Wild Horses of the Summer Sun Read online

  WILD HORSES

  OF THE

  SUMMER SUN

  A MEMOIR OF ICELAND

  TORY BILSKI

  For Matthew, for all the reasons

  CONTENTS

  Preface: The Wild Horse in Us

  BOOK I: THE WALK (FET)

  2004

  Getting Lost

  In Search of the Perfect Psylur (Hot Dog)

  The Land of Oz

  Horse History

  Arrival at Thingeyrar

  The Guests in the Guesthouse

  Where I Want to Be

  2005

  Repeat after Me: Hvammstangi

  Eve’s Life

  Tern, Tern, Tern

  The Herd

  A Thin Place

  2006

  The Wind in Those Places

  BOOK II: THE TÖLT

  2007

  A Reykjavík Night

  Mothers and Daughters

  All the Queen’s Men

  The Kingdom of Horse

  The Day Lisa Found Her Tölt

  The Saga of the Bulls

  Next Year, Iceland

  2008

  Horsewomen of the World

  BOOK III: THE TROT (BROKK)

  2009

  The Situation

  What We Carry with Us

  Sylvie in Love

  The Herd Changes, the Herd Charges

  Stallions and Mares, Oh My

  Starting Horses

  2010

  Annus Horribilis

  Snaefellsnes Revisited

  Herd Instinct

  Life Style Envy

  Next Year, Iceland

  BOOK IV: THE CANTER (STÖKKI)

  2011

  Ask for Canter

  All That Is Missing

  Gift Horse

  The Truth about Elves and Trolls

  Next Year, in Iceland?

  2012

  But the Sheep Réttir

  We Went Some Places

  2013

  Welcome to Iceland

  Ridiculous Women

  The Nights of Magical Thinking

  The Sisterhood of the Ridiculous Women

  In Which We Order, Dish Out, and Leave

  Raptured

  BOOK V: THE PACE (SKEIÐ)

  2014

  The Road to Thingeyrar

  Wild River

  About Those Ghosts

  My Iceland Thing

  2015

  Getting Iceland

  Learning to Fly

  “Þetta Reddast” (Life Will Work Out)

  Finding Our Way

  The Golden Summerland of Thingeyrar

  Epilogue: Locked Gates and Lost Places

  Acknowledgments

  PREFACE

  THE WILD HORSE IN US

  “Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”

  —Virginia Woolf

  I am out of control, my preferred way of being. I am on horseback, my preferred mode of transportation. I am cantering, my preferred gait. Even after a long, cold trek to get here, I can’t tamp down the spirit of this mare when we finally reach the sea. It’s like she breaches.

  All the horses get wilder here, their blood filled with the wind and the waves of the Arctic waters. I can’t really stop her now, so I let her go, let her run to her heart’s desire, which becomes my desire. I am part of her rhythm and speed, galloping along the densely packed sand, sea-spray splattering my face, breaking an imagined barrier. The whole world becomes what I can see through the space between her ears, her wind-parted mane. She is fast and sleek; like a ship she is yar. I don’t think of falling or stopping, I only think which one of us—horse or rider—will tire first. I am wildly free, giddily so, the long-forgotten impulses of my youth awakening and leaving my heart in flight mode.

  I am known around my hometown as the woman who goes to Iceland to ride horses. At parties or at our local coffee shop, I get introduced as, “This is Tory. I told you about her. She goes to Iceland every year to ride horses.”

  If this once-a-year gig is part of my identity, I’ll take it. I prefer identities that aren’t tethered to either DNA or to the happenstance of birth. I’m American, whatever that all means; my father’s Polish ancestry is written in my face, though the connection to the culture has long been lost; my mother’s side has contributed a jumbled concoction of Northern European from Scottish to Estonian.

