The Icelandic Canadian - 01.10.2002, Page 25

Vol. 57 #2
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
67
bines. Those were days of pleasure for us,
our real estate outings together. We
stopped that day to visit a sheep farm; my
father and I had ordered and studied a
selection of booklets on sheep husbandry.
We stepped into the weathered and run-
down house to speak with the sheep
owner, a bachelor, and found his kitchen,
his parlour, the walls covered, tacked high
and low with pictures of naked women.
Legs and breasts and buttocks of naked or
lingeried women.
Playboy, I imagine. I had never seen
anything like it, nothing closer to women’s
nudity than the pictures I found in Time
magazine or on my brother’s television. I
didn’t know where to turn my eyes. I
wanted to look, needed to look, but I did-
n’t want my father to catch me. I was a nor-
mal boy but I knew then already my
father’s taste for judgement and disgust.
Sheep. And horses again, meadows with
still more Icelandic horses. Icelandic mead-
ows, how do I describe them. Covered
with lumps, and humps, and rocks, and
natural grass Bill calls those lumps tus-
socks. More mares, and more foals, and
two stallions up on their hind legs quarrel-
ing. I called to that herd there in the north
meadow along the road where I stood by
the fence and they all came running. I
stroked their soft necks and offered my
palm to their muzzles.
One male ptarmigan flew from the fur-
row beside me when I turned, white mot-
tled back and red eyebrow, its dry belching
call. Rock ptarmigan. And then a female. A
meadow pipit sang and fluttered from a
post down into the grass.
Red, when I rode him in my early teens,
must have been about the size of these
Iceland horses. We spoke of him as a Welsh
pony but he was likely some large Shetland
cross Welsh just somehow sounded better
to us boys, more romantic, and the
Shetland was small and common. As red as
his name, a sorrel, I borrowed him from a
Reimer family that lived on a peach and
grape farm a few miles east of Virgil near
my childhood home. Days my four or five
friends and I were going to ride I phoned
ahead to ask the Reimers’ permission and
then peddled my old blue bike over.
A gelding, and lazy, Red had mastered a
few interesting riding habits. When I laid
on the saddle and cinched the girth he blew
up his gut quite large. I had to poke him in
the ribs a few times with my knee before I
could draw the girth tight enough to ride.
Most horses of course know this trick, but
Red seemed a champion once out of the
barn at emptying his lungs and letting both
saddle and one of us riders slide off and fall
to the side. Maybe it was our youth and
inexperience.
If that prank failed in getting him back to
the pasture, he knew another. Successfully
saddled and mounted and fifty feet down
the driveway, if his rider wasn’t careful he
would lower his head and fall to his knees,
plop on his fat shaggy side and roll over.
Forewarned, I knew to pull hard on the
reins with his first downward motion, to
wait for it, jab with my heels on his belly to
push him on to a trot. That trot. I wish old
Red had been an Icelander, had known the
Iceland tolt, his ride was as rough as any
you’ve ever imagined. And I don’t think I
ever persuaded him to a gallop.
Once on the road, however, he settled in.
Not the most elegant animal in our group
and the only pony, but he forgot his tricks,
until the next day. Unlike my friends, I had
no horse of my own to ride. My father
wouldn’t, or couldn’t, buy me' one; and
Red even if my legs were already a bit too
long was a lot better than no ride at all. I
may not have been enthusiastic about many
things as a boy but I was crazy about
horsemanship and horses.
In those days, in the days of Red and real
estate adventures, I still felt forced into my
parents’ religion, into the creed of my com-
munity. Mennonites, a branch of the old
Anabaptist stock, a radical and peasant
movement of the sixteenth century
Reformation and once persecuted every-
where; we had squandered our heretic
belief in pacifism, in the communal sharing
of goods, in the equality of all people, and
had joined with other pious denominations
in the fight to maintain traditional interpre-
tations of the Bible, traditional hierarchies,
to reassert conventional beliefs and prac-
tices.
My parents sent me off to a Christian