greenland

When we weren’t sledging on the sea ice our dogs lived on a clump of rocks opposite our house (also on a clump of rocks). That first winter on the ice (2007) was a nightmare. Getting the dogs up and down a steep, icy road to the ice and back was hell and hard work. I vowed to get smarter and did what the Greenlanders did – I relocated the dogs to the ice.

If you’re wondering about the chains and thinking that it’s cruel… well, I understand. But in the sledge dog districts of Greenland, adult dogs (typically over six weeks old) are required by law to be kept on chains when not working. Working is the key word. Sledge dogs are working dogs, taking the hunters to and from the fishing holes, and on hunting trips. In Qaanaaq they even load qajaqs onto the sledges and sledge to the very edge of the ice before launching the qajaqs when hunting narwhal. It’s illegal to hunt narwhal from a boat in Qaanaaq.

Anyway, back to the dogs, they are chained by law. These are tough dogs. With the right food – plenty of blubber when it’s cold – they are capable of toughing out temperatures in the minus 50s. That’s Celsius. Being so tough, they are not house trained. Meaning, they really shouldn’t be in a house. Sometimes a Dane on a short term contract would fall in love with a puppy and then go through the motions to take that puppy home with them to an apartment in a Danish city once their contract ended.

You’re thinking about it now… 😉 Working sledge dog, used to the extremes and lots of activity (when working), suddenly inside a three-room apartment with central heating.

Yep. That can turn out badly. It doesn’t have to, but it’s not a good idea, and it can be curtains for the dog. It’s a bit like when Game of Thrones fans wanted their own Dire Wolves from the series and bought sledge dog puppies thinking they would just slide into family life.

Hmmm.

In Greenland, the story goes that when a hunter wanted new blood for the pack, he would put out a bitch when she was in heat and wait for the wolf to come and visit.

Greenland sledge dogs are about as close to the wolf as you can get without having wolves or hybrids – not recommended.

Anyway, we – my team and me – relocated to the ice.

I still had to deal with the hill, carrying water and food up and down it every day. I was in good shape, if a little exhausted.

However, even though our dogs were not working dogs – I was a teacher not a hunter – we treated them as such, although I confess there was a lot of cuddling and spoiling in our team, and when they felt sufficiently spoiled they even pulled the sledge! Cue shaky but very important photo below! Oh, and it was -28 Celsius that February day. The sea ice is perhaps 20-40 cm thick.

Apart from the red harness in the photo above, I sewed all the dogs harnesses, made the lines, cut lengths of chain, stuffed drill holes in the rock with wood then screwed attachment points into them, or when camping on the ice, dug holes in the ice, slipped wood and chain anchors into the sea, then pulled the anchors tight in an upside down T to freeze before adding the dogs. I didn’t build the sledge, but I did sew the sledge bag – the same kind of envelope bag Maratse keeps all his gear in when sledging.

One more thing, in the photos we are sledging on the road created by taxis and other cars going to and from the settlements. Uummannaq is an island, but in the winter, with good ice, all the islands were connected. We watched Ice Road Truckers when living in Greenland, then went out and did it. 🙂

I am not a photographer. Capturing the Northern Lights was a real challenge. But so was photography in general. We have had several cameras during the years we were in Greenland, starting with the tiny pocket digital cameras – the kind with a screen on the back.

For those of you thinking about travelling north, my advice is to get a camera with a viewfinder.

In winter the screens of those pocket cameras tend to freeze in the cold. In the summer, the Arctic is so bright you can’t see anything on that screen. Overcast days are best, and especially when taking photos of icebergs, but if the sun is shining – forget it!

It makes me smile, actually. I’m sure the iPhones and mobiles of today are far better than my cameras were, but still, without a viewfinder … good luck! 😉

Back to those pesky (and breathtaking) Northern Lights.

