Sixty Degrees North (5 page)

Rebecca West once wrote that certain places ‘imprint the same stamp on whatever inhabitants history brings them, even if conquest spills out one population and pours in another wholly different in race and philosophy'. This stamp is what Lawrence Durrell called ‘the invisible constant'; it is the thread that holds the history of a place together, the sense of sameness that cuts through the past like a furrow through a field.

In Shetland, human society has evolved in both gradual and sudden movements. For a few hundred years people built brochs, and then they stopped. In the two millennia that followed many other changes took place. New people came, bringing a new language and a new religion, before they too disappeared when the Vikings arrived in the late eighth century. Yet despite these changes, despite all that came and went in that time, always it was the land that dictated the means of survival. The Norsemen arrived as Vikings, but they became Shetlanders. They became fishermen and farmers, just as the Picts had been, just as the broch-builders had been, and all those before them. Crops were sown and harvested; sheep and cattle were reared and killed. The land scarred the people, just as the people, in turn, scarred the land. If there is an ‘invisible constant' or identity bestowed by a place upon its inhabitants, it could only be found there, in that relationship, that engagement with the land. It is not inherited, but earned.

As I walked slowly back towards the boat, a cloud of Arctic terns – called
tirricks
in Shetland – billowed like a smoke signal from a beach just ahead. Some of the birds drifted southwards, swooping then hovering above me,
pinned like little crucifixes against the sky. Everything about the terns is sharp – beak, wings, tail – even their cries are serrated. And their tiny forms belie an aggression that can terrify the unwary walker. Like the Arctic and great skuas that share this island with them, tirricks attack without hesitation anyone who seems to threaten their nesting ground. There is no subtlety in their assault. They simply wheel and swarm above, then dive, each in turn, screaming as they drop. It is enough to discourage all but the most determined of trespassers.

It occurred to me, almost too late, that I had forgotten why I was here on the island. The departure time for the ferry was approaching, but I pulled the map out of my bag and tried to locate the parallel on the paper. I was only a hundred metres or so from the line, it seemed, so I hurried ahead to find it. But when I turned the next corner I stopped again, for standing just where I was heading was the man in the red baseball cap, staring down at his GPS. Clearly he too was looking for the parallel. The man took a few steps back, and consulted the gadget again, head down. By this time he was only ten metres or so away, and soon noticed that I was standing watching. He turned, as if to ask what I was doing. I smiled the best smile I could muster, which probably looked more half-witted than friendly. He didn't smile back. I wasn't sure what to do. I could have spoken to him, told him that we were both looking for the same thing, but somehow the seconds passed and we continued to stand there, each hoping the other would just go away. I had no particular desire to explain myself, and he, it seemed, felt the same way. It was an awkward moment, and in the end it was me who gave up and moved on. I nodded, then put my head down and walked towards the jetty, where the little boat was waiting.

GREENLAND

in passing

To reach Greenland from Shetland required a detour in completely the wrong direction, through Scotland and then Denmark, via Amsterdam. From Copenhagen I took a flight back over the North Atlantic, crossing almost directly above Shetland again, and arrived in Narsarsuaq, a tiny airport that clings between Greenland's southwestern coast and its icecap. My final destination was Nanortalik, a village further south still, but I took my time in getting there, enjoying the chance to explore a place I expected never to see again.

Public transport in Greenland is by boat or by helicopter – there are no roads between communities – and in springtime it is largely the latter. On the last of my flights, from Qaqortoq to Nanortalik, we lifted calmly from the tarmac, then thundered up and over the fjord, flying low above bare valleys and hillsides, over tundra, lakes, rocks and snow. Below, the land stretched out in a patchwork of brown and green, studded with scraps of white and blue and grey. And then, suddenly, the sea.

In my travels south along the coast I had seen a lot of ice. In Narsaq, I had walked across beaches strewn with stranded bergs, decomposing in the warm spring sunshine. They were a thousand forms: some pointed, with sharp fingers and shards; others smooth, like the curves of muscle and flesh on an animal. Some were as large as cars or caravans, others I could lift and hold in the palm of my hand: tiny fragments, faded almost to nothing. I wandered among these shapes, watching their quiet disappearance, and I
felt a peculiar kind of grief. Here was a difficult presence, almost alive and almost unreal, like shadows made solid, or crystalline astonishment. Out in the water beyond, the icebergs were much bigger, but still somehow precarious. They seemed out of place in the sunshine, beside the colour of the town and beneath the blackness of the mountains. Bright, blue-white against the vitreous shiver of the water, the ice like clouds took form in the imagination. Reclining bathers, ships, mushrooms, whales and kayakers. They seemed caught in constant imbalance, between two worlds.

