In the Empire of Ice (24 page)

They are pulling on anoraks and boots. “And you think our problem is climate change,” John says bitterly as he goes out the door. “Be sure to keep it locked.”

TEN-THIRTY IN THE MORNING. Pink sky but no moon, no sun. The kneading of the dough in the kitchen is vigorous and repetitive. John has returned and is making 12 loaves of bread to help Leah feed her clan. “The woman who killed Leah’s brother had killed another boyfriend a few years ago,” John says, shaping the loaves on a wooden board. “She did time, was released, and killed again.”

Loaf pans go into the oven and others are waiting on the counter. “Leah’s brother had some problems, but he’d straightened up. He was interested in theoretical physics. He studied it closely and played in a band with Zach’s brother. Yes, that’s the other news. Zach’s brother died of brain cancer yesterday. The week before, Zach’s other partner in the film company was killed violently. We’ll be going to funerals,” he says quietly, and for the moment his rage subsides. It’s replaced by a suffocating silence as if the house had been wrapped in cotton. No Christmas tunes play. By the time John is finished baking, darkness is overtaking the town. It’s 1:30 p.m.

A week earlier Leah had told me about her summer cabin at the beach, where she goes to collect her sanity. “It’s amazing to take the kids there for a weekend. I don’t have a lot there—no lights, only a woodstove. In spring and summer we watch the birds and have a contest to see which ones hatch their eggs first. The kids want to go there every chance they get. It calms them. We take walks at night during the full moon. Here, we live under false lights. But at camp, many still use a qulliq—a blubber lamp. They cut the walrus or seal blubber into squares and cook it to let the oil out. Then it’s poured onto moss in a shallow oblong bowl and the lamp is lit. That’s how we have heat and light without electricity.”

At night they put nets out in the water, and in the morning they have arctic char to cook over the fire. “I would like to spend a whole summer at our old camp,” Leah had said. “My mother lost a child, and we went back there about three years ago to put up a headstone. Who wants to be buried in town? We don’t belong here.” Now I wonder where Leah will go for solace, if there is such a thing.

At the end of the day John says, “Look, about global warming, we’re just not seeing it here. But there have been climate shifts before this one. The Thule people were living here on bowhead whales, then, when the weather warmed and the ice began breaking up and shifting, the populations dispersed into smaller groups in Foxe Basin. They are an example of people adapting to climate change. It must have been catastrophic: Many humans died, others adapted. The polar bear evolved from the grizzly. Now, perhaps it’s going back again, to being a brown bear.”

He continues: “These are threats to the world as we know it. Maybe we won’t survive. But we won’t know that for a while. The more immediate threat to the Inuit is how to organize themselves around the government and globalization. What we had here was a life elegantly and brilliantly adapted to a difficult environment. In everything they expressed the genius of a place, a culture that found order and kept the barbaric at bay. Now I’m finding it difficult to see how it’s all going to end.”

LAST DAY. A rim of light brightens the gray horizon, then fades. Twilight goes to black. Across Davis Strait and north to Greenland there is only polar night—no light at all until the end of February. Here in Igloolik I stare out the window at bruised days.

A deceased person’s soul is kept alive by a name. I ask who will get the names of the newly dead—Leah’s brother and Zach Kunuk’s—but no one knows. In the night, pond ice, land-fast ice, and sea ice converge under the umbral hat of a tilted sun, as the dead are absorbed into the living and the threads that bind them are carried in the names.

Before the Qallunaat came in the early 1880s, there was a dark-time ceremony called
tivajut
. In his oral history, George Kappianiq says, “It was held after the darkest period had climaxed and as the days started to return. They would make a big igloo. This occasion was held in celebration of the New Year that would see them to the time when they would be able to catch more game animals. They were able to determine the returning of daylight by the star structure. The stars start to move faster as the daylight starts to return because the Earth rotates and tilts. If you observe the sun as it goes down, it really goes fast. We appear to be stable but in fact we are moving.”

Closed-system chaos, in the universe as well as this society. Without a ceremonial life and ritual there can be no passage from dark to light, from madness to sanity, from life to death. Without boundaries there is no societal cohesion, no self-discipline in which the good of the group remains more important than the individual. These were the ways that Inuit people managed to stave off self-interest and greed, to cope with the cold and survive.

