Copenhagen → Nuuk → Ilulissat
The icecap through the window, a language we don’t speak, and a first night with no night.
*** a little note: all images in this post taken on the iPhone
The lobby at half past six. Copenhagen still doing its flat early light, the canal pretending to be asleep. We were the first ones down, which never happens, and only happened because today was the day the journey stopped being a journey and turned into the place.
The Language We Don’t Speak
You know you’ve left the world you know when the boarding call is in a language you can’t even guess at.
At the gate for the Greenland flight, the announcement came in Kalaallisut first, then Danish, then, a distant third, English. Greenlandic is long soft strings of sound that don’t break where your ear expects them to, a whole language built for a place most of the people who hear it will never go. It was the first time the trip had said its own destination out loud in its own tongue, and not one of us understood a syllable.
That, in our experience, is the exact moment a trip gets good. When the signage stops being for you.
There was one Greenlandic word we had learned before we came, because it does the work English needs ten or twelve words for. Sila. It means the weather, and also the sky, the air, the wind. It also means mind. It also means wisdom, and the whole universe, and a person paying proper attention to any of it. One word for the thing that is everywhere and is also you, noticing it. We hadn’t even landed yet, and the language was already a better philosopher than we are.
The Icecap
We’d written, before we left, that you can hold the size of Greenland as a number and still be completely wrong about it the moment you see it. That the fact goes in through the eyes and the scale goes in through the spine. We got to test the theory about ninety minutes out of Copenhagen, when the cloud broke and the icecap arrived in the window.
There is no way to make it sound like anything but what it is. White, to every edge of the glass, in every direction, for the better part of an hour. Not snow lying on a landscape. The landscape itself, made of ice, going down in places the better part of two miles, older than writing, older than most of the things people are sure of. You hunt for something to give it scale, a road, a building, a shadow the right size, and there is nothing, because nothing of ours has ever been set down out there. The eye gives up and files the whole thing, exactly as we said it would, under white.
We’d had the number for months. The spine got it in about four seconds.
The Smaller and Smaller Planes
For most of the flight we watched the little plane on the map crawl up the world. Norway. The Faroe Islands. Iceland. Somewhere past that, Tracey lost the fight and fell asleep. Dee woke her just as the map ticked over the line into Greenland, and it was worth every minute of the sleep she didn’t get back. A whole coastline made of ice. Mountains standing behind it. The kind of thing you don’t quite accept is real until you’re looking straight down at it.
And then the descent into Nuuk, which is, without a word of exaggeration, the most stunning twenty minutes of landing either of us has ever flown. Breathtaking, start to finish. One of those rare stretches you know, even while it’s happening, you’ll be holding onto for a very long time.
Greenland belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark and somehow still isn’t part of Europe’s borderless zone, so you land first in the capital, Nuuk, and clear a small border in a small building, the visas that work across the whole continent quietly useless here. Then you change to a smaller plane. Then, it turns out, a smaller one again.
We’d read before we came that this last little plane gets grounded for days at a time, that the weather up here doesn’t negotiate. In Greenland a plan isn’t a promise. It’s a polite suggestion you make to the weather and the water and the sky, and they decide whether to accept it. For two people whose whole working life is a timeline defended to the minute, there’s something bracing about arriving somewhere that outranks the schedule and knows it. We’d brought a plan. Greenland was going to have a look at it.
The last hop north to Ilulissat is a propeller plane with a few dozen seats and a view out of every one of them.
It also handed us the most alarming ninety seconds of the whole trip. We tore down the runway, engines deafening, fully committed, and then the plane stood on its brakes and threw us all forward against the belts before the wheels had ever left the ground. It swung around and taxied slowly back toward the terminal. The pilot came on, perfectly calm, to explain that a warning light had flagged a technical problem, that they had concluded the warning itself was faulty, that everything was in fact fine, and that we would simply try again. OMG. We looked around for one shared flicker of concern and found none. Not a single other passenger looked up from their book. So we tore down the runway a second time, on the strength of a warning someone had decided not to believe, and this time we lifted off.
