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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