The Best Travel Writing

by James O'Reilly

  At the harbor I had difficulty recognizing Jens: he had traded his white chef’s apron and poofy hat for blue overalls and a sweatshirt. He was probably in his mid-twenties, with shaggy black hair that spiked out as if surrounded by static electricity, and had slightly upturned lips that gave him a permanent smile. Jens introduced me to the others: a Dane, also named Jens, and another Inuit, his “very good friend” Ule, whose ski jacket, sunglasses, and knit cap made it look as though he was ready to hit the slopes.

  We slowly wound our way out of the harbor—passing small boats, commercial fishing trawlers, and an occasional stray iceberg—and once outside we picked up speed, whipping around icebergs like it was a high-speed video game. This felt like the motorcycle version of the guided iceberg tour that I’d taken last week.

  Jens didn’t slow as we approached an area of densely packed smaller ice floes, scattered like puzzle pieces across the water’s surface. He deftly maneuvered around most of them, but sometimes we’d hit the Greenland version of black ice—a refrigerator-sized berg floating invisibly beneath the surface—and it would scrape against the bottom with a kind of ominous grinding noise.

  I tried conversing with the Dane but over the roaring motor and wind we had to shout, so all I could gather was that he was living in Ilulissat and working “with electric,” which I assumed meant that he was an electrician. Eventually we settled into our own worlds, the Dane stroking his hunting rifle and occasionally aiming it out at nothing in particular, and Jens and Ule at the back, effortlessly standing tall, as if they were casually waiting in line for a coffee.

  After some time Jens cut the motor. We drifted quietly, eight eyes darting across the water and icebergs in a furtive search—though for what, I wasn’t exactly sure. I’d seen seals at zoos, and I’d come across a dead one in Iceland, the fat thing sprawled on the beach like an oversized football. Would the seals be sunbathing on ice floes or would they be frolicking in the water? Would they come close or would we have to sneak up stealthily from behind?

  The day continued in much the same way—motoring to a new spot, drifting, searching, giving up, moving on—and my eyes quickly fatigued from straining at the same empty expanse of water. The initial thrill had faded. Now, even the Dane looked bored; he was no longer caressing his rifle.

  Suddenly Ule pointed ahead: two black whales breached off in the distance, one after the other. “Minke whales,” said Jens excitedly, as we changed course and raced towards them.

  Surely they weren’t thinking of hunting whales with those rifles?

  “Where there’s whale, there are seals,” Jens yelled over the engine.

  A few moments later: “Get down!”

  I lowered my head. Pop! pop!

  But either I was too slow in “getting down” or my sprawling ponytail of dreadlocks had gotten in the way (my hairstyle occupies so much airspace that I’ve earned the moniker “Sideshow Bob”), because Jens told me that I’d prevented Ule from taking a shot. So we switched places: I moved to sit on a blue fuel jug near the back, and Ule took my place at the bow, next to the Dane. They were on high alert—guns positioned against their shoulders, fingers on the trigger—and scanned the sea in all directions.

  “Seals come up for water every five minutes,” Jens explained. “Sometimes more, sometimes less.”

  Minutes passed. Then, in the distance, something broke the water’s flat, glassy surface. At the first pop! I dive-bombed the floor like it was a war zone.

  “Don’t need to go that far,” Jens laughed.

  The next time I saw the seal’s head: it looked almost like a duck, bobbing in the water about eighty feet away. It bobbed up once (pop-pop-pop!) twice (pop-pop!), three times (pop! pop! pop!), and it was gone.

  I didn’t see how it was possible to shoot such a small, quick-moving target from such a great distance. Even if they succeeded, wouldn’t the seal sink?

  “Sometimes,” said Jens.

  Round Four: the seal didn’t pop up at all. Three minutes passed. Nothing. Five minutes, and we expanded our search radius, scouring the very distant waters for any sign of movement. Eight minutes and it seemed hopeless. Ten, still nothing. Fifteen. Twenty. The Dane traded his gun for a cigarette. Jens and Ule resorted to binoculars. Perhaps the seal held its breath for an extraordinarily long time. Or more likely, we hadn’t seen it surface.

