Wild Horses of the Summer Sun

by Tory Bilski

  Eve tries to be the peacemaker. She quotes the Pema Chödrön line about anger only lasting ninety seconds and reminds us of the temporariness of the physical manifestations: the palpitations, the fear, the rise in blood pressure—all of which were exactly the responses we felt at the time as if we were a herd of horses surrounded by roaring lions, not the mild-looking older Englishwoman in sweater sets and the middle-aged gym rat in Spandex. Sometimes I can see why women’s conflicts baffle my husband.

  We don’t tell Helga about our quarrel, because we don’t want her to think we are troublesome guests. Helga is like Aud the Deep-Minded in the sagas, who was one of the earliest settlers, considered the first mother of Iceland and known for her wisdom and kindness. Aud was greatly respected—she captained a ship of twenty men and freed the slaves. If Helga is like Aud, we are more like Hallgerd clashing with Bergthora over a bench, or, in this case, baðstofa. We are ridiculous.

  When the five of us are together, we tell ourselves we have to put this flare-up with Pippa aside. She can’t ruin our time in Thingeyrar. We want to deflect her hostility and not escalate the conflict because, quite simply, it will take up too much of our precious time at the farm. Eve sets the tone, because she always does, and we follow her lead. We practice being more civil to them, especially in the barn, where Eve is very nervous about bad karma around horses. So, we say, “Could you pass the curry brush when you’re done? Can I have that hoof pick, please?”

  Cordiality reigns, but it’s an uneasy peace. And it bugs me. What Pippa said questioned my whole being. It wasn’t that she rejected my early gestures of friendship. I’m sure that over the course of my life I too have unknowingly or purposely rebuffed overtures of friendship. It’s that she objected to my very presence at Thingeyrar. You reach a point in life where you feel pretty confident, and there’s enough evidence supporting the notion that you’re a genial, interesting, likable person. Then suddenly you’re made aware that someone thinks otherwise. It happens and normally I would spend the rest of my life avoiding that person, and they would avoid me. But I can’t here. And it’s here I want to be. And it’s here where she intentionally picked me (and Viv) out of the circle to kick out of the tribe.

  I try to avoid Pippa and Karen when we’re not in the barn. I direct all necessary social interactions to Madison, when she doesn’t have her earbuds in. I can’t blame her for wanting to tune us out. She walked into a minefield of unknown women having a spat. And her mother spends all her time working out.

  No one who has ever traveled with us has been as dedicated to fitness as Karen. She gets up at six every morning to run eight miles, while we get up at eight and spend a good part of the morning over a leisurely breakfast. She spends most of her free time on the lawn trying out some odd looking, old-fashioned calisthenics with a timer, while we spend most of our free time soaking in the hot pot or sitting around the kitchen table snacking. Eve finds out that Karen is a Spin and Pilates instructor and is preparing a new class, one of those boot camps, which is what she is testing out on the grassy knoll while we gaze up at the skies in the steamy hot pot.

  Sociologists talk about the influence of social networks and social contagion, that is, if you hang out with people who are overweight, you tend to put on weight, or if you’re always with smokers, you start smoking. If you hang around people who are unhappy, you become depressed. Basically, this theory is heavily dependent on mathematical models of network formation, using statistical analyses of large observational studies. I’ve seen the PowerPoint slides the professors put up at a lecture—they have a circle with a large point in the center (the infector) that radiates out with clusters of smaller points (the infected), which tells us that our behaviors are not individualistic, but instead socially contagious. A rather long-winded, heavily researched, and costly way of saying what our mothers used to tell us for nothing: “Birds of a feather flock together.”

  I’ve noticed our physical activity in Iceland reflects our social network: we ride, we walk, even strenuously at times, we do yoga—and we snack and soak a lot in the hot pot.

  Karen doesn’t rest or indulge. She runs, spins, lifts, pushes, pulls, jumps in place, and eats only vegetables. To us, she is an alien, and we hope her behavior isn’t contagious and will infect us. And it sure doesn’t look like she will adapt her behavior to be more like us.

