Photographic reproduction and mass tourism are now commonplace and diminish a family of qualities broader than, though including, our experience of art: aura is affected, but so is wildness, spirit, enchantment, the sacred, holiness, magic, and soul.
Jack Turner – The Abstract Wild
Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone.
Gaston Bachelard – The Poetics of Space
Glacier, iceberg, fjord - perhaps the most common images that capture the lure of the Arctic. Is this what drew me to sign up for the trek in Greenland? Travel advertisers make the most of these emblems, tags, and when we travel, we follow suit and photograph precisely these iconic features - what we expect to see in the Arctic, what we believe our viewers want us to show as evidence we were there.
Are these images ultimately a fantasy, like the popular image associated with the word “island”, of a lush tropical paradise with palm trees and long sandy beaches? The southern Caribbean island where I grew up is arid, a rocky desert island, with small, intimate coves, not always sandy. There certainly is more to the poetic image of ‘island’ as a lived experience – perhaps closer to what it means to be both self-sufficient and cut-off from the world.
Similarly, the desert holds that mystique for many, but the image of the desert often consists of sand dunes with camel caravans casting long shadows at sunset. In contrast, the deserts here in Israel, where I have lived for almost 50 years, as well as the deserts where I trekked in the Sinai and Jordan, are stony, with craggy canyons and steep cliff walls. Do they still have the same appeal?
Was my image of glaciers and icebergs shallow and stereotyped, determined by some commercialized picture of the arctic? Would I be able to return with photographs that reflect a more complex reality, beyond the picture postcard?
The actual landscape that struck me as we landed in the little town of Kulusuk, on the island of the same name, was marked by rugged mountains, partially covered with snow. Even though I had seen photos of the region, including those taken by a friend who had done the same trek just two weeks prior to ours, my mind did not take note of these mountains. Perhaps my vision was determined by the predictable image of glaciers and icebergs.
These are steep mountains with sharp ridges and peaks. One would not expect such sharp edges from the oldest massif on earth – erosion would have molded them into gentler, more rounded rock faces. As, over the ages, more of the earth became exposed from underneath the Greenland icecap, the glaciers continued their carving of the deep valleys, sharpening the mountaintops.
To see the mountains from the airplane excites me – the thought that we will be walking in a rough, wild landscape that few have explored. But they also frighten me, those bare mountains that dip steeply into the fjords – it does not seem there is any shore left to walk along, and we will have to climb high on their scree slopes, which with my lingering fear of heights, is not an encouraging prospect.
As we begin our trek, I am relieved to see there is a strip of tundra at the foot of the mountains, on our side of the fjord where the slopes are gentler and formed by a different kind of rock. For the first three days, we walk along the shores, near icebergs left behind by the tides, through mossy tundra slopes with small, wild flowers and lichen, over sandbanks and crossing icy mountain streams closer to the sea, where they are wide, but also shallower and calmer.
All the while, I ask myself, is this a wilderness? Is this the wilderness that I sought, that we were promised by the organizers of the trek? It is that sense of total wilderness that excited me about the idea of going to Greenland, to a place where few foreigners visit, let alone go on a camping trek. In this boat-supported trek, the Inuit fishing boats hired by our trekking company pick up our bags with our camping equipment and drop them off at our next campsite. Today these fishing boats are equipped with outboard motors and satellite radio communication, and we can call them to pick us up whenever we want. Is that wilderness?
There is the remoteness of East Greenland, known as Tunu - the backwaters. Even in Greenland, with its icecap covering 80 percent of its territory and only 56,000 inhabitants, the East is a forgotten area with five tiny, isolated Inuit communities, counting no more than 3000 souls, who speak their own language. There is only a minimal tourist infrastructure and one daily passenger flight from Reykjavik that cannot land on the little airstrip in Kulusuk in heavy mist. In fact, our flight was canceled for three consecutive days because of weather conditions. Just as we were about to give up and trek in Iceland instead, our plane was finally allowed to take off. This means that rescue, in case of serious injury, with no hospitals or adequate medical services in Kulusuk, can take several days.
True, this is a landscape with few marks of human presence. There are no marked trails, not even footpaths, as the local Inuit do not move around by foot. They travel by boat in summer or dogsled in winter on the frozen fjords. With no trodden paths, we have to check out the earth where we set our foot, watch where the person before us has stepped and judge if it was the best move.
