Stan Hirson on his horse, Sómi frá Dýrfinnustödum. 

Stan and Sómi

About Me...

(Excerpted from the December, 2006, article in the United States Icelandic Horse Congress Quarterly)

Stan Hirson started riding, quite unexpectedly, in 2000, when he was 61. He has been sharing his learning experiences about the Icelandic horse and Iceland on www.hestakaup.com.

I always had "heavy" careers: film maker and organizational consultant with some interplay between the two and brief forays into others.  But my work always dealt with serious issues.

In the old days when I worked in broadcast television I had easy and current answers for the "Have I ever seen anything you've done?" question which is always asked of filmmakers.  For example, just about everyone on our planet has seen the interview I did of that blind Egyptian sheik, Omar Abdel-Rahman, 10 days before his group blew up the World Trade Center.  That was the kind of special project filming I was commissioned to do.

With that kind of background...   

"...anything you've done?"

"Er, well... have you ever seen hestakaup.com?"

Really! With all that is going on in the world today, why am I spending so much of my time and taking up bandwidth on the Internet to write and make videos about Icelandic horses?

Riding the horses is fun, but putting together and running a website is work.

Important work. And I take it very seriously.

The relationship between man and horse is trivial only when we forget our history of reliance on the horse. Until less than 100 years ago, we were dependent on the horse for most of our transportation, our farming, and, as we are learning from books such as Seabiscuit, our entertainment and sport. I clearly remember draft horses from my own childhood during World War II when engines and mechanical vehicles were being shunted to "the war effort".

It's a two-way relationship. Just as we were dependent on the horse, it was on us. Now that I care for horses at home, I am keenly aware how fragile they are, how susceptible they are to colic, diseases, injury and pedators.

What draws me to the horse is the closeness I feel to it when I am riding one. And it is a closeness to a part of my self that I otherwise can't reach.

Then why Icelandics?

Man's dependence on the horse was extreme in Iceland as perhaps nowhere else in the world. The horse literally pulled the Icelanders through the first settlement in 873 until the beginning of World War II when Iceland became important enough to the rest of the world to become mechanized.

But they still kept the horse.  Many, many of them. There are now 300,000 Icelanders and around 80,000 horses. Putting that into an American perspective, that would be 80 million horses here. (And we complain about snow removal!)

I sense that to Icelanders the sight of the horse and, certainly the experience of riding one, is a celebration of their very survival as a people.  

When you buy an Icelandic horse, even one that is domestic-bred, you have the possibility of connecting to much more than an animal. This horse has a context, a history. It did not just evolve, but was developed and bred by people.  It is not by chance that I am friends with the people from whom I got my horses. What is, in my case, unusual, is that these were never intended for sale as pleasure horses, but were kept back and ridden by their breeders. As a result, I know how they were trained (or not!) and something about the people who started them and then rode them and the kind of work they did with them.

In fact, the way the videos came out has to do with tracing the early life of my horse, Sómi.  He had been a riding horse for an elderly horse farmer, Sigurjon,  in Skagafjordur. When he sold his farm, Dyrfinnustadir, to a young man who had worked there, Ingolfur Helgasson, the horse stayed at the farm because Sigurjon was going off to live with his son in Sweden. Now the Icelandic coincidences start to pile up!  When I went on my first trek (really my first time out of a ring) it was from Dyrfinnustadir. Fortunately, that summer Sómi had been leased to another farmer. After the 5 day trek some of the riders who were professional horse people went through the herd and picked horses to import to the States.  If Sómi had been with us, he would have been selected.  He is a large gray (snow white) gelding, very forward, very powerful, but with a calm disposition. At the level of experience I had then, there was no way in the world that I could, or would, have ridden him.

The trek and the Skagafjordur landscapes were like magic! I took the last day off to preserve the experience on video.

Now I had these videos which I edited into a fifteen-minute record of the trip. I sent a few tapes out as presents and that was it. (I have since broken down that initial tape into 4 sequences that are here on hestakaup.com.) 

I had managed to stay on the horse all the way, but when I came home I realized that now I really had to learn to ride. I went at taking riding lessons with the same passion I had about riding. Soon I imported my own horse from Iceland. 

That horse did not work out and for a few months I was not able to ride. I was despondent.

Everyone, it seemed, joined in on trying to "find a horse for Stan". After a while, we heard from Karen Winhold of the Vermont Icelandic Horse Farm that some good horses had just come down from Iceland on consignment and one in particular was very special.  Come right up! We tried the horse for weekend and all I wanted in life was for him to pass the vet check. 

Whoever he was, that horse and I bonded. It was only a few weeks later that I realized that he was from the same farm, Dyrfinnustadir, where the magical trek took place. And where I shot the video.

After a few months of lessons and saddle experience, I was able to take him out alone for some trail riding near our house. As far as I was concerned, that was what riding was all about. Being immersed in nature as you can only be when riding a horse.

Then I noticed something very special about this Sómi frá Dyrfinnustodum.

He had his "opinions". Why are we going this way again?  Are you sure you know what you are doing?  We didn't do this in Iceland! Sometimes you are really stupid!

I felt that old farmer who had him as his riding horse, who had ridden him for 5 years chasing sheep, visiting friends, checking out the pastures, talking to me through the horse.  Do people who have organ transplants wonder about the donor? Why wouldn't this horse who had been patterned by an Icelandic farmer that had ridden all his life think that the American doofus who now had him and had only ridden for about a year, would need to be told what to do?

