Sixty Degrees North

by Malachy Tallack

  Much earlier in the day, at five or six a.m., the rabble would have been prowling the streets, dragging tin cans on strings behind them, banging metal trays and yelling loudly outside the homes of their teachers. In Narsaq, further up the coast, I had seen (or at least heard) the same ritual, and wondered at first if some kind of early morning riot was unfolding. But this was an annual event, I was told. It was a ceremony, marking the end of one part of the children’s lives and their imminent entry into another. Most of them now would have to leave home, to complete high school in another town.

  As I walked out on the dirt track towards Quassik, the sounds of the street faded and the sounds of the mountain grew. Lapland buntings flung themselves into the air around me, then glided back to earth again, wings outstretched, singing as they fell. Among the low bushes, redpolls danced and darted, some stopping close by to watch me pass. The air shimmered with song. Beneath my feet, the lower slopes were thick with life: crowberry, dwarf willows, tiny white flowers among the rocks, plump beds of mosses and lichens. There was, everywhere, an anticipation of summer.

  It was warm as I began to climb the trail, and I soon took off my jacket, then my jumper. The walking wasn’t difficult, but after three days lying down I wasn’t feeling fit. It took an hour to gain the steep 300 metres to the top of the hill, and just a few more minutes from the first cairned summit to the highest point, topped by a pyramid of stones. The view was astonishing. To the north and east, snow-studded mountains rose abruptly from the fjords, all cluttered with ice. Peak after ragged peak stood whisped in haze and shadows. Behind me was the town, looking tiny and worn out, its colour drained by distance. Beyond it, to the south and west, was the straight line where the sea ice began, a carpet of white and blue and light, with only a few huge bergs protruding above the flat surface.

  I sat down on a rock just north of the peak and ate my lunch. There was only a hint of a breeze, and everything was close to silence. The far-off hum of a helicopter; the drone of a bluebottle nearby; an outboard motor, somewhere among the fjords. Besides these, the only sound was the whispering of air among the mountains, a kind of live white noise.

  I lay back with my head on the lichen crust of the rocks. The sun was only just breaking through now as the cloud slowly thickened, but it was still warm on my skin. I listened to the quiet and closed my eyes. There is great pleasure to be had in lying down outside. On a sun-drenched beach or a cold Shetland hillside, wrapped up warm or in shorts and a T-shirt, a doze in the open air is rarely a bad idea. Wild sleeping is as rejuvenating an activity as wild swimming, and it has the major benefit of being a lot less wet. I think my fondness for the activity – if you can call it an activity – in part explains why I am such a poor mountaineer. The lure of the summit is rarely strong enough to lead me further than a good view and a comfortable napping spot, and unless I can combine the two goals, such as here on Quassik, recumbency usually wins out. On this occasion, though, I didn’t sleep long. Almost as soon as I had closed my eyes, something changed. I felt a breeze on my face – a sudden gust from the north that failed to fall away – and the temperature dropped. Even with my eyes shut I could sense a darkening of the sky. So I decided to move.

  The walk back down the slope was easy and enjoyable, and the threatened downpour failed to materialise. I made my way into the village again, through the ramshackle streets of its eastern edge, but I was stopped by a loud voice calling. A man was beckoning me from his open window, Danish rock music pouring out from behind him. I couldn’t understand what the man was shouting, nor could I see the expression on his face, friendly or angry. But he stretched his arm in my direction and called me over, so I moved, somewhat reluctantly, towards him.

  ‘Dansk?’ he asked, when I was close enough to comprehend.

  ‘Nej, Engelsk,’ I responded, for simplicity’s sake.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he said slowly, in English.

  ‘From Scotland,’ I answered, a little more accurately this time.

  ‘Scotland, yes,’ he smiled. This was clearly a welcome answer, for the man immediately invited me in to his house, and sat me down opposite him by the window. An open can of beer stood between us on the table. ‘I am Thomas,’ he said, then elaborated. ‘Thomas Jefferson – you know? – the United States’ president. That was not me!’

