Bilski - Wild horses of the summer sun: a memoir of Iceland

WILD HORSES

OF THE

SUMMER SUN

A MEMOIR OF ICELAND

T ORY B ILSKI

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.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-64313-064-4

ISBN: 978-1-64313-161-0 (eBook)

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company

www.pegasusbooks.us

For Matthew, for all the reasons

CONTENTS

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 cant tamp down the spirit of this mare when we finally reach the sea. Its like she breaches.

All the horses get wilder here, their blood filled with the wind and the waves of the Arctic waters. I cant really stop her now, so I let her go, let her run to her hearts 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 dont think of falling or stopping, I only think which one of ushorse or riderwill 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, Ill take it. I prefer identities that arent tethered to either DNA or to the happenstance of birth. Im American, whatever that all means; my fathers Polish ancestry is written in my face, though the connection to the culture has long been lost; my mothers 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 Icelandthat 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 its 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 jobin boredom begins adventureand 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 didnt know I was looking for.

On my screen was a dark bay horse standing alone on a misty hill of green tussocks. Its 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 dont 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 didnt 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 Bjrk. Or if they were really in the know, they knew of Sigur Rs and the burgeoning music scene of Reykjavk. Maybe they knew of the cheap flights to Europe with a pit stop at Keflavk. 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 wasnt 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 couldnt get his work done. Why cant you fall in love with a horse around here? he asked. Whats 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 some thing 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 lands end, to drum out the humdrum, and wake up the dormant desire, and fear, of a fast horse.

It wasnt 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.