Well, in this partnership, I was boss. Sómi would settle down and go along quite willingly, curious to see where the idiot sitting on his back would take him.

I kept taking lessons from a dressage-oriented teacher and took advantage of every Icelandic clinic that came anywhere near our area. I took from the best: Reynir, Eyjolfur, Bruno. With every lesson and every clinic, I felt closer to Sómi.

As my riding skills imroved, my bond with the horse became intense. I would think tolt and we would tolt.  I would wonder where that trail to the left led to and were exploring it. It was no longer clear to me whether I liked horseback riding or just riding Sómi. And I started asking questions about what that farmer, now deceased but maybe living through his horse, was like.

Maybe others would find this an interesting story.

So I took my camera gear and went up to Iceland to trace Sómi's early life.

This time, I would be following Sómi's path.

I dropped in on Ingolfur at Dyrfinnustadir and pried him with questions about the old farmer and my horse. Of course, when I bragged that in his first dressage competition, and being the only Icelandic horse, Sómi came in first, Ingolfur laughed and said that at Dyrfinnustadir "his dressage was chasing sheeps!" In the course of the visit he showed me his breeding stallion, Hágangur, and even put his 5 year old daughter, who was an infant at the time of the trek, on him in a round pen.  Bareback of course. All this I captured on video.

I wanted to stay in Skagafjordur for a few days. In fact, I really had to.  A bad snow storm had made the route back to Reyjkavik impassible.  And I also broke my cell phone. You do not want that to happen in Iceland in even the best of conditions.

Without a cell phone, and in a blizzard, the best thing to do would be to hole up in a hotel.  But all the hotel rooms were taken for a large international cross-country ski competition. 

How was I going to follow Sómi? Should I even try?

I drove to Holar because I heard they had rooms.  No such luck in the winter.  But a Swedish student called a guesthouse she knew in Hofsos and made arrangements for me to spend the night there.  I got to this tiny village of Hofsos where would be absolutely nothing to do and no place to buy a new cell phone. Could I make it to Blonduos?  Or should I stick with the Sómi plan?  What plan?  While I was sitting in the car a man came up and asked me if I was the person who called from Holar.  Yes.  He was the owner of the guesthouse.  Are you interested in horses?  Yes.  Have you ever heard of Kolkuos?

Kolkuos!  Kolkuos is a line of horses from the farm of that name.  And Sómi was a Kolkuos horse from the stallion Feykir!  Tracing Sómi's life meant checking out Kolkuos even in its abandoned state. I had heard that they were trying to restore the old farm. 

"Well," he said, "I am trying to do something with Kolkuos.  And if you have time now, I have to go to a farmer who is going to give me 2 young Kolkuos horses to be put there."

So there I was, with the guy who was going to fix up Kolkuos and make it into a horse center.  He would take me with him to a farm to pick up the beginnings of a new Kolkuos herd...

I swear, Sómi was now leading me. Somewhere back in his pasture in upstate New York, he was guiding me on his home ground.  Again.  And this time he was boss and I would listen carefully to his "opinions".

I ended up shooting a marvelous sequence with the yearlings at a farm where they remembered the farmer from nearby Dyrfinnustadir, of course, but they actually remembered that he had a white horse!  Sómi. And drank White Horse whiskey.

And I have it all on tape.

And Sómi also led me to Mette Manseth giving Ingolfur's 5 year old daughter dressage lessons on Hagangur.

He took me to Kolkuos to see the old farm and hear the stories of the early Viking settlements and the first horse in Iceland, Fluga, who jumped off the ship and came to the very beach where I was standing and ran off to a swamp which they now call Flugumyri.

And I got the videotapes to prove it!

He led me to the farm where his father, Feykir, was bred.  At  Hafsteinsstadir, Skapti tacked up one of Sómi's brothers and...
 
All on tape. 

Now, what to do with all these stories and videos? There would not be much of an outlet for a "movie".  I came up with the idea of taking advantage of a brand new technology that was making it possible to stream movies on the Internet with good enough quality so that they could be played in real time rather than downloaded. 

So I started what has to be the narrowest-niche-videoblog in the blogosphere, hestakaup.com.  Through this project I am sharing my experience becoming a horseman and the horses and the country from which they come.

And trying to explore why riding the Icelandic horse is actually important.

Stan Hirson

Stan started his professional career as a documentary film maker at WGBH-TV in Boston in 1962.  Among his credits was being floor manager on Julia Child's first shows of The French Chef.  He covered the civil rights movement in the South for National Educational Television in 1963 and made film portraits of James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.

Stan joined the Maysles Brothers as Associate and was involved in the films such as The Beatles in America, Salesman, Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens, and numerous television documentaries.

As a result of his films about the workplace, he was awarded a Ford Foundation fellowship to the Graduate School of Management at UCLA at the Center for Quality of Working Life and left his film career to practice organizational consultation.  He trained in group and organizational behavior at the Washington School of Psychiatry and was awarded a fellowship at London's Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.  In addition to consulting to industry he taught group and organizational dynamics at the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at Teachers College of Columbia University.

He currently  lives and works in the Hudson Valley where he has consolidated his careers to make documentary videos for the internet.