  He laughed, then lapsed back into Danish, where he remained for the rest of the conversation. I tried my best to follow.

  He told me he was a pensioner, though he was only 57 years old. He used to be a sailor, working on the ferry between Esbjerg in Denmark and Harwich in England, but now he was retired. This was his house, he said, but he didn’t really live here; he lived with his mother. There was a photo of her on the wall, which he pointed out to me with pride. He lived with his mother, but he came to this house during the day to listen to music and to get drunk. In the summertime he went hunting and fishing in his boat, and sometimes he took tourists up the fjord. But for now, it seemed, the next can was as far as he was going.

  A big man, with a slight limp, and a face that smiled even when his mouth did not, Thomas was, I thought, somewhat shy, though alcohol had brought him confidence. His exuberance was not really talkativeness either, just enthusiasm for sharing a moment; and like many of the Greenlanders I met, his conversation was punctuated by long, silent gazes out of the window.

  Thomas was not the only person in town who spent his days with a beer in front of him. I was visited at the cabin on more than one occasion by men some considerable distance from sobriety. They were always polite and quiet, but still I was disconcerted by these uninvited guests. Alcoholism in Greenland, as in many Arctic communities, is a major problem among the native population. More recently, drug and solvent abuse have also become serious issues, along with a rise in teenage pregnancy and in health problems such as obesity. The reason, in part, is poverty, and a lack of education. But it goes deeper than that.

  In Narsaq, two weeks earlier, I had spoken to Bolethe Stenskov, a social worker and counsellor, who told me that the country was suffering from the problems of rapid social change. ‘We have moved from being hunters to modern life very quickly,’ she said. In just a few decades a massive cultural transition has been made, and it has not been an easy one. Low self-esteem is a particularly significant problem, she explained, especially among men, who find themselves without their traditional community status. Once they were hunters, providing for their family. Now it is much harder for them to find a role. Capitalism has introduced a new set of values to Inuit culture – a framework of indulgence – and while Western materialism has yet to be fully embraced, our compulsive consumption has been adopted in an altogether damaging way. Alcohol, drugs, tobacco, junk food: this is non-accumulative consumption. It is our own excess, translated into Greenlandic.

  Bolethe offers support, advice and information to those who need it, and despite her familiarity with the problems, she maintains a remarkably positive outlook. She sees her job as, unfortunately, a necessary one within this society. The damaging cycles of addiction, of abuse and ill-health, passed down between generations, cannot be broken without intervention. And key to that intervention, Bolethe believes, must be education, for both children and adults. Currently, many youngsters struggle in school. They struggle because their parents may be unable to help them, or unwilling to encourage them. They may have a Danish teacher, but may not have the necessary skills in that language to carry them along. There is, too, a shortage of positive role models among the adult population. These factors can easily lead to a lack of interest in education, and a failure to connect with the learning process. But if they are to find a meaningful place for themselves within society, as it exists today, they must make that connection.

  There is a paradox here, though, as there is in many traditional societies. For Greenlandic culture is deeply woven together with the idea of place, and the community is central within people’s lives. Yet with each step in the education process, and with each succ
essful progression, children are likely to find themselves drawn further and further away from their place and their community. At fifteen, they must leave home to complete high school elsewhere. Then, if they wish to go further, to college or university, they must go to Nuuk or to Copenhagen. These students must travel far from home, and that distance will not just be geographical. Almost as soon as they enter the education system, children are already leaving behind the traditional knowledge of their grandparents, and the higher they climb the greater that distance will become. Education promises choice and opportunities, but in return it asks for aspirations and ambition. These aspirations are rarely compatible with a small Greenlandic community; they are rarely compatible with a life that maintains a real connection to culture and tradition. There is much to be lost here – much that has already been lost elsewhere – and while education represents an opportunity, it also potentially poses a threat.

