In 1993 an unforeseen vitality pushed me back into the world. With no ranch holding me, I plunged: nothing more to lose. Not that I went out seeking excitement; rather, it kept coming to me and I didn’t hesitate to welcome its arrival.
A chance meeting with the editor of Islands magazine resulted in a chance to go to Greenland, and off I went with no real idea of where I was going. On the way I met a young couple from Uummannaq, a village on Greenland’s west coast, and they drew me north for the summer, and for part of the next dark winter.
The next spring, when I returned, the sea ice failed to come in. We had planned to travel up the Melville coast by dogsled, a route that Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen regularly took in the early 1900s. Little did we know that such a trip would soon be impossible, that the Davis Strait would not freeze again.
Following my friends’ advice, I went north, to the two northernmost villages in the world: Qaanaaq and Siorapaluk, traveling with the elite hunters of the far north: Jens Danielsen, Mamarut Kristensen, and their extended families, about which I wrote in my book This Cold Heaven. I returned often—almost every spring—and for the next twenty years they allowed me to accompany them. Against all odds, these families had chosen to live a traditional ice-age life, taking what they needed from the modern world and insisting on the old ways. When I asked why, they said, “Dogsleds and skin clothing work better.”
Greenland subsistence hunters are soft-spoken and savvy, as elegant in the way they make decisions and handle a dogsled on the ice as when they manage the social well-being of their villages. The dogsleds are long and sturdy—fourteen by four feet—and are pulled by fifteen to twenty dogs harnessed in a fan hitch and spread out across the ice because there are no trees.
In those days before the climate heated up, the ice came in mid-September and for nine months it was possible to travel and hunt on the frozen sea. By Midsummer Night, the white floor of the world quickly disappeared, and bright all-day, all-night light shone down. By October 24, the sky goes dark and the sun doesn’t reappear until late February. In March the spring hunt for food urgently resumes.
In Greenland there is no ownership of land. What you own is your house, your dogs, your sleds and kayaks. Everyone is fed. It is a food-sharing society in which the whole population is kept in mind—the widows, elderly, infirm, and ill are always taken care of. Jens said, “We weren’t born to buy and sell, but to be out on the ice with our families.”
Ice-adapted people have everything to teach us: they have a survivor’s toolbox of self-discipline, patience, and precision. They understand transience, chance, and change. Adaptation for them is a daily flexing of mind and muscle. Animal-human transformations and spirits are the norm. Utterly practical, conscientious, observant, clever, and wise, Jens and his extended family knew that the individual mattered less than the group, that the animals understood what humans said, that there are consequences for every human action. They had survived for five thousand years at high latitudes by depending on the group’s hunting together, helping one another, and sharing food. Jens’s wife, Ilaitsuk, said, “We all have our differences. We just keep ours inside.”
Sea ice—ice that freezes ocean water and floats on top (as distinguished from glacier ice)—is a Greenlander’s highway. Usually ten feet thick, it is the icy platform on which Arctic animals, including humans, travel, rest, bear young, and find food. In 1997, the dogsled I traveled on with Jens and his friend Nils almost went through a hole in the ice. Jens retrieved the fifteen dogs from the water, and we were able to continue on. But he was shocked. “This shouldn’t happen. Something’s wrong. Please find out why.” After, I dedicated my days to educating myself about why the Arctic climate was changing and how it would affect the entire world.
Albedo (from albus, Latin for “white”) is essential. Without it, the planet cannot reflect the immense solar heat it receives back into space, and thus, keep the lower latitudes temperate. The less albedo, the more global heat. Every time I returned to Greenland, I witnessed what James Lovelock called “Earth’s morbid fever” and the demise of my beloved friends’ cold heaven.
Jens’s dogs had gone through the sea ice in 1997. By the year 2000, Arctic scientists who studied ice around the top of the world were saying that Greenland’s northern district was part of a “rotten ice regime.” Instead of nine months of dependable sea ice, there were, at best, only two or three. Ten-foot-thick ice had dwindled to a mere seven inches.
I could never have imagined the extent of the changes taking place. I’d gone to Greenland to celebrate Inuit culture and life on the ice. Ironically, my new life on a dogsled in Greenland with Jens, Mamarut, Gedeon, Mikele, and their wives contained in it the dark seeds of mortality and extinction. Hard times would soon come.
In 2002, I was invited to be part of the Greenland delegation to the Inuit Circumpolar Conference held in Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska. It was there that one of the delegates, an anguished hunter from Qaanaaq, said to me: “This is the first time I’ve been told that we are losing ice. What is it that I’m to tell my children? Everything I know has to do with ice. Now I will have nothing to teach them.”
Climate is culture: as soon as the ice in the Arctic began to disappear, so did the lifeways of Greenland. Arctic people had traveled over the land bridge across Arctic Alaska to Nunavut and finally to Greenland five thousand years ago. They were part of an ongoing Arctic culture that was at least thirty thousand years old. Though the polar traverse was long, the language, lifeways, watercraft, clothing, and social mores remained robust enough to endure. A single culture spans the entire top of the world, from Siberia to eastern Greenland.
Now the youngest members of that culture were holding on to the stray ends of a death spiral. They were being sent to south Greenland to attend college or trade school. Instead of living the hunting life on dogsleds, they were becoming electricians, cooks, helicopter pilots, nurses, or teachers. To drive a dogsled and join the elite marine mammal hunters had once been tantamount to becoming a national treasure. Now it was no longer an option.