  But the patch of water that we’d just stumbled upon seemed to be fertile seal territory, and we chased a few—or maybe the same ones—in a similar fashion. I learned to recognize the difference between a distant bird (a black blob that stays on the surface of the water) and a distant seal (a black blob that pokes its head out of the water a few times and disappears). Jens, on the other hand, could discern the seal’s age and body type just by briefly glimpsing its head: “Baby one,” he would say, or: “small but fat.”

  Seal hunting is a controversial topic that has received plenty of media attention, largely due to gory photographs of seals being clubbed to death, eagerly disseminated by organizations like PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). Although seals don’t inspire the same heartwarming oohs and ahhs as dolphins, they’re not too far off: seals, especially the furry white pups, are cute. The anti-seal hunting campaign got a huge boost in the late 1970s when actress Brigitte Bardot was photographed lying on some ice and cuddling with a baby harp seal. In one image, she is playfully—almost flirtatiously—caressing the area near its cheek.

  In 2009, a parade of celebrities and wannabe celebrities—Pamela Anderson, Kelly Osbourne, Perez Hilton, and a slew of reality television stars—adopted it as the latest Hollywood cause du jour. In a sleek marketing campaign, they wore hipster “Save the Seal” t-shirts (in the case of Pamela Anderson, that’s all she wore) that featured line drawings of innocent, helpless-looking seals. Bardot was back, blogging about the “sinister slaughter” on the PETA website. She wrote that “the gruesome bloodshed has only one purpose: to fuel the fur trade!” and vowed to boycott Canadian maple syrup until the government agreed to ban seal hunting “forever.”

  Aside from Bardot, who appears to be plainly misinformed, it’s unclear if the celebrities have read up on the facts. If they had, they might have learned that up until recently, the Inuit relied on seals for heat and light (blubber was used for lamp oil), clothing and upholstery (seal skin), utensils (seal bone), jewelry and religious objects (seal teeth and claws), and food, both for themselves and their sled dogs. In older times, Inuit men would set out in a qajaq, a long, slender wooden boat covered with seal skins and designed to move quickly in the water. The men would harpoon the seals, and the women, who often followed in a wider boat called an umiaq, would load up the day’s catches.

  In modern-day Ilulissat I saw a strange mix of old and new: some people have desk jobs but go seal hunting after work or on the weekends, using outboard motor fishing boats and rifles instead of qajaks and harpoons. One woman I met—who nearly hyperventilated when she learned I was from New York, because it is the site of her favorite television show, Sex and the City—seemed just as excited about her recent seal hunting trip as she was about the green designer handbag she had just purchased in Copenhagen. And although there are two large supermarkets and several clothing stores, people still eat seal and many still use the skin for coats, gloves and furniture.

  When Jens finally shot and hit the first seal, things moved fast.

  Jens dropped his gun. Ule gunned the motor and we lurched forward. Jens retrieved a wooden pole with a hook at one end and leaned over the side. He kept his gaze on the water but guided Ule with his fingers, like a baseball catcher calling pitches. Just before we collided head-on with the seal—its black body floating in billowing pools of blood, its skin shiny in the glint of the sun—the boat veered sharply to the right and Jens deftly hooked the seal.

  The whole thing, from shot to hook, lasted no more than several seconds. Like a well-choreographed dance, it was an impressive display of movement synchrony, clearly a result of many hou
rs, days, and probably years of hunting together.

  Together, Ule and Jens reached down and grabbed the seal by its hind flippers and with considerable exertion, hauled it out of the water. They slung it over the side of the boat like a piece of wet laundry, so that its bulbous head dangled over the water and the hind flippers rested inside the boat. A steady trickle of blood drained from its head to the sea.

  “Ringed seal,” Jens proclaimed.

  I couldn’t stop gaping at this creature, splayed out beside me at the back of the boat: its glassy eyes, its surprisingly long whiskers that skimmed the water’s edge, and its stubby fins, with five finger-like segments, each containing an elegantly curved black claw that reminded me of a well-manicured fingernail. I touched its fur, which was dark gray with black spots—the spots are the “rings” that give it its name—and it felt like a soft, wet carpet. As we moved forward, I was mesmerized by the way the wake battered the seal’s lifeless head, slapping it back and forth against the boat’s hull.

