A father, Mogens Kleist, and his youngest son, Lars, enjoy time together on a fishing and hunting trip outside of Sisimiut.

By Rudy Brueggemann

Written August 1998

At midnight, a 22-foot wooden fishing boat glides deep inside the cloud-filled fjord. Mogens Kleist, a 70-year-old Greenlander who's fished and hunted in these waters since he was a boy, puffs on his cigarette and then turns off the engine on his leaky rig, the "Qilalugaq," or "White Whale."

In the late arctic light, his two sons, Lars, 34, and Frederik, 41, board a skiff tied to the boat's rear. They bring two gill nets and orange buoys. The nets hopefully will catch some char, a migratory saltwater trout and popular summer catch on the Greenland's populous west coast.

Like their father, the Kleist brothers have come here since they were young, to fish and collect a popular wild herb called fjeld kvana. When cut, the vitamin C-rich, stalky flower resembles rhubarb and celery and is a popular summer treat, especially dipped in sugar. "Greenlanders love it," Lars told me. "We'll sell it on the street once we return. No problem."

In 30 minutes, the Kleist brothers have secured the two 75-foot nets, each tied to a rocky peninsula and stretched partly out into Kangerluarsuk Ungalleq, a painfully scenic fjord north of Kleist's home in Sisimiut, Greenland's second-largest city. A mere 5,500 residents call Sisimiut home, as do nearly 5,000 noisy sled dogs who live on its outskirts.

Brothers Lars and Frederik Kleist position their skiff in Kangerluarsuq Ungalleq fjord.

Lars points behind me. I look up and see the brilliant orange light from the midnight sun illuminating the Akornata Qaqqa, the north face of the fjord's southern granite wall that towers above us. With the clouds breaking up, I feel as if I'm in another realm.

"We Greenlanders love nature," says Lars, who's climbed back onboard and is amazed as I am by the scenery. "It's important for us to be out here." I can't argue with him.

Mogens, a retired officer with the Greenland's Home Rule government's merchant fleet, looks livelier now. The small, thick-cheeked man has steered the boat for two hours through bone-chilling mist without leaving the rudder, while I've escaped several times to the boat's front hull to drink black coffee and stay warm from our Primus stove with our fifth passenger, Samuel.

Frederik Kleist looks out on the fjord Kangerluarsuq Ungalleq, north of Sisimiut.

"Father is always happier out here," says Lars. Looking at the barely 5-feet-tall man, you wouldn't guess he received Greenland's Medal of Honor, the highest award given by the Home Rule government. And looking at Lars, dressed in jeans and a baseball cap, you wouldn't guess he's a future section head in Greenland's important Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum.

These men represent the past and future of the Kingdom of Denmark's largest hunk of real estate. The ice-covered island dwarfs the tiny European nation with a land area 50 times larger, while the Danes outnumber Greenlanders 100 to one. Surprisingly, Greenland's status as the world's largest non-autonomous territory gets little discussion in the United Nations or the world's media.

Technically, Greenland's chief of state is Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, a figurehead who occasionally visits Denmark's far-flung kingdom in North America. Under the current arrangement, two Greenlanders sit in the Danish Parliament, the Folketing. And since May 1, 1979, when Greenland's Home Rule parliament began, Greenlanders have assumed authority over all local affairs, leaving defense, foreign diplomacy, currency, and the courts to the home country.

Complete independence may not come soon, though it is likely as the territory gains more economic self-sufficiency. According to one expert on arctic affairs, Ivar Jonsson, "This situation will very likely lead to the demand for the sovereignty of the Greenlandic nation and the establishment of an independent Greenlandic state."

But independence may depend on Greenland's military importance in the north Atlantic. Strategically, Greenland still serves a vital role in the NATO defense shield. The U.S. military runs the one remaining missile warning system in northern Greenland at Thule, one of four original Defense Early Warning radar stations built in Greenland by the Americans.

