Greenland Part 1: Hauling Ice
First of all, I got a summergen story! And it rules! So go over here and read it. I wanted something about the music that Sam listened to during the Stanford years and this is a unique and touching take on it. And I do love me some Dean POV. As an aside, to the talented and anonymous author, I apologize for not being able to comment right away. I've been without internet for a couple of days and just managed to purchase some today. Thank you again for writing me such a lovely fic.
Things you should know about Greenland:
1. It’s really big. About three times the size of Texas.
2. It’s really cold. About 98% of it is covered by the ice sheet.
3. Things are really expensive. For scale: about $6 for a bottle of Coke, $4 for a wash, $4 for a dry and $12 for a box of Cheerios. YIKES.
Day One: Copenhagen. Everyone is jet-lagged except for me. We’re in the downtown hostel where I share a tiny room with three other girls who want to know where the dishwasher is. I worry about the learning curve.
Day Two: There is quite a bit of partying. One of my roommates has semi-anonymous sex with a Danish boy in a bathroom at the hostel. I worry about the learning curve.
Day Three: We get up at ass thirty and take a taxi to the train station, a train to the airport, and a 5 hour flight to Kangerlussuaq. We layover there for about five hours and then take a smaller plane to Ilulissat. The hostel here is more spacious-only two people per room-but a little older. It was built as temporary housing approximately 16 years ago. It’s held up very well, but the doors have a tendency to stick and everything leans to the left or right depending on which side of the building you’re on.
Day Four: Up at ass thirty again to take a van to the docks. We take a 5 hour ferry to a calving glacier. A calving glacier is one of those where enormous chunks of ice continually fall off. This one is about 2 football fields high and the pieces that fall off, becoming icebergs, are the size of pick-up trucks. The ferry powers through large floating chunks of ice that bounce off the hull hard enough to jostle your teeth. We ‘dock’ by literally running this ferry into the side of a rock and gunning the boat while we all exit the bow in a hurry. Don’t worry, I have pictures for later. Then we hike 7k to the permanent camp by the glacier. The following conversation takes place:
Christian (the only black man in Greenland, apparently): DO you or do you NOT want me to poop in this bag?
Danish Guide: No!
Christian: Do you want me to bury it!
Danish Guide: No!
Christian: Do you want me to just leave it there?
Danish Guide: No!
Christian (making motions like he is backing his ass up into the plastic bag): PLEASE HELP ME UNDERSTAND.
Terrence: Do you not have a dog?
I laughed so hard during this part I might have broken something. I slept inside 2 sleeping bags but still froze. This is because we were really close to the glacier. Cold, cold air continually forms on the glacier and plows downhill towards us. One of the tents blows over in the night.
We are 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
Day Five:
We hike out for NINE HOURS, three and a half of which are spent actually walking on the ice sheet. It is unbelievably beautiful. I felt like I was on the moon, though. It looks like sand dunes as far as you can see. Our Danish Guide led us across the ice. We could only step exactly where she had stepped before us. We stopped a lot so that she could poke at the ice with a stick to see if it would hold our body weight. Occasionally we take turns letting her dangle us over crevasses that funnel melt water down to the bottom of the glacier. These can be up to several kilometers deep.
It was EPIC.
We climbed several hills that, to be perfectly honest, might have made me nervous back home. I perfect the art of not thinking about this shit because if I do, I will totally freeze up. I spend a lot of the day singing show tunes under my breath to avoid losing my shit. Don’t worry, there will be pictures later.
Day Six:
We pack up and hike back to the base camp. There we wait for the ferry to return. We scramble on board again for the 5 hour return voyage to I. We shower, eat, and generally return to civilization.
The dogs run Ilulissat. The sled dogs are kept chained in random spots. There is no private land ownership so when you want to build a house, you just pick a spot and do it. Nobody has a back yard or a sense of where their land ends or begins. So the dogs are all over the place. Sled dogs are only fed every three days or so in the off season. This is to keep them sharp and keep them loyal to the feeder. Even the act of feeding the sled dogs reinforces the team dynamic as the feeder tosses the best meat directly to the lead dog while letting the others work a little for it. As it turns out, it’s not the sled-driver who’s really in charge at all. Nothing happens but the lead dog says so. The puppies run completely wild on the island. They run around in their little packs, playing and nipping at each other’s heels. It’s freaking adorable. All across the little town there are yield signs with pictures of dogsleds on them. In the wintertime, when you are returning home with your sled, the dogs know it. They become impossible to control inside about 5 miles of home so cars have to stop and treat the yields like railroad signs since the drivers can’t stop their dogs even if they want to. All day and all night the dogs talk to one another. It’s kind of eerie, but I really like it. Sometimes it’s just light chatter, but once or twice a night they start howling and it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
I love Greenland. Especially the parts where nobody asks me to poop in a bag.