  And as far as identities we make ourselves, I check the usual boxes: mother, wife, worker bee, suburbanite. But being the woman who rides horses in Iceland—that gives me, at least in my own mind, a bit more panache than, say, being the president of the PTA (a title I once held). It at least makes me worthy of another glance. If someone is about to politely pass me by, taking in my looks (hey there! I say) or my age (hey again!), and can only muster a ho-hum interest, this sometimes give them pause . . . Huh? I mean it’s not polar bear tracking in Greenland (I wish) or reindeer herding in Lapland (oh please, oh please), but it pulls up a close third.

  We are what we venture.

  Why Iceland, why horses, why me? Because I was in my office, bored at my desk job—in boredom begins adventure—and had one of my first forays into “surfing the web” as it was so quaintly called those days, circa 1999, when Google was new and not yet a slouchy verb. I was only a few years out from my graduate degree thesis on Viking invasions of England, where I looked at the cultural influences those invasions may have had on Anglo Saxon life. I studied the Norse settlements in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, never thinking about the Norse settlements in Iceland. But the clicks down those new Google steppingstones finally led to the official page of the Icelandic horse. I stopped and stared at the page for a long time. I had found something I didn’t know I was looking for.

  On my screen was a dark bay horse standing alone on a misty hill of green tussocks. It’s hard to say why certain topics, objects, or places resonate with certain people. Why some people may gravitate toward the African continent, or, say, all things Italian.

  But with that first glance of the pixelated Icelandic horse, I was nothing short of obsessed, a girl again, smitten. It was a well-muscled horse with a noble head, a compact body, flaring nostrils, and a Fabian black mane swept back from the wind. I knew it was a stallion; he had that tough-guy look to him. It was a horse that I felt some past kinship with, a memory of, a familiarity of place and time (I know, I know . . .). Usually I don’t believe in past lives until my third glass of wine, but there I was, midday and procrastinating at work, staring at this dark horse that stared right back at me. We reconnected. It had been centuries.

  So the dream began. This place: Iceland; that horse: Icelandic.

  Once the North got in my psyche, it didn’t let go. Iceland was not on the tourist grid back then. It was hanging off the map of Europe. If people knew anything, they knew that Erik the Red had intentionally switched around the idea that Iceland was green and Greenland was covered in ice. Maybe people had heard of Björk. Or if they were really in the know, they knew of Sigur Rós and the burgeoning music scene of Reykjavík. Maybe they knew of the cheap flights to Europe with a pit stop at Keflavík. It was mostly known as a flyover country on the way to London or Paris.

  I got laughed at by a cousin when I expressed my desire to go: “You want to go where? To do what? That sounds like hell.”

  It wasn’t just her. I knew no one, neither family nor friend, at the turn of our last century, who had the slightest interest in Iceland. Or their national horse.

  My husband discouraged it. Mishaps always happened when I was gone: the basement flooded, the roof leaked, the dog got sick, the kids missed school, as if I were the household lucky charm. He couldn’t get
his work done. “Why can’t you fall in love with a horse around here?” he asked. “What’s the matter with Connecticut horses?” He was suspicious I was some kind of horse racist.

  One friend did encourage me to go, wondering aloud if it was my version of a midlife crisis and instead of falling in love with someone else, I fell in love with something else, a horse, a particular kind of horse. On deeper reflection, she said, “Oh, Tory, you have to go,” settling all matter of conflicting discourse. She was a social worker with Jungian training, who dabbled in desert vision quests. She grabbed my arm with an urgency I could not dismiss: “This is your spirit animal calling. Your totem. You have no choice but to meet it, greet it.”

  My digital, mythical, totemic horse called, and I had to answer. I set my compass north, to a remote ice rock of an island in the northernmost sea so I could throw myself on the back of a horse and gallop to land’s end, to drum out the humdrum, and wake up the dormant desire, and fear, of a fast horse.

  It wasn’t my first equine affair. I was a horse-crazy young girl. I did the riding lessons and summer horse camps, and the fastidious grooming, fussing over the mane of a thousand-pound animal the way some girls fuss over their dolls. But by age eleven, I had lost my fervor.

