To Build a Fire, 2011

We’re about 120 miles from Akureyri now, and up until last night it had been a brutal passage. By “brutal” I don’t mean difficult: the conditions haven’t been life-threatening or anything like that. It had been a brutal passage due to tedious conditions that resulted in fatigue, tension and just general malaise.

For instance, right now we’re motoring over a smooth but rolly sea. There’s a thick blanket of cold fog surrounding Polar Bear, drenching every last surface — deck, sail, body — with a thin but pervasive bone-chilling layer of wetness that sinks deep inside the cabin and the soul.

And we’ve been motoring since we left Constable Pynt, almost two days ago. It was a bright, sunny, breeze-on-the-nose motor south in Hurry Inlet, but as we neared the broader waters of Scoresby Sund, things got interesting. A fierce wind blew from the east-northeast, steadily in the mid- to high-30-knot range with gusts even higher. In response to that, the seas in Scoresby Sund were heaped up into a choppy maelstrom of steep waves and blowing spray, again, pretty much from the direction we were trying to go. Polar Bear’s already underpowered engine struggled to move us at much over 2 knots. And the pack ice that had been outside the sound had blown in on the wind and waves, turning our path into a slalom course through icebergs, growlers and bergie bits. It was a lousy way to start a passage, ruining the upbeat mood that had permeated the boat upon our departure.

We turned the corner at Kap Brewster, exiting Scoresby Sund and entering the open seas of the Denmark Strait. There we found a large, steady swell out of the southwest formed by the storm that had recently passed so it was all locally generated and, as in Scoresby Sund, short and steep. And southwest was our desired path in order to head south past the pack ice before turning southeast to Iceland. But with the wind out of the south and southeast, we had a choice: motor into the seas and rock like a bucking bronco or motor into the headwinds for a somewhat gentler ride but at really slow speeds.

On top of the in-your-face conditions that made everyone at least a little queasy, the wear and tear of almost two weeks in the cold had begun to take effect. Continually low temperatures had made fatigue a constant, and I, for one, could do nothing when not on watch but sleep. The cocoon of my bunk was so welcoming that whenever I came off watch it wasn’t more than three minutes before I was safely and warmly ensconced in my sleeping bag. With others in a similar state, esprit de corps was waning.

So it was that despite calming seas, I went into last night’s midnight-3am watch dreading another three hours of monotonous engine droning and cold, wet air. And upon exiting the companionway hatch and standing in the cockpit I found myself surrounded by, yes, a droning engine and thick, cold fog. But I looked straight overhead, right up the mast toward the zenith and was rewarded with a clear view of the W of Cassiopeia. To the south a bit, off our starboard beam, the bright stars Vega and Deneb were visible in a clear, night sky. And off to the north, off our port quarter, the Big and Little Dippers (the latter with Polaris, the pole star, at its tail) were also visible. And that’s when the magic happened.

The fog eased slightly and a bolt of green shot across the sky from north to south. From the horizon off our port side to the horizon off our starboard, a grand, waving curtain of green danced before the solar winds as the aurora again appeared at the start of my watch. In short order, other cliffs of shimmering green undulated in rhythmic swells, punctuated by occasional globs and pulses of bright auroral glow.

For a good half-hour we were all treated to a magnificent show of the northern lights, and occasional displays occurred for another two hours, until the glare of morning twilight grew from the dark northern edge of the sea to engulf the entire sky. Any queasiness I’d been feeling? Gone. And the malaise that had plagued the journey from Scoresby Sund was gone, swept away by the energy I generated bouncing from rail to rail to maximize my view of the magic light in the sky. At 3am, in the broadening glow of day, I went off watch feeling refreshed and invigorated, and though I once again headed straight to my bunk to sleep, the pall that had weighed on my eyes and my psyche was lifted. A few more watches to go and we’d be in Iceland, but in the meantime, I’d had my taste of northern magic and was greatly refueled.

The northern lights last night were a lifesaving fire that warmed the inside so much that the outside and the soul were brought back from the edge. I hadn’t gone into frigid water and I wasn’t trying desperately to build a fire that would save my life, but the conditions didn’t seem that far off. Thanks to this fire, the numbness that had been creeping deeper and seemed ever more deadly were banished.

