Wild Horses of the Summer Sun

by Tory Bilski

  These dinners on the last night have become grand affairs and get larger and last longer each year. This time it is the six of us, plus Oli and Gita, Helga and Gunnar, the ambassador and his wife, and Frieda. We set aside time to perform skits, read poems, and tell our jokey faux medieval sagas chronicling our mishaps and adventures, starring Sylvie the Red, Eve the Cheerful, Viv the Unweary, Allie the Assured, Margot the Eager-Hearted, Helga the Deep-Minded, Frieda the Thoughtful, and Oli the Woman Fattener. I am the Scribe, who writes and reads aloud these sagas. Each ends with: “And so it was, year after year, Queen Sylvie and her merry band traveled to their favored golden summerland of Thingeyrar.” We need our myths.

  After dinner, we walk up to the church for a concert Helga has arranged with two of her nieces, vocalists in the music conservatory in Reykjavík. The girls, accompanied by a pianist, sing a dozen songs that range from Paul Simon’s “El Cóndor Pasa” to a traditional Icelandic riding song to the Beatles “In My Life” to an aria from the opera about Agnes Magnúsdóttir.

  After the concert, the six of us go back to the guesthouse and sit around the dining room table. We stay up late, long into the sunlit night, watching our horses gamboling in the grassy tussocks under the midnight sun. As if we know there will not be another summer at Thingeyrar, we talk about stories of years past, with one story reminding us of another: the horses we rode and loved and didn’t love; the rivers we crossed and got stuck in; the first time in Lake Hóp when our horses plunged in and swam; how we fell in love with the sound of the hooves cantering in the shallows of the lake; how the horses pranced in place while we prepared ourselves for the ride along the riverbank; how the band of frisky young horses ran alongside us; the daylong trips to the Greenland Sea; and the years when Disa rode with us with a flask of cognac, and the day she made herself big, and bellowed and scared the bulls away.

  These were our tales, these were the times, these were the women, and this was the place.

  EPILOGUE

  LOCKED GATES AND LOST PLACES

  As it happened, Helga moved out of Thingeyrar in November, 2015. She sold most of her horses, keeping only a few near her new home. Her horses were bought by people from the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden, countries where Icelandics have been popular for years. Three buyers were from the States, Margot being one. She bought Freyr to join the new herd at Solstice Farm. On the transport plane to New York, Helga’s three traveled in the company of forty other horses being exported from Iceland. The population of Icelandic horses in the States is inching up to 5,000.

  The next time we see Helga, it’s June 2016, and Eve, Allie, Sylvie, and I have come to visit her in Selfoss. In Thingeyrar, I don’t remember even seeing a plant in a flowerpot, but here the yard of her new home is lined with raised garden beds full of growing vegetables. Tomatoes and herbs grow in her greenhouse. Flowering trellises grow against the southern side of her house. Her property is tree-lined and leafy with mossy little streams hidden in between patches of grass. It reminds me of Ireland.

  Helga sends us to a nearby mega-farm to ride. We join a group of about forty people we don’t know, some of whom have never been on a horse before. The guides give instructions in English, German, and French. “This is how you steer; this is how you stop; this is how you make it go.”

  Sylvie says, “It makes me cry to think how good we had it all those years at Helga’s.” Within fifteen minutes of riding on the trail, she bails. “I am not comfortable riding this horse at all,” she tells the guides. She turns to us, “It’s not Stulka. It’s not Thingeyrar.” Eve eagerly offers to get off with her and walk the horses back to the barn.

  Allie and I continue with the group and when the guides ask who wants to split off into slower or faster groups, we go with the fast group. Our guides are not Icelandic, but young German and Norwegian girls, who tell us stories of Iceland—about elves and trolls, and about an argument in a saga that took place nearby. They assume that we are all new to Iceland.

  After a few days in the south, we meet up with Sibba and Ljotur and head north to Siglufjörður. We visit yet another one of Iceland’s quirky museums, The Herring Era Museum, commemorating the fishing industry that disappeared about sixty years ago when there was a sudden dearth of herring in the North Atlantic.

  We walk up the planks to the old boats and enter the cramped quarters of the decks below; we watch a video of life at sea projected against a wall. Next door is the station house, another museum requiring a separate entrance fee. Downstairs are the shipping offices, kept perfectly in the 1940s decor. Upstairs are the apartments that once housed the “herring girls,” farm girls who came to the town to spend their summers working on the piers, rinsing and salting the fish when the boats came in. It was a way to get off the farm and meet men to marry. Their living quarters are cozy, dusted, and clean; the beds are made, an iron and ironing board left out, skirts and bathrobes hang in the closets. In the kitchen are the coffee and teapots, the flour and sugar tins, mugs, a toaster, a painted-metal roll-top bread box, the wall calendar turned to the month of August 1941—as if the girls are coming back, their rooms waiting for them. You can almost hear the herring girls’ laughter in the hallways, the bustle of movement and the clatter as they run downstairs when the ships’ horns blow.