In late autumn, in anticipation of darkness, or maybe the hunger that often came with the dark days when there was little hunting, incidents of
pibloktok
—Arctic hysteria. It broke out among humans, often women, and also dogs and was said to be the result of starvation and of mineral and vitamin D deficiencies. But the anticipation of darkness in the isolation of the far north can be profound, and the strong influence of the environment must also be factored in.

JOHN, CAROLYN, AND I eat dinner quietly and go to the living room for our evening libation. No more dinner parties for a while. Carolyn dozes on the couch. Kindness shows in her face even when she sleeps. Her days with children and mothers begin early in the morning and are strenuous. She rises and goes to bed. John and I are left to mull over global heating and cooling and the coming and going of lives.

We drink a “wee dram” of Scotch and listen raptly to a CBC radio program about collapsing stars and supernovae that experience death more than once. One star kicks off solar masses several times. More massive stars burn off carbon, and the temperature gets so high that the radiation produces both matter and antimatter. This consumes so much energy that the remaining mass begins to contract. Instability increases until finally, the star collapses at a black hole.

“It sounds like a description of Igloolik,” John says solemnly. “Maybe we are dying now but will live again.” Earlier, he had talked about the intricately woven web between Inuit views of the environment, cosmology, and survival. “Their understanding of nature, of being part of nature, was both transcendent and practical, and the narratives that emerged were meant to awe and instruct. Now it’s all ending—the old ways and the people who knew them,” John says.

And the ice, I add, finally getting in my last word about climate change. Culture is always changing, and so is climate and the extinctions it causes. But we’ve tampered with nature too much, this time, and it is having its way with us. It’s far bigger than Igloolik.

John looks askance at me, then smiles: “I guess we’re just a failed species, eh?”

Another wee dram and we listen to the end of the radio report: “After the collapse at the edge of the black hole, something else happens. There’s a collision between the star shells kicked off by the pulsing star. The resulting kinetic energy produces light.”

ICE ISLANDS IN WIDE LEADS. Sunrise merging with sunset and nothing between. I buckle my seat belt and click through the images on my camera. There’s one of a towering thundercloud with a hole at the top, a hole like an eye in the forehead of a coming storm. When we die, can we see ourselves vanish?

The plane lifts off from Igloolik. Below, the frozen, white-blasted town appears antiseptic and harmless. In Samuel Beckett’s novel
The Unnamable,
he wrote: “They must have explained to me, someone must have explained to me, what it’s like, an eye, at the window, before the sea, before the sky…. I must have wanted it, wanted the eye, for my own.”

As the plane bumps upward, I recall John’s story of Sikuliarsiujittuq. It is a red star that rises on midwinter evenings over the sea ice and is named for a big man who was afraid of going out on the ice for fear that he would fall through. At last he is convinced that he should go hunting. When he asked how one should spend the night on the ice, the other hunters said it was customary to have one’s hands tied up. He submitted, and later they stabbed him. He then rose up and became a star. “They love these stories about those who are harmed by others and then get otherworldly grace,” John says.

Above, the stars; below, the tidal crenulations of shore-fast ice in collision with moving ice. I begin to feel the burden of this town’s sorrow lift. Craning my neck, I look for Sikuliarsiujittuq, but clouds have gathered over Foxe Basin as we fly southeast toward Iqaluit. A storm is on the way.

The scene back at the airport was crowded with members of the Kunuk family. The coffin bearing Zach’s brother arrived, just as the coffin bearing Leah’s murdered brother was being pushed into the cargo hold. The killer, it was said, was one of the passengers on the plane.

It seems important to remember that Igloolik’s problems belong to everyone. They are symptomatic of the kind of unhealthy societies that have been created everywhere—inner-city strife and rural community boredom, the cruel dispossession of colonialism, the injustice of having been betrayed, and the two kinds of imposed poverty, material and spiritual, that bring about similar results: a sense of deprivation and displacement.

