Living in Greenland

Greenland is a place that gripped me from the moment I breathed the dry Arctic air, felt the shards of cold pierce my layers and placed a foot on its ever changing snowscape. As a person who likes going to places hot, cold, humid or dry, I inevitably find myself comparing and contrasting country to country, place to place, but Greenland didn’t offer me that distraction. I was uniquely present to appreciate the incomparable beauty before me. 

Arrival

Rumbling through the snow-filled January skies in a small propeller plane from Kangerlussuaq to Ilulissat, I was on the final leg of my journey from Copenhagen to my new home for the next six weeks. The desolate purity of the white landscape below moved steadily by, but it wasn’t until we finally began our descent over the intermingling ice flows and crystalline behemoths of Ilulissat’s ice fjord, that I was put into the steady state of awe that would remain for the next six weeks. 

In Ilulissat, I collected my bag from the smallest baggage carousel ever constructed and then met Ivan, my Russian host, outside where his taxi was waiting. That drive into town, in the straining daylight of an Arctic winter, was one I will remember for ever. As we topped the hill, passing a graveyard full of snow-white crosses, I got my first view of the ocean and the giants that plied her hidden trails. Gigantic icebergs with concave blue slopes and jagged peaks stood out against the crimson-orange sky. From the steadily darkening heights of the atmosphere, grey clouds sent their envoys into the colourful scene. Spectral arms of snow flurries whirled and danced downward through the colour palate towards the ocean, it was a graceful and completely otherworldly sight, my first glimpse of Arctic magic. 

I knew from my Facetime conversations with Ivan before travelling that he would expect a lot from me, but on my first day, after a 5am start in Copenhagen, and a long day of travelling I wasn’t expecting a day of volunteering. However, from the lofty viewpoint we sunk into the outskirts of town, where the harbour was nestled. Once we arrived, Ivan told me he had to try to unfreeze the engine of his boat. I hadn’t come prepared for outdoor work, I was dressed for seated travel and brief walks from plane to building or vice versa. So, as the orange sky intensified and my legs (which did not have any thermal insulation) began to freeze, I stepped out onto the sea ice that had filled most of the harbour, careful to follow in Ivan’s footsteps to the boat. All of the boats were stranded between the slushy grey ice which rolled with every movement of the ocean and the immovable thick white ice. Fishermen strolled along this thick ice, which in places was stained with the blood of a seal that had been hauled ashore during the day. They carried long wooden poles tipped in metal with which they furiously attacked the ice, trying to free up any ropes which had been caught in the freezing tide. As I slid around the motionless boat, I watched others struggling to plough a course through the slush and out to the open sea, I felt vaguely unsafe in my tired stupor and unsuitable clothing, my need for travel insurance was becoming blindingly obvious. Russians don’t mess around. 

My New Home

After wryly asking if I was cold in the “mild” -17°C air, Ivan eventually took me to his house on roads which were all covered with compacted snow. From the road we walked down a gently sloped wooden walkway towards the sea and then turned off of it to negotiate the steep rocky section before the house. This is where an almost random assortment of wooden boards formed a partially completed walkway to a partially completed house. An hour in Ivan’s house, will tell you most of what you need to know about the man. Straight away the house was a jumbled mess. Ivan was a man obsessed with keeping busy, salvaging building materials and having 200 projects on the go simultaneously. In this house of questionable structural integrity, the need for cleanliness was shoved down my throat while I looked around me in awe at the tools, clothes and stray chipboards. The shower was an unattached square bath basin liable to tipping and the toilet was a thick black bin bag fitted into a toilet bowl which had to be manually lifted out, tied and changed when half full. As well as the precarious shower and toilet conditions, the water wasn’t attached to the mains so every time the tank got almost empty we would run an improvised hosepipe line to the top of the hill where a municipal waterspout gave free water. Was this legal? No. Was it convenient to stand pushing a button every 54 seconds to keep the water flowing for 45 minutes in the freezing cold of a Greenlandic night? No. But was it free? Yes, yes it was. When I arrived, I set up my camping cot in the living room (my room was being occupied by Carl the other volunteer who would leave in a week) and then Carl and I put up a shelving unit in the workshop under the house.

Over the next week I would come to appreciate Carl greatly. Not only was he a thoughtful, perceptive and endlessly cheerful person to have around but he was also, perhaps more importantly, someone to vent all Ivan-related gripes to. He was younger than me but his approach to life meant he was someone I felt I could learn something from. With our similarly adventurous aspirations and dreams, who knows, we might meet again.

