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The New Stuff

Cold comfort: looking for the sun in Greeland's endless night

One man enjoys Greenland's long night, which involves a great deal less work than the country's summer. He finds the barren, icy landscape satisfying. He describes traveling north, visiting with people, native peoples, life with the sled dogs and more.


Our country has wide borders; there is no man born has travelled round it.

And it bears secrets in its bosom of which no white man dreams.

Up here we live two different lives; in the Summer, under the torch of the Warm Sun; in the. Winter, under the lash of the North Wind.

But it is the dark and cold that make us think most.

And when the long Darkness spreads itself over the country, many hidden things are revealed, and men's thoughts travel along devious paths.

This morning a sundog--a rainbow-like ring around the sun--looms so large it seems to encircle the visible world. As I move, it moves. I watch it slide across something stuck: a ship that has frozen into the ice of Frobisher Bay. I am taking off from Iqaluit, a town in Arctic Canada where I've been stranded for several days, and as my plane taxis out onto the runway, the sundog billows and shudders, dragging itself across black ice, too heavy to leave the ground. Then the plane does rise and so do the spectral rays of the sundog--a bright porthole into an Arctic winter's permanent twilight. I pass through its wavering hoop and it breaks.

People always ask, Why do you want to go north, especially at this time of year? There's nothing up there. But Greenlanders know the opposite is true: "Summer is lots of hard work. All we do is catch fish to feed our dogs through the winter. We don't have time to visit or see one another. In winter the fjords are paved with ice. We go out with our dogs every day. That's when we are happy." Which is why I'm on my way to Uummannaq, midway up the west coast, to travel by dogsled with ten hunters to Thule--the northernmost part of the country--or as far as we can go.

I delight in the spare landscape out the plane window--ice oceans and ice mountains and clouds full of ice. So much of what Americans live with is an economic landscape--malls, stores, and movie theaters, ski slopes and theme parks--in which one's relationship to place has to do with boredom, undisciplined need, and envy. The Arctic's natural austerity is richness enough, its physical clarity a form of voluptuousness. Who needs anything more?

The first time I visited Greenland was two summers after a near fatal lightning strike. My heart had stopped and started several times, and the recovery from ten thousand volts of electricity surging through my brain took years. To live nose to nose with death pruned away emotional edacity and the presumption of a future, even another sunrise. Life was an alternating current of dark and light. I lost consciousness hundreds of times, and death's presence was always lurking--a black form in the corner. Life was the light hovering at the top of the sea.

Greenland's treeless, icebound landscape appealed to me so much then that now, three years later, I've come back. Its continuously shifting planes of light are like knives thrown in a drawer. They are the layered instruments that carve life out of death into art and back to life. They teach me how to see.

My plane from Iqaluit to Kangerlussuaq makes an unscheduled, early-morning departure. Every seat but two holds strapped-in cargo; the steward and I are the only passengers. It's thirty degrees below zero, made colder by a hard, northwesterly wind. In the cabin we wrap ourselves in wool blankets and sip coffee while a mechanic sweeps snow from the wings.

The blizzard that was stranding us has abated for a few hours, and by the time we get off the ground I can see a glow on the southern horizon where the sun will rise. But I am flying north, away from the sun, toward day that is like night and night that never becomes day. An old feeling of dread fills me: the claustrophobia of losing consciousness, of not being able to talk, move, or see.

We break the roof of the storm and fly east, then veer north, crossing the 63rd and the 65th parallels. The immanent sun is marked by a neon-pink eyebrow in the southeast. "The sun is lazy in winter," an old Inuit woman at the airport told me. "It worked so hard all summer, now it doesn't want to get up. It just lies there and sleeps all day."

Days before, flying from Kuujjuaq, Quebec, I saw a ship frozen into the ice at Hudson Bay and thought of Henry Hudson's last journey in 1610-11, during which he had discovered the bay later named for him. After leaving winter quarters, some of the crew members, despairing of the continuous ice and fog and diminished food supply, refused to go farther. Moored to an ice floe somewhere in James Bay, the mutinous crew seized and hound Hudson casting him adrift with his son and six others in the shallop. The mutineers sailed the Discovery home safely. Hudson and the others were never seen again.

