It was cold in the Thule they had hammered to the ice-shore. A coldness that made me sneeze and cough even as I walked a few paces along the beach. Rasmussen lurked behind the evening, a bemused presence, wondering what had happened to his settlement. He had known the Inuit, he had lived with them, written about them; he had called them the Thule people. These people of the remote north had been his inhabitants of Thule, a non-European people, with nothing to do with the Germanic tribes. Now the Thule Inuit were trapped in this semi-civilization, in a town they couldn’t entirely understand. When I walked along the street, asking for directions, they stopped and smiled and tried to help. At night the local drunks came out in strength, weaving between the dogs and the rubbish. Through the mist haze I saw them moving along the beach; some were lugging boxes and bags, others tripped as they walked. There was an Inuit man standing on the shore, holding a guitar. He was tall, with fine features and dark eyes, wearing black trousers and a blue hooded top. It seemed a piece of curious defiance as he sang to the twilight. The multi-coloured rubble rocks loomed behind the town: shadows against the pale sky.
He was singing about the mountain by old Thule, where the Inuit had buried their dead. It was a lament, soft in the stillness. As he played the locals began to sing along, a strange chorus, lifting their voices to the ice-plain. A steady droning of male and female voices, with a few more Inuit coming to join the choir, huddled in their coats. It had a curious effect on my frozen senses—the soprano female voices, the men singing the bass lines, everyone shivering slightly on the beach, the lights of the town glinting up the rubble coast. It was crazy and moving, this faint sound of voices, in this village in the wilderness.
‘What do you think?’ I asked a local, who was listing slightly. ‘It was our home,’ he said. ‘We feel shame, as if we have been weak.’ The Greenlander stood on the beach, among the debris of the shore, the bust-up crates, and the dogs lying like rocks. ‘It is very hard here,’ he said, suddenly, eagerly. ‘We have no money.’
None of them knew anything about a recent treaty which said they could visit Thule Mountain and return to Thule after a few years. None of them thought it would help. It was too difficult to get to their former settlement, they said; they hadn’t the money. And they couldn’t believe something as abstract as a treaty; it hardly registered as a reality. One of them shrugged. ‘Probably it won’t happen. No one will make us houses there. It would cost too much to go there. We can visit, like visitors in our old settlement. But that’s not what we want. Recently we celebrated the founding of new Thule,’ he said. ‘But it was no celebration. There was singing, dancing,’ he said, ‘but I felt sad at heart. We should not celebrate this,’ he said. ‘It was a defeat.’
Standing in Thule, puffing on my hands, my face chilled by a blasting ice wind, I stared at the rubble rocks and the drifting ice shapes. The light subsided slowly across the mountains. The lights glittered on the metallic surface of the sea.
In the morning the sky was a vivid pink. The people were silent in their houses, sleeping off the night before. As I dragged my bag from the hotel room I heard the thud of helicopter blades. The town was bathed in light, the sun was glinting through the haze, and the dogs were whining along the beach. I walked out of the settlement, towards the flat rock where the helicopter was standing. The pilot was loading a few boxes and a child with a broken leg into the back. He was an upright Dane, and we had a small tussle about my failure to have anything like a ticket. He was irritated by my inability to present the right paperwork, and he nearly slammed his door. Basic stubbornness made me persist; it was the tussle of an hour, and then the helicopter had to leave, so he told me to get in.
When the helicopter lifted into the air I looked down at the small huts of new Thule, spreading across a small patch of land. A few locals were watching the helicopter ascend, and then they turned and walked slowly towards the harbour.
It was a short flight across brilliant whiteness. We banked south towards Thule Air Base. The helicopter pilot showed no trace of strain when the helicopter moved out above the ocean; he was a stocky man wearing a tattered uniform, and he said, ‘My father came and worked at the base in the 1950s. He loved it there. Look at that stuff below! Isn’t it amazing! Beautiful beautiful ice!!’
‘Is everything normal at the air base?’ I asked.