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The Northern Lights Appear

Yup, another anchor watch. Quite possibly my last anchor watch of this summer adventure…and what a watch.

I came on watch just before 1am. Right at 1, I popped up on deck to see if the night had turned dark enough to see some stars. Saturn had been blazing in the northeast twilight when I went to sleep and there he was again, this time more toward the southeastern corner of the sky. Polaris, the north star, was visible, more directly overhead than I’ve ever seen it before. And several other stars were also visible — mostly bright stars, as the sky to the north was still the deep orange of twilight. At this hour, night time had deepened to as dark as it was going to get.

But it was dark enough. As I turned to head below, I ventured one more look toward the east and there it was: the aurora. The northern lights, dancing overhead in a curtain of fluorescent green. A couple of curls radiated along a northeast-to-southwest axis, and a brief tinge of purple appeared. As with Polaris, this aurora was more directly overhead than I’d ever experienced it before, a testimony to the fact that this summer has seen me journey farther north than I’ve been in my life. Above the ridge to the west, just ashore of the anchored Polar Bear, another node of aurora undulated in the deep blue sky, keeping time to whatever unheard (by me) rhythm the universe was tapping out.

I quickly returned to the cabin to wake the German photographers (they’d asked to be awakened in case of an auroral display) and my predecessor on anchor watch woke his wife as well. Even Boogie popped his head topside briefly. I also grabbed my camera bag, but the display was all too brief: five, maybe 10 minutes, tops. By the time I had my rig set up, the northern lights were quiet again, and the stars shone on again in solitude. But oh…it was enough.

I get all choked up when seeing any fleeting and beautiful natural phenomena. Make it astronomical — a hobby of mine since boyhood — and throw in the latitudinal bias of the aurora and the northern lights are a treat I will never tire of. So to see the aurora in this particularly unique (to me) setting on the final night of our stay in Greenland, and toss in the fact that it turned on just as I was coming on watch and well, you’ll excuse me if I don’t feel more than a little privileged and honored to have been granted such a show.

I stayed topside for the entire hour, the frosted decks and chill air no challenge for the glow I was feeling from the brief appearance of the aurora. I shot a few twilight photos, and then a few of the sliver of moon as it rose over the ridge to the northeast after Boogie came on watch at 2am, and here I am jotting these thoughts at 3am. It’s time now for me to head back to sleep, but wow. Wow, wow, wow. I am suitably buzzed at this evening’s events.

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What a Difference Five Days Makes

Polar Bear is motoring past Hurry Inlet, the north-south stretch of water that is home to Constable Pynt, about 16 miles up-fjord. The inlet looks much less filled with ice than it did on our last trip here, last Saturday.

As does the entirety of Scoresby Sund. We’re headed back to Ittoqqortoormiit after a circumnavigation of Milne Land. It’s been a trip of grandeur and incredible scenery, and one of never-ending changes.

The primary change is in the ice. Upon Polar Bear’s arrival from Iceland, and a day later, upon our departure deeper into Scoresby Sund, the ice was a major factor. As detailed earlier, vast packs of ice crowded Hurry Inlet and the bay upon which Ittoqqortoormiit resides, making navigation a slow, tedious affair often requiring a lookout in the spreaders. Today, we’ve passed a few large bergs but beyond that, little ice. Perhaps the down-fjord winds of the past three days have blown all the ice out to sea, in which case we’ll have to deal with it next week en route back to Iceland.

We were also forced to thread our way through a maze of ice — large and small — in Fönfjord yesterday. We had anchored in an exposed bay called Ankervig, site of an Inuit summer hunting camp and also home to a couple of Danish researchers. In fact, Ankervig was at the southwest corner of Milne Land and formed the intersection of Fönfjord and Rödefjord.

Rödefjord was so named — Red Fjord — because of the sandstone cliffs and islands along its western edge. In this landscape of black and white and blue, the Colorado Plateau-like red along Rödefjord was shocking; to observe white icebergs in blue water amid a backdrop of Utah red was jarring to the senses and made for some interesting photographs.

The families who had called Ankervig home for the past couple of weeks were busy harvesting musk ox from the hills above, and seals, narwhal and fish from the waters below. Fish dried in racks along the shore, just as they did in Native villages in Alaska and Norwegian villages in the Lofoten. A seal lay on the edge of the beach awaiting it’s dressing out while beside it one of its cousins had already been reduced to what the humans wanted and what they were going to discard. And two Inuit men took turns sawing the horns off the skull of a musk oxen they’d taken earlier in the week. 

