Vintage Books, 2003
The biggest island on earth is 95 per cent ice, has an average temperature of -25 degrees Fahrenheit, and is in total darkness three months of the year. Greenland, known in Inuit as Kalaalit Nunaat, or White Earth, lured writer Gretel Ehrlich over seven years, weaving its icebound spell upon her. Seeking a barren landscape, Ehrlich wanted to know about Greenlanders, how “the ephemeral ice shaped their minds and society,” and how Inuit subsistence hunters lived, defying encroaching modern life for one of independence, danger, and guaranteed poverty.
Her narrative style is rich, full of beautiful metaphors for the dramatic landscape she encounters. “Part jewel, part lighthouse, part recumbent monolith, the ice [cap] is a bright spot on the upper tier of the globe where the earth’s purse strings have been pulled tight, nudging the tops of three continents together. Summers, it burns in the sun, and in the dark it hoards moonlight.” She calls icebergs, “deconstructed cathedrals.”
From nighttime dogsled rides over undulating ice with a doctor calling on her patients, to a summer stay on an island where artist Rockwell Kent had lived, to eating raw seal liver in celebration, Ehrlich draws readers into a world full of harshness and mystery. The Inuit, who arrived on the island 5,000 years ago, descendants of central Asians, are, she affirms, the true explorers of the North, not the later British and European explorers, many of whom couldn’t cut it in the grueling climate.
This book is accented with Inuit tales of spirits such as Sila, the weather spirit, who demands respect in a land where, “Winds could blast at 150 miles per hour, blowing people and dogs away, never to be seen again; cold devoured limbs and all thinking…ocean currents broke up ice; dogsleds disappeared in the holes.”
Well before the Danes came to colonize, the Viking Eric the Red called the island Greenland in order to lure other Norsemen there. Its history includes wandering monks, Irish pirates and European explorers, but Greenlander Knud Rasmussen’s expeditions from northern Greenland in the early 1900s interest Ehrlich the most. She scatters chapters about Rasmussen’s experiences with the Inuit and Polar Eskimos among narratives of her own trips made from 1993 to 1997. Rasmussen traveled from Thule, Greenland, to Nome, Alaska, by dogsled, taking three-and-a-half years to make the astonishing trip during which he recorded the ways that boreal peoples lived, retracing the path of Inuit migration.
Some of the strongest writing in this book is of the dogsled hunting trips for seal and polar bear that Ehrlich makes with traditional hunters on a 13-ft. sled pulled by 20 dogs. Afterwards, she writes, “My mind was distracted with images from the sled trip: breaking ice, the percussion of dogtrot, the slide of sled runners, steaming meat pulled from boiled seal ribs, the sleek elegance of kayaks turned sideways and carried to the ice edge on dogsleds.” Her hunter-host Jens champions the choice of traditional hunting, as he and fellow northern hunters try to preserve rules that enable subsistence hunting. If they shifted to hunting on snowmobiles as in Canada, they would become dependent on machines, petroleum and paper money. “You can’t get a can of gas with a harpoon,” one points out. The old ways would be broken, they feared, if they loosened the rules too far. Their lives were inextricably linked to animals when dogs were used – hunting was for feeding themselves, their families, and the sled dogs (their vehicle for subsistence) and so the circle goes. This book will captivate readers, thanks to Ehrlich’s exquisite, sharp-as-glacier-air prose describing a people integrated with their forceful landscape.
Also see Island Journal, Vol. 19, 2002, “Summer Ice,” with Gary Comer’s photographs of Greenland and introduction by Philip Conkling.