He stopped talking, wiped his mouth, and said, ‘Normal! Normal! You’d hardly call it normal! Normal!’ he said a few more times, and laughed. ‘I love the Americans,’ he said. ‘I love them. They’re great. The Greenlanders, I love them, such a warm vibrant people. I love them so much, I married one! We live in Copenhagen! We have seven children! Seven! I love it here, but I love my wife, my children too. So I work for a month, go home for a month. It’s a hardship posting, everyone says that. But if you travel a few days north from here, you’ll see polar bears on the ice! How often do you get to see that! I’ve seen dozens of polar bears! Oh yes! I love it here.’
The child slept behind us. The pilot said, ‘People say we are mad to live here. I say to them, “What do you know?” I love it here! A month on, a month off! Perfect!’
We had just turned again when I saw a brown mountain, planed at its top like an inverted coffee cup, with the sea sliding slowly past it. This was the mountain where the Inuit had buried their dead, and further inland stood the silver rows of barracks buildings. There was a long white runway, stretching towards the mountains. The ground was dusted with snow. We hovered above the surface, and then the helicopter came to a halt on the ice.
At the entrance to the base there was a large sign: WELCOME TO THULE AIR BASE. Everything was clean and orderly. A sallow band of light stretched beneath the thick clouds. The rust-coloured slopes of the mountain stood with the pale sea beneath them. Further inland, the ice cap glittered.
The helicopter pilot was waiting for the blades to wind down. ‘Remember’—he smiled—‘be nice to them, they’ll be nice to you.’
There was an exhausted quality to the light; it made everything sepia, as if I were watching an antiquated film, its scenes crackling through the projector, the cast performing jerky movements, everything subtitled ‘US operations, Northern Greenland.’ I had thought for a while along the coast that I might find a contemporary Kurtz. These fantasies faded at the sight of the trim walls of the arrival lounge, and there was a young first lieutenant shaking my hand, smiling broadly and introducing me to two smart majors who were smiling too, stretching out their hands. They were delighted to see me, they explained. They would be glad to show me around. There was another flight out of the base in a few hours, and it was regrettable but I would have to leave then. But they could show me a few things in the meantime.
The majors were stocky men, almost identical, with their shaved heads and their broad smiles. They pointed towards the tidy barracks buildings; they nodded at the oil drums like white mushrooms, the storage containers, the heating pipes. They pointed me into a van, and dragged the door closed. Driving through the barracks-lined streets, there was no sign of anyone at all. Everyone was inside, staying out of the wind, which was blustering hard now, blowing the dust off the roads. Between the massive pipelines and the white fuel containers, there was a view across the frosted rubble to the pale sea. The sun was sliding across the sky.
Standing in the street for more than a few minutes caused shivering like convulsions, but the majors cracked jokes and laughed, slapped their hands on their knees. We left the edge of the base and the van bounced along a rock track, heading out towards the ice cap. We drove through the rubble towards the ice cap. The majors were immaculate in duty uniforms; when they weren’t laughing they spoke in fluent acronyms. They didn’t seem cold, though the windows of the van were frosting over and the wind was shaking the frame.
Everything I had seen in Greenland made me wonder why the US Military was still up there. In the Cold War a secret base made terrible sense; the quickest route for an attack on Moscow was across the North Pole. The base h
ad been built for more than ten thousand soldiers; at the height of the Cold War it ran at full capacity. Thule Air Base had been running on a few hundred since the Cold War finished—a frosted shadow of its former self, left in the remote north. Large parts of the military city had been dismantled, many of the buildings taken away. Yet the US Military was still in Thule.
One of the majors said: ‘We’re here for BMEWS—the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. It’s actually over there.’ He pointed towards a patch of ice in the distance.
‘Our mission,’ said the other major, ‘is to provide North America, the President, NORAD, SecDef, JCS and unified commands with warning and space surveillance. We operate a radar which continuously provides warning of sea-launched and intercontinental ballistic missile attacks against North America.
‘We also detect and track earth-orbiting objects. We monitor and control satellites,’ added the major.
We swerved along the rock roads, trailing a drift-cloud of dust. The long shining plains of snow, yawning into the distance, were like a force pitched against the majors’ certainty. The majors were ignoring them, smiling into the ice-dust, pointing out patches of significance, antennae almost obscured by the rocks and the whiteness, satellites in the distance. They waved their arms at the ice cap.