Under us thin clouds are white rib cages threaded with pink strands of flesh. Farther east, the ice below breaks into platelets--stepping-stones on which to make one's cautious way. Out one window are the mountains of Baffin Island; a fast-moving river pours out from them, its riffles frozen in place as if to teach me lessons peculiar to the far north: that ice is time, time is light, light is speed, and speed times light equals darkness, or else more ice.

It is morning, almost nine o'clock. Between blizzards, somewhere out over Baffin Bay, a low-riding sun casts its brilliances: islands of ice shine within bodies of water that have no islands, and islands of land float within uprooted continents of ice. But out the other window, to the north, an indigo wedge has been hammered against the sea. We are flying into the earth's shadow. That is the darkness, the Arctic night for which I am bound.

"Do you see that coming?" the old woman Arnaluq asks.

"What?"

"That--out there over the sea. It is the Dark coming up, the great Dark!"

The sea is calm, and awl-like summits stand against the sky. Morning out one window, night out the other. For a moment I feel balanced between the two. Then dawn quickly dwindles to twilight. A black blank of fog lies against the horizon: the polar night advancing.

The Inuit say that only the qallunaat--the white people--are afraid of the dark, whereas Eskimos like nothing better than long winter days of conviviality.

"Is there a creation story, a beginning?" I once asked an Inuit archaeologist.

"That goes too far back," he said. "It was so dark then, too dark to know anything."

We land at the old airbase at Kangerlussuaq, transfer to a smaller plane, and fly north to Ilulissat. There, at midday, the sun is like a fire burning on the horizon, but after a few hours it drops out of sight.

The helicopter to Uummannaq is grounded by bad weather. I stay with Elisabeth Jul, a young doctor who is chief of staff at Ilulissat's regional hospital and visits her outlying patients by dogsled. She is red-faced, tomboyish, and stocky, with a physician's speedy abruptness and tenderhearted courage. Her house smells like the kitchen scraps she gets from the hotel next door and feeds to her dogs.

Three days later, the helicopter to Uummannaq lifts up through lingering snow showers that have turned Ilulissat's few hours of daylight gray. Up above, over the waters of Disko Bay, the sun burns a hole on the horizon, its long wake of light a torch striking north at the darkness into which we fly. Below, each iceberg is a miniature continent with its own turquoise inlets and long-fingered fjords, sharp peaks and sloping plains. Where an iceberg has collapsed into itself, its broken parts have curdled and are floating in black water; in other places, the ice floor has shattered into elongated rectangles like blocks of basaltic rock.

Instead of flying over the mountains, we fly way out and around the Nuussuaq Peninsula, a rough thumb of land that sticks out into Baffin Bay, separating the town of Ilulissat from Uummannaq Fjord. The idea is that it's safer to auto-rotate down onto ice than onto a snowy mountain. The father of my Greenlandic friend Aleqa Hammond drowned in this fjord when she was seven years old. He had been hunting when he fell through the ice with all his dogs. "I asked my grandmother why people have to die, and she told me it was something arranged by the spirits. Some people have thick candles that last a long time. His wasn't so big. And so he went down to where the goddess of the sea lives."

Once the storm overtakes us, winds buffet the helicopter, an old Sikorsky. Its one blade of hope holds us above ice, ocean, sea goddesses, and the certain death that Arctic waters bring.

Uummannaq. Latitude 70. We follow the fjord where Aleqa's father disappeared. Snow-covered cliffs rise up, wounded and scarred by glacier traffic over their rocky flanks, and the last of the twilight disappears. We pass the village of Niaqornat out on the western end of the peninsula, where the mountains turn from rock to cloud. For a moment a half-moon comes up above the storm as if greeting us. Then we auger down into a chaos of snow, falling away from the gaudy metallic glow far to the south, toward black, pitching water where a smooth floor of ice should have been.

I'm in Uummannaq again, a town of 1,400 people and 6,000 dogs perched on a rock island, cast off from Greenland near the head of a fjord. Long ago the sun stopped rising here, and I can only wonder if it will ever come again. It's 3:00 P.M. and the lights are on all over the settlement. What is called day here is something else entirely; here the sky has not yet become a lamp for human beings. I only want to sleep.

Friends have arranged a house for me. It is reached by a long series of rickety wooden stairs over steep, snow-covered rock. At the top sits a two-room house, uninsulated and with no running water, that looks down on the town and harbor below. From my window I can see the grocery store, the post office, the warehouse, the administration building, and the bakery on one side of the harbor; on the other, the Uummannaq Hotel, the Grill-Baren--a Greenlandic-style fast-food place--and a clinic; and on the far side, the Royal Greenland fish factory. Fishing boats are frozen into the harbor, and the seal hunters' skiffs are laid helter-skelter on top of the ice.