The ice mirrors ruined lives, and now the ice itself is headed toward ruination. The clues to finding one’s way home, so to speak, are being cruelly removed.

“We are all immigrants to the modern world,” Kai Lee, a social geographer, said. But what kind of world is it? What will it be in 50 years?

The latest report from climatologist Susan Solomon at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration explains that the upward trend in temperatures as a result of carbon dioxide emissions is irreversible for at least a thousand years, because the balance between heat transfer and deep-ocean mixing has been lost. The thermal expansion of seawater alone will cause 1.3 to 3.2 feet of sea-level rise, and that doesn’t include melting ice sheets and glaciers, which will add much more.

OUT OF DARKNESS COMES transformation. The charnel ground is a kind of radical space, and in it exuberant, creative enterprises can suddenly flourish. They help transcend betrayal and punishment because they focus on what is, not the bitterness of the past. In Igloolik, this is happening. Young hunters are staying true to tradition and providing their families with food. The Artcirq circus troupe started as a result of a teenage suicide and is now thriving. Isuma, the film production company, has created a flood of new films by Igloolik residents, and its new Aboriginal Peoples Television Network is streaming video in Inuktitut online day and night. Zach Kunuk has just received funding for a language and culture institute that will install public access production studios in any Inuit community that wants to participate. The Women’s Film Cooperative has just finished a new film called
Before Tomorrow,
which showed at the Sundance Film Festival.
Atanarjuat
and
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen
keep winning international awards.

John’s oral history project is one of a kind and stands as a model for cultural preservation by indigenous peoples all over the world. It can be used locally, to inspire, to teach, to help keep a culture intact. Outsiders can read the histories to appreciate the splendor and sophistication of these circumpolar cultures.

But changes that will denigrate these cultures even further are still coming. The Northwest Passage mania has begun again. With increased summer ice melt and longer open-water seasons, world powers are salivating at the prospect of using the passage as a permanent shipping route between Europe and Asia. They’ve never paused to think that this traditional migration route, used by Inuit peoples coming from Asia to Alaska, Arctic Canada, and Greenland for thousands of years, will destroy what is left of the maritime ecosystem of Nunavut and Alaska including the last of the subsistence hunting villages along the way.

What have we lost, what have we gained, and what’s next to go? Narwhal, whale, walrus, and seal habitat, coastal villages and seabirds, hunters and circus performers, filmmakers and translators trying to hold in their memories a spirit world that enclosed the earthly one in ritual circuits and animal-human transformations, and a material ingenuity that allowed them to thrive in a part of the world where most people would be dead in a day.

Out the window a wild, icy beauty unravels beneath me: frozen water, snow-covered land, rough ice and rock, raven and walrus. Some people thought that the moon spirit caused the weather to be cold by whittling walrus tusks and strewing the shavings on the earth like snow. How is it possible to locate tragedy in such a fine place?

I doze a bit. I’m feeling seriously unwell—dizzy and debilitated as a cough that will later turn into viral pneumonia comes from someplace deep under my ribs. At the last moment, before leaving Igloolik, I tried to find a Kenn Borek Air plane going to Greenland—one of my heart’s homes, my refuge—but no one was going there, not in the dark time of year.

There is no life up here without ice, dogsled, seal, or the walrus’s gasping breath, the slide of the pale beluga, the diving auk, the glittering frostfall, the polar bear, the snowdrift spirits, and the dog-trot symphony. But I’m dreaming of another place—Greenland—where the old way of traveling and hunting still go on. Or will until the ice is gone.

I jolt awake. Have I been sleeping? We’re flying through thick clouds. As the plane reaches altitude, I’m hit in the eye by the sun.

G
REENLAND

FEBRUARY 20, 2007.
Midwinter, and Greenland’s sea ice is rotting. Graying pans spin and collide with shore-fast ice. Winter sun-fires ignite anything frozen. Wind waves uncoil under sea ice, bucking and jolting until the white ice lid heaves up and shatters.

