"FORE"

I forgot to mention that I have also learned to golf. How do I explain this learning? How do I explain the course? First of all, golfing here, is free! There are no electric vehicles, no caddies, no green fairways and no other people. The club house is an old single wide trailer painted army green. Inside there are carts full of clubs and buckets of brightly painted balls (so you can find them in the sand). There is also a porta potty, the kind your parents may have put in the back of the station wagon for you when you were a kid in order to avoid having to make pit stops every 47 and a half minutes.

The first time I went golfing, was with a women from Brooklyn NY working on her PHD from Columbia University. She and I rode our bikes out along the river and let ourselves into the club house with the key one picks up from the airport hotel desk. As I was trying to determine what type of clubs to take I learned that she had only golfed once before herself and it was also here at the Kangerlussuaq country club. She didn't know a wedge from a driver; in fact neither of us carried a putter. Never the less, we went out with the course map and did our very best to hit the tiny little balls towards a flag, any flag. We beat at the sand, searched through the willows and swatted at mosquitoes for 2 hours without ever putting a ball into or near a hole.

My second time out golfing, I convinced Steve to play. We accompanied a colleague of ours who was just up from Denver, for a week of remote office work. Jason, actually plays golf. It is because of Jason that I learned to use words like putter, driver and wedge. I also learned to keep my head down, but for all of my slugo -home- run -baseball -type whacks at the little ball, seldom did I ever manage to connect the head of the club with the dimpled orange sphere. The few times that things went right I watched with absolute childhood wonder as my ball went soaring through the air. But where did it go? From, Jason,

"That dog'll hunt..........." Translated means: "Hey! Your ball is actually in a darn fine place {use an incredulous voice} and very close to the putting "green"!

Strewn cryptically around an old river bed, with little boggy water swamps the whole course is one big sand trap. Just for an added challenge. And in case you were to forget that golf was invented in the foggy sheep pastures of highland Scotland, you get to carry around a square patch of astro turf to drive off of. Without it, you are wedging out of sand on every par, unless your ball lands in a willow. At the place where you are to put your ball into the hole, there are prickly stiff patches of inflexible sedges and rushes and the flags will not come out, so anchored in by timeless sand storms, they are impossible to budge. On a par 4 I averaged around a par 16. We played 7 holes in 3 hours and finally gave in to the late afternoon heat. Back at the musty dusty club house, we collected empty soda and beer bottles to take up to the store for some redemption. We tried on a few left behind hats and filled in our names in the guest book. I think all in all, we only lost a few balls, which is nothing given the willow shrub studded desert we were playing in. I decided to like this free admission, wild Greenlandic golf, and am finding myself surprised to want to go out and practice driving. That is, as soon as my arms recover from what felt more like bludgeoning baby seals than having been out enjoying an afternoon's game of civilised golf.

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.

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.