The Greenland Culture: Fact Or Fiction?

AUGUST IN GREENLAND AND ALREADY winter beckons. Glinting like shivery stars, an immense tide of ice floes and slush have gathered at the remote Eqi glacier along the mid-western coast. Some 150 miles above the Arctic Circle, boats are finding it harder to reach a lonely camp on the rocks nearby. Powerfully active, continually haemorrhaging ice, the glacier creaks and booms, sounding like dynamite on the wild wind or an immense army passing in the near distance, an unbreachable, marbled wall taller than the Eiffel Tower. No wonder the handful of Danish science students who run the camp are obsessed with Game of Thrones.

In the evenings I watched them – keen, ruddy-faced – fighting each other with wooden swords on rocks overhanging the glacier, laughing and lunging with the mad happiness of being in such a place. The vast, vacant air, the months away from any town or family or mechanical noise, the muddled memory of Arctic days without sunrise and moons that never wane. And now this exquisitely brief autumn, swooped over by Lapland longspurs and the occasional tiny sparrow, somersaulting in a light rain.

The largest island in the world, Greenland is only inhabited around its fjord-lined coast, and even then scarcely: altogether just 56,000 people across its 836,000 square miles, mostly gathered in the south-west. A ‘self-governing overseas administrative division of the Danish realm’ (but opted out of the EU), Greenland relies mostly on Danish money and imports; more than 80 per cent of its economy is based on subsistence hunting of whale, seal and fish. Most visitors tend to converge on the southern capital of Nuuk to watch the purple and green northern lights, and travel by sledge to the island’s infamous centre: the ice cap, locked in an 11,000ft-thick original deep freeze, forming continuously from layers of compressed air and snow, bearing down with a might that contorts the middle of the island.

But further north, the aurora borealis are celestial white and the air stretches incandescently far and further into a lambent vastness. For millennia very few people came here, but now, through the summer and autumn, when the coastal terrain is free of snow, a few curious hikers arrive by boat and hunker down in a handful of simple wooden shelters at Eqi, striking inland on foot to the ice or up to mountain tarns, then gathering round the hot stove in the community hut for food in the evenings, cackling with enjoyment and vodka, sometimes showing treasures found on their wanderings, relics unbearably evocative of lost expeditions. A very old ski, carved beautifully from ash.

An unopened can of pre-World War I lemon syrup infused with scurvy-bashing vitamin C. Although steadily retreating for decades because of climate change, the glacier at Eqi has long been an object of study and reverence. On the black cliffs just opposite stands a wooden hut held together by fraying ropes that was built by the French polar expedition in 1948. Inside; the peeling papered walls are stained a weary yellow from the long, companionless hours and decades, and scratched everywhere with graffiti that suggests an immense spiritual discombobulation at finding oneself on this strange far shore of the northernmost country in the world. ‘OHI KNOW NOTHING ABOUT NOTHING’ someone has written in a despairing, looping hand, ‘I AM A USELESS BURDEN’. As I read, ice sheds and calves off the nearby glacier with a fulminating thwack and the hut shudders.

Bits of equipment still scatter the shelves A long-dried king-crab claw suggests unrecoverable evenings over fish stew and cigarettes, doubtless mulling over how ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ are mere words in Greenland. Depending on the time of year, there are nights eternally lolling in twilight, and days that don’t bother to start again. Sometimes the sun is not even the sun but a solar mirage, its rays an oasis suspended in the atmosphere. ‘HERE. IN THE MIDDLE OFTHE ICE. 1949’. On the long journey up to Eqi, I’d stopped at the small city of Ilulissat, with its own magnificent Kanga glacier nearby and 6,000 huskies chained on the outskirts of town – thin and lupine after a summer with scarcely any food – resting and hungry for the snows and the hunt.