Four P.M. looks like midnight, and the dog noise is cacophonous. Bundled up in wool pants, down parka, and sealskin mittens with dog-hair ruffs at the wrist, I trudge through a village lined with prim Danish-style houses painted yellow, blue, or green. Once, the Inuit people lived in peat, stone, and whalebone houses that in winter were lined with rime ice. When the sun returned they removed the roofs to let the rooms thaw.

Each yard has a sled, twelve or fourteen Greenlandic huskies (each chained on a long line), a drying rack hung with halibut to feed the dogs, and seal- and polar-bear skins pulled taut on stretchers and leaned against the house to dry.

Kids shoot by, four to a sled, narrowly missed by a dog sled climbing the hill the other way. Men and women push prams with babies whose tiny hands reach up to touch dangling mobiles of soft-sided whales and seals. Female dogs in heat run loose through town, as do all puppies, and as each passes through a new neighborhood of chained dogs, howls and moans erupt--the sounds of excitement and longing. I feel rather unnecessary in this world of dogs. Local taxis zoom up and down the hills, taking grocery shoppers home, and through the window of a tiny woodworking shop whose lights are on, it is impossible not to see two graphic posters--beaver shots--of naked white women on the wall.

Morning. The current crisis is that the fjords have not iced over. Without ice, there is no way to get to other villages. We are prisoners here, and my dogsled trip to the north may be doomed.

Far out near the head of the fjord there is a piece of ice shaped like a heart within a heart-shaped opening of black water. My own heart--which stopped once and started again unaided--is almost too cold to beat, and anyway, for whom? Down there in the water the sea goddess lives. Her long hair is tangled and full of lice, and no one will comb it clean. She is unhappy, the old people say, and there are no angakkoqs--shamans--to pacify her. That is why there is no ice.

Today I meet a man who knows all about trees but has never seen one growing. He's the local dogsled maker. Each district has a distinct sled-making style.

The shop is high-ceilinged, with handsome Danish-modern workbenches where sleds of different sizes are being constructed. As we walk between them he explains that for the runners, which must be strong but flexible for traveling over rough ice or rock, he buys whole trees from Denmark that have been split in half and air-dried. When cutting and shaping them he is careful to match the left, or outer concave, side of the log to the left side of the sled, and the right, or inner convex, side to the right side. Otherwise the runners will break, he tells me.

Sleds vary in size according to function. The long sleds used to hunt narwhal in the spring, when the sea ice is breaking up, are eighteen feet long, whereas sleds for local travel and seal hunting may be only six or eight feet long. On sleds to be used for long trips at any time of the year, he reinforces the handles and joints with sheet metal, and the crossbars that make up the floor of the sled must be fastened at alternating lengths into the runner. If not, the runner will break through the grain of the wood.

It's Friday afternoon, and already the other workers in the shop are drinking warm Tuborg beer. On the floor I lay a topographical map of the Uummannaq Fjord and the Nuussuaq Peninsula. They gather around to show me which canyon they go up to get across the top of the mountains, where they sleep at night (there are huts along the way), and where hunters the year before were rescued by helicopter after the piece of ice they were standing on broke away during a storm. They also show me where friends have disappeared through the ice--dogs, dogsleds, and all.

When I ask if the ice will come this winter they look out the windows and shrug. Then the sled maker says, "The time between the full moon and the new moon--that is when ice always comes. When the weather grows calm and very cold. If there are no more snowstorms, there will be ice."

Qilaq taatuq. The sky is dark. Seqineq. The sun. Siku. Ice. Tarraq. Shadow. Aput. Snow. Tartoq. Darkness. Kisimiippunga. I am alone. That's my vocabulary lesson for the day from a mimeographed Greenlandic-English dictionary used by Allied troops during World War 11, with words about bombs, warships, torpedoes, and German-speaking people. In reading the expedition notes of Knud Rasmussen, I learn that words used in seances are different from secular words, so that the shamanic word for sea is aqitsoq (the soft one), rather than the usual imaq.

By the time I walk home from the sled maker's shop, the skim of ice is gone and the pathway out to the annual ice used for drinking water has gone to liquid.