After a long day, travelling, working and cooking, I slid into my “bed” obviously physically and mentally shattered. As I tried to drift off to sleep, Ivan appeared. He was wielding an unfolding measuring stick and bright head torch and was muttering loudly to himself. Muttering it seems is better than the Ivan default. Much of the time over the next six weeks I would be writing my journal, reading my book or actively walking away from him and he would be talking at me. Having a conversation with him is nice but silence was a concept unknown to the man. On most evenings, his incessant barrage of chatter about the price of everything from reindeer meat to importing copper tubing from Poland would wash over my tired carcass. Retuning into Ivan’s talking from my zoned out “mmhmm’, ‘yep’ and ‘wow’ replies, he would have changed subject to the dimensions of wooden boards needed for a new room in the house or how to correctly cook cod’s liver and spread it on toast. So, with my sheet pulled over my eyes I wished:

1. That he would go to bed.

2. That he would never discover Adderall. With the power of legal amphetamines that man would never sleep. He would be unstoppable.

A Brief History of Greenland

Greenland was first inhabited around 2500 BC by waves of Inuit travelling across from the nearby North America. They weren’t bothered too much about the extent of their new icy home and so stayed in the north. But in the 10^th century the mad lads of the time, the Vikings, took a break from stabbing monks and decided to discover somewhere new. They rocked up in the south of Greenland and found no sign of habitation and decided to relax out there until the Little Ice Age between the 16th and 19th centuries cooled the North Atlantic region. This drove the Vikings back home and allowed the Inuit to move further south where they made more small communities. The union of the Kingdom of Denmark and the Kingdom of Norway, inventively called Denmark-Norway, still claimed sovereignty over Greenland, apparently believing some of their Norse settlements had survived the centuries. In 1721, feeling the rush of possible colonial power, Denmark-Norway sent missionaries out to reinstate Christianity among the non-existent Norse settlers. The Danish feared their countrymen could have reverted to the much more fun pagan beliefs of a wise one-eyed god who rides an eight-legged horse across the sky, or the equally interesting assertion that a giant sea serpent surrounds entire earth and bites its own tail until the dawn of the apocalypse. Not finding any Norse people to educate in their new favoured superstition, they instead settled on dipping the Inuit they found in some water and thenceforth calling them Christian folk. For millennia teaching people about your chosen omniscient autocrat in the sky has been a fantastic foot in the door to establish your colonialist intentions, and so soon Denmark-Norway began setting up trade colonies and then a trade monopoly. The town of Ilulissat (originally Jacobshavn) was established as a trading post by the Danish in 1741 and is now is the 3^rd largest settlement on the world’s biggest island, with a population of 4700 people. A bustling metropolis by Greenland standards.

Living in this trading post turned town, the thing that most fascinated me was the changeability. No day was the same and never have I been so compelled to stop and revel in the utter implausibility of the beauty I was faced with. 

Leaving The House 

A changing in the wind or ocean currents made a huge difference to the daily scenery I would see on leaving the house. An onshore breeze or current would bring icebergs dutifully shoreward, gathering, pushing and squeezing to bathe momentarily in the warm light radiating from the nearest home, sometimes mere metres from their icy faces. Whereas some mornings only small ice flows would be floating past, bobbing unsteadily along the shoreline where the ice giants had been the previous night. 

Fishing boats negotiated the constantly shifting pathways between icebergs to work the productive waters. During the day they chugged eagerly towards the fjord and during the night they headed home, their bright lights reflecting as a shimmering pathways in the inky blackness of the Arctic Ocean. The oppressive darkness of the night made them seem almost alone out there, surrounded by nothingness until their lights chanced upon the whites and blues of the silent icebergs around them. A beautiful and serene sight for us spectators, but a Celine Dion tinged warning to sailors. 

In some early mornings, I would head out before starting work to enjoy the morning light on the icebergs out to sea. I would climb the rocky promontory at the water’s edge, 50m from the front door, and watch. Tabular conglomerations of ice rode the rhythmic swells in front of me, each interred boulder of white ice waiting for the right time to free itself. The icebergs creaked while the waves sloshed energetically against them. Looking north, across the bay and along the seaside reaches of the town, the dark wood of the Zion Church (previously the largest building in Greenland) almost begged for sunlight to warm its reaching spire, instead the far hills towards Oqaatsut were glowing orange, struck by the sun’s rays that had remained unseen in Ilulissat this winter. Turning my gaze out to sea, there was always the presence of Disko island. This enormous island is big enough and high enough to have its own permanent ice sheet and from Ivan’s house it was a familiar companion to my days. Usually, it was obscured, showing either its ill-defined silhouette or a couple of mountains breaking through the cloud banks. However, on the last day of January, the dark overcast day permitted a band of clarity to sweep over the horizon for the first time. Disko’s long coastline revealed itself as a tangle of ridges, valleys and peaks, their wild features picked out by the orange low-angled sunlight. In front of the island, icebergs moved at all speeds through the waters, some the shape and size of apartment blocks and others like jagged spines of ancient reptiles ominously hinting at their presence in the depths.