‘There’s talk about modernizing Thule Air Base, making it a crucially important place for US missile defence. This is the next phase for Thule. We will alert the Pentagon, should missiles be approaching the USA, and those missiles will be blown out of the sky,’ said one of the majors. ‘Secretary Powell has been to Greenland now.’
The other major smiled and said: ‘You won’t see the difference after the upgrade. The base won’t look any different. Operations might change a little.’
In the far north, the US Military was watching a band of sky. The purpose of the base had changed: during the Cold War it was a place where nuclear bombers could land on their way to an attack. Now it was a defensive station, watching the world, so the US government could anticipate an attack.
‘Watching who?’ I asked, and they laughed and shook their heads.
‘We watch whatever we are ordered to watch,’ said a major, a phrase like a tongue twister, but he showed no signs of stuttering.
There was a pause while we rattled across a pile of stones, and then the other major said, ‘We watch for speed. A particular sort of height and speed. We saw the Russians doing missile tests in the Barents Sea a while back. Other than that it’s pretty quiet round here.’
He smiled. Behind the robust forms of the majors, I could see the pale blue waters of the sea, and the white mountains along the coast. The barracks shone in the weak sunlight. In the distance a cluster of satellite dishes stood among the ice-covered rocks.
We stood outside the van, while the majors pointed at dusty patches of ice, scattering acronyms across the view, and when everyone was shuddering and clapping their hands in the cold, the majors stepped back into the van and beckoned to me to follow them. ‘If you don’t mind,’ they said, politely. They smiled and slammed the doors shut.
We scuffed along the rubble tracks, back into the base. The streets were made of dust rocks, and the buildings were all stamped with their functions: GYM, RADIO STATION, SHOP. Behind the closed doors, the barracks were full of soldiers, moving from the luxury gym to their posts. A few soldiers, a few purposeful apparitions in uniform, hurried out of one building into another. Community, the majors kept saying. Against the bitterness of the cold, the vastness of the wilderness, Thule Air Base released its key strategy: society, like a military tactic, spun around the men, lifting them above the void. ‘We are preparing for a setting of the sun party,’ said the major. ‘In the spring we will have a rising of the sun party,’ he added. ‘Fancy dress. Concerts, bands invited. Greenlandic choirs. Leather-making workshops, ceramics workshops, woodwork, pottery societies. You can take the stuff home,’ said the major. ‘Made in Thule.’
‘And anyway we only stay for a year,’ said the other major. ‘You can’t get too sad in a year. It’s just one winter, one period without sunlight, and then there’s the summer.’ And he smiled.
‘And the cold? The relentless biting, frigid air, the constant darkness in the winter?’ I asked.
They shrugged. ‘It wasn’t so bad,’ they said, smiling.
‘In the summer, you can go for long hikes,’ said a major. ‘In the winter, of course, there are serious storms, so you can’t go out so much. But in a way that’s when the community is most close, because everyone is around all the time. People can’t do stuff on their own. I’m kind of used to this sort of cold—I come from North Dakota. But we still have to be very careful. And in case people get depressed during the long winter months, we have very bright lights, all around the base, so you can go about your business, as if there’s ordinary daylight.’
‘Do you ever regret coming here?’ I asked.
‘I do have one regret,’ said the other. ‘When I came, I forgot to bring a good fancy dress costume. Anyone who comes here, I’d say that’s an essential. Everything else you can buy, but a good fancy dress costume, it’s worth its weight in gold. If I’d just had a Hawaiian shirt, or a great hat . . .’ and he tailed off, imagining the perfect costume.
We walked around the supermarket, which was full of kitchen equipment, mugs and hats and T-shirts with GREENLAND or THULE AIR BASE stamped on them, cut-cost alcohol, tax-free cigarettes.
‘Perhaps,’ said one of the majors, smiling, ‘you might like to buy this?’ And he held up a cup which had THULE AIR BASE painted on it, with a picture of an Inuit with a sledge and dogs.
So I bought the cup.