  Out on the trail, I ride a handsome gelding named Mokkur. He is the color of a portobello and his mane has blonde tips. He’s a big boy for an Icelandic, fourteen hands, with a thick head and neck and a stocky body. But he trips often. I ask Frieda what I am doing wrong. She says, “He may be a little heavy in the front. If he starts to trip, pull his head up immediately. You need to help him balance.” For a long time when I rode, I thought every problem the horse had was caused by my faulty riding skills. But there is rarely a perfect horse. No horse has perfect confirmation, perfect gaits, perfect balance, and perfect attitude. All horses have weaknesses, and all riders need to figure out what those are and work on it. Training is ongoing with horses; they are not done at any age.

  Mokkur has a smooth tölt, but we’re very crowded on a narrow path heading toward the Greenland Sea, and as the sand gets deep, I let him trot. He trips so badly he goes down on his knees. I get tossed out of my seat, hit the saddle’s pommel hard, lose my stirrups, but manage to bring Mokkur’s head up sharply while hanging onto his neck, and pop myself back into the saddle, avoiding disaster.

  Pippa is riding right behind me, close to Mokkur’s tail, and doesn’t alert the others to slow the pace down as I am half hanging off the saddle. She expresses no word of concern for me, though she couldn’t have missed my near catastrophe. When I regain my balance, she passes me and she’s grinning. Eve is worried about bad karma in the barn; I’m worried about bad karma out on the trail. Horses are sensitive to moods. What if they pick up our antagonism toward each other? I’ve read that some Native American people believe you should never ride a horse when you are angry. Even if you are going to war.

  But nothing makes the five of us tighter than a common foe. While we are walking in the fields after dinner, down by the drainage ditches with the massive dandelions and cotton grass, Margot poses this question: “And what’s wrong with being ridiculous?”

  “I don’t know. I kind of like it.”

  “I think we should claim it, own it: The Sisterhood of the Ridiculous Women.”

  “It’s subversive.”

  “It’s who we are, what we are.”

  “It’s how we roll.”

  In Which We Order, Dish Out, and Leave

  We are driving around the town of Sau∂árkrókur. Helga told us to remember it as “soda cracker.” We are looking for a fish skin museum. Yep, it’s one we haven’t been to yet. Iceland seems to make every product they’ve ever made or every hardship they’ve ever endured into a national museum. Complete with entrance fees and a summer staff that dusts off the cash register when we enter, surprised that anyone, particularly tourists, have shown up. We’ve made a dent in most of them: textile museums, the saga and folk museums, the horse history museum, whale museum, seal museum, the phallus museum, witchcraft museum, the sea ice museum, half a dozen turf house museums, and our current destination.

  Eve has gotten it into her head that she wants to buy a fish skin wallet. Don’t we all. Over the years, enamored of all local crafts, we have collected stores of such items: lamb skin shoe liners, buttons made of sheep bones, combs from ram’s horn, earrings made out of lava rock.

  Sau∂árkrókur translates as “sheep-river-hook” and Route 75 goes through it at the north end, right along the crook of the bay that features the town’s livelihood: fish processing plants. Off the main road, the town has more roads than most Icelandic towns, with shops and cafés, even a few hotels. The buildings are brightly painted and we hit the town in sunny weather, so it sparkles with the light bouncing off the bay onto the blue-, green-, and yellow-painted houses.

  At a stoplight, a crossin
g bar comes down in front of our car, as if a train is going to pass. We know there are no trains in Iceland, so we wonder what’s up. Not too far ahead of us, the air tumbles with clouds of dirt and dust, out of which emerge three riders leading a herd of horses.

  “Oh, look,” Eve says.

  Hundreds and hundreds of horses trot down the path along the edge of the bay; a mesmerizing sight that leaves us speechless, except for excessive sighing. Swooning over horses is what we do. It is a long, long line of horses, more horses than I’ve ever seen at once, even in Iceland. After fifteen or twenty minutes the end of the herd trots up with three people riding sweep, leaving the dust to settle.

  “Don’t you want to do that someday, be part of a horse roundup?” I ask everyone. They hardly jump all over it the way Holly did when I mentioned the sheep and horse roundup to her last year.