A quick stop in Sisimiut, the adventure capital of Greenland, to refuel, and then up again, over some of the most beautiful country either of us has ever seen from a plane. Ice and water and bare rock, all of it, for as far as the window reached.
It comes down on a runway that feels like it simply stops, the tarmac handing over to tundra with no particular ceremony, the way a sentence ends when the writer has said the thing and sees no reason to keep talking.
The moment the wheels touched, the whole cabin broke into applause. It turns out this is close to a Greenland thing. Not the nervous clap of a charter flight that’s finally found the ground, but something quieter and more earned. Up here the plane isn’t a luxury, it’s the road. There are barely any roads between towns, so the pilots fly what amount to bus routes through Arctic weather, crosswinds and fog and fjords packed with ice, into runways not much longer than a good driveway. The applause isn’t relief. It’s a thank-you to the crew for doing a genuinely hard thing well, and nobody thinks twice about joining in.
And there it was. Ilulissat. The name means icebergs, which is the kind of plain honesty you have to respect in a town. It’s small and low and painted in the same bright box colours as the sailors’ houses back on the Copenhagen canal, except here the colours sit against a fjord that is genuinely, absurdly full of ice the size of buildings, drifting past the front windows of people’s houses as casually as traffic.
Dee Green-land
Here is something objectively ridiculous.
Dee, for the first time in her life, landed in Greenland. Arriving in a country that, in English at least, more or less wears her name. The place was named by a Viking running an early and shameless piece of real estate marketing, centuries before there was a Dee or a Green alive to appreciate it. And yet, stepping off that little plane onto the tundra, there was a daft and undeniable sense of having arrived somewhere that had been quietly holding the door. A homecoming to a place she’d never set foot in.
We’re not going to overthink it. We’re just going to note that the universe occasionally sets up a joke decades in advance, then waits, very patiently, for you to walk straight into it at sixty-nine degrees north.
The Ride In
There was no walk in the end. The hotel shuttle collected us, which meant the Smidge we never did find at Heathrow was a problem for another day, and the town got to introduce itself gently instead. We spent the whole short ride with our faces more or less against the glass, unable to look away from Disko Bay, which was full of icebergs, casually, the way another town’s water is full of boats.
Tracey’s Oura ring, somewhere over the last two days, had given up entirely. It had stopped reporting sleep and started, we assume, simply praying.
The First Night With No Night
And then the thing we’d flown to the top of the world for, the thing we hadn’t quite known to expect even though we’d read about it a dozen times.
It didn’t get dark.
Dinner had been freshly caught halibut and a Greenlandic gin to go with it, the kind of meal that tastes entirely of the place it’s served in. We’d been awake the better part of two days, across more time zones than a body holds opinions about, and now here we were, lying in bed at ten at night, watching icebergs drift past the window in full, calm, gold daylight. The sun didn’t set. It slid sideways along the horizon and stayed there, the way the light in Copenhagen had loitered after lunch, except this far north it had given up on setting altogether, as if even the sun had decided to let the hour be whatever it wanted to be.
Here’s the part that undid us a little. We’d come about as far from a city’s lights as two people can get, the kind of place where the night sky should be at its most outrageous, and we could not see a single star. Not one. The sky hadn’t been dimmed by cloud or washed out by streetlight. It had been switched off by geometry. We had travelled far enough up the curve of a tilted, spinning planet that the shadow simply couldn’t reach us anymore. The midnight sun isn’t weather. It’s the machinery of the solar system, finally running somewhere you can feel it on your skin. The stars hadn’t gone anywhere. The universe was exactly where we’d left it, doing exactly what it always does. We’d just put ourselves somewhere the sun won’t move aside long enough to let anyone look.
There is no fixing a place that has no night. Pyt won’t reach it. Shoganai won’t reach it. The lie-flat seat and the long shower in Singapore are a world and a lifetime away. You just sit in the gold at what your body insists is the middle of the night, with a country that more or less shares your name spread out in front of you and full of ancient ice, and you stop asking what time it is. The question doesn’t apply here. It may not apply for weeks.
We made it. The map ran out of names, and we kept going anyway, and here we are at the top of the world, in the light, wide awake and home in a place we have never been.
Tomorrow there are boats. Tonight there is only this, and this is plenty.