  After the week with my group is over, my husband comes to Iceland for the first time. He flies into Akureyri Airport. We spend time at Lake Mývatn, go whale watching in Húsavík, and stop in on the horse competition at Landsmot that is being held at Holar this year. We sit on the hill overlooking the parades, eating dried haddock and drinking beer that Eve recommended so many years ago. We stay overnight in Blönduós in a barn that has been transformed into a luxurious inn. The next morning, we head out on Route 1 going west. Ten minutes out of Blönduós at a crest in the road, I point down to the black basalt church in the valley. “See the church and the farm below it? There’s Thingeyrar. That’s the farm.”

  It feels odd to be saying that to him—“there’s Thingeyrar”—as if pulling back the curtain on my secret place, where I lived a part of my life that didn’t include him or anyone else back home. I am conflicted about sharing it with anyone, as if showing it will cause me to lose my secret self, or more importantly, to trivialize everything the place has meant to me.

  “Do you want to drive up the road and see it again?” he asks.

  He knows I do.

  At first, I play the tour guide as we drive up the dirt road to Helga’s farm, faking a lighthearted mood. “There’s the Steinnes farm where we stopped for coffee and donuts; there’s the barn pit where we corralled the horses; there’s where Dora fell off when the horse wasn’t moving; and over there is where the terns attacked me and Viv, very Hitchcock.”

  When we get to the gate of Thingeyrar, I get out to open it, but it is padlocked. It has never been locked before—there’s never been any reason to lock it. I know from Helga that the dissolution of her business at Thingeyrar with the ambassador was quicker than either had anticipated. And I know that the farm won’t be used for horses anymore. Helga told us that once she moved out and the horses were all sold, the grass was poisoned with weed killer to kill all of the dandelions. It is unfit for horses to graze there now.

  We drive up to the farm’s church and get out of the car. On the hill, I point out the sights in the valley below to my husband: “That’s Lake Hóp that we used to cross, that’s the Greenland Sea, there’s the Vatnsdalsa River.” Facing the other way, and still in my tourist guide mode: “There’s the house and the barn and the guesthouse. And there, you see the headstones clustered together and fenced in?” It occurs to me that I never told him the ghost story. “Well, there’s a long story about a woman named Agnes.”

  It is early July and unusually warm for Iceland. There is no wind, the lupine have gone to seed. The structures are all here—house, barn, fields—but no horses, no people or life. Thingeyrar is another Iceland museum, patiently and lifelessly waiting for us, for the girls w
ho will never return.

  Back in the car, my husband says, “You’re tearing up, aren’t you?”

  I nod mutely. I’m tearing up and trying not to. I can’t speak or I will burst.

  Couples, if they’re lucky, transition as they age together. My husband originally thought these trips with the girls, to what he considered a godforsaken place, were a kind of fling, that I would get over wanting to keep coming here. But then he began tolerating my week of horses and friends with a close facsimile of good cheer, which then one day morphed into a true pride. “My wife, she rides horses in Iceland.”

  Now he is here with me, overlooking the fields of Thingeyrar, and when he sees me tug on the locked gate, he gets what I kept in abeyance for years.

  “You really miss this place, don’t you?” he says softly.

  I break, sobbing at the loss, but also at his understanding of my loss, because once someone names your grief, you can no longer pretend it isn’t real.

  Thingeyrar means “place where the assembly (the thing) meets at the sandbank (eryar),” referring to the early parliament meetings of Iceland’s first settlers and to Lake Hóp’s tidal beaches, those long stretches of black lava sand that gave our horses a soft but firm, steady footfall. If history has marked itself like a palimpsest upon this land, from the island’s first settlers to the Benedictine monks to the ghosts of the witnesses of Agnes Magnúsdottír’s death to the recent Holar interns, did we as frequent visitors leave a faint smudge on the parchment of Thingeyrar? Did I leave my imprint on the history of the land the way it has left its imprint on me?

  On winter mornings at home, I look out at my hemmed-in New England forest of a backyard and picture Thingeyrar covered in snow, with its vast vistas, open, treeless, and desolate. Though the guesthouse is empty now, I like to picture the students from Holar who interned there, living out their hard eighteen-hour workdays, most of it in polar darkness, training horses, cleaning the barn. I imagine them sitting in the kitchen, making coffee, and talking about the horses or about their young lives and loves. How lucky they were to be there. As the days got longer, they would get ready to go, clean up the house for the next guests, for us.

  And I knew my small paneled bedroom at Thingeyrar would be waiting for me in June: the comforter folded in half on the bunk bed, Icelandic style, the bedside table with water stains where I spread out my books, the casement window with the single plaid curtain that partially blocked out the constant sunlight, the church and the graveyard of witnesses within my view. I could depend on the cry of the skua and the kria, the beating of the snipes’ tail feathers in the grass, the barking of Helga’s dog, the sound of the clotheslines snapping in the brisk Arctic wind, and the sounds of the horses so close to the window that I could hear them exhaling, their short yips and neighs as the sudden urge of the herd made them trot to the other end of the field.