We fly up and over the thick waist of this biggest island in the world. The mist tears open, revealing an infinite horizon. The ice sheet drips like hard sauce, tonguing nunataks—mountaintops that stick out of the ice sheet. At cliff edges, ice breaks: Crevasses shatter and cascade down. The ice skin is old, stippled, threaded with dirt and turquoise. In fjords, trapped drift ice chokes inlets. Glaciers dangle from the great sheet and slide waterward, stubbing their floating toes, their long tongues snapping into extinction’s silence.

Through no fault of their own, the Inuit subsistence hunters of northwestern Greenland and the animals upon which they depend for food are vanishing. Winter sea ice that was routinely 12 to 14 feet thick is now only 7 inches thick. “Eighty or ninety percent of our food comes from the ice,” a hunter says. “Without ice we are nothing. Without ice we can’t travel; without ice, we starve.”

Below, a stranded iceberg is decapitated. Its ribbed roof ruptures, a porthole drops, a leg of ice bends, making a knee that spins and dissolves. “Are we dying or coming into a different way of living?” an Inuit friend on the plane asks. Wind punches us down toward the Kangerlussuaq Fjord. A fringed cloud the color of spilled claret cuffs the wing. The fjord is milk. We follow it inland for 103 miles. Cerulean tarns, stippled ice, and grooved rock walls flash by as we twist through orange air. It’s morning but twilight. The sun, accustomed to lying below the horizon since October, barely shows now in late February, just a few minutes before diving down.

Ahead is a blue floodlight: the terminus of the Greenland ice sheet, a remnant from an ice age that ended 10,000 years ago. Musk oxen graze a ridge. The plane stops at the glacier’s snout, turns, and taxis. We left Denmark at 9:15 in the morning and flew four hours. Here, it is only 9:30 a.m. but not yet light, as if we’d been moving backward and forward simultaneously. There are “ancestor stories” that tell of time being lost, of strange beings who live at the edge of the ice cap who can make a year seem like a day. “Time is very wide here,” my Greenlandic friend says. “We’ve now entered aboriginal time.”

North. Only north. And the disburdenment that comes with it. Once we start the slow progression up the latitudinal ladder, everything else falls away. Ice is home. For the Inuit it is the white world, not the green of a savanna, that greets the eye and instructs the mind to find food and animals, make shelter, grow in happiness.

SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO I arrived alone in Greenland with no sure idea of where to go or how to travel. I carried under my arm two thick compendiums of ethnographic notes by Knud Rasmussen from his 1917 trip to the north of Greenland, as well as his epic
Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition,
describing a three-and-a-half-year dogsled trip from Greenland to Alaska.

From Rasmussen I understood that in the Arctic the path of ice was full of odd pairings—danger and plentitude, famine and beauty, humor and sorrow—and that whatever came one’s way was to be met with resiliency, flexibility, modesty, self-discipline, and grace.

The rigors of this northernmost subsistence-hunting society in the world were modulated by what Rasmussen called the “wizardry” of many local shamans, who acted as intermediaries between populations of spirits, animals, and humans and whose narratives about these different beings have been the carriers of traditional ecological knowledge into the present. I learned that all skins, species, and boundaries were permeable—the polar bear could become a human, the human could be a seal. The constant hunt for food was part of a circle that, once broken, began the unraveling of the entire Arctic ecosystem.

Now frigid winter weather in Greenland is becoming an anomaly. In the International Polar Year of 2007, the ice in the Arctic Sea shrank to its summer minimum, and daily temperatures in winter were what Inuit people would describe as hot. When one hunter, Mamarut Kristiansen, experienced a temperature of 50°F, he said he hoped never to know that kind of heat again.

Winter in a polar desert should be cold and placid. Now, because of storminess, it is difficult for sea ice to form. The walls of ice and frigid air that once protected the high Arctic are disintegrating as oceans absorb more solar heat. Everything breathes: Warm ocean water exhales, upping the air temperature; warm air comes back down as precipitation, and oceans grow even warmer.

At the top of the world clear, frigid air masses functioned as the Arctic’s insulation. They protected the many expressions of deep cold: ice sheets, tundra, permafrost, snow cover, and glaciers. Now these cold treasures are being plundered by global heat. Snow and ice give way to temperate storms. Wind waves batter seasonal sea ice from beneath. Snow comes down, blanketing and incubating ice.