  The women in the car sit in silence, digesting this horse roundup suggestion of mine. Even though, or maybe because, they are all better riders than I am, they tell me how easy it looks but how difficult it is to escort a large herd of horses down the street. Still, I dream of doing this and want to ride sweep behind hundreds of horses. Lots of people specialize in a particular form of riding, whether its barrel racing, polo playing, steeplechasing, cross-country jumping. I am thinking horse and sheep herding may be my calling.

  The horses of this district, the valley of Skagafjörður, have a particular bearing that is imperceptible to the ordinary eye. But Icelandic horse people in the know can immediately tell the horses that come from this area: their heads are shaped differently and often their eyes are two different colors or both are blue. I’ve seen Icelandic trainers look at an old horse in a riding clinic in Massachusetts and name the farm it came from in the Skagafjörður valley. “It’s like magic,” Eve says. “They look at a horse and tell you who their father and who their grandfather was.”

  Eve drives up and down every street in town until we find the fish skin museum. It is closed, and I am relieved I don’t have to spend $14 to see how fish skin is tanned. But the restaurant next door that Helga recommended is open. We bustle into a booth, and immediately order beer.

  That’s the easy part for us. Margot, Sylvie, and I are beer aficionados. And lately we like this Icelandic stout, Lava, with 9.4 percent alcohol. Viv orders tea, because she never drinks. And Eve has recently developed an allergy to gluten, and therefore certain beers, and orders coffee instead.

  The waitress comes over and explains the daily special, which is a local fish with the choice of three different sauces: curry, onion, or a mustard sauce. This causes havoc in our group. Sylvie wants the curry sauce and the onion sauce on the side; Margot doesn’t want any sauce, but wants it broiled. And Eve wants the mustard sauce on the side, broiled, too, if they can, or baked. Viv isn’t having fish, but wants to make sure the vegetable dish she orders doesn’t have onions in it. And I tell the waitress I just want the fish ‘regular’—the way it’s described on the menu—with curry. And to differentiate mine from the difficult orders, I further explain, “The fish with curry sauce on top of the fish, not on the side.”

  In my effort to make matters simple for her, to distance myself from my picky compatriots and simply order something from the menu, I have confused her more. She looks irritated, too.

  “Maybe this is confusing her,” I say to the group. “I’m guessing that ‘sauce on the side’ may not translate.”

  “Do you know what sauce on the side means?” Sylvie asks the waitress, making her hands round like a little bowl. “It means you put it in a little dish, a sauce on the side, in a saucer.”

  This confuses the waitress even more. Almost all Icelanders speak English now, but the degree of expertise depends on the particular rural setting. I’m sure she knows the words for bowl or dish. But saucer? It must sound as if we’re asking for our sauce in a sauce.

  Eve steps in with cheerful diplomacy. She’s like Glinda the Good Witch, always calm, smiling: the only thing missing is her magic wand. “She wants the fish with the curry sauce, and with the onion sauce on the side, in a saucer. She wants her fish broiled, no sauce whatsoever. I want my fish broiled or baked with mustard sauce on the side, you know, in that saucer, and . . .” She turns to me as if I’m the troublemaker, “And she wants the fish, how? Regular? The fish ‘regular’ with the curry sauce on top of the fish, not in a saucer.”

  Viv pipes up because Eve left out her order. “And no onions in my vegetable dish, please.”

  The waitress backs up from us and goes over to the bartender to confer with him. She comes back minutes later to make sure she has it right. But by that time Sylvie has changed her mind. “I don’t want the curry sauce any more, just the onion sauce. On the side. In the saucer.”

  Second to invading countries to enforce democracy, this is my least favorite thing about being an American. This insistence upon persnickety, tailor-made meals in restaurants. In the States, this is de rigueur, and all waitstaff know the drill. But in other countries, it is baffling at its best, rude at its worst. And it all starts harmlessly enough with a simple request with our stated preference or choice: Can I have this dish but without that in it? We believe in choice and all the many variations of choice. But beware: pretty soon we’re invading your foreign restaurant, enforcing menu democracy.

