What do we eat?

Kivioq, dovekies stuffed into seal carcases left to rot, were once a favorite winter staple in the northern part of Greenland. Knud Rasmussen, perhaps the world's most important Arctic anthropologist, part Greenlander, part Dane, died from food posoining after eating kivioq. He was certainly no stranger to native foods, nor was this a common cause of death amongst the Greenlanders. I presume it was just simply his time.
After Hitler invaded Denmark, the 2oth century invaded Greenland. Already Inuit culture had undergone the dramatic changes introduced by the missionaries in the early 18th centrury which discourged communal lifestyle, shamantic spirituality and wife sharing. Diet however was slow to change as subsistence hunting led gradualy to commercial fishing; both of which allowed for a consitent relationship with the natural world.
After WWII however, Europe had begun to compete with Greenland in Greenland's home waters for cod fish. After the collpase of this industry, Greenlanders looked desperately into the eyes of a lifestyle they had never known before. Already showing some dependance towards the tobaco and alchol and coffee they had become accostumed to in the early days of whaling trade and missionary posts, this new, urbanized style of apartment dwelling, processed food eating and alarm clocks was to prompt a downward spiral that is still circling the drain of dire societal health concerns that do not only end with the stomach.
Though there still is an annaual hunt in Kangerlususaq for musk ox and caribou, as there is in all of the townships, cities and settlements, the Pilersusioq (national grocery chain) provides the food everyone is sustained by. This food is flown in by the Airbus weekly from Denamrk, though bulk goods such as canned food, flour, and frozen meat does come once a year by ship.
The typical fare at the airport cafetireia is boiled potatoes, shredded red cabbage (boiled with sugar), some sort of pot roast and a thick suace one is often too afraid to try.
Other menu items are polish sausages, musk ox burgers, fried fish, instant rice, deep fried egg rolls, iceberg lettuce salads, fried chicken, noodle gulash, pickeld capeline, pickeled halibut, pickeled herring, pickeled cod, boiled shrimp, tinned meat and odd cubic gelitans that seem to be meat based rather than fruity delectables.
No one can go wrong with the cheeses and breads. Fruit is scarce unless it is canned, preserved as a marmalade or unripe as it has just traveld from Mexico to Denmark to Greenalnd.
There are all sorts of chips and candies and sodas the wrappers of which, after there contents have been devoured, can be seen littered all over the town. There seems to be a lack of either respect for the landscape or a yet to be understood as litering is naughty, concept here. Greenlanders did not grow up with Woodsy the Owl, we have decided.
Alot fo the food Steve and I eat has been mail ordered from an organic distributaor stateside; namly walnuts, dried fruits, oatmeal and soymilk. We get apples and some fresh vegatbles as a kick back from the bulk orders ordered by the cook staff at Summit, but this is an unrealaible, usually paltry ammount, say a tomato, 3 avacadoes, 2 quarts of Stoneyfarm yogurt and a leek.
We also get to take some of the frozen vegetables that Raven Camp has orderd too much of, for they have no means of storing food; the ice cap summer tempertures get too high for consistent freezing temperatures and there is space enough only for a cooler. They bascally live in a small yacht on a sea of snow where rain storms are not uncommon.
We buy dark rye sunflower seeded loaves of bread from the bakery at the Pilersuisioq. We buy cream and cheese and chocolate, potatoes, onions and marmalade. Salty licorice, apple juice. Otherwise we do our best with what we can making it an honest goal of eating at least 5 fruits or vegetables a day, whether they be dried, frozen, canned or fresh.
Once we get up on the ice cap to Summit Camp, our diet will improve signifigantly as Summit recieves entire airforce pallets of fresh food ordered from the internation wholesale food supllier, SYSCO. Up at Summit we enjoy a walk in cooler full of asparagus, roamine hearts, fresh herbs, cucumbers, squash, tomatos, avacoadoes, radishes, onions, garlic, beans, tofu, milk, cheeses, yogurt, yams, tempeh, apples, citrus, grapes, pineapple and bananas.
There is also a pantry full of organic soy and rice milks, grains, oats, dried fruits and all matter of sundries, from lemon grass and curry to chipolte and soy sauce. Steve's favorite thing about Summit, I am convinced, isnt so much the solitude and the beauty and the skiing and the sky full of snow, but the endless 5 gallon buckets of Belgian chocolate chips.
I have just learned of an edible wild flower which is growing all over in the rockiest patches of steppe. The Arctic Harebell, a delicate but sturdy purple blue flower can be picked off its stem and eaten. The dandelion greens are deliciously biiter and fresh, there are arctic char, which we haven't yet caught, the blueberries are bursting out and there are several mushrooms one can eat withour fear of mistkaing it with anything posionous, for which wild foods there are none in Greenland, unless you stuff a dead bird into a dead seal and leave it for sometime under a rock in the sun.

