It was pitch black, five o’clock on a late January afternoon, when my son and I walked the few hundred metres from our home to the local supermarket. Crisp and dark, but the street lamps glowed yellow on the deep snow. Immediately we noticed the familiar, deep, heavy grind of helicopter blades – whack, whack, whack – cutting the wintery silence, and we both searched the sky for the invisible sound.
Helicopters are common in Nuuk, but this one was circling, not coming in to land. There it was, a black machine with its search light on. Something was wrong – Air Greenland helicopters are red with white dots. This was a military search and rescue helicopter. We paused by the roadside to watch.
It circled the top of Store Malene – an 800 m, snowy peak. Store Malene dominates the skyline of our local area, towering over my son’s school. It’s the view from our living room window. In the spring, the icy top glitters in the slow yellow sunrise. In autumn, thick fog pours over like a waterfall in slow motion. In winter, auroral streams launch over the dark summit, just two kilometres from our house as the crow flies.
As we watched, the helicopter narrowed its search lights onto a steep icy slope, a channel of treacherous white stretching from the summit, between rocky crags, hundreds of metres to almost half way down the mountain, where it opened into a broad icy bank. From there, the slope eased into a shallow descent toward where we stood. Above the icy bank, the helicopter hovered, searching with its white eye. After perhaps twenty minutes, the beam of light became fixed on a single point, and the helicopter descended. I continued to the supermarket with my son, feeling dejected. I learned later that a man had slipped at the very top, falling 500 metres down the ice to his death.
On the way home, I felt somehow outside of my own skin. Here I was, walking through Nuuk surburbia, carrying my groceries for dinner, my son trapsing along by my side, while there in plain view of suburban life, a helicopter crew were retrieving a climber who had just ended his last day on Earth.
