A Wilder Time. William E. Glassley
if I would be interested in joining him and John in new work there. It would be a chance to expand our earlier work into areas we had not been able to explore before because of budget and time constraints. In passing, he also mentioned that there was some controversy about the earlier interpretations he and others had made about the significance of the zone of intense deformation; resolving that controversy would also be part of the effort.
Although I was not directly involved in research in Greenland at that time, I followed the research that was published, simply out of personal interest. I was aware of a few papers that had appeared that presented interpretations of the history that were inconsistent with what I had learned from Kai and John and some of their colleagues, but I had dismissed them. I had assumed those papers were simply offering options for consideration and had not been taken very seriously by the research community. I had no idea that a deeper personal conflict was hidden behind the scenes.
Craving a return to Greenland, and to work closely again with John and Kai, I jumped at the chance to join their expedition. For years, I had been quietly nagged by memories of unanswered questions in the work we had pursued.
Standing at the rail of the boat, watching the skerries float by, I could not have anticipated that we were on the first leg of a journey that would carry us more than fifteen years into the future.
WHEN WE REACHED THE SITE of our planned base camp, the skipper pulled the trawler into a cove and we off-loaded the gear, using a small skiff. It took several trips, but within thirty minutes all the supplies were stacked at the foot of a small bluff on the beach. When we were finished, we shook hands with the mate and the skipper and said our good-byes.
Our campsite sat on a narrow, ragged bench that ran along a stretch of the northern coast of Arfersiorfik Fjord. We were ten miles west of the inland ice cap, sixty miles from the nearest Inuit settlement, and far enough above the Arctic Circle that the sun would not set for weeks.
A chill evening breeze blew. I turned up the collar of my parka, jammed my hands into its pockets, and climbed the small bluff up to the bench to watch the trawler sail off. As the blue-hulled boat headed away, back to civilization, a bittersweet melancholy drifted over me. Our last concrete connection to the modern world was that boat, and in the churning of its prop wash, that connection was dissolving.
We were in a landscape of long, rolling outcrops, tundra plains and pockets, massive rock walls and glaciated peaks. The setting had the feel of a flooded Yosemite Valley: dramatic, austere, and beautiful. Small waves splashed along the cobbled shore, becoming a cadenced auditory backdrop.
Vaguely remembered serene experiences, filtered through years of longing to return, now confronted reality. The crystalline fjord water was bitterly cold; the rhythmic wash of water over stones made for lethally slick algal slimes; the beauty of the wild world was empty of affection. A lonely solitude blanketed the land as completely as the late-afternoon clouds covered the sky.
I walked from the bluff over to the rocky beach where we had piled our supplies and joined John and Kai, who were carrying food boxes, an emergency radio, tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, hammers, sample bags, and notebooks—the minimal necessities for our four-week expedition. John and Kai, in their inimitable way, had organized where each type of supply should be stacked, and how. In this wild place, some order was being imposed.
Kai was the anointed cook. His sturdy, rounded self spoke of a joyful respect for good food. He smiled often, and joked about how well we would eat as he strategically placed bags of onions and potatoes next to the cooking gear. Every food box was opened, its contents quickly evaluated, and a decision made about where it should be placed relative to the stove. Each of us enjoyed cooking, but for Kai it was integral to his spirit. Allowing him the privilege of cooking for us served us all well.
Much of our work would focus on rocks along the shore, where tidal scour had exposed, in cleanly washed surfaces, the patterns and minerals we had come to study. Such work required a Zodiac—an outboard-powered inflatable boat that could easily land on rocky beaches. John, the dedicated mechanic among us, unhesitatingly took on the role of Zodiac “captain.” His beard, already growing into a grizzled stubble of gray and black, and his thinly lined face made him look the part. Taller than Kai and I, with a slightly gruff demeanor and dry humor, and a face vaguely reminiscent of the silent movie star John Gilbert, John projected an authority he embraced but did not demand. Invariably, he wore a blue baseball cap, which covered his very bald head, and a red anorak. Unlike Kai, whose strong Danish accent made it obvious where he was from, John had a deep voice that reflected the years he had lived in Canada, his accent attesting to a confusion of cultures. As I joined the two of them to organize our gear, John pointed to where each box should go.
Home was now a bench of tundra-covered rock a quarter of a mile long and two hundred feet wide, abutting a west-running ridge that disappeared under the ice. The late-afternoon Arctic sun was in descent toward the western horizon, struggling to warm the world cast in the shadows of a thick cloud cover and dusky light.
The permanent daylight was a liberation. Although the body’s diurnal clocks are at first confused, and anxiety about whether or not sleep will be possible jangles nerves, an unexpected calm eventually settles in. The dictatorship of night’s blackness, which constrains movement and limits sight, is banished. Clocks and time of day become unnecessary burdens. The freedom of timelessness seeps into life. We got used to taking strolls along beaches at two in the morning, with billowing globes of clouds backlit by the sun reflecting off of glassy fjord surfaces. Watching prowling Arctic foxes stealthily search for sustenance in the spongy tundra at midnight, clearly visible in the pale light, would become addictive.
AFTER UNPACKING, WE TOOK A BREAK FOR COFFEE. Kai put a pot of water over a hissing Primus set up on a flat stone. As we stood around waiting for the water to boil, red plastic mugs with a spoonful of instant Nescafé in our hands, we mused about our abrupt change in circumstances. Just twenty-four hours earlier, we had been in Copenhagen, one of the world’s most sophisticated cities, where John met us at the airport for the flight to Greenland. Shortly before meeting John, I had been sipping cappuccino at a sidewalk café and enjoying the bustle of tourists along the quay in Nyhavn. I had flown in from San Francisco a few days before to help Kai finalize the logistics for the trip. Now, isolated from the rest of the world, removed from everything a “normal” day would bring, the meaning of normal became ambiguous. We were at the beginning of days of discovery, of seeing things never before seen. Excitement was implicit in every comment and laugh. The water finally boiled and Kai poured it into our cups, the smell of the instant coffee pungently punctuating the Arctic air.
But there was also an undercurrent of tension.
“It is nice to be back.” Kai sighed as he looked across the fjord. His ruddy face glistened from the afternoon’s efforts. A thin smile on John’s face acknowledged the passing of decades. He was looking off in the same direction as Kai. I nodded, and uttered a slight “Hmm.”
Across the fjord, nearly five miles away, a small ice field glowed white against the grayish greens and reddish browns of the tundra it rested on. We absentmindedly watched it as we mused about plans and what we might find. Eventually, Kai’s comments turned to the controversy that had briefly been mentioned long before. He glanced down at the plant-covered ground and slowly ran a boot across it. He spoke with strong emotions about published interpretations of the geological history that conflicted with years of work and the field observations of two generations of researchers. He quickly alluded to the fact that those new conclusions were based on a single season in the field, and lacked the in-depth direct scrutiny earlier studies had benefited from. It was our task, he said, to break new ground, with more detailed attention given to specific locations and features that might resolve what was clearly a conflicted set of hypotheses.
I asked what papers he was talking about. Although I knew there was some disagreement about details of the geology—it is a science, after all, and debates keep things honest—there wasn’t any specific paper I could recall that justified this attention.
John said that he had the papers with him and that he would bring them out later, his baritone voice taking on a serious tone. Then, breaking into a smile, he swept his hand across the scene in front of us.