Polar bears, looking for food, have attacked campgrounds in the past, we are warned, and so we all have to alternate keeping watch at night. Should a bear approach our camp, we have to make a lot of noise and wake up our two guides, who each carry a large rifle throughout the trek. I wonder what happens if you kill a bear in self-defense, in a place where polar bears are protected. The Inuit of East Greenland, for whom hunting and fishing is still their main source of living, are allowed to hunt only 25 bears a year, and only male animals.
On my turn on the nightly bear-watch, I look out far into the dark waters of the fjord with its icebergs drifting by, both fearful a bear should come ashore, but at the same time fervently hoping I will be the one to spot the elusive white animal. Perhaps it is there, aware of my presence, like the snow leopard in Peter Matthiesen’s eponymous book recounting his trek in the Himalayan mountains, where he senses the leopard eying him, but he is never blessed with its sight. Our guide’s dog Nanuk- meaning polar bear - with the same white coat, will have to substitute as a model for our iconic pictures of the arctic.
on bear watch - photo taken at 5 am
Nanuk
Wilderness or not, still, there is something that starts to grow on you. It is not the drama of the images such as iceberg and fjord, but rather the immersion in the landscape. It is the difference between a sightseeing trip and a trek. The trek is a journey where you live day to day; follow the routine of walking, resting, of setting up tents, eating and sleeping, and of sitting on the polar bear watch. It is time as duration, undivided into hours, an occasion to see, deeply, to meditate.
It is the change of light - the low sun, peeking occasionally through the mostly cloudy skies, lighting up an iceberg, a mountain peak. It is almost a midnight sun that sets at 11 pm, painting the skies red. It never gets fully dark - in the blue night you do not see the stars. Then the sun rises again at 3.00 am in all its glory. This I see, and photograph, on my bear watch, or when I wake up in the night and sit for a while on a rock outside my tent.
It is, especially, the ebb and flow, that you follow by the hour as the sea withdraws, exposing a wide expanse of sand and mud, with branching rivulets running through, like delicate drawings; with beds of seaweed, and a lone, abandoned iceberg. And then the waters return in tender waves that increase in force, each time reaching a little further ashore. All this, you do not experience if you are just passing by in a sightseeing boat.
On the third day, after crossing the sandy delta of a mountain stream, the tundra gives way to a beach strewn with large stones, rocks from the core of the earth that have been polished, rounded by wind and sea. It is not easy balancing on these stones, hopping from one perch to another.
I realize we are now rounding a cape, a headland that leads to the bay where our next camp will be. Rounding a cape builds up an expectation – of something beyond the bend, something new, different. At what point does the view open up? But no, our cape keeps rounding out more and more, and we do not even glimpse the next bay. Until we reach a high cliff that marks the end of our stony beach and will have to climb a scree slope that looks scary. Many of us are tired of a long day on difficult terrain, not only on the loose stones, but also on the tundra slopes, where we have to forge a path on ground that is never level – a good exercise for the muscles of our feet, but exhausting nonetheless. Our guides decide to call the boat to take us to our campsite – at a lovely bay with striking rock formations – depriving us of the experience of rounding the cape.
As if to make up for the loss, the next day brings us the crossing of a pass - another poetic image arousing deep associations. We finally leave the coast and go inland, walking up the stream that brought fresh water to our camp, and then begin to climb the steep side of the U-shaped valley carved out by a glacier long ago. As we make our way through slanted tundra slopes and snowfields, we approach the top and then, wow – the view suddenly opens up and we face the aquamarine waters of a fjord with an enormous glacier at its head.
The excitement of a pass lies in the sudden view of what was not visible before, a reward, after the strenuous effort of climbing. Compared to the visual images of iceberg, fjord, glacier, the image of the pass is more experiential, even existential – it is crossing a threshold, it is going physically from one realm into another – and something happens to our inner selves when we do. As an image, the pass can arouse memories of other times we have crossed a pass, but it also touches on something beyond our memories of similar places. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard connects the poetic image to ‘archetypes lying dormant in the depths of the unconscious.’