Then they pushed through the doors of another low-rise barracks block, and there was a room lined with portraits of former commanders. In the next room there were photos of the base in 1951, rows of corrugated iron and steel, the same old snow, the blazing colours of the sunrise dulled into black and white. There was a page torn out of the New York Herald Tribune, from October 1951: THE US HAS TOP OF THE WORLD AIR BASE. CAN BOMB ANY PART OF EUROPE. In 1951 it was a major scoop.
There were two Danes wandering around the museum, trying to interest me in a bunk bed, part of the original accommodation for soldiers. One of them saw me looking at the newspaper article, and came over. He was about sixty, tall and stocky, with thick grey hair, dressed in a neat tracksuit. ‘When you read about it now, everyone says it was a secret at the beginning,’ he said, smiling shyly. ‘As if no one knew about it. But even the Russians knew, from the beginning; I remember a friend of mine told me he had heard about a piece on Russian radio, all about the Thule Air Base, and that was almost the same time as it was being built.’ He had been in Thule Air Base as a young man, he said. ‘I came to make money, like everyone. I was a civilian contractor.’ Now he had returned, for the same reason. ‘The money is not as good now, but it is still a lot. Really a lot.’ He laughed and scratched his head. The other Dane had been circling the room, looking slightly irritated, but now he came over and tried to show me the original air traffic control system. But I was walking straight towards the showpiece—a rusted piece of metal, standing in a room lined with photos. This was the emergency escape hatch from a B-52 bomber that crashed in the 1960s, spilling controversy across the ice. It had been carrying nuclear materials when it crashed. For years, it was claimed that the debris had been removed, but eventually they conceded that perhaps not everything had been found. A fragment, a small quantity of plutonium, might have been left on the seabed.
‘The crew ejected,’ said the Dane with the thick grey hair, ‘and this hatch was found two hours’ walk away from Thule Air Base. We had a fine job getting it back to the base,’ he said. He pointed at the dents and cracks in the metal.
The majors and I were walking along the street again, and I said: ‘Do you feel cut off from world events, stuck up here in the far north?’ They smiled politely, shaking their heads. ‘We do whatever we are asked to do . . . don’t choos
e our posting . . . happy to serve our country in any way possible,’ said one, mumbling slightly. ‘Part of the same operation . . . homeland security, national defence . . .’ And the other nodded slowly. For a moment, neither smiled.
We were back at the security station, and on the runway I could see the plane was ready to leave.
I wanted to stay longer; I was asking if I could stay a night, a week, but they all shook their heads.
‘Unfortunately . . . completely impossible . . . No one can stay, not even our wives . . .’ said the major, shaking his head.
‘Not even our mothers . . .’ said the other major, shaking his head.
‘The next plane isn’t for a week, so you’ll have to hop on this one,’ said the deputy commander, a tall affable man, who had just emerged from an office in the runway complex. A foot away, someone had taken my bag, and was searching through it. ‘Just routine,’ said one of the majors.
‘I’d love to talk,’ the deputy commander was saying. ‘But you have to go. You say Thule? You’re looking for Thule! Well you found it! You have a good flight now.’ He shook my hand, turned smartly and disappeared into his office.
The winds might blast at two hundred miles an hour, the temperatures might drop to minus forty, but Thule Air Base stayed the same in the north, watching the sky, waiting for a threat. There were no desperate messages, crackling out to Washington. Thule Air Base was a piece of hi-tech military hardware, standing in the middle of the ancient ice. At Thule Air Base, they floodlit the winter, living it out in the gym, staving off lunacy with parties and concerts.
There was no Kurtz; the soldiers were the servants of a more elusive power. Thule Air Base took its orders from Washington; it was the northern outpost of a vast military empire. The invisible figures of the Pentagon controlled Thule from a distance, sending orders into the ice, which were obeyed without question. Everything was out of the hands of the majors, out of the hands of the soldiers scurrying through the blasting winds. The instructions were terse—sit in the north, watch the sky for threats to the USA. The ebullience wasn’t feigned; the soldiers liked the place, the glaciers and the rocks, the frozen ocean. But none of them knew what was going on. Far away, in the south, the generals were dictating the script. Sealed instructions, a sense of driving momentum, nothing could abate it.
The Ice Museum Page 28