Narsarsuaq, Greenland
The multilingual safety card at the Hotel Narsarsuaq let me deduce that the Greenlandic word for fire must be ikuallattoqartillugu, and is unusual only for having such a low percentage of Qs. Which concluded my study of the language. The hotel is a repurposed barracks from Bluie West One, a World War II airfield built by the U.S. Army on a glacial flat far up the Tunulliarfik Fjord. The airfield now serves as the transportation hub of southern Greenland, and the town of Narsarsuaq (pop. 160) exists to run it.
Flights approaching from the east cross a vast icecap, exceeded only by Antarctica’s. Its white and black landscape is mesmerizing. Jagged mountain peaks poke through the surface of a sea of ice two miles thick. Glacial tongues, cracked and twisted, creep down deep fjords to the sea. The Kiattuut Sermiak glacier points the way to Narsarsuaq and sheds the icebergs floating just past the end of the runway. This is going to be good.
As was promised by my friend when he organized the trip. In love with remote places, he’s guided outdoor excursions on every continent. But our plans are not ambitious, mostly day hikes from two tiny settlements—Igaliku (pop. 27) and Qassiarsuk (pop. 50)—for the scenery and Viking ruins. Sheep farming, the main occupation in both, sets the rules for visitors: Keep off the grass, which will be winter feed; don’t pet the sheepdogs, who have jobs. The dogs watch us intently, as if a loop is running nonstop in their brains: What’s that, where does it belong, how do I get it there?
Qassiarsuk is where Erik the Red spent his exile from Iceland and hatched his legendary real estate scam to exploit the appeal of a land allegedly green to residents of one demonstrably icy. His wife was a Christian convert, and the footprint of her chapel, the first Christian church in North America, is still visible. It’s been reconstructed nearby, along with a sodcovered Viking long house. (Ole, who’s mowing the roof when we visit, turns out to have been an exchange student in Rochester, New York.)
The settlements are resupplied every other week—by boat when the fjord is navigable, by helicopter in winter. Each has a small general store. A sample of the shelves in Igaliku: whale blubber, horseshoes, Red Bull, canned muskox pâté, and the truly international food, Pringles potato chips. I try the blubber two ways—raw (jellied art gum eraser with slight fishy aftertaste) and fried (pencil eraser)—but pass on the muskox.
Igaliku’s ruins include the house and church of the New World’s first bishop (12th century). We get there on a tour boat that puts us ashore an hour’s walk away. The tour includes a side trip that weaves through icebergs in a tributary fjord. Kim, the pilot, stops amid them and offers each adult a splash of vermouth chilled by chunks of glacial ice he scoops up with a fish net. For Greenlanders, English is at best a third language (Danish being the second) but Kim’s is excellent. He says that he drives this boat for fun, and on return, will clock in at his day job, air-traffic control. I ask him to translate a text message on my Icelandic cell phone that details what Vodafone will charge me for using it in Greenland. The free translation—”Bend over and smile”—shows that his English is not just good but idiomatic.
From Igaliku we take a speedboat up and across Tunulliarfik Fjord to a dock consisting of piled-up boulders and stumble across them to begin a short backpack to the middle of nowhere, which even that part of Greenland not under ice mostly is. We intended to follow a marked trail along a valley, but a crucial bridge has been washed out. We will have to travel crosscountry, using a pass 2,000 feet above us to get over the ridge we’d planned to go around. Bleating sheep soon let us know that we’re not alone. That’s fortunate: They’ve made game trails we can use to get through thick brush of gray-leaf willow.
As we pick our way down a steep gully on the far side of the pass, the view is striking at every scale of size and distance. On top of the world broods the distant, Alaska-sized icecap. Five miles to our west, the huge Eqalorutsit glacier scours the cliffs of its surrounding fjord. The stream we’re following is punctuated by charming waterfalls. Beneath our feet lies an astonishing profusion of delicately detailed mosses and lichens, already starting to show fall colors. There are no trees.
We use the prolonged arctic twilight to pitch tents and make dinner on a knob not far from the gully’s mouth. Next morning, we hike to a sheepherders’ shelter on a plain near the glacier, which regularly calves icebergs with thunderous booms. We’re back in camp well before dusk. The wind calms and the sky clears. Around midnight, a curtain of northern lights shimmers overhead. I can’t see my companions but hear them whoop at every subtle flash of color.