It was afternoon and everybody was out fishing for halibut; I walked for hours amongst the dogs and a flower called Arctic cottongrass, which explodes into balls of immaculate white fluff in such vast numbers that the rocky fields leading down to the water looked like oceans of foam. In old Innuit stories, heaven is nothing much. But the sea? Life-giver, place of dreams. Later I sat on the craggy shore with Nikolena, a young Greenlander whose family had lived in Ilulissat for many years and whose conversation was teenager meandering and intense, muddling the distant past with the present, talking about how it used to get so hot inside igloos that man, woman and child wore G-strings made from seal skin.

As the dogs began to stir and whine in evening unison, we headed away from the cacophony, passing white fish drying on racks in the gardens of painted wooden bungalows, and cafes selling whale stir-fry, their porches hung with skulls of musk ox, relatives of the dire wolf found out on the tundra that Alaskan eskimos call oomingmak – ‘the animal with skin like a beard’. ‘Siku,’ says Nikolena in her low, insistent voices indulgently repeating some of my favourite Innuit words. It means ice. And ‘Quaqag’, meaning mountainous. Sweeping the blood and blubber of a minke whale from the deck of a boat in the bay, fishermen were smoking and listening to a local radio station playing Hank Williams. ‘What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever found through a hole in the ice?’

I asked 29-year-old Fari as he threaded baby pollock onto hooks for tomorrow’s catch. I was hoping he might say a narwhal, with its spiral ivory tusk that protrudes from its upper jaw, once coveted by medieval monks as a supposed unicorn relic. For a long while he said nothing, his eyes looking away at the weather, the horizon, the saffron flutterings of sunset. On the ground by his feet, four severed seal paws. ‘A man,’ he said finally. ‘A frozen fisherman. He must have fallen from a boat. Could have been years before.’ And Fari just shrugged. To the sagacious Greenlander, that’s fair balance. You hunt; you take life; and one day you might very well give your own. Up at Eqi, it’s so close to the end of the season only a few of us are left: the Danish kids, a French couple here to hike, and a trio of Japanese naturalists.

Soon it will be impossible to negotiate the iced-over waters unless using sled and dog, as there are no roads in Greenland. As the season clearly changes -autumn here is fast, as though happening in a magical time-lapse – the surrounding mountains are flintily brutal and self-absorbed. By the stove in the community hut I watch an ingenious young chef make apple-vinegar-poached roots and a great stew of reindeer, steeling myself for the thrilling biological vulnerability I’ll feel on the way back south, just as I’d felt it on the squat boat zigging and zagging up here slowly through seas infested with icebergs The wind! I’ve only felt something even vaguely close in Moscow in the mid-1980s, scurrying across a December Red Square chilled as stone having impulsively given my coat in exchange for a Young Communist badge.

Filing past were the largest floating objects in the northern hemisphere, perfectly bizarre to look at, megalomaniacally individual, and made from an ice that can be anything from one to 250,000 years old and bright blue or variants of blue or white or diamond sheer, depending on its age and the refraction of light. Often the bergs are four times bigger underneath the water too, as though swooning into another dimension.

Some seemed ash-flecked, like fur. Some are shaped like ribs, or whole pieces of Cornwall. Coral, apple crumble Daggers and domes. Colours and colours.

Meltwater of flooding aquamarine. Ice-bridges of amethyst. A shipmate tells me he had jumped in and swum out to one in summer, dragging himself onto it, shuddering and near-unconscious – and found he was bleeding from every limb, right through his clothes. Arctic needle ice can puncture even a bear’s foot.

But I understand why he did it. These are enchanted, elf-islands made from obsidian or pearl. Whole shimmering shells of abalone. They call out for you to step onto them. ‘This really is the time to come here,’ confides the 21-year-old camp leader, Oliver, as we forage on the cliffs about the huts to supplement our dinner. Abruptly, in the water below us, we see the high spout of a humpback whale – a puff of perfect white – and moments later the glimpse of horizontal tail. The waters here are full of life, although there are relatively few species this far north. Whales struggle to negotiate the distorting clamour of even smaller boats, let alone cruise ships and industrial trawlers. Despite their reputation for tenacity, whales are immensely sensitive and can be woken by the tread of a bird’s foot on their skin.

