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The Land of Stone and Ice: A Trip to Southern Greenland
| Article
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16027 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1997 |
3,038 Words |
| Author
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Judith Lindbergh
Judith Lindbergh is a freelance writer and photographer
currently working on a novel about women in Norse Greenland.
She is based in Brooklyn, New York. |
"Cigarette! Cigarette?" Four stocky, black-haired men in grimy sweaters wave across a ship's span of sea and ice. On the prow of their cabin cruiser, a seal lies, fat and black in the sun, and on the stern, another spills fresh blood across the creamy fiberglass hull.
In the distance, barren peaks of the east Greenland coast jut like teeth from the ice-ridden water. The hunters blithely mock our tourist ship's stunted progress. One shakes his rifle above his head. These men are Inuit, descendants of a people who knew every whim and breath of this brutal land. Greenland is their inheritance, the briskly changing Kalaallit Nunaat, the "Land of the People," brought rushing into the modern world within just the last century from a timeless Stone Age existence. Yet I have come to find a different Greenland--a Greenland of a thousand years ago, of Erik the Red, Leif Eriksson, the Vikings--a Greenland that no longer exists but for ancient sagas and some church walls lying in ruin.
It is Sunday morning. I stand ankle-deep in icy harbor water, securing our rubber Zodiac boat to the foot of a cliff. Above us is the tiny encampment of Ikateq, the single token of human existence in a gleaming, ice-choked fjord. As I work my way up the barely shrouded bedrock softened by moss and tufts of arctic cotton, stout wooden houses in peeling shades of yellow, blue, and red peek over the crest of the hill.
Slowly the town comes out to greet us. A middle-aged man with jet black hair watches me from the shadow of a house. His eyes hide behind sunglasses and high, sun-worn cheeks. I smile at him tentatively. As he nears, I notice on his shirt pocket a logo--"New York,"
... (1998 of 19126 Characters)
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