The Ice Museum (37 page)

The other major smiled and said: ‘You won't see the difference after the upgrade. The base won't look any different. Operations might change a little.'

In the far north, the US Military was watching a band of sky. The purpose of the base had changed: during the Cold War it was a place where nuclear bombers could land on their way to an attack. Now it was a defensive station, watching the world, so the US government could anticipate an attack.

‘Watching who?' I asked, and they laughed and shook their heads.

‘We watch whatever we are ordered to watch,' said a major, a phrase like a tongue twister, but he showed no signs of stuttering.

There was a pause while we rattled across a pile of stones, and then the other major said, ‘We watch for speed. A particular sort of height and speed. We saw the Russians doing missile tests in the Barents Sea a while back. Other than that it's pretty quiet round here.'

He smiled. Behind the robust forms of the majors, I could see the pale blue waters of the sea, and the white mountains along the coast. The barracks shone in the weak sunlight. In the distance a cluster of satellite dishes stood among the ice-covered rocks.

We stood outside the van, while the majors pointed at dusty patches of ice, scattering acronyms across the view, and when everyone was shuddering and clapping their hands in the cold, the majors stepped back into the van and beckoned to me to follow them. ‘If you don't mind,' they said, politely. They smiled and slammed the doors shut.

We scuffed along the rubble tracks, back into the base. The streets were made of dust rocks, and the buildings were all stamped with their functions: GYM, RADIO STATION, SHOP. Behind the closed doors, the barracks were full of soldiers, moving from the luxury gym to their posts. A few soldiers, a few purposeful apparitions in uniform, hurried out of one building into another. Community, the majors kept saying. Against the bitterness of the cold, the vastness of the wilderness, Thule Air Base released its key strategy: society, like a military tactic, spun around the men, lifting them above the void. ‘We are preparing for a setting of the sun party,' said the major. ‘In the spring we will have a rising of the sun party,' he added. ‘Fancy dress. Concerts, bands invited. Greenlandic choirs. Leather-making workshops, ceramics workshops, woodwork, pottery societies. You can take the stuff home,' said the major. ‘Made in Thule.'

‘And anyway we only stay for a year,' said the other major. ‘You can't get too sad in a year. It's just one winter, one period without sunlight, and then there's the summer.' And he smiled.

‘And the cold? The relentless biting, frigid air, the constant darkness in the winter?' I asked.

They shrugged. ‘It wasn't so bad,' they said, smiling.

‘In the summer, you can go for long hikes,' said a major. ‘In the winter, of course, there are serious storms, so you can't go out so much. But in a way that's when the community is most close, because everyone is around all the time. People can't do stuff on their own. I'm kind of used to this sort of cold—I come from North Dakota. But we still have to be very careful. And in case people get depressed during the long winter months, we have very bright lights, all around the base, so you can go about your business, as if there's ordinary daylight.'

‘Do you ever regret coming here?' I asked.

‘I do have one regret,' said the other. ‘When I came, I forgot to bring a good fancy dress costume. Anyone who comes here, I'd say that's an essential. Everything else you can buy, but a good fancy dress costume, it's worth its weight in gold. If I'd just had a Hawaiian shirt, or a great hat . . .' and he tailed off, imagining the perfect costume.

We walked around the supermarket, which was full of kitchen equipment, mugs and hats and T-shirts with GREENLAND or THULE AIR BASE stamped on them, cut-cost alcohol, tax-free cigarettes.

‘Perhaps,' said one of the majors, smiling, ‘you might like to buy this?' And he held up a cup which had THULE AIR BASE painted on it, with a picture of an Inuit with a sledge and dogs.

So I bought the cup.

Then they pushed through the doors of another low-rise barracks block, and there was a room lined with portraits of former commanders. In the next room there were photos of the base in 1951, rows of corrugated iron and steel, the same old snow, the blazing colours of the sunrise dulled into black and white. There was a page torn out of the
New York Herald Tribune
, from October 1951: THE US HAS TOP OF THE WORLD AIR BASE. CAN BOMB ANY PART OF EUROPE. In 1951 it was a major scoop.

There were two Danes wandering around the museum, trying to interest me in a bunk bed, part of the original accommodation for soldiers. One of them saw me looking at the newspaper article, and came over. He was about sixty, tall and stocky, with thick grey hair, dressed in a neat tracksuit. ‘When you read about it now, everyone says it was a secret at the beginning,' he said, smiling shyly. ‘As if no one knew about it. But even the Russians knew, from the beginning; I remember a friend of mine told me he had heard about a piece on Russian radio, all about the Thule Air Base, and that was almost the same time as it was being built.' He had been in Thule Air Base as a young man, he said. ‘I came to make money, like everyone. I was a civilian contractor.' Now he had returned, for the same reason. ‘The money is not as good now, but it is still a lot. Really a lot.' He laughed and scratched his head. The other Dane had been circling the room, looking slightly irritated, but now he came over and tried to show me the original air traffic control system. But I was walking straight towards the showpiece—a rusted piece of metal, standing in a room lined with photos. This was the emergency escape hatch from a B-52 bomber that crashed in the 1960s, spilling controversy across the ice. It had been carrying nuclear materials when it crashed. For years, it was claimed that the debris had been removed, but eventually they conceded that perhaps not everything had been found. A fragment, a small quantity of plutonium, might have been left on the seabed.

‘The crew ejected,' said the Dane with the thick grey hair, ‘and this hatch was found two hours' walk away from Thule Air Base. We had a fine job getting it back to the base,' he said. He pointed at the dents and cracks in the metal.

