In the Empire of Ice (32 page)

“At the same time I found I liked nature more than mechanics. I climbed many mountains, and I still wanted to have some feeling of freedom. We can decide for ourselves how to live…. But maybe I want too much…. I don’t know.”

He invites me to have coffee. “Look at this. It’s my new house. Maybe it helps me somewhat in my old age!” Laughter. In the basement are hundreds of skins tanned and hanging—arctic fox, arctic hare, and a musk ox skin.

We climb back up to the porch and look out. It’s dark again, but the snow is bright. “There were polar bear tracks right there. It walked past the village in the night. We don’t want to stay outside much at night anymore because there are so many bears. They’ve come onto the land because the ice is so broken, and it’s dangerous. Maybe my house will protect me!” Laughter again.

“More and more there are reindeer and musk ox. If there were a thousand last year, there are 4,000 this year. We hunt them because there is not enough food from the sea. On June 10, I’ll be 60. My mother will be 93. She’s still doing something every day and grows lots of flowers in the springtime. So I hope I will be that way too. Ten years ago I visited Japan. Oh, it was so terrible! All the houses and buildings had changed. I couldn’t find my house. I came into a kind of panic and thought, I’m a wild man. What am I doing here?

“Here, we own no land. We only make an application to put a house on it. Maybe it’s better this way, because we use it for only a short time! My wife is ill, and she lives in Qaanaaq now. But my granddaughter was living with me for a year. She just left. This is the first month without her, and I miss her. Between us there was no need for words.”

We drink our coffee in silence and look out at the ice. I invite him to our house for dinner, and he accepts eagerly. Someone brings reindeer meat from a neighbor, and we make Scandinavian-style stew with dried fruit. I ask Ikuo again about the changing climate and the ice. He says, “I heard in Savissivik there have been many visits by polar bears. The ice condition is not good, and there are many bears in the village. The males and females without cubs are traveling about all winter. The season for polar bear hunting is from December to June, but only Greenland’s best hunters can hunt them. The ice is so bad only one bear has been killed in the entire northern district.

“When we go to Humboldt Glacier to hunt nanoq, we need two days to cross the inland ice because the sea ice in front of the big glacier is still not good. Up there is a small island that’s closer to Greenland than to Canada, but the Canadian government wants to own it. They are planning to build an air force base. They want more power to protect the Northwest Passage, because the ice is melting all the way to Alaska. The world is peaceful on its own, if only we didn’t bother it. People don’t need power. When I look at our dogs running, that is their happiness, and for all of us, to eat enough, that is happiness as well.

“Every year we go over the inland ice to Etah. We used to be able to travel up the coast a ways, then go over at Pitoravik. Now that is not possible. We have to go to the end of our own fjord and up onto the ice that way. That’s how bad the sea ice has become. It is becoming more and more difficult to travel. We used to get walrus up there. Now we get musk ox. But the meat of both animals is good. Oh, it’s so beautiful up there! Yes, I think we will survive somehow, maybe just on beauty.”

BACK IN QAANAAQ I brood and walk. The poet Joseph Brodsky said that the purpose of evolution was beauty. Up top, the melting ice cap gleams. And rough ice between town and Herbert Island looks like Hiroshige-style frozen waves. Up on a hill I find Birthe. Her arms are crossed. “I’m so cold,” she says, as if she were dying. No one here ever complains about the cold. Heat—
kiak
—yes, but not cold. She tells me why: With so much open water, the mist that rises from it adds humidity, making the air feel cold. Now 40 or 50 below begins to seem unbearable, whereas in the “dry days” no one was bothered. “The soles of the hunters’ kamiks are always wet now,” she tells me.

Together we gaze out at the ruined ice. Ruined or not, it is still beautiful. “We love it here. We never tire of watching the icebergs and the light. It changes all the time. It was always calm here. We always had calm minds too. That’s how we faced the weather. But now the weather is not right. Now the ice isn’t behaving.”

