Friends

The elegance of a place takes time to seep into the human element. There are so many minutae; not only in the landscape's largess, the improbability of endless blue skies waving tall summering grasses with full heads of seed against glaciers and flowering tundra, but in the other people you meet and in the closer inspections of the everything that becomes the place.

So much happens here. It is an international airport for Greenland, a cargo receptacle for the fleet of four or five different Hercules aircraft chartered by the national Science Foundation, a way point for dozens of privately chartered, miscellaneous aircraft form Canada, Iceland and the US; a small shipping port, a city, a village, a town. It is a home with playgrounds and trash in the ditches and late night soccer and tourists playing tennis. It is a place with hotels where the long since dead and dismembered heads of reindeer and muskox lay around next to empty JATO (this is the common acronym for Jet Assist Take Off, literally propulsion rockets used by the LC 130s for take off boost from soft snow) bottles. Both are considered to be standard local flare. It is a place where the fresh fruits and vegetables which arrive only once a week, may be forgotten to be put out on the meager shelves in the towns only grocery store due to lack of understanding; most of the Greenlandic people that have come here to work, eat at the airport cafeteria. They haven't to think about preparing home cooked meals. A Danish friend of ours, a meteorologist at the local weather center responsible for forecasting all the islands weather, mostly concerned with flights, told us tonight at dinner that to the local Greenlanders in Kangerlussuaq, the most important "food" to be put out first on the shelves is, " soda, chips and coffee".

I spent two hours picking up garbage from the steppe adjacent to out rented warehouse lot, from the trash I collected, I would say that it is safe to confirm a colloquial hankering for soda and chips and candy.

Farther out in the hills, the blueberries are ripening. Tonight we all were treated to a dessert made by our friend from berries she picked all day. She threw a hand knitted shawl over her bare shoulders when the sun went behind the hills, it was made from the under hairs of the musk oxen. When she left, she put the shawl and some notes she had made, for these dinners are always an exchange of cultural ideas and fancies, into her purse which she had stitched by hand from seal skin. The toggle was a small piece of caribou horn.

In these past few weeks, I have gone on a late night bike ride to find one of the five wild orchids that grow in Greenland. I found one just before midnight in a swarm of mosquitoes by a rock in a bog. Its three flowers were each no bigger than the tip of my pinkie. I have swam across and back across a small blue lake surrounded by green jaded hills with a friend who became more of a friend when i looked back and saw she too was stroking across the liquid jewel. I kept up with Steve on an 8 hour, single speed bike ride up sandy, wash boarded hills to the edge of the very ice cap we will fly over and across and to when we journey this August to Summit Station perched on the summit of the island's inland ice. And I have lain over a stone in a pool of piercingly cold water with a Danish women my Mother's age who spent her youth as a biologist in these very hills, catching stickleback minnows in our palms while the cotton grass blew.

Today I spent most of the working hours on my back underneath a suburban removing all of the parts in the way of the transmission. Steve handed me tools and moral support. Tomorrow we'll lower the old tranny and install the rebuilt transmission. While Steve wasn't handing me tools, he was building "pooper boxes" which he has sanded to the smoothness equivalent of a river rock and stenciled, "NO. 2" upon the side. Asked if I thought most people would "get it", I said, "I would certainly hope so" (there just aren't that many boxes with pink Styrofoam cut outs the shape of a toilet seat). Later on, I found myslef deeply envying those researchers who will get to use one of his new "NO 2"s far away from here, out in the deep wild field. When there are orchids so small, a blade of grass looks like a sword, anytime that one can spend just sitting, ouside studying sky and hill and lake, flower and bird is worth a million billion indoor rests upon the very finest of poreclain thrones.