The majors and I were walking along the street again, and I said: ‘Do you feel cut off from world events, stuck up here in the far north?' They smiled politely, shaking their heads. ‘We do whatever we are asked to do . . . don't choose our posting . . . happy to serve our country in any way possible,' said one, mumbling slightly. ‘Part of the same operation . . . homeland security, national defence . . .' And the other nodded slowly. For a moment, neither smiled.

We were back at the security station, and on the runway I could see the plane was ready to leave.

I wanted to stay longer; I was asking if I could stay a night, a week, but they all shook their heads.

‘Unfortunately . . . completely impossible . . . No one can stay, not even our wives . . .' said the major, shaking his head.

‘Not even our mothers . . .' said the other major, shaking his head.

‘The next plane isn't for a week, so you'll have to hop on this one,' said the deputy commander, a tall affable man, who had just emerged from an office in the runway complex. A foot away, someone had taken my bag, and was searching through it. ‘Just routine,' said one of the majors.

‘I'd love to talk,' the deputy commander was saying. ‘But you have to go. You say Thule? You're looking for Thule! Well you found it! You have a good flight now.' He shook my hand, turned smartly and disappeared into his office.

The winds might blast at two hundred miles an hour, the temperatures might drop to minus forty, but Thule Air Base stayed the same in the north, watching the sky, waiting for a threat. There were no desperate messages, crackling out to Washington. Thule Air Base was a piece of hi-tech military hardware, standing in the middle of the ancient ice. At Thule Air Base, they floodlit the winter, living it out in the gym, staving off lunacy with parties and concerts.

There was no Kurtz; the soldiers were the servants of a more elusive power. Thule Air Base took its orders from Washington; it was the northern outpost of a vast military empire. The invisible figures of the Pentagon controlled Thule from a distance, sending orders into the ice, which were obeyed without question. Everything was out of the hands of the majors, out of the hands of the soldiers scurrying through the blasting winds. The instructions were terse—sit in the north, watch the sky for threats to the USA. The ebullience wasn't feigned; the soldiers liked the place, the glaciers and the rocks, the frozen ocean. But none of them knew what was going on. Far away, in the south, the generals were dictating the script. Sealed instructions, a sense of driving momentum, nothing could abate it.

PROPHETS

WITH FAVORING WINDS, O'ER SUNLIT SEAS,
WE SAILED FOR THE HESPERIDES,
THE LAND WHERE GOLDEN APPLES GROW;
BUT THAT, AH! THAT WAS LONG AGO.

 
HOW FAR, SINCE THEN, THE OCEAN STREAMS
HAVE SWEPT US FROM THAT LAND OF DREAMS,
THAT LAND OF FICTION AND OF TRUTH,
THE LOST ATLANTIS OF OUR YOUTH! . . .

 
ULTIMA THULE. UTMOST ISLE!
HERE IN THY HARBORS FOR A WHILE 
WE LOWER OUR SAILS; A WHILE WE REST
FROM THE UNENDING, ENDLESS QUEST.

 
“DEDICATION TO G. W . G.,”

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882)

 
 
The plane flew into a beautiful northern night. The sun had set into the sea, and the sea was as calm as a mirror, reflecting the evening radiance of the sky. Below were the silent plains of ice, the blank spaces unseen for thousands of years. The darkening ocean, the drifting bergs, the sludge-ice beneath were blanketed in clouds and darkness. The flight had been chartered from southern Greenland to Svalbard; I was once again an interloper, having begged a seat from a tour company. It was a modern jet, comfortable and sterile. The cold sea stretched toward the Pole, as the ice began to close around the northern lands for the winter.

I had travelled in search of silence and a retreat from the city. I had been looking for a quiet and empty land, where everything would be simplified. I thought of it as a walk with Rousseau, disappearing out of the complexity of the city into the virtuous innocence of nature, experiencing a state of childish receptivity to external objects. It was a hunt for an Arcadia away from the seething world below. Yet I found history scattered across the plains and the urge towards rustic simplicity bound up with anti-democratic movements during the twentieth century, with the elitist agendas of the Thule Society. I had been retreating from all the clutter, the litter, until I was confronted with the whiteness at the most northerly edge of the retreat—the vast ice heart of Greenland. A land still magnificent and terrible, though polluted in places by military debris, controversially contaminated by lost nuclear materials. A land as close to absolute wilderness as I had found, still retaining the anarchic force of unbridled nature, even as the US Military sat out the winter on a patch of the coast.

When the remote north was an area of speculation and uncertainty, Thule could be many things. Thule could be pure while it was a fantasy, a place beyond the reach of humans. But now, the human history of the north in the twentieth century was bound up with my sense of Thule. As much as the silent ice and the ancient rocks, the mournful Inuit, the optimistic wilderness-hunters sitting on their slow boats to nowhere, and the US soldiers were a part of the history of the north in the last century. I had seen desperate bleakness, people struggling to survive. I had stared in horror at the silent ice. But amidst it all, I had felt moments of stubborn exhilaration. It was hard to know what to think. Where to stop, with the frozen ocean stretching beneath me?

Every society had some version of the yearning for an Arcadia, for a time when life was simple and everyone lived close to nature. My own entwining of this yearning with nostalgia for the simplicity of childhood was hardly unique. Growing older, growing up, brought all the chaos of adulthood, the pressures of money, the loss of time. Returning to London would bring back the feeling of disorder, loss of control. The state of innocence, the state of simplicity, was a holiday state, transient, impossible to sustain in the real world. As I listened to the low hum of the engines, I thought that knowledge and experience brought ambivalence; things became cloudy and difficult. Things might be better in a myth-world, but the option was not available. As an adult, I had to accept the trade-off—that the fall into experience brought a sense of comparison. It brought the consolations of knowledge, of knowing that others had felt the same way. The state of innocence was static—it lived and breathed and found fascination in small things, but it couldn't choose. Having no knowledge of the alternatives, it couldn't really understand.