  On the cusp of puberty, my solitary horse love was usurped by a newfound girl clique. The tribal need to belong took precedence and there wasn’t a horse-lover among them. We girls all lived in the same neighborhood, took the same bus home. Our houses edged a thousand-acre forest, in which we roamed every day after school. We tested our derring-do on trestle tracks, or with makeshift hockey games on frozen streams full of jutting roots and rocks, or played with matches, flicking them into stalks of dried grass that lit (oh shit!) too quickly. On the remains of old army barracks, we made a pact to return when we were older, which we swore we would keep, though “down we forgot as up we grew.” We talked incessantly. We ate Twizzlers and drank Yoo-hoo. We tested out cigarettes, trying various methods of inhalation and exhalation, often pretending we had a cocktail in our hands at a swanky party.

  Such were the joys.

  Sometimes life circles back and gives us a chance to recreate ourselves, to revisit some prior incarnation. So, thirty-odd years later, I was traveling in a van in Iceland with a pack of women, new friends. Only this time the common bond was the pursuit of Icelandic horses. And we didn’t plan on making a pact to return every year—but nonetheless, we did. Each June, we left our ordinary life behind, full of work and routine and all the troubles and concerns of adulthood, and ran with the horses in Thingeyrar, so to speak. Our time in Iceland was not a vacation, but our temporary vocation. We rode our horses through lupine fields and black volcanic sandbanks. We crossed rivers and lakes and came back, covered in dirt and mud, to our guesthouse in Thingeyrar. We talked incessantly. We ate cake and drank beer. We grew older together; we kept each other young.

  Such, such were the joys.

  BOOK I

  THE WALK (FET)

  A slow and natural four-beat gait, during which two hooves always touch the ground and all hooves move forward at an even pace.

  2004

  Getting Lost

  First time, right off the bat, years before the technical advantages of GPS or iPhones, we get lost.

  Within thirty minutes of leaving Reykjavík we are at a fork in the road and, putting all our collective navigational skills to work, we take the wrong turn. It takes about an hour before we realize it. We are nine women stuffed in a van, three layers deep, with luggage on our laps and at our feet—four teenagers, four middle-agers, and Sylvie, who defies age-related genres. The teenagers sit in the back of the van and tune out on their iPods.

  Bags of cheese-filled pretzels and chocolate-covered cookies get passed around. Eve’s driving, and the rest of us grown-ups, at least Sylvie, Maggie, and I, are supposed to be navigators. We are armed with a map, the unwieldy fold-up variety sold at gas stations and tourist centers. Our index fingers dutifully, if erroneously, follow the map. We take turns passing it around every few minutes or so, occasionally interrupting our stream of conversation to weakly feign interest in the directions, saying something helpful like, “We should be in Smorgasbordafjordur any minute now.” After making such a declaration, we crumple the map back up and pass it on, as if to say, “My job’s done, pass those McVitie’s.”

  Sylvie does most of the talking. Her conversation ranges from her enthusiasm for her newfound yoga instructor, Rodney Yee (Eve agrees, “He’s a god”) to Pema Chödrön (Eve again, “A goddess”) to Sartre (dead silence on that one) to Shakespeare, which is my only safe entry into the conversation. I can talk Titania, Iago, King Lear.

  Sylvie squeals and pushes Eve’s seat from behind. “See, that’s why I invited her, I need a literary companion.” Eve, I presume, is her spiritual companion.

  I barely know these two women who have organized the trip; the other women and the teenage girls, I know not at all. We are going to Helga’s farm, a person and place I don’t know, either. But I am in a place that I love: Iceland. They love what I love: Icelandic horses.

  Sylvie is the connection to Helga: “We became friends when we drove to Saratoga together to look at a horse. We couldn’t find the stables and we drove around for hours and got lost in the dark, but we found our friendship.”

  Sylvie is possessive and boastful of her friendship with Helga. “She invited me and said I could invite others. We are the only people she does this for. She doesn’t open her guesthouse up usually. She is doing this for me and whoever I decide to bring.”

