How Not to Farmer in Iceland

You're Too Old to Spend the Rest of Your Life on the Couch: Let's Adventure!

Photo by redcharlie on Unsplash

A nasty habit gets even nastier

If you grew up in a rural area and found yourself working in the fields, chances are that you cleared your nose by pressing a finger against one nostril and blowing out the other. We used to call it “farmering,” or some version of the saying.

Runners and cyclists do it, too; it’s too damned clumsy to try to be delicate in the middle of a marathon. It’s efficient, and with any luck nobody is running behind you.

It’s also decidedly indelicate. Not something I give much of a damn about if expediency is more important. That said, I’m not likely to do it at a state dinner, even if it would be a statement about the crappy food or a boring speech.

But I digress.

Where was I? Oh. Iceland.

Photo by André Filipe on Unsplash

It was our second day on the trail. Far ahead of us was half our group of female riders (all Germans but myself). Our small group made up the trailing lot, and in between us was our herd.

In case you haven’t done this before, multi-day rides on Icelandic horses involve bringing a fair number of herd horses along. The herd is kept between the lead and trailing groups. You change horses several times a day, which gives them a break and you plenty of opportunities to ride different steeds.

You also get to trade places with the riders in the front after every break. I guess so that everyone can be equally miserable sucking dust.

If a horse goes lame, there’s always a backup. It’s lively, long days in the saddle up to nine hours, but the scenery is amazing.

What I hadn’t planned on was the dust kicked up by all the horses in front of us.

I had, however, planned on the black flies.

Those nasty bastards get up your nose, they get into the horses’ ears, they drive you mad. In a rare moment of prescience, I had bought a finely-woven netted mosquito hood which went over my head and riding helmet and tied at the neck, just over my bandanna.

I was right proud of myself.

While other riders, all of them about a third my age or thereabout, struggled with swatting the flies away, I was riding in comfort, at least as it related to the black flies. You get so used to the hood that you forget you have it on.

That of course is the point. You need to concentrate on the riding, and taking photos when you can.

This particular contingent of German girls (I won’t honor them with the moniker “women”) despised being stuck with an American. I’m not sure what the issue was but I’d been shoehorned in at the last moment. They resented my presence deeply.

I wasn’t very happy with them, either. Let’s just say I’ve met wart hogs with better manners.

That said, I concentrated on the ride, and took pleasure in the long days in the saddle and the relationships I had with the horses.

This particular July day was bone dry. We were headed into high country, and the mud and grass were higher up. For now, hundreds of hooves were sending clouds of dust into our faces. My netting was helping against the larger particulates, but it was still hard to breathe.

Worse, the day before I’d developed a cold. By the middle of the second day on the trail, I had a full nose of snot. The dust was making it worse.

We were moving smartly along. Icelandics are ridden with both hands, not one, as you often do riding Western.

Suddenly the lead riders signalled us to speed up. The herd took off. In the back, now in a thick cloud of black dirt, we sped up our tolt (the unique Icelandic gait for which they are known) to keep pace.

By Dagur Brynjólfsson - originally posted to Flickr as 043 Sævar frá Stangarholti, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8563681 The Icelandic tolt

We were sucking in black dust and dirt. By then I couldn’t breathe.

Instinctively I did the most obvious thing: I farmered, enthusiastically, to clear my clogged nose.

Right into my mosquito netting.

Now I had a massive slug of black snot hanging on the inside of my mosquito netting, wobbling like wet drapery right next to my face. There wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it, and the pace was jiggling the damn thing as we tolted hard ahead.

That black slug of snot began to slide downward on the inside of my netting towards my neck.

Now I can’t speak for anyone else but I happen to find such things unbearably hilarious.

Here I am tolting along at speed, I’m surrounded by a bunch of arch, arrogant German girls who hate my guts for being American (and OLD, let’s not forget OLD), and I had a big black snot loogey sliding down the inside of my netting towards my neck, and I couldn’t stop it.

I tried to stifle a laugh with my forearm and succeeded in blowing another big black loogey out the other side of my nose on to the inside of my netting.

So now I’m trying to keep my composure while two black loogies are marching inexorably down towards my neck (where, blessedly, at least I had tied a bandanna).

At this point I’m laughing so hard that the girls close to me are staring. They can’t quite make out what’s the matter. I waved them on so that I could bring up the rear.

While that gave me some measure of privacy, it also meant that I got the absolute worst of the dust.

At least back there, I was largely invisible. I gripped my horse with my legs, pulled up the hood and used my bandanna to wipe most of the black slime off. A good wash would have to wait, but at least I stopped the downward progress of the nose lava.

At our next rest break I was able to scrub some of the hardened snot off the inside of my netting. I was still laughing. The rest would have to wait.

It wasn’t until we arrived at the night’s lodging that I saw what the girls had been staring at. I had thick rivers of dried black snot all over my face, cheeks and chin.

Where I’d rubbed, it had spread.

The more I laughed, the more I’d blown out my nose, the more the black dust had settled. I had traded black flies for black snot.

After that, by god, I was legendary.

“Let’s give them something to talk about….” Bonnie Raitt

Now before you think naaaaaw, there’s this, a treatise on “the farmer’s blow,” as told by cyclists who are considerably better at it than I am.

I particularly enjoyed the following specific instructions:

As would be expected from our education specialist, Jason Jenkins offers an advanced option to under-the-arm technique, called the “crossover.” “If I'm blowing snot out my right nostril, I use my right hand to close my left nostril, crossing over the bridge of my nose,” explains Jenkins. “Then I lift my right elbow and launch the snot to the right side of my body, under my right armpit.”

and

Finally, bike commuter and Active Trans member Liz Farina Markel stresses the importance of alerting riding partners and other cyclists of your intention to fire.

The only pity was that upon firing, I fired upon myself.

If you can’t laugh, stay home.

Let’s play.

Photo by Hiki App on Unsplash

I hope you got a chuckle out of my discomfiture. And no, that particular trip didn’t end well but the next one was superb, I made lifelong friends from Switzerland. That friendship began when I told the snot story. That’s true, by the way; I visited her in Switzerland two years later. But that’s another story. If this was fun for you please consider

If you know someone else who needs a good snorting laugh kindly consider

Either way, whatever you do, please warn anyone if you’re getting ready to farmer. And lift your netting. Just saying.