  Back on the hunt. The adrenaline subsided and I remembered how badly I had to pee. I crossed my legs and rocked back and forth. I focused all of my physical and mental energy on not pissing my pants. It became a song in my head: I have to pee, I have to pee. Oh God, I have to pee.

  Jens must have noticed my discomfort. “You have to pee?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll find you some ice,” he said.

  Ice?

  I thought of a conversation I’d had earlier that week, with a young Hungarian who’d been teaching English in a nearby fishing village. “The iceberg is finely balanced,” he said. “One touch, one tip”—and here he stabbed the air with his forefinger like he was pushing a piece of a Jenga puzzle—“and the whole thing comes crashing down.”

  Yes. Icebergs were meant to be looked at. Not stood on. On the official iceberg tour, the guide had explained that huge chunks of ice often broke off the icebergs—a phenomenon known as calving—and caused waves large enough to topple a boat. For that reason we’d kept our distance from the bergs. Today I’d heard the thunderous sound of calving at least a dozen times (it echoed through the bay) and had witnessed a truck-sized chunk of ice crumble like fine powder and crash into the sea. Even land was not completely safe. A sign on the shore near Ilulissat read: EXTREME DANGER! Do not walk on the beach. Death or serious injury might occur. Risk of sudden tsunami waves, caused by calving icebergs.

  I tried to imagine the logistics of my imminent iceberg piss, which quickly turned into me picturing the logistics of dying a very awkward death. It was like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, with divergent paths all leading to the same unpleasant ending. I tortured myself like this for some time. In the end I gave up, the way one does on those treacherous mountain bus rides in South America where a peek out the window reveals a straight drop over an impossibly steep cliff gorge. At some point you need to ask yourself: Are you going to get off the bus? If not, then accept your fate. If it’s your time, it’s your time. Anyway, it wouldn’t be such a bad way to go, on an iceberg.

  Is there anything more beautiful than icebergs? While mountains may have particularly sharp peaks or ridgelines scoured with hints of the past, a mountain’s peak never crests like a wave, and a wave, though elegant and graceful, can never display the wrinkles and creases imprinted by years of geology. Not so with icebergs. Each berg is a structural marvel, abstract art on a colossal scale, a wholly unpredictable mixture of edges, fine lines, of stalactites and stalagmites, of Arabic archways and New York City high-rises, of domes, of lattices, of hills, of overhangs and undercuts, of caves and cavities, pillars and pyramids, of improbable balancing acts, of ridges and topographic lines, of peaks and dunes. Icebergs inspire a childlike sense of wonder; drifting through an iceberg-littered sea is like wandering through the most spectacular natural sculpture park on earth.

  The icebergs are Ilulissat’s claim to fame. The town sits near the edge of the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier, a slow-moving river of ice that runs from Greenland’s interior ice cap out to the Arctic Ocean, depositing gargantuan icebergs in the bay surrounding Ilulissat. Sermeq Kujalleq is the largest glacier outside of Antarctica and the fastest glacier in the world. According to the Ilulissat Icefjord website, the glacier produces 46 cubic kilometers of ice each year, which if melted, would be equal to the USA’s entire annual water consumption. The largest icebergs calved by the glacier are 1.5 cubic kilometers—equivalent to thirty football fields covered by a layer of ice as high as Mount Everest. After being calved, the icebergs journey south, often reaching latitudes on par with that of New York before they melt. The infamous iceberg that struck the Titanic is thought by most scientists to have originated in Greenland.

  Ilulissat is the heart of Greenland’s fledgling tourist industry, and it attracts a grab-bag mix of foreigners: elderly Danes who come on weeklong package tours, kayakers who come on organized trips, the ubiquitous German tour group, young Danes like Ivalo who come for seasonal work in the tourist industry, and other Danes who come for the same reasons mainland Americans move to Alaska—in search of solitude on an isolated frontier. My favorite foreigners, the middle-aged men who had served in the Canadian equivalent of the Navy SEALs, were living in Ilulissat and providing search and rescue services to an offshore oil rig. (Greenland has almost zero natural resources; finding oil would be like striking gold.)