At my house I read about dark nebulae--immense clouds composed of the detritus of dying stars. Their function is unclear, but their effect in the universe is to "produce visual extinction." Yet the nebulae themselves are detectable because of "the obscuration they cause." I look up at the sky. The dark patches between constellations are not blanks but dense interstellar obstructions through which light from distant suns cannot pass. They are known variously as the Snake, the Horsehead, the Coalsack. Darkness is not an absence but a rich and dense presence, a kind of cosmic chocolate, a forest of stellar events whose existence is known only by its invisibility.

Polar days are almost the same as polar nights, and anyway, the streetlights in town are always on. I try to keep to a schedule--coffee in the morning, dinner at night, then sleep--but the schedule slides into the body's own understanding of constant dark. I sleep when I should eat and eat in the middle of the night. A recent study suggests that the eye may have its own biological clock, separate from the one in the brain. Now it's possible to think of eyes as circadian timepieces with resettable daily rhythms in the retina that orchestrate the ebb and flow of the hormone melatonin. In the dark and near-dark, I wonder what dances my eye rhythms are making and if, upon reentering the world of all-day sun, I will be blind.

Ann Andreasen is a Faroe Islander who followed a boyfriend to Greenland and decided to stay. Her house is next door to the Children's House she runs for children whose own homes have been marred by domestic violence or drugs. In the middle of the night a little girl is brought in. She has just witnessed the beating of her mother. The policeman who went to the scene is a friend of the family's, and, as in all Greenland towns, there is no bureaucratic tangle and no prison, just a firm suggestion that the child spend the night elsewhere.

Ann has left her own child, who is sick with the flu, to attend to the newcomer. Badly shaken, the girl is given hot chocolate and cookies, a fresh nightgown and toothbrush, then put to bed. The Children's House is modern, spotless, and cheerful with a capacious kitchen, living and arts area, computers and paints and traditional crafts for the kids. But the stories Ann can tell are a litany of tragedies--the inevitable consequences of a fiercely self-sufficient people meeting up with modern European life, despite or maybe because of Denmark's altruistic socialism.

My daily walk has been the one constant. Down the stairs from my perched green house, I stroll along the rocky edge of town, past the inlet where yesterday a wave generated by a calving glacier washed fifteen anchored boats onto the road. The Danes were so busy trying to save their pleasure boats that they forgot about the dogs tied up at the shore. The dogs drowned.

A week later. Now it's mid-January. A distant sound of thunder jolts me: a glacier calves, and waves made from the iceberg's birth undulate toward shore. Then something catches my eye low down, from between two white cliffs, a full moon begins to rise--almost too enormous for the mountains that flank it. I stand mesmerized on the edge of the island. For some time the moon rises so slowly I'm afraid it will drop back down. But moons are not betrayed by gravity. Soon it tops the icy towers at the head of the fjord and brightens, suddenly rubescent, as if it had just been cut from ice and thrown up in the air--the absent sun's pale twin.

Morning. I'm not living on earth or ice but on rock and the sharp tooth of Uummannaq Mountain. At eleven the peak catches light like the poisoned tip of an arrow, and the cliffs that gave birth to the moon last night are pink, crimson, and gold. At noon there is a bit of light in the sky, but not enough to read by.

Later, maybe 2:00 A.M. Against the dogs' constant conversation about social hierarchy--urgent matters of food, sex, and rank, and the general angst of being chained on dirty patches of rock and snow--I lie alone in my bed. The moon is down. Unable to sleep, I drink a cheap bottle of blanc de noir--the white of the black, the foam of the night, the light hidden within dark grapes and made to sparkle. But how do they get white from black? How do they separate the two?

When all the blanc is gone there is only noir, obscurum per obscuris, a dark path leading through darkness. The Inuit never made much of beginnings, and now I know why. Because no matter what you do in winter, no matter how deep you dive, there is still no daylight and none of the comprehension that comes with light. Endings are everywhere, visible within the invisible, and the timeless days and nights tick by.

I am invited to dinner at a local painter's house with Ann and her husband, Ole Jorgen. Ole Jorgen arrives first to drop off a bottle of wine, and an ashtray almost hits him in the head. The artist--S.--and his wife are fighting. S. has been drunk for days. But they insist we come in. S. has recently suffered a stroke and can't walk. Holding court in his unkempt house, on a low daybed amid empty beer bottles, he looks like a doomed, deposed king, but his conversation is bright.

