Greenland
Triumph
After four previous attempts Julia and I finally made landfall on the frozen shores of Greenland. Below is the story of our journey to this distant and remote wonderland.
Oakland, California
We begin
Airport, oh airport you’re so filled with people
Wait! there’s a pizza, a pretzel, a bun, oh fun
When did we get here, no when will we leave?
Airport, oh airport hurry up and wait
Put down that pretzel and head to the gate!
Gatwick, England
Sleepless night
Crammed in
So tight
The flight it went all day
All night
Crammed in
So tight
We shared the same all day
All night
And so, we spent our sleepless night
Gatwick
Bags are ripped
Bags are torn
Air Norwegian cares no more
We must go forward
We can’t retreat
Even though Julia is so sweet
This message is approved by Julia Buss
To rest
At Sofitel we took a spell
We ate and drank and slept so well
The sheets were clean in our lovely bed
Not a vibrating chair so far over head
We’re rested now and ready to go
Much further north to the land of snow
Riverside Garden Park
Aircraft smoke and buses too
Will not restrict the blackberry stew
Nettles and oaks
Ducks and moats
Is what we found where whence we walked
Reykjavík, Iceland
Reykjavik
Reykjavik, oh Reykjavik
How far away you make of it
Your skies of rain
Your summers of pain
Instead of going we still remain
Reykjavik, oh Reykjavik
I didn’t think I’d see you again
And yet we are here
And you remain
Late at night
The sky is light
Late at night
And gray and rainy too
The people come from far away
All manner of humans too
They move about
All dripping wet
As summer fills this northern world
But the sky is light
Late at night
No matter what we do
Runner
She’s running here
She’s running there
In Reykjavik she’s running everywhere
She doesn’t care
Nor does she despair
As long as she can breathe the air
Blue Lagoon we’ll be there soon
Your waters warm and volcanic yet
We did get wet and salty too
But Blue Lagoon we’ll be back soon
Greenland
Constable Point
Is where our boat
Awaits us afloat
It’s to be our home
Protecting us from the foam
So that we might roam
The home of the Polar Bear
Where very white hares
And musk oxen too
Roam the snow and ice
Far from view
Tourism is starting in Eastern Greenland. It hardly seems like a possible future. It is incongruous to think of hordes of tourists, gift shops and cruise ships in such a remote place. It could happen. It happened in other places. Take Iceland for example. Once hardly anyone went there for a vacation. Now it’s definitely on the destination map. I wonder will Greenland end up on the destination map too? Is that what will happen here? I guess it is already happening in a small way – we are here, and we are tourists.
The airplane that brought us landed at an unpaved airstrip created in the 1980s to allow for oil exploration. There were about 20 tourists and 5000 mosquitoes waiting for our arrival. We were swapping places with these tourists. They were heading back to modern life, we were heading away. Into the wilderness. Icebergs, a 100-year-old wooden ship and the wild.
We walked out to the ship following a man with a gun to protect us from animal attack. We were warned that polar bears don’t kill their victims before eating them. The place was void, grey, remote and quiet.
We stopped at the only village, the next town is 800km away. The place was like a ghost town, there were a few children, some barking dogs, and a couple of men drove by on four-wheel dirt bikes. Nothing to see, nothing. On the ship that was to be our home for 8 days we climbed into our bunks to sleep while the crew sailed us into the Scoresby Sound.
Scoresby Sound
The Arctic Scoresby Sound
We made our way around
Basaltic pillars and sandstone too
Icebergs, some white
And some very, very blue
Not one but two polar bears we saw
One swimming and one on top of an iceberg tall
We couldn’t believe how beautiful this place could be
But the mosquitos made us scratch and itch and flee
A voice was calling urgently: “Polar bear, polar bear, quick come and see.” We were roused from our sleep to see the wonderful sight of a bear swimming next to a glacier. Apparently, these marine mammals frequently hunt near glaciers. This bear’s head was held up out of the water as he circled around. He seemed concerned that we were there. Our diesel engine and our ship seemed so big and noisy in that silent wilderness. We sailed away and left the bear to hunt.
We passed bergs and ice lumps, some crackled like popping plastic wrap as we passed by them. Then we heard another person shout “polar bear”. This time a large bear was pacing on an iceberg next to the ship. He was awakened from sleep by the appearance of our ship. He looked at us and yawned. He paced his berg and seemed interested in us as we were in him. White seabirds circled overhead around the ice-castle turrets like guards for the polar bear king.
