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.

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.