  Before this trip, I had met Sylvie a few times, and Eve maybe twice up at her horse farm in the Berkshires, the closest Icelandic horse farm to me. The trip was one hour and forty-five minutes; I could make it up and back in a day. I found out from Eve’s stable manager about their trip to Iceland, and I wrote a lengthy email to Sylvie asking if there was any room for me. She wrote back: “Van crowded. Wheel hub seat over heater avail.” I took it as a yes, soon to learn that while Sylvie is verbally expressive, her written skills are curt, truncated missives open to all kinds of interpretation.

  So I am the last to join, the odd woman out, one up from a hitchhiker. Perched, as promised in that email, up on the wheel hub with my head bumping the top of the van. Soft bags and pocketbooks are stuffed between every available space. My seat is literally the hot seat—June in Iceland can still require heat, and it is pouring out of the side door.

  Eve slows down to look at a road sign. “Can anyone find that town on the map?”

  Maggie has the map and squints at the road sign, not the map. “I think so.”

  Satisfied enough with her answer, we drive on. Looking in the rearview mirror at the teenage girls, Eve tries to engage them. “Should we play Earl?”

  “Yes, Earl,” Maggie says, “Put on Earl.” She has hardly spoken at all, except to weigh in with utter surety that we should take a right instead of a left at what turned out to be a critical crossroad.

  “Should we play Earl?” Eve repeats, gathering support and enthusiasm.

  “Earl,” Sylvie demands.

  One of the teenagers takes out her earbuds, and looks through her bag to pull out a CD.

  I am not in on the joke, whatever Earl is, but soon it is blasted from the audio player up front. I don’t know the song at all, don’t quite get all the words to it, but I get the sentiment. Goodbye, Earl, Earl’s gotta die. A woman’s revenge song. Eve chimes in at the chorus. Earl is dead. I sit back and relax. These women, girls, are okay. But also, someone’s mad at her husband.

  After a few more Dixie Chicks songs, I hear Eve murmur to herself, “Mmm, we’re supposed to go through a tunnel at some point.”

  But the landscape has changed from a few horses in the fields—when Sylvie irrepressibly shouts out, “Horsey!”—to hundreds of horses in the fields, with herds of fecund mares and knobby-kneed colts. “Babies!” It’s a horse-lover’s dream. All the Icelandic horses the eye can behold in all the Icel
andic greenery. We give up on the map and pick up our cameras, haphazardly dangling them out the window to click away.

  And it’s more the grownups in the car than the teenagers who revert to childhood at the sight of these horses. I am forty-six and Sylvie is going on sixty-six; Maggie is Eve’s negligibly older sister and Eve, I’m guessing, is about fifty-two. To this day I don’t know Eve’s real age. If the topic comes up, she diverts attention away from it. I know many women like this. They don’t like to be pigeon-holed by their age, and that’s fair. If we live in an era where people can be gender fluid, I think we can be age fluid as well. We can say it’s a spectrum, and we can go back and forth in age at will. When challenged, we can say: Why be so dogmatic about the biology of age? Hanging out the window, cooing at all the horses, we are ten again.

  Eve does her best to get on with the purpose of getting us to our destination. She pulls over to a road sign, squinting at the town name and asking, “Does that look like anything on the map?” In the back seat, Sylvie and I collectively put our heads together and pretend to study the map again. “Mmm, sort of.”

  Sylvie gives up and holds the map out. “Who’s good at navigating?”

  Maggie and I don’t volunteer. Sylvie rattles the map in my face. “Here you navigate.”

  I take the map with no real conviction, singularly focused on the fields of horses in the green tussocks, running freely all over the hills and dales. It’s a visual feast. I do not know if I am recalling an early childhood episode or if it’s paleo-genetic memory, but nothing lowers my blood pressure, nothing stimulates my hippocampus and alights my dopamine receptors, like the sight of herds of horses. Peace, tranquility, and, incongruently, excitement possess me all at once. The map flops limply in my hands as Eve drives on.

  Sylvie is chatting away about her husband, who hasn’t moved with her and still lives in Connecticut and is “Frankly, a drag, he acts like an old man. He doesn’t want to do anything.”