Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

I went in June, in the season of light. Nothing could have prepared me for the beauty of Greenland in June, when the sun stays high overhead right through the night. We took a fisherman’s small motorboat from the five-thousand-person town of Ilulissat, where I had landed in a small plane, southward toward one of the settlements I had selected in consultation with Greenland’s minister of public health. Called Ilimanaq, it is a place of hunters and fishermen with a total adult population of about eighty-five. No roads lead to Ilimanaq, and no roads traverse it. In the winter, the villagers travel across the frozen terrain by dogsled; in the summer, access can be gained only by boat. In the spring and autumn, people stay in the settlement. At the time of year when I went, fantastical icebergs, some as large as office buildings, flow down the coast, grouping near the Kangerlussuaq ice fjord. My guide and I crossed the mouth of the fjord in a small motorboat, navigating among the smooth, oblong shapes of older ice that had turned bottom-up, and chunks of broken-off glacier that were corrugated with age and curiously blue—our boat humble in the face of such natural majesty. Some ice refracted the light from the sun, which was permanently perched on the horizon. As we progressed, we gently pushed aside the smaller icebergs, some the size of refrigerators, others like floating dinner plates. They crowded the water so that if you let your sight line follow the remote horizon, you would have thought we were sailing through unbroken sheets of ice. The light was so clear that there seemed to be no depth of field, and I could not tell what was near and what was far away. We stayed near the shore, but I could not distinguish the land from the sea, and most of the time we were canyoned between mountains of ice. The water was so cold that when a piece of ice broke off the lip of an iceberg and fell in, the water dented as though it were custard, reclosing itself into smoothness only a measurable few seconds after it was split. From time to time, we’d see or hear a ringed seal plopping itself into the frigid water. Otherwise, we were alone with the light and the ice.

Ilimanaq, built around a small natural harbor, has about thirty houses, a school, a tiny church, and a store, which gets supplied about once a week. Each house has a team of dogs; dogs far outnumber the human residents of the place. The houses are painted in the bright, clear colors that the locals adore—Turkish blue, buttercup yellow, pale pink—but they hardly make an impression on the vast rocks that rise behind them, or on the white sea that stretches in front of them. It is hard to imagine a place more isolated than Ilimanaq. The village does have a phone line, however, and the Danish government will pay for helicopters to airlift local people in a medical crisis if weather permits a landing. No one has running water or water-flow toilets, but there is a generator and so some houses, and the school, have electricity, and several have televisions. Every house has an inconceivably beautiful view. At midnight, when the sun was up and the locals were asleep, I would walk among the silent houses and the sleeping dogs as if I were in a dream.

A notice had been posted outside the store a week before I came, asking for volunteers to discuss their moods with me. My translator—a lively, educated, activist Inuit woman who was trusted in Ilimanaq—had agreed, despite misgivings, to help me persuade the reserved local people to talk. We were accosted, somewhat shyly, the day after we arrived. Yes, they had some stories to tell. Yes, they had decided to tell them to me. Yes, it was easier to talk about these things with a foreigner. Yes, I must talk to the three sage women—the ones who had started this whole business of talking about emotions. Everyone wanted to help, even when that help involved an alien loquaciousness. Because of the recommendations that had been sent ahead for me, and because of the fisherman who brought me in his boat, and because of my translator, they made me part of their intimate community while granting me the courtesies due a guest.