S.'s Greenlandic wife sets dinner down on the coffee table. It's a traditional soup made with seal meat and potatoes, accompanied by a shrimp and cabbage salad. (Lettuce doesn't survive the trip from Denmark to Greenland.) As the evening wears on, S.'s talk is reduced to expletives and non sequiturs. He adopts a British accent and says "I caun't" over and over, inserting it nonsensically between anyone's words. It's funny at first, but once I realize there will be no end to it I grow bored.

The wine has fumed to vinegar; in the middle of the meal S.'s wife vomits in the kitchen sink. As we try to finish dinner fire engines roar by toward Ann's house, and we race outside after them. They pass her house and continue up the hill. My intention is to keep going, but Ole Jorgen says, "You're the guest of honor!"

I talk to S. about his paintings, and he gives me some sketches he's made of the harbor, white cliffs, and icebergs. The man can draw. When the evening finally ends, I thank him for the gifts. Alone in my green house, I bundle myself up in my made-to-order Feathered Friends sleeping bag and sit by the window. The tranquillity of perpetual night is like starch in my brain.

In winter, light sources are reversed. Snow-covered earth is a light, and the sky is a blotter that soaks up everything visible. There is no sun, but there's a moon that lives on borrowed time and borrowed light. Home late from hunting, two men pull a sledge laden with freshly killed seals up a hill, dripping a trail of blood in the snow. As I doze off, I dream that the paths are all red and the sky is ice and the water is coal. I take a handful of water and draw with it: in the frozen sky, I draw a black sun.

Later I can't sleep. The half moon's slow rising seems like a form of exhaustion, with night trying to hold the moon's head down underwater. It bobs up anyway, and I, its captive audience, catch the illuminated glacial cliffs on the surface of my eyes. The moon's light is reflected light, but from what source? The sun is a flood that blinds us, a sun we can't see.

January 27. The glaciers are rivers, the sky is struck solid, the water is ink, the mountains are lights that go on and off. Sometimes I lie under my sleeping bag on the couch and recite a line from a Robert Lowell poem: "Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise."

I sleep by a cold window that I've opened a crack. Frigid air streams up the rock hill and smells like minerals. In sleep I hear the crackling sound that krill make underwater. Earlier in the day the chunk of glacier ice I dumped into a glass of water made the same sound.

The ice came from the top of a long tongue that spills out at the head of this fjord, as if it were the bump of a tastebud that had been sliced off, or a part of speech. Now it has melted and looks floury, like an unnecessary word that adds confusion to insight. But when I drink it down, its flavor is bright, almost peppery, bespeaking a clarity of mind I rarely taste but toward which I aspire.

When I lie back in the dark, the pupils of my eyes open.

My Uummannaq friends and I have started a countdown until the day the sun appears. After all, there's nothing else to do. Days pass. I try to distinguish the shadowed path from the shadowed world but fail. Then it's February.

The real is fragile and inconstant. The unreal is ice that won't melt in the sun. I walk partway up Uummannaq Mountain and look south. The sun's first appearance of the year will occur in three days, but for now the light is fish-colored--a pale, silvery gray, like the pallor between night and day. I try to remember the feel of sun on my face, but the dark mass, the rock body of Nuussuaq Peninsula, drives the sensation away.

In the night there is none of the old terror of the sun going down and never coming up again, the terror that heart patients feel, because the sun is already gone, and I'm alive, and the darkness is a cloak that shelters me. As I walk down the mountain to the town dump, patches of frostbite, like tiny suns, glow on my cheeks. They burn like lamps, and I wonder if, later, they will cast enough light to read by, if they will help me to see.

Later I walk around the room trying to lift the dark cover of night with a flashlight in my hand, as if its fading beam were a shovel. I'm trying to understand how one proceeds from blindness to seeing, from seeing to vision.

In Greenland's early days a young shaman would come to the old angakkoq and say, Takorusuppara. "I come to you because I desire to see." After purifying himself by fasting and suffering cold and solitude, he would sit on a pair of polar-bear pants beside the old man, hidden from the villagers by a curtain of skin, and in time would receive qaamaneq--a light suddenly felt in his body, an inexplicable searchlight that enabled him to see in the dark.

One young shaman told Knud Rasmussen that his first experience of "enlightenment" was a feeling of rising up--literally, up into the air so that he could see through mountains, could see things far away, even blades of grass, and on that great plain he could locate all lost souls.