  When I put this to Bolethe, though, she disagreed. There is no contradiction, she told me. ‘We need to improve education and quality of life, but also retain our culture as hunting people.’ So how is that possible, I asked. How do you retain a culture that is, at its heart, at odds with the education system and with the economic system that education underpins? Bolethe smiled and looked out of the window. She lifted her hand and gestured out towards the harbour, the ice and the mountains across the fjord. The answer was simple, she said. ‘We have the nature; we have the landscape and the sea. There is our culture. It is with us.’

  I looked out and tried to muster the same confidence. I tried to persuade myself that Bolethe was correct. Here in Greenland, as elsewhere on the parallel, the landscape and climate continue to bring the same challenges they always have. The place continues to make demands upon the people. And while individuals might struggle to reshape themselves as society changed, perhaps the culture would still yield to those demands. I hoped it was so. I hoped that she was right.

  CANADA

  beside the rapids

  No other nation has worked as hard to understand, define and come to terms with the north as Canada. And no other nation, surely, has such an inconsistent relationship with that place, which it both contains and embodies. Canada is a northern country and sees itself as such, particularly in relation to the United States. Around forty percent of its landmass lies north of sixty degrees – a vast area, comparable in size to the entire European Union. And yet the country’s centre of balance is firmly in the south. The population – around 33 million in total – is concentrated along the southern border, and the most northerly city of more than half a million people is Edmonton, just above fifty-three degrees, the same latitude as Dublin. Only about 100,000 Canadians actually live above the sixtieth parallel – considerably fewer, in fact, than Americans.

  For most in Canada, then, the north remains alien, a neighbour but a stranger. Many dream of it, but few ever wake up there. It is a place read about in books, seen in films and on television, but rarely visited. Viewed from afar, the region is tangled in contradictions. North means danger and adventure, but it also means refuge. It offers possibility and fear, beauty and horror. It is almost empty of people and yet overflowing with their imaginings.

  But for those who do wish to know the north, and to see it for themselves, the first difficulty is getting there, for the north is nearly always beyond the horizon. I arrived in the country in Calgary, Alberta, and my destination was the town of Fort Smith, just inside the Northwest Territories. It was a twenty-four hour coach ride away.

  A cluster of tall buildings raised like an exclamation in the flat prairie, Calgary was bathed in summer heat that afternoon. As always, my fear of flying had left me unable to sleep while in the air, and the time change had made things worse. By eight p.m., when the Greyhound bus pulled out of the depot into the clean sunlight of the streets, it had been a very long time since I had last been asleep. We drove north from the city and into the broad plains beyond. In the west, clouds were piled like rubble above the Rocky Mountains, haze-drawn on the horizon. The bus was filled with chatter, but outside the soft light of the evening lay like a blanket of quiet upon the fields.

  Our first stop was Red Deer, shortly before ten p.m., just as the sun was setting. My head was cluttered with half-formed, exhausted thoughts, but I held myself awake, staring dazedly through the window. As we continued towards Edmonton an hour passed, but the memory of the sun lingered. Colours washed out, leaving behind a muted light; and as the sky softened to golden grey in the northwest, farmhouses dissolved into silhouettes – fat, black stains on the disappearing land.

  At Edmonton we changed buses. It was midnight, but the depot was still full of people. Many of the passengers had brought pillows and blankets with them, and as we drove on into the darkness, voices settled into silence. I bundled up my jacket, then wedged it between the seatback and the window. Closing my eyes, I tried to sleep.

  By the time we reached the town of Slave Lake at three a.m., a smear of white was in the northeast sky. Soon after, darkness began to lift again. Trees emerged from the night, close against the road, blocking the view beyond. An hour or so later the prairie returned, with fields stretched out in every direction. The farms were tidy – all straight lines and well-kept gardens, quaint wooden houses and giant grain silos. Even the old cars had been abandoned in neat rows, lined up, perhaps, in the order in which they stopped working. A few white-tailed deer grazed here and there, and once the driver blew his horn at a pair that strayed into the road. The deer were forced into a quick decision, the right decision.

