Mario’s Log – July 29th
Tomorrow morning, we leave Greenland and head across Baffin Bay for Lancaster Sound; the start – if there is one – to the Northwest Passage. I’m making up my bed on the settee. Unrolling the ragged sleeping bag I was assigned; I shove a sheet into the corner of the two-foot-wide bench and notice that I can’t stop smiling. This is one of my “how did I get here?” moments. If there is a constant refrain to my life, it is this sense of good fortune. This feeling that there is no one in the world I’d rather be and no place I’d rather be and that I am having a better life than anyone else.
Tonight, we ate frozen pizzas and drank cheap beer at anchor. I’m not going to get a good night’s sleep. There is snoring coming from the aft cabins and I’m still up waiting to file the now annoying 6-hour report to the Danish authorities and I’m cold. With five men on a boat that sleeps four, we take turns sleeping in the salon and this is my week. As I make up my bed next to the galley on this gently rocking beast of a boat I can’t stop smiling because I got to see Greenland.
Greenland has been distractingly magnificent to look at and I’m not sure that bringing a camera was a good idea. At one point, both Sam and I stopped taking pictures and videos and had to force ourselves to just look. Afraid we were going to miss it as we tried to not miss the perfect shot. Then, while failing to contain our awe at a scene outside the large windows of Sarah-Sarah, we’d shake our heads in defeat. “Ok just one more,” one of us would smile and we’d run up on deck into the freezing wind to capture whatever we couldn’t resist, a landscape or another iceberg.
After at least a thousand photographs in four days, I’m having to admit defeat. The ruggedness and scale and power of this place are impossible to capture. The photographs give a sense of what we saw, but looking at a picture of a large iceberg and standing under its shadow are inexplicably different things. They talk, groan, have a voice. You can hear the small ice next to a large berg sizzle as the air trapped, perhaps hundreds of years ago, escapes. When a sheet breaks off the side of a large tabular berg it sounds like a shotgun blast. Waves pop and slap at cavernous recesses at their waterline.
Seeing the landscapes as we floated by offshore or up the inside passages north of Nuuk, it is impossible not to admire the people who decided to make Greenland home and their descendants who still live here. Sheer cliffs, bare rock and moss and not a tree in sight. It’s hard to put into words, but if you were looking for the most unforgiving landscape imaginable, you’ll find it in Greenland. Everywhere, but for the small villages that rarely dot the landscape, is as it must have ten thousand years ago. Untouched by anything but weather. Where every day is like the first day at the beginning of time.
None of this can be captured through a lens. It cannot be put into words. Greenland is the epitome of the phrase, “you have to see it to believe it.” And I got to see it. It is impossible to do so without awe; without feeling like you are experiencing a privilege that only the locals who hack their lives out here deserve.
It’s our last night in Greenland and I’m going to bed now, if you can call it that. Despite the late hour the arctic sun slips around the shades in the salon tricking my body into thinking I’m not tired, but I am exhausted. I’ll crawl under this ragged sleeping bag and try to get five hours anyway, but I doubt I’ll make it. The guys have been snoring for a couple of hours now and Scott wants to leave early to make a perfect weather window across the bay. I’m the luckiest man alive.
I wonder what we’ll see tomorrow.