Years ago, a group of people tried moving farther north to live in the old way without anything from the stores, without schools or medicine, but it failed, Jens told me earlier. When I asked why, he said, “They ran out of coffee and sugar!” I walk the narrow paths to the kommune office to see him. Walls of hard-packed snow lie against the west walls of the houses—remnants of the big blizzard. At Jens’s house Mamarut and Tecummeq are visiting, plus Ilaitsuk’s daughter, who has just had her fifth child. “It seems to be all she wants to do,” Ilaitsuk says. She’s a bold, broad-shouldered woman who doesn’t mince words. The daughter bears children; the grandparents—Jens and Ilaitsuk, who are only in their 40s—take care of them.

Jens dandles the baby on his knee, so very gently. He’s a big man, and next to him the baby seems impossibly small. Until recently, no one but Hans at the Qaanaaq Hotel had a television. Now Jens and some others have them. Television in Greenland is perhaps a model of what it might be elsewhere, limited programming with a blank screen until evening. At night Danish news is followed by news from Greenland’s capital city, Nuuk, then there’s a movie from Europe or the United States, dubbed in Danish with subtitles in Greenlandic. “Before we had televisions, we had storytelling,” Jens says. “Now we just tell our ancestor stories out on the ice.”

When the television goes off, there’s talk in the room of the economic plight of hunters who cannot get enough food, who cannot afford to buy a boat. Last year Greenland’s prime minister, Hans Enoksen, had come to talk to the hunters in Qaanaaq. He is from a village too, but farther south. The townspeople told him they had no jobs, and the hunting was not bringing enough food to live. Every Thursday they get 300 Danish kroner from the kommune office. “And three hours later, they’ve spent it,” Ilaitsuk says. “The prime minister listened, but after he left we never heard from him again.”

Since the early 1990s the grocery store has quadrupled in size. Television, long-distance telephones, faxes, and Internet service became available for those who could afford it. And more recently a bar. “We didn’t need that. We didn’t need alcohol at all,” Ilaitsuk says.

It has been decided to call a meeting of the hunters in town, so they can report on the effects of the declining ice. Hans Jensen generously allows us to use the guesthouse at the hotel. I want to beg forgiveness from my Greenland friends for the vandalism and greed of the so-called developed nations, where only profit counts, where decisions are not made with the biological health of the planet in mind but only the material wealth of a few. Where true poverty is enforced on even the wealthy, where the social standard is to live and work in a fixed place. Where the moral implications and social injustices of the crushing demands of extreme capitalism are daily overlooked and denied. Where the “I” is king; where the “getting” is done at the expense of others; where the concept of “we” is considered a form of weakness.

It was here, in Greenland, that I had my first taste of true civilization: where the demands of capitalism are held to a minimum. Where the conscious choices of what an ice age society might keep of its traditions were added to what they deemed useful from the 21st century—harpoons and cell phones; helicopters and kayaks; and far beyond a simple striving for survival, gratitude for the natural beauty of the place and its importance in their daily lives.

Here, people’s basic needs are met first; matters of buying and selling come last, if at all. This is a society based on sharing, self-discipline, patience, modesty, resilience, flexibility, and humor, and a sophisticated understanding of the circular continuity, the transmission of ecological knowledge that keeps tradition alive.

Sunday night, meeting time: Jens and Ilaitsuk; Mamarut and Tecummeq; Gedeon and Marta and their son, Rasmus; Paulus, a hunter I hadn’t met before; the elder Qav; Otto S.; and Toku Ishima (Ikuo’s very capable daughter, in her 20s). The faces are solemn. There is none of the usual joking and laughter.

“I’m so sorry for what is happening to your ice,” I begin. “As you know, it is happening not because of anything you’ve done, but because of what our countries have. Many of us are working hard to slow down carbon dioxide emissions, but we are not as powerful as we would like to be. I apologize for this. I’m so sad. You have been so kind to me and many others like me who have come as visitors here. I will work hard to bring your situation to the ears and eyes of other people, so they will know the precious culture that is being lost. I have tried to show them who you are—there’s no one quite like you in the whole world.”

An embarrassed silence, then slowly the hunters begin to talk. Otto begins:

“Even in summer it’s hard to get out to the islands or up the coast by boat because the sea is so rough. The whole village of Siorapaluk used to empty out in February and March. We all went north to hunt polar bears. All the way to Humboldt Glacier and Washington Land. The ice was good. Now we have to go up and over the ice cap to Kap Alexander, and it is very strenuous and a danger to our lives.”

