All or nothing in Narsarsuaq

I last visited Narsarsuaq years ago. It’s an abandoned American military airbase and a settlement entirely devoted to supporting the only airport (at present) in South Greenland. Out of season, like this, the Hotel Narsarsuaq has a edge of The Shining to it, with it’s enormous capacity, long brightly lit corridors and it’s distinct lack of visitors. There seem to be more staff than customers before the direct flights from Copenhagen begin for the summer. Hunched over my bitter morning coffee, there are just a handful of others scattered amongst the plastic tables in the sparse cafeteria – an elderly Danish couple, a couple of French scientists, a cluster of Americans and their local Greenlandic guide sitting away on his own in the corner. Each group sits at separate tables, protected from each other by our lack of eye contact.

I stayed here years ago at the end of the high season when the hotel was noisy and crowded. And I remember my first thrilling experience of a Greenlandic bar. Not my last. In general, people like to drink a lot in Greenlandic bars, get a bit messy. But they often remain overwhelmingly friendly, even exhuberant. Typically someone plays awful Greenlandic polka music on a synthesiser while others dance. The hotel bar in Narsarsuaq had been full of life as the deep yellow light burst through the windows on that last long evening of summer. I remember climbing the winding staircase from reception, my hand sliding up the curved wooden railing toward music and laughter. I was one of a group that were supposed to have departed Greenland that afternoon on the last direct flight of the season but the plane never arrived. I remember wondering vaguely what that meant. Would we have to wait until next year? But I decided to focus on enjoying the evening, an evening when unlikely passions were ignited. On the dance floor, a tiny withered Greenlandic woman of indeterminate age staggered, clutching her beer and grinning at the young men in our group through terrible teeth. It was only 7pm. Her intentions toward them were quite clear and she could not be dissuaded by mere rejections. Meanwhile, a half dozen Greenlandic boys, apparently in town for an air-traffic control course and surely not old enough to be drinking, clustered in a protective circle, casting nervous glances toward the decades-older women in our group.

Now, standing alone in that same space, years into the future, the bar seems smaller than it did when it was full of revellers years ago. On the walls, yellowing oil paintings of snowy mountains overlooking wind-clipped fjords watch over only stillness. It’s almost impossible to imagine that Narsarsuaq was once thriving, filled with over a thousand people, when the base was operational sixty years ago.