Anthroplogy

I must first post a disclaimer: it is late, I am tired. We worked a 16 hour day yesterday, which pales in the face of my old days, spent on the back of the Bering Sea, but is very tiring once one has grown used to more land- lubberly hours.
Another busy flight week is upon us. Hercules, it is said, had 12 "ardours" tasks; and though we did not have to clean the 3000 ox stables, as he did, we were sent to hand load 8000 lbs of science cargo into a Dash 8 aircraft today.
Batteries, GPS units, solar panels and empty fuel drums (to be filled and then staged along the east coast for helicopter support) were all hefted from the ground by us (humble schleppers) and stowed by a magician of geometric spaces (Icelandic Air's flight engineer).
The mosquitoes are thick. I have learned, by observing, that though a hundred may sit on my skin, only a few will ever bite. The wind all but eliminates the hordes. Never scratch, and do not allow the buzzing to disrupt your mind; wear ear plugs!
A group of anthropologists from Bowdoin College, in Maine, is passing through on their way to Inglefield land. Inglefield land is north of Thule on the west coast. They are studying the interface between Peary and the Inuit that lived at this site. The lead researcher, known as the "PI" or, principal investigator, Genevieve Le Moine, and her colleague, Christine Darwent, and I found ourselves standing around in the thrumming peak of the tourist season at Kangerlussuaq airport awaiting the arrival of another college, Hans Lange from Nuuk, the capitol city (pop 20000) of Greenland. As we loitered, we talked. I learned that both Genevieve and Christine hail originally from Saskatchewan, Canada, where legends and facts, knowledge of the arctic, are instilled in every child's imagination. I also learn that Bowdoin College has an arctic history museum, which Genny is the archival director of. What i don't learn until later, is that the group is carrying around a Robert Peary doll, which they have their pictures taken with all over the Arctic at odd places, such as in front of a ski equipped military cargo plane, or a big red cement building that says KISS.
One of the things that makes me really happy is seeing toddlers out playing with their older siblings when most of the world would think they should be in bed. Ten pm seems to be the local high point of play ground activity here; teens on the soccer field, 8 year old girls learning to do pop o wheelies, pods of kindergartner's waiting for turns on the slide, moms on swings, the night is alive with the light of the sun and the buzz of insects and the speed of the river's course.
Trucks are running back and forth to the harbor, 9 miles west, collecting and depositing 20 ft containers. One of the two annual freighters is in port, delivering the bulk of Kangerlussuaq's commodities.
The river is positively galloping!We are coated in fine, silica dust, baptised by time, and sparkling sun. We shclepp boxes for research and inquire the "whys" of other's passionate intellect. The weather is wonderfull and warm. I walk barefooted in the sand dunes looking at the almost, constant, fair weather sky though I should be sleeping......... I spent Sunday reading, "from Walden", by Thoreau, in a camp chair by the Watson. I spoke with my niece, in Montana, about Polar bears ("no, Willa, I have not yet been lucky enough to see a Polar bear. They do not live this far south). I promise to write her a story about how a Polar bear spends it's life. She promises to send me a drawing of what she thinks a polar bear looks like. I sense the beginning of something wonderful.