Little did I know when I first came to the high Arctic that the climate had been changing for decades, that global satellite monitoring of the Arctic would show that seasonal sea ice had begun its sharp decline in the 1970s. Cloud cover was decreasing, Arctic rivers were transporting larger quantities of dissolved organic carbon to the Arctic Sea.

Before the climate began to change, Greenland’s indigenous culture was thriving. In the far north, to be a provider of food for dogs and families was the most honorable position in society. “Our culture was not in danger at all. It was not even threatened. We had it all here,” says Jens Danielsen, one of the great hunters of Avaranasua, the farthest north district of Greenland. “We live in modern times but we keep our traditions with us. We hunt with harpoons and use cell phones; we travel on sea ice by dogsled; we made sure that snowmobiles were banned.”

Now Jens, my longtime guide and friend, spends his days trying to figure out how to salvage an ice-adapted subsistence hunting society that is finding it more and more difficult to provide sufficient food. “We used to hunt from September through June on the sea ice. Now we don’t know when the ice will be strong enough to hold us. We had multiyear ice that never melted. Now it is all
hikuliak,
new ice. One day it is good; the next day it will not hold our dogsleds, and on the third day it is gone completely,” Jens says. “And so it will be with us.”

In the days before the ice began to wane, I savored these long trips that could take two days or a month. I stopped “watching the watch.” I wandered. I made new friends. To be “weathered in” or “weathered out” was a luxury, either way. I watched one season pass into another, saw ice come in September in transparent sheets that looked like water. Spring was often sunny and frigid. Seals hauled out—black commas on oceans of ice. In mid-June, the platform of ice on which polar bears, walruses, and ringed seals had flourished quickly dissolved: A whole nation vanished overnight, but only for a few months. Then the ice quickly returned.

Sun was welcomed. To greet the sun when it appeared over the horizon required pushing one’s hood back and removing one’s mittens. Hands were outstretched in a gesture of gratitude and acceptance. There was no thought that the ice wouldn’t come back, that sun and water would be enemies. Sun and cold, animal and human life, food and shelter were bound in a deep alliance, and water went only one direction—not toward more water but toward endless square miles of ice.

Of all the nations bordering the Arctic Sea, Greenland has the northernmost continuous inhabitation. Against all odds, Greenland’s subsistence Inuit hunters have maintained their traditions into the 21st century. Ironically, the west coast of Greenland is the hardest hit by the climate crisis, and as the ice goes, so go these last traditional ice age hunters.

Travel in the northern district is by dogsled only; snowmobiles have been disallowed except for emergencies. Sea ice is the highway. The hunters wear skins. Polar bear pants, fox-fur anoraks, sealskin and polar bear
kamiks
(knee-high boots) and mittens, and bird-skin underwear have been keeping these men and women warm since they began drifting across the ice of Smith Sound from Baffin Island 5,000 years ago. The sled dogs that once carried their loads across the polar north now pull their long freight sleds up and down the coast of Greenland. They are the descendants of the first dogs that accompanied Inuit people from Siberia, at least 15,000 years ago. When the ice begins to break up in spring, kayaks are lashed onto dogsleds. The hunters travel as far as they can by ice, then finish the journey on water.

In Greenland I saw how the social and cosmological landscape interacted with the physical. How landforms and oceans of ice determined when and where a glacier would move, as well as how Inuit genius would flourish living on the world’s most dynamic surface—ice—and how it shaped their imaginations in the making of houses, oceangoing umiat and kayaks, masks, songs, dances, clothing, and tools. Greenlanders live with an evolving knowledge of their natural world and participate in a daily engagement with weather and the environment. Cold, storms, drift ice, fog, open water, and the constant search for food order society. Success as a hunter demands a deep intimacy with ice and fearlessness in the face of hunger.

WE ARE FLYING NORTH from Kangerlussuaq to Ilulissat. The name comes from
iluliaq,
meaning “iceberg.” Perhaps the name should be changed to
auktuq,
meaning “melt.” To see the coast of Greenland from the air is to observe a rapidly changing climate in action.