I did have a SLR digital camera – and it worked, prior to juggling with it. That’s another story. But learning about all the different things with numbers in photography – yes, I’m that technically proficient when it comes to cameras – kind of escaped me. And the only exposure I thought about was what was happening to my fingers as I tried to set it all up. I think it’s about -25C in this photo.

Added to that, Uummannaq, where this photo is taken, is about 600km above the Arctic Circle, and the lights tend to be green, pale green, or white. We’re too far north for the really colourful stuff. In Qaanaaq we were way too far north for any Northern Lights at all.

However, this photo, looking towards the mountain of Qilertinnguit (1,977m) on the Nuussuaq Peninsula, also shows a pipe running above the ground – can’t dig into these rocks! I think it’s carrying electricity cables – insulated. There are far better photos of the Northern Lights to be found, but this one is mine. 🙂

You might be interested to know that if the Northern Lights formed an arc across the night sky it usually meant that good weather was on the way. The opposite was true in the summer. If we had a day of glorious sun one day, then strong winds would come the following day.

Forget technology, living in Greenland was far more about learning to read the signs in nature all around you. They were more reliable than technology ever will be!

Chris

Greenland is a fabulous place but it’s not what I’d call picturesque. It’s not supposed to be. It’s supposed to be raw and untamed. It’s supposed to be a challenge.

It’s like a slow, beautiful death.

Okay, I should explain that, if I can.

Greenland is about living life at the very edge of where life can be lived. Sure, modern houses in Greenland have modern amenities. But it doesn’t take much for the power to get knocked out, or a supply ship to get turned around because of ice, or a mercy flight grounded because of bad weather.

The slow is the pace of life. You simply can’t speed things up. Everything is against you. That doesn’t mean things don’t happen fast. A glacier that hasn’t calved for a day can crack off a piece of ice the size of a small village the next second. A whale can surface beside you and disappear again a second later, leaving little more than bubbles and an accelerated heart rate.

But you can’t plan for or anticipate these things. You can’t rush it. You just have to live it.

The beautiful part needs no explanation. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I met one Danish nurse who couldn’t see the beauty around her because she was locked into the long dark winter, and used all her energy to get from one day to the next until her short-term contract ended.

I had dark days, sure I did – lots of them. But then I just had to look around me and see and feel Greenland.

It helped.

It was beautiful.

But then I was dying a little every day – that slow, beautiful death I mentioned. Explaining that is hard, but it’s like absorbing one massive experience after the next, seconds apart, often when turning the corner and seeing the light hit the mountain in a different way than you had seen it before. You take on these experiences, and you absorb them, but to do so requires processing them. That’s not always possible. There’s not always room. So, knowing that it’s going to take time, you also know you’re taking these experiences to the grave, and this slow time is so packed with impressions of the natural world, that you know you can’t possibly absorb it all before you die. And in knowing that, you die a little every day. Rather, you let a little piece of you die – that experience you had earlier in the month, you have to let it go, because it just got surpassed by something bigger.

Not necessarily better, just bigger.

It needs more room.

So you allow one part of you to die, to make room for a new part a new life experience.

And so the process of dying a little every day becomes a slow beautiful death.

Romantic?

Yeah, sure. But real.

Sometimes reviewers have wondered at the plausibility of some of the things I write about in my stories. It makes me smile. About the only thing I exaggerate are the characters, making them a little larger than life.

I don’t have to do anything to the nature or geography. Greenland has that covered! 🙂

Photos explained:

1. The first photo is a shot of the more industrial part of town with the ubiquitous shipping containers, various rusting hulks of metal, topped with big mountains in the background.
2. The second photo is shot of a hunter heading towards the northeast corner of Salliaruseq Island.
3. The third is a photo of a hunter going out to check his longline – you can see the plastic fishing box strapped to the sledge.
4. Photo four is a hunter arriving in Uummannaq, sledging between the boats locked in the frozen harbour.
5. And the last photo is Uummannaq hospital where Jane worked and I have staged a few gun battles! Because I could. 🙂

Chris