  But then there is more surety in her horse’s step, as he senses the ground growing firmer beneath him. The water gets shallower until it is only inches deep.

  “I see the shoreline,” Helga says, and the fog is lighter along the edge of the lake. “Take it slowly though.” We let out a collective breath and compliment Helga’s horse.

  Sylvie, relieved, says, “Okay, next time, Helga, don’t cue the fog machine. Leave that part out.”

  Once on land, the fog is light, and disappears completely away from the lake. We are quiet riding home, taking it slowly. I don’t know whether it’s the experience of the fog or if everyone is wondering the same thing I am: whether this will be our last ride together across the tidal lake, our last trek back to Thingeyrar.

  The Golden Summerland of Thingeyrar

  On our last night in Thingeyrar, we throw a big dinner party. Oli cooks as we prepare the table. Allie cuts and arranges large bouquets of lupines, dandelions, and buttercups as centerpieces. Sylvie, Eve, and I go to the vínbúðin in Blönduós and buy bottles of Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris and six-packs of specialty beers—the microbrewery industry has exploded in Iceland. Helga brings over appetizers of wood-smoked salmon and small pieces of halibut dry-cured in salt and herbs. Oli’s main course is sea trout in onion sauce, potato gratin, roasted mushrooms, and arugula salad with blue cheese. For dessert, blueberry skyr cheesecake.