A Return Trip to Greenland

(Parts of this narrative also appear at Canadian Geographic and Nanaimo and Voyager Magazine)

A yellow-brick sunset shimmers ahead, paving our way to the west. Standing alone at the bow

of a small ice-class ship, my only companions are a scatter of fulmars hanging next to the sun.

There’s a ripple of wind and soft whsshhh of wake as we carve through a jade-coloured sea.

The ship is the Ocean Endeavour, part of a compact fleet designed to haul explorers into the

Arctic. Half of the 300 people aboard are travellers, the rest crew, while a few of us are scientists,

researchers and guides. Among the biologists, geologists and glaciologists, I’m privileged to be

here as ambassador for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

My voyage this time will be two weeks and two days, mostly at sea. A flight brought me to

Reykjavik, another will return me home from the Arctic in West Greenland. Our ship launches

westward from Iceland; at Greenland’s east coast we’ll bear south, before heading north up the

island’s west side. Our path navigates Prince Christian Sound, a naturally carved throughway on

Greenland’s southern tip. To start, two days at sea, reacquainting with sea legs and watching ocean slide by. The surface, now calm, glitters on, and it already feels like I’ve been here a lifetime.

Two very long sunsets later, I glimpse the east edge of the world’s biggest island, at the

moment in slate blue and grey. Icebergs linger in tabular slabs, some snowy white, others the

frost blue of deep glacial rifts. Iceland Gulls wheel with the fulmars, and three minke whales roll

in tandem to starboard. South down Greenland’s east side: Sikuiuiteq to Kangerluluk, the fjords of Lindenow and Igutsaat, toward the most southerly latitude point that we’ll reach. 60 degrees north. Landscape here shifts to a rugged and radical blend of immediate and ancient: plummeting gneiss

cliffs—some of Earth’s oldest rock—buttress ice sheet in fingers now cracking and drifting to

sea.

Dodging increasing gales (3 meter swells and 40 knot winds) we take shelter in fjords, then

zodiac to shore and explore. Sea conditions improve and we resume our route south and then

west. With the transition from the east to west coast of Greenland, terrain better resembles its

name. Hills in rich hummock, juniper, birch, with crowberry, bilberry, cranberry too. All this

speckled in buttercup yellow with the mauve of tiny azaleas. Blooms are abundant now in

northern hemisphere summer. Buntings cheep, there’s the slide-whistle call of a lapwing, the

kraa of two ravens, then a great ffwoom-ffwoom as a sea eagle passes, the visual nearly primeval.

Over the following days, a meal of reindeer, two more of musk ox. I eat ten types of fish:

salmon, cod, herring and haddock. Snapper and hoki and pollock plus others I never do learn.

By a beached dory in Nuuk I hear the rasp of a handsaw, someone hacking through

antler—the branchlike rack of a reindeer, severing it into chunks for a carver. I imagine the stag’s

lifeline, tundra to tool: a knife handle perhaps for an ulu.

Where we are is Greenlandic Inuit land, considered autonomous Danish territory, but sit at

any communal table and you’re likely to hear language from everywhere. Last time here I was

on foot, a blend of trekking and small boats across fjords. One evening was a meal of mussels

and whale at a table of polyglots. Introductions ensued in a Ouija board manner to determine

what language to use: Danish? Swahili? English? Romansh? (These were actual suggestions.) It

turned out the one language we all knew a little was French. And with that, dinner became

moules et baleine.

A rattling clack-clack-clack as we anchor one final time, now at the head of Kangerlussuaq

Fjord in West Greenland where a runway accommodates a few international flights. Drybags and

zodiacs, then a brief drive by a silt river lined in dwarf willow where musk ox graze, their

appearance like squat woolly mammoths. Another blurring of time and of place, before boarding

a plane with new friends, and a flight to return us to now.

___________________________

Bill Arnott is the bestselling author of A Perfect Day for a Walk by the Water, the Season

memoirs, and award-winning Gone Viking travelogues. He’s a Travel Ambassador for Canadian

Geographic and for his expeditions received fellowships at Britain’s Royal Geographical Society

and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Bill lives on Canada’s west coast on

Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh land.