An inauspicious start in Greenland

It wasn’t a promising start. I opened the official-looking letter to find only a few lines of text. I had been judged “unqualified” for the position for which I had applied – making geological maps of Greenland. Rather harsh, I thought. But it was true. The PhD that was required for this position was still a couple of months of sleepness nights into my future. Casting the letter aside, I hardly gave it a second thought, and continued with the monumental task at hand.

Fast forward a year and half. Finishing up a short postdoctoral position, I was again looking for the next opportunity. And to my surprise, I saw what was, in fact, the same job advertisement – making geological maps of Greenland. So I applied again. A month or two later, I received another official-looking letter, again with only a few lines of text. This time it said I was “qualified” for the position I had applied for. Bemused, I correctly assumed that this was the first stage of some opaque assessment process. Later, I supposed, I would be informed whether they wanted to interview me. But months passed and I heard nothing. Soon the application was again just a barely-remembered and slightly fanciful dream. Meanwhile, I had started a new postdoctoral position where I found myself struggling with a project in which I had little interest. After only a few months trapped in a sterile laboratory, I was casting around for something new. I had strayed too far from my love of field geology, wandering in the wind and the rain, watching the sun rise and set, unfolding the quiet secrets of rocks.

I sat in my office around 6 o’clock one Thursday evening, struggling with what to do next, how to extract myself from this project that was going nowhere, at least for me. Then the phone rang. I didn’t really want to answer it. I knew I should have left for home at least an hour ago, and I thought momentarily of the scowl on my boyfriend’s face. But I picked up the receiver anyway, annoyed at myself for doing so.

“Hello?” I snapped.

“Is that Arctic Alien?” asked an unfamiliar and slightly foreign-sounding voice (obviously using my actual name).

“Yes.”

“It’s Christian,” he said cheerily, as if that should mean something to me.

“Yeess?” I repeated, as I vaguely considered hanging up.

“From Denmark,” he offered, as some kind of explanation.

“Um, yes?” I said, again.

“It’s about the job you applied for with us,” he said, again assuming that I had some concept of the identity of both him and the mystery organisation he worked for.

As the uncomfortable pause grew longer, I scanned my brain for any crumb of recognition of what he might be talking about. Finally, the cogs snapped into alignment. The memory of the Greenland mapping job that I had, months earlier, been deemed “qualified” for leapt to the forefront of my mind. That had to be it.

“Oh, yes!” I replied, too enthusiastically.

Ten minutes later, driving home, I was planning how to fly half way around the world to Denmark for a job interview the next week. Despite the apparent rush to now fill the position, there was a reason for the long delay since I had submitted my application months ago. I later discovered that I was only the third choice for this job, the others having turned it down. By the time I arrived for my interview, everyone was a bit sick of how much effort they’d already put into the recruitment process and the organisation refused to pay for my accommodation during interview, or shipping any of my belongings once I was offered the job. So barely six weeks later, I was stripping my life down to what could be packed into the four cardboard boxes that I could afford to post myself.

Having left my boyfriend on the opposite side of the world to figure out how and if he would pull together the various threads of his life and follow me to an unknown future with no job or place to live, I now found myself resting my forehead against the cold, oval window of the Dash-7, the roar of the twin-prop engines drowning out all else, watching the snow-covered, rocky landscape pass beneath me, mile-on-mile, as we descended toward my first summer in Greenland. A summer that would lead us ultimately, years later, to move our family to Greenland and call it our home. On that flight, eyes fixed on the scene below, before even setting foot in Greenland for the first time, I was already trapped in its icy grasp.