Mamarut: “And going south is very bad now too. We used to go over Politiken Glacier or around by the coast. Now, even these ways are gone. Many years in July we could get to Kiatak on the ice. I remember the dogs’ paws used to bleed where they went through the meltwater into the ice.”

Tecummeq: “I always went with Mamarut. The ice was always solid. It wasn’t something we thought about. It was always very cold. Town is like prison. I used to be a hunter’s wife. I worked with Mamarut 100 percent of the time until a few years ago. I wanted to help him be a hunter. We had fewer animals to get because the ice edge was stronger. Now we can’t even reach Kiatak anymore, and that’s where the hunting was best. If the ice was still good, we could still be taking care of ourselves. There are only two of us. It must be very hard when there are a lot of children.”

Otto: “Until 2003 the living of a hunter family was possible. But not after. In 2004, that’s when the ice got really bad. The wives have to get jobs, so they are able to buy fuel for a boat. That’s the only way for us to get walrus now. We share the boats, but still it is more than we have. We did not want these things. They didn’t interest us. Now because of the ice condition, we are forced to go this other way.”

Toku: “The situation is like this: To be a full-time hunter is impossible today. In the old times the whole family worked together with no outside work necessary. Now even full-time hunters like Otto, Mamarut, Gedeon, and the others have to take care of dogs and family, and it’s hard because of the changes. The hunters’ wives have to get jobs to pay rent or bills. There are always those new kinds of expenses now. The hunters’ sons are told to get an education because it’s the only way to make a living in the future.”

Jens: “Farther south the village of Savissivik is now very bad. They can’t even go to Kaviok because the ice is so thin. They had polar bears in the fjord between Kaviok and Savissivik, but they couldn’t get to them. Before it was the place with the most solid ice. We used to go there when the ice was gone here. We’d always go south. When the ship came in late summer, there was still ice and they had to used dogsleds to bring the supplies in. Still, there are seals to hunt down there, so as for now, they have food for people and dogs. But they can’t go very far in any direction except by boat, and at Moriusaq, they can no longer get out to Saunders Island and the other small islands where they hunted walrus. And if there’s no ice, there’s no walrus.”

Paulus: “Summer weather has changed. It used to be so quiet. Lots of sun. Now it’s stormy. We have rain and wind. We’ve never seen rain before. We didn’t know about it. Up the big fjord you can sometimes hunt seal, but there’s only water in front of Qeqertarsuaq. The glacier is gone at the head of the fjord. That’s why our sea level is rising.”

Jens: “The warming is causing those glaciers to calve huge icebergs, but then they melt. That didn’t used to happen.”

Toku: “It’s not just the current but also the Gulf Stream coming north from the coast of Africa. I’ve been following the changes on the Internet. The Gulf Stream is dividing. It is now pointing at Herbert Island. Yes, the warm part of the current is coming this way, and when it comes this way, it brings different fish, but it takes the ice away.”

Jens: “When you think of having to make money, something we didn’t have to think about before, the main resource is seal—year-round. But even for seals the conditions are worse. When living in open water, the hides are not as good. There are pollution problems too, and the seals sink when you shoot them because they are skinny. Now the ice period is so small, the seals’ new coats don’t change. They don’t molt. Even in winter they don’t change their coats. Now the furs aren’t good for making our clothes.”

Toku: “We have pollution problems, too. POPs [persistent organic pollutants] attach to the fatty tissues of all the animals, the seals, walrus, and polar bears. In other areas the POPs go up in the air, but here it’s too cold, so they sink and invade the fat that we need to eat to keep warm.”

Otto: “The ice melts so fast now. It snows on the ice more often and makes the ice melt. Now we notice something new about the animals. They have yellow blubber—it should be whitish pink—and the livers look unhealthy. Maybe it’s because they are not clean anymore. If we didn’t have a store and halibut in the fjord, we wouldn’t have enough food. We’d be getting hungry now.”

Jens: “Only last year we received information about the health of people and animals in east Greenland. They have the highest levels of mercury contamination in the world.

“We are also told that Greenland is melting faster than expected. Both the inland ice and the sea ice. The next 10 to 20 years are critical. Even if the world makes changes in emissions now, it will take 100 years for the ice to come back. If we wait 20 years to make these changes, it may never come back. But by then, who will remember how we have lived these many years?”