Working outside, most often with salvaged wood or shovelling snow to make a compacted trail for Ivan’s snowmobile, was hard but rewarding work. Being in the elements, breathing in the cold air and appreciating the battle against the elements that life undertakes every day in Greenland made me so appreciative of the opportunity I had been given to be there. One day I had gotten up early and decided that, despite the -21°C weather, I would go walking and photographing the ice fjord (which I will talk about in my next post), when I got back I began work shovelling snow. The sun’s prolonged motion of setting in the mid-afternoon always produced stunning views on the ever changing icescape of the bay but that day I was astounded by what I saw. The sea appeared to be steaming. The blackened scars of the wind’s constant advances across the surface waters were commonplace but in the calmer sections orange smoke was rising and blowing out to sea in mesmeric unison. This sea smoke’s enticing beauty was indescribable and kind of made me want to go for a swim. As the orange smoke started to recede, I began to feel the cold, I walked down to towards house, removed my buff, and my beard instantly froze. Less fun than my frozen face was the fact that one of my fingers had gone completely numb inside my ski gloves. Even once I had warmed up, it took days to recover feeling in it. 

One night on a walk back to the house, I experienced the most surreal sight I ever saw in Greenland. On any normal day heading back to Ivan’s house, down the hill and following the wooden paths where the terrain didn’t allow for roads, I could always sense the sea. I could hear it, smell it, see the rolling waves or the creaking icebergs but that night there was nothing. The sea was so dark and still that the horizon was indistinguishable. There were no stars, there was no breeze and everything was utterly silent. The water was pure obsidian reflecting the icebergs caught in its flawless crystalline surface. Their reflections in the blackness of the water were so perfect that it seemed as though the water wasn’t there at all. Instead, I was staring into an endless void only occasionally graced by symmetrical white wanderers drifting on an invisible plane. 

Ilulissat

The town itself didn’t offer much in terms of attractions or sights but walking through with a curious eye was enough to entertain. 

Going back and forth from the municipal gym was often one of the highlights of my day. I had gotten a gym membership when I arrived. This unlikely move not only allowed me to work out, but also to shower somewhere I could stand up straight, with good water pressure and without the very real possibility of any movement tipping me over onto the floor. In other words, my month’s membership was very much worth the money. Usually, I would go to the gym around 4pm and then get back and make dinner for both Ivan and myself.  One day as I set off for the gym, I left the house and as always looked left down towards the sea. There was a raging barrage of snow blasting left to right along the coast. Undeterred by the wind, I headed towards the centre of town which wasn’t far. But, as I reached the school, the blizzard truly hit. The wind wove together swirling films of snow which shut down visibility to a few metres. Lights from cars and street lights were about the only things that pierced the gauzy air, and even they were suppressed until they were mere candles in the gloom. The constantly shifting curtains of snow sometimes opened to show a silhouette battling against the wind, their heads down to stop the blinding snow reaching their face. While the relentless wind was probably commonplace for the locals at this time of the year, for me it was an incredible spectacle. The dampening of the light and the fact that all shapes and figures were reduced to otherworldly outlines standing in the pressing gale or shuffling in spite of it, made for an unforgettable disconnect from the real world.    

Day to day the winds or snow were never the same. Sometimes the light powder would stream in one direction, jostling hurriedly along the ground until the wind pushed it spiralling through the air. Tiny snowflakes agitated by the eddying winds appeared like swarms of tropical flies dancing in the conical illumination of the street lights. Often the winds graced the tops of snow drifts like the desert breeze does the dunes, liberating those top particles to re-join the aerial display.

Most nights the streets were quiet, only a couple of cars interrupted the serenity. Some children sledded down steeper roads and hills while old Greenlandic men walked back from the shops seemingly unfazed by the whipped up snow or the beauty around them. 

