Kulusuk Football

Taiga, steppe, tundra: when I was at school, geography was my favourite.

It was the right time to dream on the green and brown pages of the world atlas, on the strange and fascinating words of the textbook that reminded me of  the adventures that one day I would live.

Tundra, steppe, taiga: the sound of these words repeated in my mind gave me almost a physical sensation, the harbinger of a smell that I imagined was typical of those places.

Anyway, tundra doesn’t smell. And it is also very quiet: no trees, no leaves, no obstacle for the wind, our feet trample on the soft and slippery moss. With a little attention you could hear your own heartbeat.

The scenery is fascinating: streams and lakes, a few patches of snow in a weird silence.

We are almost at the end of the short Arctic summer. The thaw has created new, temporary rivers, the water flows down from the rocky ridges, floods the plain and eventually goes to the sea. The trail is often interrupted by these fatuous streams, which can lengthen the time of the walk because you have to find a suitable place to ford.

Here in Greenland, they say, you can drink from any stream, it’s all pure water from centuries old melting glaciers.

We already think of the first refreshing sip and we are in front od the surreal sight of a soccer ball that floats incongruously in the middle of the tundra, miles away from any human presence except for the two of us. Who knows what was the journey of that ball before keeping floating in this silent nothingness. Or – more simply – who knows where are now the guys who have lost it while playing and how much they miss it: a leather ball in good condition must not be a very common object in Kulusuk.

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Into the frozen void

Do you remember Ikateq, the Greenlandic ghost village?

Well, at the end of the exploration it was time for us to get back to the pier where the tiny boat was waiting for us.

Our next destination is the (inhabited!) village of Tiniteqilaaq and to get there we will sail along the Sermilik Fjord, one of the least explored slices of our world.

In winter the fjord is frozen and you can venture far inside with sleds. But it’s freezing cold, there is nobody living there but seals and bears, there is no food and no water: you can’t venture very far away. In summer – with the thaw – navigation becomes possible in the widest part of the fjord, but the cabotage is still very difficult because of the great number of iceberg of all sizes adrift in a relatively small space. Only small ships and boats such as ours can have the ability to manoeuvre necessary to venture into these waters. And it takes a sailor with all your senses to steep. And who better than a Inuq as Agloolik, our captain? He’s accustomed to use his instincts to locate prey to hunt and to avoid all the dangers of the hostile environment in which he lives. Our sailor sails at full throttle, zigzagging between these mountains of ice, brushing often, finding the way in the maze of icebergs and fog where you can not see the open sea and you do not see the coast.

 We are at the southern edge of the “Land of King Christian IX” in the territory of the second largest municipality in the world: Sermersooq.

And if the name does not tell you anything you are doubly justified, since you probably do not even know the names of the towns that are combined to create this kind of monster: Ammassalik,  Ivittuut, Paamiut, Nuuk, Ittoqqortoormiit. In 2009 came into force in Greenland an administrative reform that reduced the number of municipalities merging them into new administrative units.

Semersooq has an area of 531.900 km², is greater than Spain. Nuuk – the capital of Greenland, on the west coast, facing Canada – and Tasiilaq on the Eastern coast, facing Iceland, are now part of the same municipality. Between the two towns there are no roads, but seven hundred kilometers of ice sheet; it takes two hours to fly from a place to another: the first municipal  flight of the world!

 Sermilik Fjord collects the flow of ten glaciers, all terminal tongues ​​of the Inlandsis, the endless desert of ice covering over the eighty per cent of the surface of Greenland. One of these glaciers is Helheim, kept under close observation by scientists because it started to retreat quickly and at an increasing speeds: relatively stable until the end of the twentieth century, in recent years the face of the glacier has retreated by more than seven kilometers, scrolling back at a speed of about 35 meters per day.

 The melting of the glacier increases the production of iceberg, that end up all in the Sermilik fjord. But it also decreases the burden on the earth’s crust. The volume of ice resting on Greenland is immense and its weight caused a lowering of the island, which literally sunk in the earth’s crust; but if the ice starts to melt it will happen as if we remove weight from a raft floating on water: its edge will rise. The consequences are earthquakes and tsunami.

 In winter 2003 a tsunami struck the bottom of the Sermilik fjord, there where it ends into the immense glacial tongue of the Midgard glacier; earthquake and waves caused the split of the tongue of the glacier, which flowed into the sea, causing a second tsunami and uncovering – for the first time in thousands of years – the bottom of the valley. But the place is so remote and inaccessible that even the Inuit didn’t realize what had happened. Midgard glacier – in fact – is one of the few still unexplored places of the Earth. His terminal tongue is practically unattainable from the ground or from the sea: the huge chunks of ice that continuously detach from the glacier and fall into the water create big waves and can easily destroy a large ship.