John Muir stabbed one of his eyeballs with an awl. He was an avid inventor who, it is said, worked 24 hours around the clock tinkering with mechanical things. When he awoke from his bed rest after 2 weeks of blindness, and could see again, he went out into the world of nature to experience the delicate harmony of creation, change, flux, death and beauty.
I put down the book I was reading at the moment, describing John Muir, and decided, at 1130 at night to ride my bike up the hill to the lake where I have set up a tent for us to escape to, a summer home. The air was cold and the sky tumultuous. Dandelions are popping out all over the sides of the road. Far out on the fjord I could see dust being swept up into columns of silt. The ravens, who have been pushed out of town by all of the perching song birds, flew around the nests they have made in the hard sand cliffs conveniently located near the trash pile, which was smoldering from the last burning.
A fox ran ahead of me up the road leaving little prints in the sand.
When I got to the lake shore, the sky had just begun to touch down over Garnet Mt in the distance. The tent site is an elixir to the cement walls of the KISS building where all the communal noises of people living together commingle with the passing cars, airplane patterns, restless teenagers standing and un identified industrial sounds. At the lake I have a belonging sense. A time to look at Greenland without bus stops or computers or cars. I can allow the deep green of the hills and the storm sky blue gray of the water to color my marrow. I can try and become sympathetic to the possible meanings of the singing birds; at the very least I am becoming increasingly bewildered at the might and the passion of a bird tiny anatomy and Herculean soul.
Upon waking I noticed the first new Harebell, a tiny 4 petaled tissue paper of a thimble sized flower. Mist, as soft as a fresh woodland spider web, fell gently about my face. I forgot about my colleagues from work, the excited, celebratory researchers preparing boxes for their flight home.;even the noisy, midnight action of the local youths , in hooded sweatshirts and baggy jeans, leaning up against buildings, smoking cigarettes ,in the heart of Kangerlussuaq, had gone.
The bridge across the river allows for one to pass from the human world of daily necessities and hub-bub populace (even in a town of less than 600 ) into the ephemeral world of nature. It is a transport from a place of jet airlines and fork lifts and i-pods to a place of still fingerling and stoic sentries without names.
This is the thing I have been trying to grasp! The alluring aloofness, the odd magic and light. The weirdness of a felt feeling for the chance of a mastodon standing alone in the next broad valley. The drum beat of a people, whose ancestry is not so ancient yet.

Kitchen Hill

On Sunday, I hiked to the top of Kitchen Hill. A strong breeze, smelling distinctly of wild flowers, did wonders to keep the mosquitoes away. At the summit, I met a duck; a male mallard who was so content with having his tail feathers in the air, and his bill beneath the water,that I was able to walk right up upon him without him noticing me.
After he was satisfied with his lunch, he promptly stood on one leg in very shallow water and began to preen his feathers nonchalantly. I was particularly struck by the always seemingly empty land and this one lone duck. We stood there together each in our place, just being quite for a long while. Without words or any mutual acknowledgment, we became friends.
When at last he took to wing, it was with more of a tender, unhurried, "adieu" than a frightened duck-like, quacking, rush! I was sad to see him go.
Far below, in the valley, the river has swelled. Parts of land that were not islands a day ago, are becoming so by the hour. Now, underneath the bridge, where the wide, quick waters are forced to be funneled, a falls is occurring. The froth of rapid turbulence has only just begun to hint at the force that will grow more powerful, indeed, become extremely violent soon(in another month, anything that were to be dropped into the river from the wooden bridge, a house hold appliance or a bus, a mobile home!, would have all of its atoms reconstructed in a matter of seconds).
Tonight I walked down to the channel of the Watson not yet full of water. I was accompanying two of the scientists that are working out of our building for the month. Adrianne and Nick. A geologist and a physicist. Adrianne, was searching for a ventifact, "smaller than torso size" but these rocks are massive or huge, and at the very least, are "two man rocks" that is, unable to be lifted without two men. Phenomenally voluptuous, bronzed with mineral veneers, sparkling with mica and feldspar, polished, pocketed and brushed, (as if by the hands of children entranced with a well loved chore)they refuse to be budged, but cannot remain untouched. Cupped and scalloped by wind and sand, these natural sculptures represent time and patterns of nature that not even a trained physicist and geologist can agree upon the formation of their chanced existence.
At long last, we found a few 15 pounders Adrianne would be able to stuff into her suitcases, and bring home with her to New York City.
In the distance, looking out the fjord, the first precipitous clouds in weeks, drew down a gray blur of rain between sky and the long far sea. Scudding, twilight -dirty -at midnight, cumulus, now move softly to the north. Passing over rock and pond and nestled ducks, moving underneath the always static dome of high latitude summer blue, a whisper of birds murmurs and even the standing musk ox, must now lay down for sleep.