The next day. I don't know where I am. Wind comes through the walls. Maybe the walls have fallen away and merged with the walls of the galaxy. In this place it seems that there are only undefined distances that grow wider. I pick up a two-week-old New York Times science section brought from America, and it confirms this notion. "Space Telescope Reveals 40 Billion More Galaxies," the headline reads. Following the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope, which gives detailed portraits of galaxies far out in space and far back in time, astronomers learned that the universe is at least five times as vast as they had thought and is still expanding. Because of the telescope's power, many fainter galaxies are now being counted for the first time.

From the window I look into indigo space, and indigo space, like an eyeless eye, looks back at me. The thirteenth-century Zen teacher Dogen wrote, "To say that the world is resting on the wheel of space or on the wheel of wind is not the truth of the self or the truth of others. Such a statement is based on a small view. People speak this way because they think that it must be impossible to exist without having a place on which to rest."

In the harbor, we walk on crystal. Night is a transparency, and ice is the cataract over the eye that won't see. Only the fin-like keels of fishing boats touch water under ice, and the fish look up through their cold lenses at our awkward boots. Beyond the harbor there is still-open water and the fjord is a wrinkled sheath of ink that has lost the word "ice."

Later. Twilight gone to dark. I lie naked, careless, not quite destitute under a full moon on a polar night. Greenlanders thought that the moon and sun were sister and brother who had unknowingly slept together. After they discovered their incest they sailed up to the sky holding torches, and lived in separate houses from then on. In summer only sun, the sister, came out of her house, and in winter only the brother moon came out. Sometimes, though, he had to go away to get animals for the people to eat, which is why, when the new moon came, the people were thankful for the return of its light.

I light two candles and open a bottle of Fitou, a red table wine from a French village I once visited. Strange that I can get it here. The biweekly helicopter from Upernavik, a town 100 miles to the north, comes and goes, its pale headlights wedging a channel of light in dark air: should I run to the heliport and escape, or give up and stay here forever? In the dark there is no middle ground.

Sitting by the window, I must look like a character from an Edward Hopper painting--almost unmoving but not unmoved. Stuck here on this Arctic Alcatraz, I don't know what I'm moved to, except too much drink, and low-fever rage.

I write and drink by candlelight. No leaf, no shadow, no used-up senses finally coming to rest, no lover's post-orgasmic sleep. Only this: a cold room where snow fallen from my boots does not melt and the toilet in the unheated entry of the house stinks because it has not been emptied for days. It occurs to me that the only shadow I've noticed since last autumn is the wavering one a candle makes, casting its uncertainty upon the wall.

Later in the evening the wind stops and a skin of ice hardens over the water. Groups of villagers come down to the harbor to watch and wait. An old woman standing next to me looks far out over the ice and water and says, "If people go out, they will die. They will fall through the ice and go down to where the sea goddess lives. No one knows about ice anymore."

February 3. Jorge Luis Borges reprimands us I for thinking that blind people live in a dark world. Behind his blind eyes, he says, there were always colors. In Paradise Lost, Milton, also blind, writes of burning lakes, of inward conflagrations. I tell Ludwig, Ole Jorgen's son, the story of Ulysses and the Cyclops, how in order to escape from the Cyclops, Ulysses and his men sharpened a stick and drove it through the giant's eye, then clung to the underbellies of sheep and were carried out of the cave right past their blinded captor.

The sun is an eye. Its coming means that the boulder rolls away from in front of the cave and we are set free. Yet I'm still night-foundered, still blind so much of the time. I read John Muir's book Travels in Alaska. He writes of a summer day, crossing a glacier: "July 19th. Nearly blind. The light is intolerable and I fear I may be long unfitted for work. I have been lying on my back all day with a snow poultice bound over my eyes. Every object I try to look at seems double."

I'm done with daylight. It reeks of carbonous toast crumbs left behind after breakfast, of the kind of bright decor that hides a congenital blindness to what is real. Today in. my house, with no lights, no water, only a view of the darkness outside from the darkness within from the unlighted room of the mind and the unheated room of the heart, I know that what is real comes together only in darkness, under the proscenium of night's gaunt hood.

It also occurs to me that the real and the imagined have long since fused here, that it's not the content of experience that is important but the structure of our knowing.