  Sometimes I would open that window a few inches and the whole wild north would whistle in my bedroom, straight from the glacier, fresh from the clean oxygenated polar cap. And it would make my heart quicken. How wind can do that! And the persistent summer sun low on the horizon would keep me awake, receptive and enthralled to this bright green earth.

  The road to Thingeyrar. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  The first year, when we rode as a dozen. From the author’s collection.

  The black basalt church of Thingeyrarkirkja. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  Up close with the young horses. Courtesy of B. Saadeh.

  Moldi (earth-colored) to the left; Thoka (misty-colored) to the right. Courtesy of B. Saadeh.

  The barn is like a church, a sanctuary. From the author’s collection.

  The horses run. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  Mares and foals and the Vatnsdalsa. From the author’s collection.

  The view from the guest house. From the author’s collection.

  Snaefellsnes, the mystical Jules Vernian center of the earth. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  A very recent newborn with mare in Snaefellsnes. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  Blue-eyed boy, Snaefellsnes. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  The Nights of Magical Thinking. From the author’s collection.

  Lake Thingeyrar and the nesting grounds of Arctic terns. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  The Kingdom of Horse. From the author’s collection.

  Facing the Wild North. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  Volcanic black beach on the shores of Thingeyrasandur. From the author’s collection.

  Is this a stampede? Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  They gallop toward us and get within ten feet, before suddenly veering off. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  They circle back to us at a slower pace, curious about us. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  New to the world. From the author’s collection.

  Taped-up boots for the ride through Lake Hop. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  At Illugastadir, now an eider sanctuary, looking toward the West Fjords. From the author’s collection.

  Riding through fields of lupine. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  The little mare that could. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  Women on the verge of the Greenland Sea. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  Me and Sveppur at the Greenland Sea. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  The long trek home. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  The Golden Summerland of Thingeyrar. Courtesy of A. Westphal.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sometimes the stars align and a constellation of luck appears. At a lunch in Los Angeles my good friend Connie Brown (brilliant mapmaker) mentioned my Iceland book to her good friend Mona Edwards (famed courtroom artist), who later mentioned it to her good friend Deborah Ritchken (literary agent extraordinaire). My thanks to Connie for Mona, and to Mona for Deborah.

  Deborah gave me the confidence to actually take seriously the idea of publishing this book, and as my agent played the dual role of guiding shepherd and dedicated champion. Thoughtful editor and publisher Jessica Case at Pegasus Books then tended it carefully through to publication. Heaps of gratitude to these stellar, tenacious women who came into my life at just the right moment.

  Without another group of women—all my traveling companions—there would be no stories to tell, no rivers to cross, no ‘in’ to Iceland. Because there were many more women who I traveled with than are mentioned in the book—for the sake of brevity, privacy, and readability—I mashed up a few scenes, changed names and some identifiers, but kept the spirit of our tales and adventures true. Fellow riders, you have no idea how much you all meant to me.

  Takk fyrir to all the Icelanders in this book. To Sibba and Ljotur who caravanned with us around Iceland with ceaseless bonhomie. To Helgi, who not only fattened us with healthy Icelandic food, but always welcomed us with unwavering bigheartedness. And most importantly to Helga, who opened up to us her guesthouse and the Golden Summerland of Thingeyrar, and was our guide, host, horse whisperer, friend.

  When I needed time and space to finish this book, the artist residency at Gullkistan provided me with a room, a desk, and solitude. It was a dream of a place to write, with bonus views of Mt. Hekla and Mt. Katla.

  For years my writing self has been buoyed by many encouraging friends, who probably don’t realize how much I hang on their every word. Particularly longtime friend, Tina, a true seeker, who has an uncanny knack for saying the right thing at pivotal moments (“Move, and the way will open”).

  For new young friend, Grace Valentine, whose exuberance for this book and for all things in life was, frankly, irrepressible. I couldn’t let you down.

  For Bev, expert horsewoman, who was only a call away with either emotional support or an answer to an equine question. May the midnight sun shine on you.

  For Mikey, whose persistent interest (“What are you writing, when can I read it?”) kept the pressure on. A blessing on your head.

  For my mother, who taught me to explore with delight and astonishment. I only wish I wrote this earlier so you could
have read it.

  And finally, for my family, my ballast—my children David and Anna, the very beat of my heart, and my husband and life mate, Matthew—first reader, first responder, first star I see tonight.

  WILD HORSES OF THE SUMMER SUN

  Pegasus Books Ltd.

  148 W 37th Street, 13th Floor

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2019 by Tory Bilski

  First Pegasus Books cloth edition May 2019

  Interior design by Maria Fernandez

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.