Beneath our feet are luxurious moss and lichen, intensely patterned and complex. ‘No midges,’ lists Oliver, of the benefits of autumn. ‘And no mosquitoes. I thought it would be summer forever. The light… ’ The bronzed sinews of his wrists say that just a few weeks ago was T-shirt weather for a very short while. The Arctic receives the same amount of sunlight as the tropics, only it comes all at once. From June to mid July is the midnight sun in Eqi – light 24 hours a day. Further north the polar night, with its constant darkness and -40″C, lasts several months in the winter, but a more bearable eight weeks here.

For hours Oliver and I marvel at the variety of what we find. All around grow tiny ancient willow trees twisted and flattened onto the rocks and candy-sweet miniature harebells more purple than anything I’ve seen. Chewing on alpine bistort, we pull the fine, bleached fronds moreishly through our teeth, crunching the tiny seeds. And then for a long time in silence, we lie on our stomachs on the mossy green softness, rifling with greedy hands through tiny hedges of crowberries – the size of a peppercorn and busting intense acidic deliciousness – gobbling 20 to every one we drop in a bag for the others until our gums are black Rose-warm clouds dull into evening by a moon hanging like a dog-rose. Beyond the rocks, the glimmer of a white fox. When the sky finally starts its proper decline into a bruised aubergine – the endless night – is it unbearably strange? I ask Oliver, but he just shrugs.

There is an Innuit word specifically for this feeling. Perleromeq, meaning The burden’, but people mostly scoff when I mention it, the Greenlandic teenagers in Illulisat assuring me that the sun is ‘boring’ and only gets in the way of their much-coveted, 10-hour-long, horror-movie marathons They make it obvious that they think Europeans fuss too much. So much talk, they chide me laughingly, so much noise! Even the Greenlandic language doesn’t hold with drama. Numbers in Innuit only go up to 12. After that, it’s just a pragmatic and untheatrical ‘many’. And yet… everybody seems happy to tell stories about the Qivitoq: humans banished for one reason or another into the wilderness, where out of the general complexities of human passion and desperation they have learned to shape-shift.

It must be impassible to not be superstitious in such a landscape, I think, picking my way down through the trackless dark to my hut on the last night in Eqi, stumbling over roots and stone, eventually prising off my boots and lying under a pile of coats listening to the continual groan and creak of the glacier, turning over, endlessly, memories of conversations and images of things I’ve read. The Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen crossing the Greenland interior in 1888 wearing just ‘a jacket lined with squirrel skin’. The wild, autumnal skies – badger-grey, with teeming daubs of indigo. Fari leaving the frozen mariner in his ice-grave and taking his sled elsewhere, nothing on his mind but seal and the breath of his dogs and the undulating dark. Nikolena, telling me that she once saw a ragged old man ‘with long hair and burning eyes’ standing among stampeding reindeer, when he suddenly leapt, but in the form of an Arctic hare.

Back in Ilulissat briefly a few days later, I try to go to a screening of Mission Impossible in the sports hall but the projectionist is sleeping off a heavy night, and instead a large group of eight-year-old Greenlandic girls dance to folk music wearing scuffed and mended tap shoes, passing around the one compliant brother while his mother rocks with pride and amusement.

Obedient on benches, the youngest children sit neat as cherubim, muffled in sweet woollen suits that look freshly unfolded after a season packed away. It’s radiator-hot in the hall, and after long days in fresh Eqi I feel blasted and woozy, eyes choked and brain smeared, dozing for a while in a chair.

Walking the twilight streets later, sleds are being oiled and new puppies counted among the silvery froth of late-blooming Arctic cottongrass. Larger icebergs have started gathering in the bay, some coloured blue as a powerful detergent. And I don’t suppose I’ll ever forget the feeling of being a slack-jawed traveller into the unknown, when one creation silently inched its way past the shore looking like a fairy palace built of sapphires, while behind me 6,000 dogs wailed. Winter is coming.