 But we are in the time of GPS and satellites, and from satellite photos the scientists realized what happened before the glacier covered again that stretch of the valley.

 We go up the fjord for about thirty kilometres between white, blue, green, brown (yes, there’s also the dirty ice) iceberg, until we get to Tiniteqilaaq, a village of 153 inhabitants who live essentially of  hunting and fishing: seals, polar bears, salmons.

The village lies on a rocky promontory protected by the Sarpaq island and the port is opened on the Ikâsartivaq fjord, that in summer is ice free and thus allows easier and safer navigation.

 This is the final destination of the young couple who travelled with us; now they collects their luggage, greets and leave the boat, walking, with an incongruous trolley, along the steep sandy road that climbs to the top of the hill, flanked by the typical colourful wooden houses: but here the paint a renovation. Other houses are scattered along the rocky coast and around the open space that serves as a heliport, with a wonderful view over the Sermiklik fjord, the glaciers and the iceberg. From time to time you hear the crash and thump who baptise every new iceberg’s birth.

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Ikateq, population: one

Roughly diamond-shaped, Angmassalik island, off the coast of Eastern Greenland, is 40 km long and 30 km. wide; it ‘s a mountainous island of granite polished by ice, with many small valleys modelled by the glacial erosion. Only the tops of the mountains are often sharp; obviously in the past they were Nunataq: this Inuit term refers to a mountain peak that rises from the ice sheet. And even to an evil person.

The sea that separates Angmassalik island from the mainland creeps in form of fjords of various size; by sailing with a small boat, it takes a whole day to make the tour of the island: first  you venture to the edges of the Polar Stream, then in the Sermilik fjord, a sort of river of iceberg, and then, through iceberg free fjords until you  get back to Tasiilaq.

It’s cold. On the sea there is a constant chill wind, the water has a temperature close to zero Celsius and iceberg are everywhere. You need warm and windproof clothes to avoid frostbite. And, above all, it is essential not to splash in the water!

We are at  the mouth of the Sermilik: a fjord over a hundred miles long with an average width of about ten kilometers that receives ice from 12 glaciers of the area. While you get closer to the bottom the fjord gets narrower and the water is full of iceberg of every size.  But this will happen later. We are just at the mouth of the fjord and between the mist we see a wooden dock. We are in Ikateq!

Ikateq’s official population is: one.

But we can’t see anybody walking the path carved in the granite, through the wooden houses, the church, the school and the deposits.

Ikateaq is actually a ghost town, completely uninhabited.

In the years of its greatest development Ikateq’s population rose up to 70, not bad for the almost inhabited Greenland (total population 56.000, less than the town where I live, with a density of 0,026 per sq. km); they were mostly hunters, sometimes with their families.

When hunting was largely banned and regulated by the Danish government, they lost every source of livelihood and moved to Tasiilaq, in search of state subsidies and cheap alcohol. In Ikateq remained only women and the elderlies, then gradually the women reached their men in Tasiilaq and only the elderlies remained, who slowly died.

The last one passed over in 2005 and since then the village is uninhabited even though the official  population is still 1. Probably  the last resident has’nt found a way to opt out from the population registers.

We climb the hill on top of which there are a few wooden buildings, a warehouse, a large structure for drying fish and a church with a classroom. Everything looks as if the town is still inhabited: in the church the organ still has music sheets on the lectern; in the classroom there are books on the table, chalk close to the  blackboard ; an old fashioned map with shapes and names of countries that no more exist hangs from the wall.

The houses around have windows with clean glasses: you can look inside and see the the decor, coats on the hangers, dishes, lamps. Outside there are wooden sleds and kennels for dogs, storage sheds for tools and spare parts for boats.

But nobody is around.

As if time had crystallized because of the cold, as if  people were all suddenly gone and the town hadn’t  gone through a long period of decay;  or as if someone comes to clean every week. Luckily during the arctic summer the is no night, because I would have been afraid of the ghosts that surely wander through these houses!

But there is no mystery of course:  in winter, when the inland waters freeze you can get here with sleds, and Ikateq is still used as an outpost and a shelter by the hunters who come from other villages of the district.

The harsh climate, the lack of dust and the absolute lack of damage caused by other people help to keep the appearance of a town  whose inhabitants are all gone somewhere for an urgent task, and will come back later.

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