Things you should know about Greenland:
1. It’s really big. About three times the size of Texas.
2. It’s really cold. About 98% of it is covered by the ice sheet.
3. Things are really expensive. For scale: about $6 for a bottle of Coke, $4 for a wash, $4 for a dry and $12 for a box of Cheerios. YIKES.
Day One: Copenhagen. Everyone is jet-lagged except for me. We’re in the downtown hostel where I share a tiny room with three other girls who want to know where the dishwasher is. I worry about the learning curve.
Day Two: There is quite a bit of partying. One of my roommates has semi-anonymous sex with a Danish boy in a bathroom at the hostel. I worry about the learning curve.
Day Three: We get up at ass thirty and take a taxi to the train station, a train to the airport, and a 5 hour flight to Kangerlussuaq. We layover there for about five hours and then take a smaller plane to Ilulissat. The hostel here is more spacious-only two people per room-but a little older. It was built as temporary housing approximately 16 years ago. It’s held up very well, but the doors have a tendency to stick and everything leans to the left or right depending on which side of the building you’re on.
Day Four: Up at ass thirty again to take a van to the docks. We take a 5 hour ferry to a calving glacier. A calving glacier is one of those where enormous chunks of ice continually fall off. This one is about 2 football fields high and the pieces that fall off, becoming icebergs, are the size of pick-up trucks. The ferry powers through large floating chunks of ice that bounce off the hull hard enough to jostle your teeth. We ‘dock’ by literally running this ferry into the side of a rock and gunning the boat while we all exit the bow in a hurry. Don’t worry, I have pictures for later. Then we hike 7k to the permanent camp by the glacier. The following conversation takes place:
Christian (the only black man in Greenland, apparently): DO you or do you NOT want me to poop in this bag?
Danish Guide: No!
Christian: Do you want me to bury it!
Danish Guide: No!
Christian: Do you want me to just leave it there?
Danish Guide: No!
Christian (making motions like he is backing his ass up into the plastic bag): PLEASE HELP ME UNDERSTAND.
Terrence: Do you not have a dog?
I laughed so hard during this part I might have broken something. I slept inside 2 sleeping bags but still froze. This is because we were really close to the glacier. Cold, cold air continually forms on the glacier and plows downhill towards us. One of the tents blows over in the night.
We are 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
Day Five:
We hike out for NINE HOURS, three and a half of which are spent actually walking on the ice sheet. It is unbelievably beautiful. I felt like I was on the moon, though. It looks like sand dunes as far as you can see. Our Danish Guide led us across the ice. We could only step exactly where she had stepped before us. We stopped a lot so that she could poke at the ice with a stick to see if it would hold our body weight. Occasionally we take turns letting her dangle us over crevasses that funnel melt water down to the bottom of the glacier. These can be up to several kilometers deep.
It was EPIC.
We climbed several hills that, to be perfectly honest, might have made me nervous back home. I perfect the art of not thinking about this shit because if I do, I will totally freeze up. I spend a lot of the day singing show tunes under my breath to avoid losing my shit. Don’t worry, there will be pictures later.
Day Six:
We pack up and hike back to the base camp. There we wait for the ferry to return. We scramble on board again for the 5 hour return voyage to I. We shower, eat, and generally return to civilization.
The dogs run Ilulissat. The sled dogs are kept chained in random spots. There is no private land ownership so when you want to build a house, you just pick a spot and do it. Nobody has a back yard or a sense of where their land ends or begins. So the dogs are all over the place. Sled dogs are only fed every three days or so in the off season. This is to keep them sharp and keep them loyal to the feeder. Even the act of feeding the sled dogs reinforces the team dynamic as the feeder tosses the best meat directly to the lead dog while letting the others work a little for it. As it turns out, it’s not the sled-driver who’s really in charge at all. Nothing happens but the lead dog says so. The puppies run completely wild on the island. They run around in their little packs, playing and nipping at each other’s heels. It’s freaking adorable. All across the little town there are yield signs with pictures of dogsleds on them. In the wintertime, when you are returning home with your sled, the dogs know it. They become impossible to control inside about 5 miles of home so cars have to stop and treat the yields like railroad signs since the drivers can’t stop their dogs even if they want to. All day and all night the dogs talk to one another. It’s kind of eerie, but I really like it. Sometimes it’s just light chatter, but once or twice a night they start howling and it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
I love Greenland. Especially the parts where nobody asks me to poop in a bag.