When it got cold enough for long enough the bays started to freeze. One day I was walking around town and the surface of the bay in front of the church almost appeared oily. I trod through the deep snow to see it more closely. It was an icy film, a jigsaw of transparent ice pieces starting to coalesce, so thin and pliable that the icy membrane rode the gentle sway of the ocean without a splash, or sign of breaking. Following the ice out to sea, boats hovered above the ocean’s surface, a perfect pane of glass seemed to have been inserted between ocean and sky. Both boats and icebergs slid across this plane, some icebergs appeared as marble islands floating into the darkening sky. It was my first time seeing the phenomenon called Fata Morgana, and it was as surreal as it sounds. Disko Island maintained its looming presence as a faintly glowing orange mass of mountains, defiant against the oppressively dark sky. As I watched this ethereal scene all was silent except for the occasional croak of a raven. 

A few days later I took a break and headed down to the shore by the church, making a conscious effort to be present in my surroundings, to not touch my phone and just to watch and listen. The same bay in front of the church was almost entirely frozen after days of temperatures around -20°C. The ice was thicker than the oily film I had seen before but still had a translucent look to it. A fishing boat sped past, emerging from the large unmoving icebergs at the end of the ice fjord, that often leered over the houses of the town, and heading towards the harbour. It nodded its way onwards, bouncing excitedly on the flat ocean. The sea birds, which often swarm around fishing boats in a squawking fury paid no attention because on this occasion there were no fish to be had. The noise from the boat’s engine faded quickly but the wake remained. Smooth ripples of liquid grey and orange glass moved in parallel unison towards me and the sea birds which were resting on the ice. Some birds took off while others rode the swell, their icy raft so thin that it deformed plastically on the successive wave fronts. Where the boat had been minutes before a pathway remained. Cut from the newly formed ice was a runway of utter reflective perfection. I didn’t know which light it was reflecting, there was nowhere in sight as brilliantly coloured as this swathe of bluey grey/orange. It was like peering through a gap in the sea and seeing into another dimension’s sunset sky. 

Away from the sea and towards the other edges of town, between the wild mountains and the colourful houses, huskies slept, jumped, barked and ran in their snowy fields. The working dogs were chained until they were needed to pull sleds while the young dogs got free reign to run around the town, but inevitably chose to spend their time annoying the older dogs. The huskies withstood the ferocious winds that brought the blistering cold from the island’s interior and were left outside all year round. They weren’t pets and their untamed gaze spoke of hunger and restlessness.

The Northern Lights

The northern lights were one of the things I was most excited to see when I came to Greenland. After missing the opportunity to see them in Sweden, this time I was ready. Luckily for me, it didn’t take long to see the lights, I shared my first viewing of them with Carl. We were both utterly blown away by what we saw, sat on the snow, necks craned skyward. 

Shimmering rivers of light rippled and undulated like ribbons in a gentle breeze. From over my right shoulder the largest green ribbon lay lazily over the sky, its top side diffusing into rays that intermingled with starlight. The ribbon joined together with the core of green light in front of us, amassing its evolving bulk over the houses like a self-tying knot whose strands curved, stretched and eventually smudged across the night. I never expected the lights to change so quickly but it seems the solar winds are just as capricious as the Arctic ones. 

On another night, out on my favourite rocky promontory next to the lapping ocean, I saw the northern lights behaving in a different way. At first it was an almost ominous radiant presence directly above me, a brilliant green mass highlighted by occasional waves of orange then it transformed into a gurgling stream across the sky. The edges of the stream remained solid, containing the flow of light that bubbled, swirled and flowed as a liquid. Soon the stream stretched beyond its limits and began to break apart and fade. As it lost its vibrancy, it became blue-green flames engulfing the town in a soft glow that danced much like the mesmerising flicker of a fire, beckoning you to stare longer. As I began losing feeling in my extremities, I decided to walk back through the deep snow towards the house. My final glimpses of the lights were when I saw the flames stretch out into pillars of pallid green light, sharpening and stretching into heavenly javelins. 

The fluttering, cascading and swaying greens of the northern lights are one of the most mesmeric sights us humans can see. In the modern world, our appreciation and understanding of the awe inspiring and humbling power of celestial sights is being lost. I hope I never lose interest in seeing the warm embrace of a hazy dawn or the sputtering embers of a sunset. I hope I never undervalue the majesty in the light sent from the fiery extra-terrestrial furnaces burning across the void of space. Some send their twinkling light across galactic distances so we can see them as they were millions of years ago. While our sun’s light takes only eight minutes to reach us and inspires a vast variety of life, on this occasion it disturbed the trajectories of charged particles in our magnetosphere. It sounds far less sexy put like that, but if you don’t think that a distant boiling plasma furnace, so large one million Earths could fit inside it, meddling with the invisible magnetic shield around our wet space rock isn’t cool then, well, we aren’t friends anymore. 