Ilulissat’s famously productive glacier, the Jakobshavn, is 4 miles wide and 2,000 feet deep. Its movement and calving rate has doubled in the past decade, sliding 120 feet per day and discharging 11 cubic miles of ice each year.

Scientists say that all of Greenland’s floating ice may soon disintegrate, as well as those glaciers that have retreated inland, where the friction of ice on rock has warmed the base of the glaciers, causing basal sliding. In addition, the basin under the heavy ice sheet is allowing ocean water in and, one scientist said, is “prying them off their beds in a runaway process of collapse.”

The great floating tongue of the Jakobshavn Glacier, which lies between thousand-foot-high rock walls, has begun to shrink. Since 2000 it has retreated four miles. Floating ice acts as a buttress to the whole stacked sheet of ice. When the tongue falls apart, it “uncorks the glacier,” and the ice behind it, a whole sheet of ice, grows more and more unstable.

Flying north to Qaarsut, my gut churns. As the plane follows the Viagut Strait and rounds the tip of the Nuusuaaq Peninsula, I see Uummannaq, the heart-shaped island where I lived on and off for several years. Now, as I look down, it is a place I no longer recognize. What should be ice-covered straits and fjords is all open water: dark ocean and black cliffs. In the bent arms of the fjords lie Niaqornat, Ukorsisiuut, Appat, Ikereseq—subsistence villages all without ice.

From an altitude of 20,000 feet a whole watery basin is revealed. Every island, strait, and village that I’ve explored and visited with Inuit friends on dogsleds and boats is dark and uncovered: To the north is Ubekendt Ejland—Unknown Island—with its one village, Illorsuit, where I spent a lonely but lovely summer, befriended by Marie Louisa, a six-year-old girl.

Below, two gulls fly under the plane’s wing, their mouths open as if crying out. A layer of thin clouds slides in, mimicking ice. Surely what I’m seeing is not real. Up the Illorsuit Strait the clouds break: erasure. I see the house where I lived, but I don’t see ice. Only
imeq
—open water, dark heat sink. Beyond, past Upernavik, the northernmost settlement to be colonized by the Scandinavians, we fly up Melville Strait, where the 20th-century shaman Panipaq could amass a head-high stack of fish in an hour. He later committed suicide, perhaps because he knew his world was coming to an end.

The water is black ink strewn with bits of ice, like the awful glitter of wrecked cars. The gulls veer off, crying. What are the laws of sea ice in a changing climate? The wind-torn, the broken, and the breaking? Buckled heaves, wind-buffeted pancake rounds, dendritic fractures, crumbling snouts. Sea smoke rises from open leads as if from a fire. This ruined paradise.

We fly into a deeper shade of blue, a sky that still holds the memory of the polar night when there was complete darkness from October to February, when there was ice. The sun rose last week for the first time in four months. Already, it is gone for the day, but the air is bright. Open leads in the sea ice break into small branches. Some describe a rough circle; others widen, demolishing more ice. Greenland lost 54 cubic miles of ice in 2005, twice as much as in the previous ten years.

Spilling down Greenland’s mountains is the inland ice, Greenland’s great ice sheet. Once it shone solid as a jewel along the length of the island. Now it is sliding on its own soles, too slippery with meltwater to keep standing. As Waleed Abdalati, a NASA scientist, recently said, “The ice cap is starting to stir.”

We fly past Cape York, with its stupendous bird cliffs and peregrine falcon colonies, and soar over the village of Savissivik, where rock from the meteorite that struck eons ago was used by Inuit hunters for thousands of years to make harpoon points. They refer to the rock as female, a mother that gave them strong tools. Explorer Robert Peary pilfered a large chunk of it and shipped it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where it still resides.

Past Thule Air Base, Pituffik, Dundas Village, once a great fox-hunting haven, now an industrialized, top-secret American base built during the Cold War.

Beneath us is Steensby Land, a rump of Greenland coastline still marked on maps as “Unexplored”—a blue bulge of ice, a white flannel slope ribbed with crevasses, a glimpse into the Arctic’s inner sanctum of cobalt. We enter a rolling wave of sea smoke, but rising above it, a lingering sun shines through, while on the other side of the plane, an almost full moon grows.