I spent much of July writing in a room overlooking Disko Bay, in Ilulissat, Greenland. There was an iceberg that looked a little like a church parked just fifty feet off my deck. It wasn’t like the other icebergs, breaking and rolling and drifting past, but a magical constant, no doubt beached out.
It sat as I wrote, reflecting back, through the morning and afternoon light and into the reddish glow of the night. And there again the next day, stoic. And then it wasn’t. It had collapsed, been divided, exposing its underbelly, as it turned itself inside out and drifted away back to the depths, leaving me with an emptiness of blue.
I was cold and afraid. It was too big or I was. I leaned forward to get my sense back and banged my cast against the gunwale. The sound echoed back, low, like the closing of a door, and the white wall went out of focus and I blinked to make it clear and it was broken, the spires gone, what looked so small and distant, and dissolved like a monster into the water, splintering in a massive rush, dissolved like snow. Part of the other side slipped off too and another shelf, each part vanishing into the water. It spat back up in a lurch of bright blue and ice, rushing out of the darkness right at us. My head was empty, my hands balled tight. Ray ran in a short heavy stride to the cabin.
“Take that, b’ys.” Charlie slid the oars to Fitz and Tommy, and they dug them through the water, hardly moving the boat. Another section of the iceberg rose up out of the water, dripping, and collapsed. The vibration of it came up through the water into the boat’s floorboards, a humming, hollow and deep, a pure force, and then a rising in the water, a vast dark thing, coming toward the boat. Ray couldn’t get the boat to start, and as much as everyone was doing, scrambling and pushing and turning, banging, no one spoke. The silence was louder as the wave rolled up to the bow, Apollo and I there, and pulled us up, higher, steadily to the top and back down again. The second wave was bigger. We couldn’t see what was left of the iceberg now, everything gone, and I was almost panicked, thinking it was too high and we would go under. We rose up, the stern coming up past us, shards of ice at the bottom of the next wave. I stepped back with it, thinking it was easy now, and lost my balance as the third wave came, almost as big, and my foot was sliding out and I was fine with that, and would have hit my head against the bench if Fitz hadn’t caught my arm and put me back on the bench. “That’s 10,000 years old,” he said. “It was snowing 10,000 years back and then it got all packed and floated down here. 10,000 years of history that is, before the Vikings, before the Romans, before the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Incas, the Mayans, everybody. People had just got out of the caves and begun the farming then.”
Ilulissat, a town of 4500 people, is the hub for tourism in Greenland; it sits at 69 degrees north, 120 miles above the Arctic Circle.The tourists come to see the icebergs which surround Ilusissat in the summer months. English isn’t commonly understood, although the youth appear to know a word or two. There is a stark aspect to the town – water piping strapped to exposed bedrock, sled dogs tied up everywhere and a dusty sports field at the center. However it’s the surrounding ice and the light that draw all of the attention.
There was an iceberg that looked a little like a church parked just fifty feet off my deck. It wasn’t like the other icebergs, breaking and rolling and drifting past, but a magical constant, no doubt beached out.
It had collapsed, been divided, exposing its underbelly, as it turned itself inside out and drifted away back to the depths, leaving me with an emptiness of blue.
