IIn August 2018, I did something that JD Vance and his wife, USHA, could only dream: I went to GreenlandAnd I did not cause a national protest against my existence. An in advance part of this was easy. All I had to do is to appear and not to be a blocked agent to expand in Trump as he pretends to be interested in dogs of dogs.
The other part – go to Greenland in the first place – it is difficult to explain. I am not an explorer, sailor, or climate world. I do not belong to any of the few syndrome professions with legitimate reasons for visiting the Arctic Circle. I was, incomprehensible, as a literary journalist.
In 2014, 24 -year -old Greenland writer NIVIAQ Korneliussen published her first novel, which was written in Greenlandic instead of the dominant Danish language. (Greenland relates to local policy, but it was a Danish region since the eighteenth century.) Four years later, it was translated into English with the title crimsonAnd it becomes best -selling books. I have been sent to the profile of this unlikely literary star.
A few days after the e -mail was sent for the first time, a car arrived in the middle of the night to take me to Heathrow. I was in the middle of the road there when I realized that my leakage resistance is still suspended, it is supposed to be next to the front door. I fell in Nuk, the capital of Greenland, without nothing but a large Cardigan for my protection of the elements.
Civilization was lacking in other ways as well. I called Korneliussen before traveling, but I was intending to call by confirming the arrangements when I arrived. With the exception of Greenland, it is not covered by the roaming agreements across the European Union, so my phone did not succeed. It does not matter: I can use WiFi in an email.
But the hotel – in fact a sailor – did not put a password on its network. When it arrived, it was a large tourist ship sitting in the nearby port, absorbing all the frequency range. While she stood on the front table, and with the Kindin for this professional catastrophe, Bahar walked in the past and called a delightful greeting to “Hey, English!” I never felt foreign in my life.
The stunning thing, really, is that I can reach Greenland in this chaotic way and do not die from exposure. For thousands of years, the island, which is known for the ice, was attracting travelers to its margin, hardly for housing, and then repelled them. The first well -known settlers were the rude fishermen who exchanged ivory with visiting ships, and scratched a difficult life from the small Greenland patch from cultivated lands.
At some point in the fifteenth century, The Norte Greenlanders disappeared and nothing in the historical registry could say whether starvation, disease, or cold isolation that you have finished. Their disappearance, journalist John Jerner writes in his excellent book Ice at the end of the world“It is still one of the upper puzzles of European history.”
The ancestors of Invie arrived in the majority of Gaglings today only about 800 years ago, and they maintained a healthy situation towards their home. In their popular stories, ice caps were a place for strange creatures and unknown horrors. A few Europeans who visited the agreement tend. Hans Ed, a Danish missionary in the eighteenth century, announced that the Greenland Center could not have “any benefit for humanity.”
Some men, though, wanted to change this. In the late nineteenth century, two explorers claimed their demand for the exotic hostile landscape. First, Dan Feridvov, Nanson, crossed the island from west to east, where she survived brutal temperatures and terrifying cracks to take a 260 -mile on foot and skiing. It took 11 weeks.
The American Robert Perry was affected by the competition. It made a longer and more frightening path, crossing the northern part of Greenland. It was physically punishing, but perhaps more mentally, surrounded by something other than the endlessness of the sun in an endless sun in the summer of the Arctic. On ice, Peary wrote, “The nightmare of the vacuum has it.”
It was not clear at that stage of history whether Greenland would end up to be a Danish or American, but the Danish collected their demand first, as they established commercial jobs in the early twentieth century. Since then, technology has made climate change – Greenland more than ever.
You no longer have to take warm ice approaches to the coast by the ship: you can get a plane. And when you get there and find yourself incorrectly incorrectly, you will not have to get the original Greenland to make you reach clothes from hiding the reindeer that was chewed bravely until it becomes smoothly soft for stitches (which is prepared by PEARY).
Instead, you go to the Nuk shopping center to buy a new jacket, which is what you did. It was very expensive (Al Jazeera prices), but it is still better than the hard look that I got from Korneliussen when we finally met and saw that I was wearing coherent clothes. However, I was not in risk of declining body temperature: the temperature while I was there was 10C summer.
Do not imagine that Greenland has become very tame. Nuk is the size of the small market town, and Wilderness presses once you reach its borders. Solid black volcanic rocks of shallow grass. There are no ways linking Greenland’s settlements: the terrain is very rugged.
The weather turned today to the house. This touch was and go to whether Iceland was able to take off at all: I think it was the last journey to leave Greenland for 48 hours. I sat at the airport, embraced myself in my new jacket, and I was impressed by how bad I was preparing to survive in an indifferent place of sin.
The lesson that the lesson should take from their disastrous mission is that Greenland does not care about human ambition and desires. Donald Trump’s attempt to capture it is just another episode in its disputed history. However, even today, you can not simply walk to the island and take it. So far, Greenlanders explained themselves that they will not welcome this new generation of American adventurers.
Sarah Ditom is a journalist and author of the book Pasta: Women, fame, and neopographies. You live in Bath.
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