In the next days there is more daylight, three or four hours at least, but not enough to read by--that's become my measuring stick. Tomorrow the sun will peep over the ridge, then disappear. Now I don't want it. I've grown accustomed to the privacy and waywardness of night. In daylight all recognitions turn out to be misconceptions. During one of my many naps I dream that I can hear the sun beating behind the rocky peninsula like an expectant heart.

February 4. Sun Day, Sonntag, Sunday, Solfest. At ten in the morning light heaves up. It's seventeen below zero and the sky over the Nuussuaq Peninsula is a pink lip trembling. The wind is sharp. Ann and Ole Jorgen spread a yellow cloth on the dining-room table for our post-sun feast. In northern Greenland it is still dark. Solfest will not reach Thule for another three weeks.

Here in Uummannaq it is nearly time. Panic sets in. Do the children have mittens, caps, boots on? Gitte, a neighbor, comes by in her pickup to take us all to the topmost viewpoint on the island--her house. Ole Jorgen, Ann, Pipaloq (their two-year-old daughter), Ludwig, and I jump in. At the top we run to the edge of a cliff that looks across roiling fjord waters south toward the mountains. There's a moment of utter breathlessness, then a pale light begins to move into the sky and smears itself from the sharp point of the heart-shaped mountain down into the village. Every object of Arctic clutter momentarily goes from shade to glosss--leds, harnesses, dogs, drying racks, clothes-lines, drying animal skins, cars, baby carriages, empty bottles, gravestones. House by house, the dead windows come alive. The sled dogs stand up and stretch in the sun, shaking all the secrets of winter from their coats.

Eleven forty-seven A.M. Ole Jorgen counts down: five, four, three, two ... A spray of cloud lifts, lit-from below and fired to the color of salmon. From behind the upside-down arch of rock, incandescent daggers spike the sky. In the square notch between two peaks, a tiny crescent of sun appears, throwing flames onto the forehead of morning.

"Look, I can see my shadow!" Ole Jorgen says. His son runs to the wall of the house, affectionately touching the elongated body of his father. "That's you, papal" he says.

Do shadows prove existence? "Song io," Gitte yells out across the valley as if yodeling. "I am."

For six minutes the sun burns inside the notch like a flame. When it scuttles behind the ridge again, our shadows dwindle to nothingness. I am not I.

Everyone goes inside to eat and drink: kaffe, tea, mitaq (whale skin with a quarter inch of fat), rye bread, cheese, smoked salmon, and a dark Dansk liqueur that tastes like night. Outside, the sky is still bright and sun pushes west behind the mountain as if behind the back of a giant, almost appearing again in a crack, then going blank again.

We toast Knud Rasmussen, polar explorer and ethnographer extraordinaire; we toast the return of the sun. After all, we're still alive despite our various bouts of cancer, tooth loss, divorce, marriage, childbearing, barrenness, and, in my case, lightning. As I drink down my liqueur, it occurs to me that there are all kinds of blindness and all kinds of seeing, that a dark world is not emblematic of death but of a feral clarity. And so I must wonder: in this sudden flood of sun, have I seen anything?

Afternoon. The pink light is going, not down but up, a rising curtain lifting light across the face of the village, up the long tooth of Uummannaq Mountain, leaving in its wake the old darkness. The diesel powered lights of town come on as we stumble home. Dogs are fed. An old man chips away at an iceberg, carrying a chunk in his pail to melt for drinking water. The world has returned to its dark normalcy.

Walking back to my perched house, I see that out in the bay a collapsed iceberg holds a tiny lake in its center, a turquoise eye glancing upward. The moon comes up in the east as if it were a sun, and for the second time in one day, the mountains go bright.

Today winter was a burning lake and I watched it catch fire.

Ilulissat. Mid February. The dogsled trip to Thule has been canceled until next year. Again I land on Elisabeth Jul's doorstep.

"You must go dogsledding at least once while you are here," she says on the phone from the hospital. It's noon and she's already performed surgery, delivered a baby, dispensed condoms. By evening she will have performed an autopsy on a policeman from Sisimuit who committed suicide. "After all," she says, "that's what you came for."

I sleep much of the day. Elisabeth is late coming home from the hospital, and I ask if it isn't too late to harness the dogs. "Why not?" she asks. "If it's dark, it's dark. Who cares what time it is?"

