We stood side by side, watching the helicopter soar over the hill and out of sight. When it was gone, we continued to watch the empty sky as the sound of the beating blades faded to silence. All the while, in the darkness of my pocket, I held the envelope in my hand, enjoying the feel of the paper between my fingers. A letter from a loved one while on fieldwork was something special. When the pilot handed it to me, “Mail for you,” I eagerly eyed the envelope, determining the sender from the distinctive curls of the letters of my name. Then I pocketed it, waiting for a quiet moment to enjoy the far-travelled message, probably penned weeks ago. When that quiet moment came, I retreated to my tent, closed the zip behind me and ripped opened the seal in the yellow light that filtered through the walls of the fluttering canvas. And I read and read, savouring the words written only for me, reading phrases over, clinging to fragments that I could call back to mind when working alone in the hills in the coming days.
The sending and receiving of letters from what then seemed a far off world of cities, office jobs, crowds, friends and family, made working in Greenland seem even more remote with its vast vistas of blue fjords, its silent unclimbed peaks, its endless, pathless wilderness whose omnipotent emptiness filled every moment. The contrast left me feeling that I had stepped sideways into a different world, one not quite connected with the one from where I had come.
Now, it seems the opposite is true. Under the grinding weight of disease that goes on and on, Greenland feels strangely normal. Shielded from the outside world by frigid seas, by limited air routes – now even more so – Greenland remains Covid-19 free for the moment, with only eighteen recorded cases all year. As winter closes in around us, life ambles on. People go to work. They smile at each other with bare faces. They greet each other with hugs. Life is almost normal. Now it is the rest of the world that seems like some dystopian realm that, from here, can hardly be imagined, where people, alone in their homes, watch from windows the silent streets, the shuttered shops. Hidden behind masks, they wish for the touch of a hand, the warmth of skin against skin. A world where loved ones meet only in digital form.
The messages from this strangely altered world come no longer as scratchings on paper written weeks earlier, but are heralded by a ping and the green glow of a mobile phone, words tapped into the void only moments before. But without the prospect of any personal touch, with the prospect of flickering faces on yet another screen for who knows how long, the world outside seems further away than ever.
As we creep toward Christmas, Nuuk seems strange in how unusually normal it is against this backdrop of upheaval in the wider world. As I watch from my window, I feel I am living inside a snow globe, sheltered from the ‘real’ world. I see the coloured Christmas stars alight in every window, the sun circling ever lower in the pastel sky, shedding long yellow rays in advance of the coming twilight, and a cold wind blows, bringing a veil of tiny snow flakes pattering against the pane.