  One of the guys, Mike, seemed to have an endless inventory of stories about plane crashes, rescue dives, and helicopter missions. Before the hunting trip I had asked him what happens if you fall in the Arctic Ocean.

  “You die.”

  “So why doesn’t anyone wear life jackets?”

  He explained that in the Arctic, both here and in Canada, the Inuit fishing communities accept that a few people will die each year. Wearing flotation devices would not only be unwieldy, but in many cases—such as those where the fishermen sail solo—they would “increase the time it takes you to die.” The life jacket would keep you conscious for a bit longer, so that you could contemplate your fate as you slowly succumbed to hypothermia.

  There were certainly no life jackets or flotation devices on this boat. As we headed towards “ice,” I leaned over and dipped my fingers in the ocean, testing the temperature of my bath water. It was cool, but not as cold as say, dipping your hand in an ice bucket.

  I spotted ice floes the size of surfboards: perhaps this was the ice Jens had been referring to? Maybe they would extend a piece of rope and I would surf-pee a floe. Even if I did fall in, they could haul me out pretty quickly: Jens was pretty handy with that wooden hook.

  I must have been staring, because Ule pointed to a floe and shook his head, as if to say: Don’t worry. That’s not your bathroom. He put on his jacket, which I now noticed was emblazoned with the words “Qajak Ilulissat.” He told me, in broken English, that there has been a recent movement to revive the qajak: mostly for sport, but also for reasons of national pride and cultural preservation. He was a member of the Ilulissat team and his girlfriend was Greenland’s female qajak champion.

  Suddenly he stood up and pointed: a seal. This one came unusually close and surfaced for an unusually long period of time, like it had a death wish. He exchanged some words with Jens, who turned to me. “We get this one, O.K.?” Jens said. “One seal for my family, one for his.”

  What could I say? Each seal could feed their families for at least several days. “Sure. But afterwards: bathroom, please!”

  That seal turned out to be a difficult target, as we were now in a more crowded iceberg area and it kept slipping behind the bergs. It was like playing a grown-up version of hide-and-seek, with rifles and seals and icebergs. I trained my eyes desperately on the water, trying to spot the seal—anything to speed this up.

  Finally, Ule shot the seal and we sped over. But by the time we arrived the seal had sunk below the reach of the hook. Jens tried to point out the sinking body. “See it? See it?” he kept asking, but all I could see was blood swirling into the blac
kish depths.

  Back on track: to the bathroom. Eventually we approached an unusual iceberg: a flat island with multiple mounds of dirty snow that reminded me of New York City streets in January. This was the ugly duckling of icebergs. Ule cut the engine, and as we drifted towards it, I realized that this was my bathroom.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all. The edge of the berg jutted out over the boat, forming a natural pier, and Jens hopped from boat to berg with ease. He extended a hand towards me, but I didn’t need it: the ice provided such a perfect step that I, too, stepped off with ease.

  On the berg the snow crunched beneath my sneakers. It was odd how normal this felt: the snow was like regular packed snow and the iceberg felt completely stable, as though we had disembarked on any old island. Hurriedly—both out of fear of this thing turning over, and because I didn’t want to deprive them of more seals—I squatted, and let loose one of the longest streams of piss of my life. As my bladder emptied, the fear and apprehension of the previous hours were replaced with a kind of wild elation: I had just made the coolest pit stop ever.

  Post iceberg-piss, the seal bonanza continued. My seal-spotting skills improved. When the others scanned the waters in front of the boat, I’d scan the back. “There!” I’d say, pointing at a bobbing head that they would have missed. They shot a third and fourth seal, but by the time we arrived they’d sunk. They hauled the fifth seal onto the boat. It was still alive. Jens held the wooden pole high over his head with two hands, paused, and then delivered a powerful blow that caused blood to spurt straight from its head.

  Once we had those two seals the pressure was off. Jens and Ule spoke more freely, chatting in Greenlandic, a guttural language of “k” and “g” sounds. Jens even let me try his rifle. It was heavier than I expected, and I found it impossible to keep it steady on the undulating boat. Eventually I managed to hold a seal’s head in the viewfinder—for a split second—and pressed the trigger. I imagine I didn’t come close: Jens politely requested his rifle back.