Monday morning we awoke to rain. Tuesday wet snow; the flakes so big and heavy, they fell to the mud in clumps. Today the sky was blown to pieces and the wind, from off of the North Atlantic, piercing.
Last night I ran east along the river on the low road out past the golf course. The roads are all sand and have a few wash outs which I leap across carefully. I look up into the head of the valley at the lumpy hills that stand alone. They are similar to pingos but are not pingos. Pingos are solitary hills of ice pushed up by the pressures of permafrost, covered by earth.
The cloud's shadows fell across the rolling earth darkening the foreground, illuminating the distance. The ice cap gave off a silty gray sheen like a well used aluminum pan.
The wind is at my back the whole way out,I feel the landscape belonging. When I turn to run back towards town I face into 15 knots of air and my heart rate exceeds my pace. Still I follow the river to the fjord.
The trash in Kangerlussuaq all gets burned. There is no recycling except for the hard plastic soda bottles and the small, stocky necked glass bottles. Everything else gets hauled up to the burn pit and lit. When it has become ash it is pushed down a bank where it waits for the waters from the river and the fjord.
Meanwhile, dumpsters must wait for the man who drives the truck to come and haul them away. Our's was full of trash sent out from Summit. One by one the ravens congregated on the top of the dumpster attracted by the freshly thawed food waste. I counted 28 birds, each one larger than a Schnauzer, ripping and tearing into trash; no comparison to the finches and juncos we left swinging in the cherry tree from a liter sized feeder.
Late Tuesday afternoon Ole arrived with his big diamond earring and his safety green city shop suit,made in Denmark. The ravens followed the truck up the hill.
The post office has cut back on its hours. They are now open from 9-10 in the morning. 1-3 in the afternoon.
I went to the warehouse that supplies the only grocery store by the same name; Pilersuissoq. Another man with a Danish name and a cigarette stood on top of a small electric fork lift and took care of my order. There was some confusion translating pounds into kilograms and deciding which bunch of toilet paper to buy, but after some mildly painful paperwork for Jen's, I left with all of the flour and coffee and T.P. Summit had requested for the week.
On the other side of town at Air Greenland the cargo freight service, Tim leafed through an enormous volume of paperwork with the quickness of a dog scratching up a bone as I peered over his shoulder trying to avoid the cigarette smoke, doing my best to decipher from the Danish and Greenlandic type, what might be the missing box I was hoping to find. Tim made a couple phone calls, first to Kulusuk on the east coast, then to Tasilaq, also on the east coast, and after hanging up and taking a sip of coffee said with a smile, "it is in Tasaliq".
Phone conferences with 5 or 6 people, some in Denver, some at Summit, some in NY help us all to feel just a little less confused about the next flight week. Afterwards I return to our warehouse to count life vests, pack camp kitchens kits and prepare small "suitcase" generators for the field.
There is fresh snow in the high hills. Everyone is feeling optimistic that this front has killed off most of the mosquito larvae that were wriggling in standing pools of water Sunday afternoon.
A diner guest, from the University of Copenhagen, discussed a book he read recently (published only in danish). Detailing all of the major problems Greenland is facing as a developing nation, it touched on: hesitation to commit to using English or danish for government affairs/ global trade, drug abuse, suicide, emigration of youth, in house bribery and corruption, interests in resource extraction such as mining and drilling for oil, climate change, tourism, fishing and consolidation of remote settlements into the larger towns. Though there is certainly much to be critical of, I find it not shy of amazing that on the worlds biggest island, where not one single settlement or village or township or city is connected to another by any other means than by boat or commercial airplane, where only fifty something thousand people live, who all happened to be mostly self sufficient, fur wearing hunters only 50 years ago, is today, comprised of a car driving, cell phone talking, freight forwarding, computer dependant, world wide webbing, pop music - rapping, vacationing in Thailand, micro beer brewing culture.
Or at least that's what I see in Kangerlussuaq (pop. <1000) and have seen in Sisimiut(pop. 5000), and have heard about in Nuuk (pop 20,000). So that's half the country right there.
Kangerlussuaq, the international hub for all of Greenland boasts not one single Doctor or Dentist. There is no emergency care. Flights flying over have requested care from the flight tower only to be told to carry on either to Iceland or Canada.
Last Sunday afternoon Steve and I collected fossils of fish in a stream bed running through a canyon of clay and sediment at the far west end of the runway. Dan, a reservist from the 109Th joined us. He served three tours over seas. Two in Iraq, at Fullujah, and "ZONE G". One, on an aid mission to Islamabad.
Dan talked about mortar fire, which have a range of three miles. Those firing the mortars, would fill a small space between the mortar and the cap with water in the evening, up in the mountains. In the morning, when the sun hit, and the water that had frozen, thawed, the mortar would fire but there would be no one accountable at the site.
I glanced around the arid arctic desert and thought about that; looking three miles off into the distance from where a mortar would come. It was the first time I ever walked with a soldier, in a fossil bed, that could have been in Pakistan, for as warm as it was that day, and thought about being "shelled".
When Dan finished his story I noticed his face was red. Maybe it was just from too much sun or from repeatedly bending down to pick up a fossil, or maybe it was from the emotions that were no doubt coursing through his being, but at any rate, he paused and smiled at the stillness, or at me, or at Steve or at the fossils he had found, or at the wonderful presence of being of alive.