*Photograph by Elis Hoffman.
There is a brief moment in the early Greenlandic summer when a confluence of factors make it seem that the very essence of living is presented for your personal pleasure. The weather is warm enough to relax outside, albeit perhaps not in your Hawaian shirt. The snow has, largely, melted. The evenings are long and sunlit, the yellow light on the mountains eventually turning a deep pink before the sun, ever so slowly, sinks beneath the sea. The smell of the earth returns, the touch of sunlight on your bare skin, the sound of Arctic foxes calling each other in the dwindling darkness of the late evenings. Those two or three weeks in May and June are a time for breathing in the pure esssence of nature and feeling it in your every pore.
Then the mosquitoes hatch.
It starts slowly. Just one or two. But as soon as you see that first one, you know it’s over. They’re coming. If you go into the fjords mid summer, you should hope for wind. Just a light breeze and they’re gone. But windless weather and you may be wishing you were somewhere very far away, or dead.
I have done a lot of geological field work in Greenland, camping in the middle of, literally, nowhere. I have fond memories of those times. But of the not so fond ones, mosquitoes feature prominantly. I recall a warm, windless day, trying to make a geological map, and just being really, really angry. I wore a headnet, so I couldn’t properly see the rocks, or what I was writing in my notebook. I wore gloves so my hands wouldn’t be covered in the bitey little beasts, but they squeezed into the space between my gloves and jacket, making an itchy ring around my wrist that would plague me for the next week. I wanted to stamp my feet and shout and smash things.
And then – bliss – in the late summer, the weather cools, they die. We rejoice in the pastel autumn evenings. But they are still there, like some bad teenage horror film, sleeping beneath the snow, waiting for the summer to return.