But now, from the window of the Air Greenland helicopter, I saw something else entirely. Stretched out beneath us, reaching away to the horizon and beyond, was an immense carpet of sea ice, a dense mosaic of flat, white plates like crazy-paving on the dark water. I felt immersed. As far as I could see, the fractured ice lay tightly packed. Great slabs the size of tennis courts, and bigger, were crammed together, and between them smaller pieces in every possible shape. This was
storis
– pack ice formed in the Arctic Ocean, east of Greenland. Each winter, a dense band of this ice drifts southwards on the East Greenland current, rounding Cape Farewell in the first months of the year, then moving slowly up the southwest coast, disintegrating as it goes. The whole scene was unfathomable. There was nothing for the eye to hold on to; all sense of scale was lost. Here and there an iceberg protruded, but it was impossible to know how large they were. When we buzzed low over a cargo ship, slogging its way through the solid ocean, it looked far too small, like a toy, dwarfed by the cracked expanse of white and glacial blue all around it. I took the camera from my bag and held it up to the window.

That picture hangs above my desk as I write. A blanket of shattered ice leads out to the horizon, swollen by a blue-black bruise reflecting the clear water beyond. I return to the image over and over, as if searching for something that I
know is there but cannot seem to focus upon. Framed within that photograph is the very thing I came to Greenland to see. It is an image of the north: bright and brittle, terrifying and intensely beautiful. Looking back on it now, the distance between myself and that ice-laden image stretches out and becomes an unimaginable gulf. I have tried to forge a connection, a bridge between, but the picture remains shocking, long after I hung it there.

The helicopter came to rest on the rough landing strip at Nanortalik, the southernmost of Greenland's main settlements. The village is decked out in northern Scandinavian uniform, its wooden houses red, yellow, purple, green, even pink – some pastel pale, others vivid as children's paint. The village is home to around 1,300 people, with a few smaller hamlets scattered through the surrounding fjords. It sits on one of the many islands that pepper this coast, but is no more isolated for that. The hostel where I was to stay was at the other side of town from the heliport, beyond the houses and the main street, at the old harbour with its white wooden church and timber cottages. Most of the buildings around the harbour were occupied by the town museum, but one little red bungalow served as a hostel, in which I was the only guest.

I threw my bag into the living room, where two bunk beds huddled around a gas fire, and went back outside to sit on the front step. The morning had cleared and warmed a little, though there was a bitter breeze lifting off the sea. The bay in front of the hostel was loosely cluttered with ice, just clear enough for boats to make their way in and out of the harbour. There was a slow shifting of everything, almost discernible as I sat watching, and now and then a booming crack and splash as an iceberg split and collapsed into the water. The view from the doorway was southwestward, out to sea, but took in the hunched bulk of Qaqqarsuasik, the island's highest point. From the step I could see ravens swoop
and wheel around the dark slopes, silhouetted as they rose above the peak, then almost hidden against the blackness of the rock. Their caws, clicks and splutters echoed around the bay, puncturing the silence as they punctured the air with their flight. A flurry of sounds – manic gulps and underwater barks – rained down on me as I sat, listening, watching, until hunger persuaded me to move.

Shaped like a great arrowhead hurled southward from the Pole, Greenland is the largest island in the world, stretching from Cape Morris Jessup, 83° north of the equator, to Cape Farewell, just south of 60°. From its earliest, uncertain appearances on the map, it has largely been a blank space, an enormous emptiness into which centuries of European fears, myths and misconceptions have been poured. This is a land of concentrated northness, where childhood images of Eskimos and polar bears, ice and isolation, come together. It is a paradoxical place, both intensely alien and deeply familiar. Geographically and culturally it is a meeting point between Europe and the American Arctic, where north and south come awkwardly together. Here, certain tensions and certain conflicts between these two worlds are played out, day to day.

But this situation is far from new, for it is here that European people first encountered American people more than 1,000 years ago, and it is here that two visions of the Arctic and two very different understandings of place have been tried and savagely tested. The familiar story of Greenland is the European story: the westward advance of the Norsemen at the end of the first millennium AD. With their empire expanding, from Shetland and Orkney south to Britain, Ireland and beyond, and from Faroe north into Iceland, the Vikings were apparently unstoppable. They flourished in these northern lands – lands once considered beyond the
habitable edge of the world – and it was not long before they ventured further still, into places that no European had ever gone before.

But in some ways this story is unlike other colonial histories. For one thing, there is the rather peculiar fact that, in Greenland, the colonisers arrived before the colonised; the Norse reached this island prior to the arrival of the Inuit. When Eirik the Red first landed in Greenland in 982AD, somewhere not far from present day Nanortalik, Greenland was populated by an entirely different people, the Dorset – part of a wider northern culture, known as the Tuniit, which is now extinct – but their small population was restricted to the far northwestern coast. This might have come as a surprise to Eirik, had he known, for although the Icelander met no-one as he explored the western fjords, he did find evidence of people. It was clear that he was not the first man to reach this place. Old settlements were still visible, the remains of hearths and homes still apparent. But no fires had been lit along this coast for more than 1,000 years. The people that had been here – the Saqqaq, from 2400 BC, and the early-Dorset, from 900 BC – had long since died out or retreated northwards.

By calling this place Greenland – ‘for he said that people would be much more tempted to go there if it had an attractive name', as the
Grænlendinga Saga
has it – Eirik the Red succeeded in convincing enough of his fellow Icelanders to follow him to the new land to found two major settlements. The larger of these, known as the Eastern Settlement, was based on this southwestern coast; the other was further north, where Nuuk, Greenland's capital, now lies.