Great images have both a history and a prehistory; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly. Indeed, every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which the personal past adds special color. Consequently, it is not until late in life that we really revere an image, when we discover its roots plunge well beyond the history that is fixed in our memories. (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space)
Bachelard goes on to examine poetic images of the house – attic, cellar, tower, nooks and crannies. Writing about my hiking and trekking experience in the desert, I have expanded on these images to include phenomena in nature - canyon, gorge, cave, underground waters, summit, cliff, precipice, the plains. Crossing a desert, a continent (or for that matter, the icecap of Greenland), circumambulating a mountain massif or a body of water - these are acts that through movements of the body, evoke the spirit, arouse primal recollections.
The next two nights, we camp on a beach at a magnificent fjord. In addition to the large glacier that burst into sight on that windy pass, four other glaciers flow into the Sermiligaq fjord that forms a secluded bay near our campsite – it feels like the most beautiful, most serene place on earth. How fortunate we are to be here, what a privilege. And just now, the sun comes out and the skies finally turn blue. Sitting at the shores of this fjord, I look at the mountains around me. They are only 1200 -1500 meters high in this part of Greenland, but because of the arctic latitude, they are covered in snow and ice. If these tranquil fjord-waters were an alpine lake, I can imagine these mountains to be 4000-5000 meters in elevation.
It is hard to believe that this magical, hidden corner of the world harbors the clearest material evidence of global warming. Here, we can sense it with our bodies, in our very physical being. On our map that was charted about forty years ago, our quiet beach does not exist – it lies buried under the mighty Kårale Glacier. This glacier has since retreated so far, that not only the bay with our lovely campsite is created, but the former tributaries no longer feed the main glacier, instead flow directly into the fjord, becoming separate glaciers in their own right.
The following morning we walk along the ebbing shoreline towards the glaciers, then turn inland to climb a hill, a little lower and less rugged than the snowy mountains around us, but rising right above the edge of the fifth glacier that was hidden from view before. Reaching the top of the hill, the summit – another poetic image – allows you to suddenly see what you do not see from below. Here, it is the fifth glacier and the great distances into a world of ice and rock, where the imagination travels to where the glaciers are formed, beyond the bend, beyond these mountains. And on the other end of the flat summit, is the fjord, shining now in sunlight, and a view of the other "young" glaciers as they reach the water. It is a moment of silence to confront this landscape and each of us finds their own perch to take in the view.
If we thought this was the climax of the trek, the next day brings us an even closer encounter with a glacier - the largest of the five, named after the arctic explorer and collector of Inuit folktales, Knud Rassmussen. One of the Inuit fishing boats takes us across the fjord, fording its way through the dense ice floes as we near the glacier, dropping us off at the shore, still quite a distance away from the glacier’s head. We start to walk towards the glacier, feeling its grandeur, seventy meters above the water, coming closer and closer.
On a raised rock platform not far from the glacier, we sit and watch. The water below the great wall of ice is like a deep blue, sometimes an emerald green mirror, as if it is covered by a thin sheet of ice, or is it just the tiny particles of ice that give that reflective surface of total stillness. Icebergs of every size float out of the bay into the fjord.
Every so often, the silence is broken by a thundering roar, like dynamited destruction, like the drop of a bomb. We look up every time, we have to look up, stop our conversations, to see where a chunk of the ice drops into the water, leaving behind a blue-green wound in the ice face. Then splashes of water, or is it ice, rise like dust after an explosion, while slowly the ripples in the fjord expand and expand, becoming waves that can endanger boats that come too close.
This is my lived experience of the arctic. It has more to do with the visceral than the visual, the actual confrontation with the glaciers, to hear them calving – an unusual connotation in that word of giving birth to little, or larger, icebergs. To be near, to see how they change in the light of the day. It is the big difference between a sightseeing trip and a trek of immersion in the landscape.
It is the extremes of the earth that speak to me – the desert, the high mountains, the arctic. Perhaps it is here I can see the forces of nature at work, the exposed surface of the earth, with its strata, its ravages and fissures, the thunder of its calving glaciers.
Even more so, these are places enabling the confrontation with immensity - an immensity that resonates with the immensity within. An intimate immensity. Places that fill you with awe, places that are numinous – where a godly presence reigns. Where the lofty words in the epigraph above far from exaggerated: aura, wildness, spirit, enchantment, the sacred, holiness, magic, and soul.
for more photographs from this trek see:
https://ritamendes-flohr.smugmug.com/EASTERN-GREENLAND-A-SIX-DAY-TREK