Icebergs, icebergs all about
Icebergs, icebergs there is no doubt
When it comes to splendor
Beyond our dreams
There is no other
That lifts our hearts
Icebergs, icebergs white and blue
Icebergs, icebergs we feel renewed
Our minds are lost within your hues
Icebergs, icebergs we belong to you
We sailed on and later in the day went on land. Always with our guide with her rifle to protect us. On land the rocks contain garnets and flashy pyrite. On the beach were quartz chunks as big as bricks scattered among the pebbles. There was a hunting hut and humans had left behind broken glass and other trash. It was a strange place with a modern stove, a dining room, beds and bottles of booze on the shelves. But nobody there and no lock on the door. The place felt desolate and it was quiet there. I saw 2 bird feathers on the rocky ground. Perhaps birds had nested there and already left for warmer parts of the planet. There were alpine flowers, tiny pink and white flowers. White animal bones were scattered about, and we saw the scat from an artic fox. And then the mosquitoes, black and hungry, on land and on the ship anchored nearby. No escape from the biters.
Covered with jewels
Sailing fiords, from east to west
Snowcapped mountains, they are the best
Granite Islands, all covered with jewels
Abandoned buildings of people long left
These are things, of much renown
These are things of the Scoresby Sound
Sounds of the Donna Wood
Rumbling engine, and creaking wood
These are the sounds of the Donna Wood
Until its hull, meets the ice
Then crashing and banging it’s not so nice
Scraping and scratching
And thumping too
Swaying and wobbling
With much ado
Until the ice
We’ve broke through
These are the sounds of the Donna Wood too
Breaking ice
Breaking ice, breaking ice
Pushing through glacial and sea ice too
Cracking and crunching
Scratching and scraping
Bumping and knocking
All morning long
Blues and whites
So very bright
We’re a wooden boat
And very small
The burgs are vast and very tall
Breaking ice, breaking ice
How could this have been so very nice
Thankfully, we sailed away from the hungry mosquitoes and further into the sound. We floated along, our lives supported by the vessel, Donna Wood, and her crew. We are far away from human civilization. We saw one or two seabirds and no other life besides ourselves all day. The waterway narrowed, and we sailed on calm clear waters, the cliffs reflected perfectly like mountainous inkblots. We were mesmerized by the beauty. Ahead of us lay a place called iceberg city, a place where bergs get caught in shallow water. We headed towards Red Island on zodiacs, making our way through a maze of giant bergs. We heard booms as pieces of ice cracked and fell from towering cliffs of swirling white and blue ice. Each piece was fashioned by water and wind into unique shapes. We spotted familiar objects in their shapes floating like a frozen Thanksgiving Day parade. Suddenly, one of the giants started to roll as its top half became heavier. In seconds it spun over. The thing was the size of a bus.
We landed and climbed up Red Island which is a northern counterpart to Uluru in Australia. We looked down at the bay of ghostly, jewel-like bergs. Before our eyes, a berg cracked then crumbled into pieces as it exploded, sending waves to jostle the giants all around. On the spongy land we found the shells of goose eggs and a few feathers. All the birds were gone. Our ship lay in the mill pond of the sound below us. Tomorrow we aim to keep going through the ice, although there may be too much broken ice to continue and we may have to turn back.
Isolation
Isolation from sounds and strife
Isolation from normal life
No cars, no noise
There’s not a sound
No smoke no haze
We’re in a maze
Of fiords and life, of fiords and ice
Isolation we’re at worlds end
Isolation, we’re not alone
Our ship, our mates
Our crew are here
They keep us sane
They keep us safe
Isolation it’s truly good
It makes yourself
More understood
Early in the morning the crew decided to go ahead and find a way through the ice field ahead. It seemed an impossible endeavor to us land-lubbers. But our captain had a lifetime’s experience and our Icelandic first mate climbed up to the crow’s nest to guide us on. We made our way very slowly through the ice as it scraped down the sides of our wooden ship and popped and crackled around us. Donna Wood has a layer of copper on her hull – mainly to stop barnacles growing on her – not to protect against sea ice and bergs. Bergs rolled suddenly deciding to flip over. We watched from the deck as we zigzagged our way to the other side of iceberg city. Once again, after hours of inching forward, clear water lay ahead.
We needed water on board, so the crew breached the Donna Wood onto a stony beach to pump spring water. We spotted musk ox. We continued on to the edge of a large glacier and saw more ox at the glacier’s edge. The glacier creaked and groaned. A berg the size of a house churned and spun over. The frozen flow ground forward and seabirds flew along the white cliffs. The magnificent power of the place is indescribable; it is mesmerizing and immense. I felt calm, yet strangely lonely and disconnected. We floated before the glacier like a matchbox filled with a crew of tiny ants. Hypnotized by the place, we watched defiantly at the frozen grandeur and indifference.