We put on layers and layers of Arctic clothes--fur over Polartec over down over Polartec--and start catching and harnessing the dogs. They are frantic with delight at the thought of being freed from their chains. One by one, Elisabeth leads them up the hill to the sled, where I am tying a frozen reindeer hide to the frame for us to sit on. She pushes the dogs' heads and legs through nylon harnesses, then ties their long blue lines to the central knot near the front of the sled.

My job is to keep the dogs from running off. "Nik. Nik. Vinta," Elisabeth says. I repeat the commands to stay and sit. She hands me the long reindeer-hide whip, which I shake at the dogs that move. They cower in mock displays of fear. As soon as Elisabeth ties the last dog in, they quiver with expectation. "Better sit on the sled and hang on," I am warned, though I'm not exactly sure what I should hang on to and Elisabeth doesn't say. When her hands touch the sled handles the dogs erupt in a snarling fight, then jerk forward and take off feverishly. She jumps on the back of the sled and we are flying.

Cars come toward us and veer off quickly. The dogs, which are hooked up in the traditional fan-like array, don't step aside for anyone or anything. If pedestrians don't get out of the way, the dogs will go right over them. We turn left at Knud Rasmussen's little red house (now a museum), follow the path to the center of town, fly past the bank, the brottlet (an open-air market), the tourist shop, then leave the harbor behind on the road that goes out to the airport.

"This is called the `Round the World Loop,'" Elisabeth yells. When she commands the dogs to stop, they stop. There are no reins. Nothing to hang on to. If you fall off the sled and the dogs run off, you walk home. We bump up and over a lip of plowed snow and follow a trail into the mountains.

In Rasmussen's day, sled runners were made of walrus bone covered with reindeer hides. Now they are metal and emit sparks as we scrape over rock. The sky clears. I think of Milton's line from Paradise Lost: "No light, but rather darkness visible." Away from the allnight lights of Ilulissat, we can see the stars and guide ourselves by them. "I wish you had a cabin out here and we never had to go back," I tell Elisabeth.

The ground is uneven--rock and snow and ice and more rock. When the dogs come to the top of a ridge they know to stop so that Elisabeth can get off the sled and look over to find a safe route down. As they tire, their speed is more negotiable--they settle into a steady trot. I try to jump off the moving sled and stand, all in one movement, but fail and roll in a ball through the snow, laughing. I run to catch up with the sled, grabbing the handle to pull myself closer, then Elisabeth jumps on and rests while I "drive," though the truth is the sled is dragging me as I pump my legs on uneven ground in heavy oversize Arctic boots.

Finally we stop to let the dogs rest. Elisabeth's face and hair is frosted white and her round cheeks are bright red. It's twenty degrees below zero but we're almost hot--Elisabeth wears neither gloves nor hat. "I only do that when it's really cold," she says. The dogs sleep curled in little knots--white and pale yellow on snow. The Big Dipper is laying its ladle down on our heads and we know we're headed north.

When we start off again, Elisabeth jumps on the sled and crouches behind me, her arm around my shoulder to keep from falling off. In that moment I experience an extraordinary sense of well-being. Bundled into polar rotundity, linked and crouching, we fly from abyss to abyss. We look up the northern lights flare, hard spotlights focused on dark nebulae and nothingness. They expand and contract like white laces being pulled tight and extending so far up into the sky that they appear to be holding the universe together.

Darkness reconciles all time and disparity. It is a kind of rapture in which life is no longer lived brokenly. In it we are seers with no eyes. The polar night is one-flavored, equanimous, without past or future. It is the smooth medium of present-time, of time beyond time, a river that flows between dreaming and waking. Behind the dogs, in the streaming wake of their flatulence, we move over white ground fast. The ground is alive like a torrent, a wild cataract. Which one is moving?

"I'm still not sure where we are," Elisabeth says, "but we're not lost. It's impossible to be lost. That would mean we were nowhere." We cross ridges, slide down icy slopes, zing over snowless patches, striking rock into sparks as if our sled runners were trying to light our way. But the moon does that, and anyway, seeing in the dark is no longer a difficulty.


To our disappointment, the lights of Ilulissat flare up ahead of the team. "Let's not go home," I plead. But we have to. We bump over a plowed cornice of snow and hit the road near the airport that leads back into town. On ice the sled fishtails, wagging with a kind of unspoken happiness, and as the dogs go faster and faster, I am swept forward over the glass eye of the earth into the full sun of darkness.

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