Food & Culture 

Coming to Greenland I really didn’t know what to expect in terms of the culture, language or people. On my flights I was endlessly perplexed by the language which showed little regard for the reader or listener. Single words could be measured in feet and there was one specific sound that I had never heard in any other language. To try this sound put your tongue to your palate and then blow out, the sound should be something like a cat’s hiss. Luckily, if you don’t understand what people are saying, just say this in reply ‘Paasisinnaannginnakkummi’, meaning ‘I don’t understand’. Easy.

Living with a Russian, I didn’t have as much access to the Greenlandic cultural dynamic as I was hoping, Greenlanders didn’t generally seem super friendly and so especially for my first few weeks in Ilulissat I had little interaction with locals. Occasionally, glimmers of the original Inuit culture shone through the modern developments though. When walking around town, the houses, as well as having boats conspicuously in the front gardens, also featured reindeer skins strung up on the wire fences. Sleds laid about too, either used for transport through the town, or equally as a makeshift sun, or I guess, snow lounger. Also, near my favourite picturesque church I found the wooden frames of kayaks (which comes from the Inuit word qajaq). Their frames were originally crafted from whale bone held together by sinew and the seal skin exterior would be added to the outside. However, the wooden framed kayaks seen here were made popular with colonialism and an access to timber not previously seen in Greenland. Invented 4400 years ago in Greenland, kayaks were originally used for hunting whales and seals, a practice I can’t even imagine trying to undertake in a boat, never mind a kayak. 

Possibly the most tangible and easy way to explore Greenlandic culture, is eating and drinking. The café culture of Greenland was a nice surprise to me, the cafes provided me with a place to read and write in peace. A big shout out goes to Cafennguaq which does the best sandwiches in town, especially their sliced pork and crackling ones. Also, maybe equally important to me, was the friendliness of the staff who remembered my name, chatted away to me and made me feel welcome. I’m hoping that one day the café culture can eventually overtake the national addiction to alcohol that plagues Greenlandic society.

True Greenlandic food requires a little more of an adventurous palate though. Mattak (the raw skin and blubber of a whale) is a widely available and popular meal, all kinds of seafood (snow crabs being my favourite), whale meat in every conceivable form, reindeer, musk ox and more were available in the local butcher in the centre of town or the supermarket. I didn’t try the mattak because it felt like something that needed to be eaten with Greenlanders, not bought from a restaurant, but everything else I tried. In fact, eating smoked and salty beluga, reindeer and musk ox with scrambled eggs was amazing. Beluga was ebony black, tender and somewhere between fishy and meaty, while reindeer and musk ox were dark, smoky and meaty. We ate whale steaks one night which were very strange but good, the colour and texture was something like beef, but the flavour deviated towards the sea somewhere along the line. 

The hunting of whales, seals and narwhals in Greenland to most sane and empathetic people would seem barbaric. Whales are some of the most intelligent animals on the planet with complex emotions and a still indecipherable language. However, unlike the whale hunting that happens in places such as Japan and Iceland, in Greenland it holds a special relevance when Greenland’s climate and geography are considered. Agriculture and pastoral farming are almost impossible in Greenland (with the exception of some areas in the south) due to 80% of the island being covered by the second largest ice sheet in the world (after Antarctica) which has an average thickness of 1.5km. For this reason the International Whaling Commission allows for the subsistence hunting of whales for indigenous hunters to a specific quota per year and per region. 

Final Thoughts 

It won’t be the £13 pints, colourful houses or the howling huskies that come to mind when I remember Ilulissat. Nor will it be precarious showers, tying together black bags full of human excrement or Ivan’s obsession with the price comparison between the superpowers of international trade that are Poland and Greenland. What will truly stick in my mind are the silent moments of appreciation I would have every day. After labouring to put on the six layers needed to survive, the hat, gloves and snow boots, and shoving the door open through the freshly fallen snow piled up on the other side, I knew I would experience something new. Sometimes people forget that without effort, discomfort or hard work you end up looking at life with blinkers on. It’s when you decide to get up and to do something that your outlook expands, possibilities multiply and probabilities fall in your favour.