I sipped an ice-cold Isbjørn Norwegian beer provided by University Centre in Svalbard–UNIS–in between rounds of geology trivia. A man in a purple wig asked questions about Arctic sedimentary deposition.
I was there visiting my younger brother, Fletcher, gleaning a portion of his unorthodox study abroad. I sat on a bench lined with his cohort. To my right was Meinert, a floppy brown-haired Dutch geology student in a chunky knit sweater; to my left, Stephen, a steely eyed Norwegian, cheeks flushed from spending the day outside dog sledding. Fletcher’s Icelandic friend, Kolbeinn, sat across from me.
“Call me Floky,” he said and smiled. The diamond stud in his right ear caught the overhead light, reflecting his pale blue eyes. “Fletcher told me about your project.”
I smiled. “What do you think?
“About what?”
“About the relationship between Greenland and Denmark?”
Floky laughed. “I can’t be a definite source because I’m four beers in, and I’m not Danish.”
“Whatever you say.” I pulled out my notebook from the fabric tote bag laying in my lap. “Is this okay?”
“Yeah, of course. Again, I’m four beers deep.” He shifted his weight, readjusted the tight camo long sleeve shirt clutching his body. “But I did study in Copenhagen, so I can tell you some things.”
Floky began to talk about his version of Greenland; sin-riddled, tainted by alcoholism and homelessness. He said he saw this Greenland–he’d never been to Greenland–clearly during his time in Denmark. “There’s one train station, Christianhavn. Any given day there are eight to twenty drunk Greenlanders there. It’s obvious which ones they are.”
“What do you mean?” I pressed.
“Hey, I’m four in,” Floky said. He held his hands up in surrender.
Floky knew about Denmark’s sterilization policy–when the Danish government placed 4,500 IUDs in Greenlandic girls and women without their consent or knowledge during the 1960s–“Definitely bad.” But he argued that Denmark used to own Iceland, too, until the country gained independence after World War Two. Now, he said, Iceland became richer with every war. The population is currently 380,000. “That’s with unhindered growth.” Sometimes, Floky thought, the Icelandic people prayed for another war.
He pulled up a Google Earth photo of his childhood home in Reykjavik. The house was white, large, tucked behind trees and nestled in a quaint neighborhood. It reminded me of suburban Salt Lake City, where I grew up. “See? Iceland is desirable and expansive.” I nodded.
Floky’s Greenland was “like Svalbard, but farther away.” Svalbard, the island currently encased by a blanket of twenty-four-hour darkness. Svalbard, population 2,000, the place that doesn’t require a visa, but does require a rifle, protection from the imminent threat of polar bears.
To Floky, Greenland was just as remote and desolate. “People say that without the IUDs the population would be 400,000. That’s outrageous.”
“Why do you think people don’t talk about the IUDs?” I asked.
Floky paused and pressed his tongue against his teeth. “The chance that people know about Greenland is slim. The chance that people know there are people living there is slimmer. The chance that people care about what happens to the people there...?” He interlaced his fingers and cupped his chin, his pale blue eyes pouring into mine. “Of course, people don’t care.”
A week later, I walked through the Nuuk town center. The street was coated in a thick layer of ice, thinly disguised by snow. I shuffled my feet to keep myself from slipping. I passed a cloudy eyed and silver-haired fisherman selling a hoard of skeletal dried salmon. Beside him, a hollow-boned woman offered a colorful array of knit wool hats and sweaters.
I walked beneath the glass-walled skybridge connecting the town mall, giving way to the tourist-shop littered main street. All I want for Christmas is you, Arrianna Grande belted through speakers. I marveled at the ice bergs floating in the ocean in the distance and wrapped my scarf tighter around my neck to shield from the biting cold. I felt a tug on the sleeve of my down jacket. I looked down. A little girl dressed in a blue one-piece snowsuit stared back at me. The pom-pom on her hat barely surpassed my hip.
“Come with me, come with me,” she insisted, little cold fingers clamping my wrist. She led me to two other girls, kneeling on a snow hill. One of the girls was intensely focused on aligning the three sections of a snowman’s body. The other waved her hand over a purple plush octopus key chain and a toy plastic iPhone. “Do you want, do you want?”
“Oh, I can’t take those,” I said. “Those belong to you.”
She shook her head and pointed to the price tag beside the toys. 100 kr, clearly written with a chubby finger in the snow. The snowman builder looked at me, as if to say this is a good price, limited edition offers, you won’t regret it.
“No seriously,” I said. “I can’t buy those.”
The little girl pouted. Beside her, the snowman builder crossed her arms.
“I’m sorry guys.” I put my hands on my knees, lowering myself to meet the three girls at eye level. “I do need some advice though. I’m new here in town. Where should I go?”
Six pairs of empty brown eyes stared back at me, blinking in unison.
I tried again. “Is there anything I should see?”
Silence.
I was suddenly aware that I’d overstayed my welcome. I’d failed. I was supposed to be the tourist who would buy their plush octopus.
“Okay,” I slowly backed away from them. “Bye guys, see you later!”
Nothing.
I continued my walk until I hit the ocean shoreline. From here, the icebergs were clear. I imagined a polar bear nestling himself against them. I thought about Fletcher in Svalbard, and the glaciers he’d been studying for the past four months. Once, over the phone, he told me about glacial isostatic adjustment, the process by which land rises after the weight of glaciers melts, rebounding, slowly, after thousand-year compressions.
In the distance, another trio of little girls ran towards the breaking waves, shrieking with delight when the cold water would brush over their shoes and lap against their shins. An enormous fifteen-foot statue of Hans Edge–the eighteenth-century Norwegian-Danish missionary–watched over them.