  We drain our first beer fast, as is our way. It hits me between the eyes, that 9.4 ABV. It affects Sylvie quickly, too. With her volume cranked up, she starts with her signature parrot’s screech. “Do you believe her!?”

  And we are back to dishing about Pippa. Because what’s starting to really bother us is that after the flare-up, instead of leaving and making herself scarce, she’s been sitting around the guesthouse and in the common rooms with us, staring us down with malice.

  Without her with us, malice begets malice. I come up with the nasty idea that Pippa probably paid for Karen and Madison to accompany her this year, that they didn’t seem particularly friendly to Pippa, the way they split off from her and went into their separate bedrooms, not even coming out to have dinner. “It’s like they don’t really know her.”

  Eve says, sadly, and I know this does make her sad, “I thought it would be great to have Madison here, you know how I like having teenagers with us, like the years when Britt used to ride with us. It adds new life. But I don’t think she wants to be here with us.”

  Eve’s regrets only slow us down momentarily.

  “Karen is so programmed. She gets up at six every morning to run eight miles.”

  “And the rest of the time she spends doing crunches and squats. The woman never sits still.”

  “Is that even admirable?”

  “Means she’s a control freak.”

  In truth, I don’t care if Karen is a control freak or not really friends with Pippa. I only care that as a complete stranger to us, and after lashing out at us during the original skirmish with Pippa, she has made no attempts at peacemaking. We have dealt with difficult women on the trip before, but it was their quirky personalities we dealt with, not their hostile takeovers.

  Pippa had challenged our inveterate social bonds. She disrupted the ethos that we had consciously or unconsciously agreed upon. Our protective cap said, “We’re in Iceland for a week, leave all shit behind at the airport gate.”

  And usually it was Eve who kept us on course. If people got too negative, if conversation wasn’t humanely understanding, she would fall back and sigh. “Oh, let’s not go there. We’re here. In Iceland.”

  But now, go there we do, even Eve. Waiting for the fish and the saucers of sauce, we go there full throttle, trashing Pippa and her entourage—when low and behold, they walk in.

  Our conspiratorial huddle freezes. “Oh,” Eve says. “Oh, you found us,” which somehow conveys we are trying to hide from them. We are.

  To be civil, we make a halfhearted attempt to make room for them in the booth. And they, to be civil, take the booth next to us instead. Karen orders coffee and nothing else. Pipp
a orders from the vegetarian menu and Madison orders a salad. In their defense, they don’t make ordering difficult for the waitress. They are better customers than we are.

  I ask Madison what she thought of the horse she rode today. She says, “I think it has balance issues.”

  “He does. Yesterday when I rode him he kept tripping on me.”

  “That means it has balance issues.”

  “You know a lot about horses, don’t you?”

  Madison nods, as if to say, of course. She is at heart another horse girl, like Britt and Mel, quiet and resolute, self-assured when it comes to horses. The rest of the world can fall around them, but they have their focus—the horses.

  We finish our meal in a rush to get away from them and get to a horse show. Frieda and Helga are competing in a regional competition. For Helga, it’s no big deal. For Frieda, a Holar student, it means a great deal. We’ve watched her practice all week. We need to cheer her on.

  As we get up to leave, Pippa says all cheery-like, “We’ll see you there.” We part from them with a series of fluttery goodbyes.

  Once in the car we launch into the discussion: “Why is she following us?” We are so involved in this question that we drive around in circles trying to get out of town.

  “Does anyone remember the directions?” Eve says.

  “Helga said it’s minutes out of town.”

  Viv gets out of the car and says, “I’ll try to find directions. Come back for me.” We agree to meet her on the corner in five minutes.

  Eve pulls up to a man on the next corner. “Excuse me, we’re looking for the horse show. It’s supposed to be nearby. Would you know where it is?”

  The guy is white-haired, bowl-legged, craggy-faced. He sticks his head close to Eve’s window and looks in to see who all is asking.

  “Horse show? I don’t go to horse shows. I eat horses. I don’t have any other use for them.” He rubs his tummy and laughs at his joke.