This visit to a microscopic slice of Greenland followed 10 days in the south and west of Iceland. Iceland claims to have, per capita, more writers, more books published, and more books read than anyplace else in the world. That seemed plausible: Many roadside stops had take-one/leave-one tables for swapping books. We spent a night at a hostel that put novels on the bedroom shelves. Along our route occur episodes from two of the most famous Icelandic sagas, Njál’s (also called The Story of Burnt Njál) and Egil’s. Egil’s Saga, which I read for homework, begins in Norway with his grandfather and ends in Iceland with his son. It is a novel-length compendium of genealogy, political intrigue, inheritance feuds, poetry, raiding, and drinking (and throwing up). Also nicknames, the best belonging to Eyvind the Plagiarist.
The Icelandic language has barely changed since the Middle Ages—leaving its alphabet in a scary place, with letters like Ð, ð, and þ. Native speakers can therefore read the sagas, their national epics, without translation or gloss. Since, essentially, the only speakers of Icelandic are natives, everyone needs a second language. That, fortunately, is English. So getting around is easy.
The interior of Iceland is forbiddingly wild, if not as extreme as Greenland’s. To mountains and glaciers, Iceland adds spectacular waterfalls, as well as volcanoes and their progeny: lava fields, hot springs, geysers, boiling mud. (The ur-geyser named Geysir, the first ever seen by Europeans, now erupts rarely, often after earthquakes.) Our “camps” in Iceland were snug cabins, reached not by boat but by rented SUV. This required frequent fording of glacial streams—slowly, so as not to send waves into the air intake, but slowly forward, with the current pushing sideways and the wheels slithering about in the stream beds’ deep gravel. Those were fun, in retrospect. We envied the operators of vehicular monsters that belonged in a Terminator movie, some with snorkels and one with a chassis raised so high that stepladders were needed to get in and out.
The south coast is the wettest part of Iceland. Forecasts repeatedly promised “three fair days” to come, but rain fell on every one of them. That didn’t stop our hiking and climbing everything we planned to, but it did require much donning and doffing of rain gear, and one lunchtime spent eating Pringles in the shelter of a cave.
Iceland also offers beauty less austere than mountains and lava and ice. There are lovely walks along the coast, kittiwakes nesting in the cliffs; there are scenic villages with houses in bright primary colors; the afternoon light often seems as crisp as light in the morning. And who knew there were so many shades of green? There were lush moss-covered rock formations with thick springy carpets that made them seem alive, or at least formerly so. Roads cut through gnarly lava fields looked like huge plates of entrails. We hiked a small valley that could have been the background for a children’s cartoon, its hills looking like soft stacks of pillows or giant cow flops.
We passed through Reykjavik, Iceland’s only real city, three times. I’d imagined a place full of chilly Hitchcock blondes. Not so—though many women, it was clear, took their eyebrows very seriously. Reykjavik has a population somewhat smaller than that of Syracuse, New York, but is a more happening place. On weekend nights, it happens—loudly—until about four in the morning. Drinking in Iceland is said to be “goal-oriented.” (On one hotel’s breakfast buffet I noticed a flask of amber liquid next to a stack of shot glasses. It turned out to be not hair-of-the-dog but cod liver oil.) Our last visit was a quick pivot, a few hours’ sleep between an evening flight from Narsarsuaq and a morning flight to New York.
Reentry was disorienting. Space folded on itself, attaching the steep ridge in front of Kiattut Sermiak glacier to a Shake Shack at JFK. Time became reorganized in a different way, from a sense of its passing at many different rates simultaneously: glaciers and volcanoes evolving in deep geological time; voyages of discovery and settlement occurring at the pace of human history; the poign-ant wartime snapshots in Narsarsuaq’s museum displaying time as memory reconstructs it—fragmentary, personal, destined to fade.
In the Shake Shack, waiting for my connection, time is what I was killing. But at home it resumed the expected speed—as did I, with a stride that had acquired a hint of swagger, a slight roll thanks to weeks spent treading rough ground. I roamed my neighborhood of 30 years like an explorer. Home felt familiar but newfound. That’s why we travel.
David Guaspari is a writer in Ithaca, New York.