  The journey north – in history, in literature, in the imagination – is a journey away from the centres of civilisation and culture, towards the unknown and the other. Margaret Atwood has written that, ‘Turning to … face the north, we enter our own unconscious. Always, in retrospect, the journey north has the quality of a dream’. Looking out through the tinted windows of the coach, my own journey felt dreamlike. But it was not my own dream. Rather, it was as though someone else’s unconscious were being projected against the glass. The honeyed light of the early morning, the procession of fields, farms, trees and towns, all seemed remote and unreal somehow. I felt disorientated and disconnected from the place outside. I observed but couldn’t engage. I let the morning wash over me, hour after hour.

  In 1964, the pianist Glenn Gould travelled on the Muskeg Express, a thousand-mile train journey lasting a day and two nights, from Winnipeg to Churchill, on the shores of Hudson Bay. It was his first northern journey, and on his return Gould made a radio programme about the trip. The Idea of North is not a documentary in any conventional sense; it is a collage of voices. Using interviews with a civil servant, a geographer, a nurse and a sociologist, all with experience of northern Canada, as well as a narrator of sorts called Wally Maclean, Gould created, to use his word, a ‘contrapuntal’ picture of the north. Like a choir of competing melodies, these voices rise, tumble and are lost. Ideas emerge then vanish again, as though glimpsed from a moving train. Sometimes they come through clearly, with only the gentle clunk and clatter of the tracks in the background; other times the sounds overlap, with voices jostling for the listener’s attention. Towards the programme’s end the last movement of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony begins, and soon it rears up above Maclean’s closing monologue, threatening to overwhelm his words, until at last there is only silence.

  Going north to me means going home, and every journey I take in this direction brings with it the feeling of return. Once that feeling was an unwelcome one, reminding me always of the times I made it when I didn’t wish to do so. But that has changed. It was two years after I was brought back to Shetland, aged sixteen and fatherless, that I found another way out, and another way forward. In that time, I suppose, I’d come to understand that, wherever I went from then on, Shetland would be the place to which I returned. I no longer had close family or friends elsewhere; I no longer had much to connect me with anywhere except the islands. My centre of gravity had shifted n
orth, and though I didn’t yet feel its pull, I knew that change had taken place.

  It was without a great deal of enthusiasm that I decided, eventually, to go to university. Others were going, and it made sense for me to go too. It was a logical escape route. But a handful of mediocre exam results from my last year at school were not enough to get me anywhere, and so I enrolled in night-classes and took more exams. Further mediocre results followed. In the end I managed to persuade one university to take me, based on the quantity rather than the quality of my grades, I suppose. And it was my good fortune that they did, because I enjoyed almost every moment of those four years, from arrival until graduation, and I thrived there in a way that I’d failed to do at school. It was during those years in Scotland that I began to look north when I thought of home, and even to feel relief at holiday times as the train took me back up the country, towards the ferry, and a night on the North Sea.

  It was a little after six a.m. when we descended into the Peace Valley. No one had spoken for three hours, though a few, like me, had sat awake throughout the night. In Peace River, dazed and dazzled, we had a break. Given ninety minutes in which to fill our stomachs and stretch our legs, I took a short walk through the centre of town, then went for coffee and breakfast in Rusty’s Diner. It was just me and the waitress. A pile of steaming pancakes arrived, doused with maple syrup, and I ate them greedily, enjoying every mouthful. I felt almost refreshed.

  When the time came to continue, only seven of us got back on the bus. It was raining heavily then, and we trundled into a changing landscape. Though we were still among the prairies, the agriculture was less intensive, the farms smaller, the roads less straight. Land space was shared about evenly between fields of cattle or fodder, and light, mostly deciduous woodland. In places, cows grazed among the trees.