Meanwhile, the scientists at Ankervig were packing up in preparation for the twin-engine DeHavilland Otter that was to land on the flats above the tents later in the day to take them out of there. They’d been in Ankervig counting and tracking narwhals, which the locals said they saw (and harvested) regularly in that fjord. A couple of guests tried raw narwhal; the German found it to his liking while the Scottish woman was less than thrilled with the taste. As for the scientists, their work was in advance of — what else? — another wave of oil exploration (who else but the oil companies would pay for extraction via Twin Otter this far out?) here in Greenland.

I’ll not go off on a tangent here, save to say that if this last pristine place in the northern hemisphere, a place forbidding and treacherous and beautiful and fantastic, can’t be left alone, well, what hope have we as a species…and a planet? And I get it: we need oil. I need oil. I get it. Hell, Greenland alone probably couldn’t supply all the diesel we’ve burned on this trip. But can’t we limit ourselves even once? Hasn’t happened yet so perhaps not.

I didn’t get to ask any of the locals but I suspect they’re all for the exploration — and the money development would bring — just as is the case back among so many of Alaska’s Natives (witness: the North Slope Borough, Pebble Mine). And when the narwhals and polar bears and musk ox are gone, Greenland will revert to a lifeless desert, instead of an arctic desert where the tenacity of life serves as an example of what this planet can create and provide.

Sorry. Tangent over.

Prior to Ankervig, we anchored at the head of a fjord that broke off to the northwest from our main route around Milne Land. Harefjord offered a nice little cove with some gargantuan icebergs just outside; the bergs were stuck on the seafloor, too big to get into the cove and as such offered a bit of protection to our perch.

Harefjord was reached after a day’s motor from our anchorage at Bøerne Øer, along the north shore of Milne Land wedged between sheer thousand-meter cliffs on either shore. The walls funneled a stiff headwind into our faces, but the resulting clear skies made for incredible vistas of granite and glacier and blue sky. The pattern was consistent if somewhat irregular: rock leaping out of the sea for a stretch of a mile or two, followed by the tumble of a glacier — tidewater or hanging — and then another wall. Along the north wall, the various layers of rock were visible in undulations that showed the tumult of this land over the millenia, in the grander time time scale beyond those of the glaciers present. Like some sort of saltwater, northern Grand Canyon, the trip down Øfjord was a glimpse into our planet’s, and our universe’s, past. Humbling.

We closed the loop of our Milne Land circumnavigation last evening at the Danmark Øer, the Denmark Islands. In a small cove named Hekla Havn we found a cabin, a couple of small skiffs, and a scattering of 20-liter plastic jerry cans, evidence of the locals’ use of the area, presumably for hunting or fishing. I put the area to use for a quick clean, leaping from the lifeline along Polar Bear’s beam into the surprisingly-not-so-cold water below. No, I didn’t go for a swim, but after pulling myself into the dinghy alongside the boat, I opted to remain in shorts and get some shampoo, which I used to give myself a much need cleansing. And after standing there for a few minutes, wet beneath an overcast that blocked any warming sunshine, I realized that the water was bearable — for a short while. I’d call it high 40s, Farenheit (8 or so in Celsius), and invigorating.

And now we’re retracing our steps of five days ago, this time in reverse as we head to Ittoqqortoormiit, where we’ll anchor and our guests can check out the Native village. The original plan for tomorrow was to head outside Scoresby Sund a bit to explore the pack ice where another boat had gotten up close and personal with a polar bear last weekend: the bear was on ice floes near the boat, at one point passing underneath the bowsprit. But with the ice now apparently gone, I have no idea what we’ll do.

Regardless, we’ll head back to Constable Pynt tomorrow evening so three of our guests — the two German professional photographers and one British woman — can catch their flight out on Saturday. As soon as they leave the boat in late morning, Polar Bear will exit Hurry Inlet and Scoresby Sund, departing Greenland and heading back across Denmark Strait, back to Iceland, the beginning of the final, southward trek to civilization and the end of this summer’s journey.

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