‘Winterize’

Before moving to Greenland, I did not know that the word ‘winter’ could be made into a verb. I had never ‘winterized’ anything before. Well, actually, I still haven’t. But each year I help out a little when my husband winterizes our boat. Winterizing the boat involves emptying the fuel tank, pumping out the seawater and pumping coolant through the cooling system, disconnecting the cooling system and all the electrical equipment, removing the batteries, removing the boat from the water onto a stand on land and strapping it to the ground. The latter is necessary. My husband spent a lot of time assessing exactly where to put our boat stand. It sits in an area with a half dozen other boats from the neighborhood, ours being the only one at an odd angle rather than perpendicular to the road. When the prevailing southerly storms hit, our boat points into the wind, aerodynamically stable in winds that can be over fifty knots. Last winter, one of the other boats in the same area – also strapped to the ground – blew off its stand onto an adjacent boat, an expensive problem.

At the end of one autumn we took the boat out on one last long trip into the fjord on a brilliant cold morning. As we prepared to leave, wrestling with frozen ropes, I trod carefully over the deck, encrusted in a film of slippery icy platelets that crunched under my heavy boots. The sky was a crisp blue, the hills covered in a blanket of new snow, and the mirrored fjord reflected the pale sky. As we sailed deep into the fjord, cutting through oily slicks of new ice, a faint distant line across the water grew more and more distinct. Gradually, it resolved into a broad sweep of ice. The sea was frozen. As we approached, we could see up to a twenty centimetre thickness of ice in a broad, almost unbroken pan stretching the width of the fjord, holding us back from any further advance toward the cliffed-walled inner reaches of the fjord beyond. As we pottered along the ice edge, looking for a path through, I spotted the sharply shadowed tracks of an Arctic fox in the thin snow covering the ice sheet that gently flexed in the boat’s wake. The tracks stopped at the water’s edge. Where did he go? I wondered.

Today, with the sailing season almost over again, I am reminded of the coming winter. After a couple of days of stormy darkness, sleet hammering the windows, wild winds straining the rafters in the night, the storm gave up its anger and released a final breathe of gently falling snow. Today every rooftop is white, every surface dusted with perfect powdery crystals, and the air glows with the pastel softness of winter.