Fresh water
Water surrounds us
It’s everywhere
An yet we have so little to spare
The kind we need contains no salt
And soon we run out of it on our boat
So, we stop by a river that flows to the sea
And we fill our tanks
We’re happy you see
To have fresh water to help us survive
To wash us
To bathe us
To keep us alive
Later we sailed away to a small bay where we landed and walked about with our guide and her rifle. We saw skulls and bleached bones. We saw a freshly gnawed bone and we thought about wolves. Later, the ship’s cook, Andy, made us a BBQ on the beach where the rocks sparkled in the evening sun and the cold waves lapped lifeless rock pools.
The cold
The cold is not fast
It’s very, very slow
It’s in the air that flows over the snow
It’s in the air that flows over the water
It enters your feet your hands your toes
It starts slowly at first
Then creeps and grows
Until finally everything’s frozen
The whole day passed as we sailed down an enormous glacial valley with peaks and sheer cliffs towering on either side of us. Our only company on the water were enormous bergs. Glaciers entered the water, cracking and sparkling, popping and growling. Next to a vast glacier a small family of eider ducks swam by, so tiny the mother seemed to know exactly where she was taking her chicks in this wild place.
On land again and plagued again by starving mosquitoes we scrambled and walked on rocks and alpine vegetation covering Bear Island. Rocks and boulders glinted with quartz. A loon called out and an iceberg collapsed in on itself sending shards, lumps and waves into the water. Mountain peaks like turrets and fairy tale castles surrounded us. Bergs like imaginings from the mind of Salvador Dali floated in the inky ocean.
We ate an early breakfast on board and headed off for another part of Bear Island where we walked across rocks and scrub. In our group we are contained. We must stay by our leader with her gun and stay in sight of each other. There is no path in this wild place and we must scramble and stagger over low brush and rocks. We feel guilty damaging the low, slow growing arctic plants as we walk brutishly with our big hiking boots. Again, we find bones. We learn that the Arctic is polluted with persistent organic compounds that accumulate in animal fat, disrupt hormones, and cause health problems for animals including humans. The Innuit are told to eat less of their traditional diet to reduce exposure. But what is their alternative diet? Likely it is processed sugary foods.
Loons on Bear Island
Loons on Bear Island they make quite the din
It’s not really singing it’s more like a ring
They skirt the blue waters with their ring a ding, ding
Loons on Bear Island they don’t really sing
Back on the ship we sail past giant bergs like medieval towers in the blue. We see the snow-covered mainland and our faces burn in the sun. We head for home.
David had been woken in the night to see the green flashes of Northern Lights. I slept oblivious to the marvel. We stop at an abandoned village where bears may be seen. We don’t see any. We waited for them with our engine rumbling.
Northern lights
About the sky on Arctic nights
Sometimes you’ll see
The Northern lights
Their green and eerie shimmering glow
Will dance and prance
About the sky
Until they vanish from whence they glow
For a second time we wander the desolate streets of Ittoqqortoormiit (pronounced “eat a quart o’ meat”). There is litter, a drunk man, broken glass. I feel sad. I look forward to cities and Mediterranean sun. The ship re-fuels. The staff prepare for the next round of tourists. Our journey is almost over.
That night, our last night we play games, drink vodka, laugh. I see the green curtains of light in the dark sky. Gentle swaths of glowing color softly crossing the blackness. It means everything and nothing, wonder and charged particles, a magnetic Earth and her light show shared with new friends.
Goodbye to the remote Artic where people live in immense isolation from global politics and celebrity gossip. Yet there the oceans are polluted by distant economies, industries, and consumers. Goodbye to Ittoqqortoormiit with her scant beauty, scattered with beer cans, broken glass, plastic and bones. Dogs howl and we travel towards our future with the same nature we have had for centuries. Messy and chaotic, violent and sometimes sweet.
These northern skies
I’m afraid it’s goodbye to these northern skies
These bright granite peaks
So far, so wide
These glacial rivers from hill to sea
These gargantuan icebergs from water to ice
These mountain horns Carved from rock by ice
To all these things we say adieu
I’m afraid it’s goodbye to all these guys too
Our shipmates
Our crew
All now our friends
May we all return home
Safe and sound
And remember our time in the Scoresby Sound
Reykjavík, Iceland
At the airport we hugged goodbye to our shipmates and wish them well.