My grandfather helped build installations there in 1958 at the height of the Cold War -- an experience that pricked my curiosity and a fact that pleased Greenlanders during my travels. When the inherently curious Greenlanders asked why I had come to their land, I told them my grandfather had worked six months at Thule, and they smiled, satisfied. Greenlanders, past and present, expect rational behavior, and my motives seemed clear. As Greenland's most famous ethnographer and explorer, Knud Rasmussen, noted, "You see, according to their opinion there must always be a sensible reality behind one's actions."

Kangerlussuaq airport, once a busy U.S. military air base, now is the main hub for tourists coming to Greenland.

Until recently, the U.S. also maintained a large military presence at two Greenland airports, called Bluie West Eight in Kangerlussuaq in central Greenland, near Sisimiut, and Bluie West One, in southern Greenland, at Narsasuaq. Both are now open to commercial air traffic and under civilian control, with the U.S. military only relinquishing authority at Kangerlussuaq in 1992.

Despite America's overwhelming military presence on their island from 1941 on, Greenlanders warmly receive Americans like myself. Many elders told me the United States helped open up Greenland during second world war, following a Danish trade monopoly that virtually had closed the island to outsiders between 1776 and 1950.

"Many Greenlanders are still bitter about the past," Lars tells me, referring to more recent events under Danish rule. By the 1960s, Danish authorities permanently ended Greenland's centuries-old subsistence economy based on hunting whales, seals, walruses, and other animals. The Danes turned hunters into fishermen, closing one half of the traditional villages, dotted along Greenland's mountainous coast.

From a hilltop above Greenland's capital Nuuk, the legacy of Danish housing policy from the 1960s is visible in the large apartment blocks.

Greenlanders were moved into government-funded housing blocks in cities like Nuuk, Sisimiut, and Maniitsoq. These box-like, four-story gray structures are homes to thousands of residents and resemble Soviet-style planning at its worse. In Nuuk, the largest buildings still bear those bleak, Soviet-sounding names: Blok A, Blok B, Blok C, Blok D. Architecturally barren and radically unlike traditional Greenlandic wooden homes, which are painted in bright primary colors, the "bloks" resemble arctic slums and stand as monolithic symbols to the painful transitions Greenlanders made to the modern era of global trade.

Today, 90 percent of Greenland's export income comes from fish exports to Denmark (the largest market), Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other countries. Shrimp exports are the primary moneymaker.

In Nuuk, government housing blocks were built to hold villagers in the Danish government's efforts to turn the subsistence economy to one based on commercial fishing.

Efforts to boost the country's mining industry have stalled following the closing of a lead and zinc mine in 1989, though the hunt for oil and minerals continues. Tourism, mostly by Europeans flying in from Copenhagen, represent the only growth industry in the deficit-plagued economy.

Thanks to Greenland's presence on the World Wide Web and Greenland guidebooks published by companies like Lonely Planet, crowds of camera-wielding Westerners now pour into Kangerlussuaq during the busy summer months. Hotels in some small cities like Ilulissat are booked solid during high season. The annual number of visitors has spiked from 5,000 in 1993 to 16,000 in 1995. By the end of the decade, officials expect 60,000 tourists a year, even though there are not adequate facilities now to serve them.

Despite the increase in tourism, Greenland posts a trade deficit of nearly $90 million, and a large debt of nearly $250 million. Nearly all Greenlanders acknowledge their reliance on Denmark's generous subsidies, totaling more than $425 million annually.

In fact, Greenland may be one of the world's last truly socialist systems, where the Home Rule government controls all the major enterprises (Royal Arctic and Royal Greenland shipping lines, for example) and where venture capitalism has stalled, except in tourism and retail. Some Greenlanders privately complained to me about the money wasted on large public works projects, like a new airport under construction at Sisimiut.

Royal Greenland is on of many large companies owned and run by Greenland's Home Rule government.

The airport, being carved out of a rocky hillside as of June 1998, will only be able to land the Sikorsky helicopters and the fixed-wing fleet of the national air fleet, Greenland Airlines (controlled, not surprisingly, by the Home Rule government, and by the Danish airlines SAS and the Danish government).

My friend Lars has investigated the tight clan of powerful men who dominate several dozen Home Rule enterprises, and he promised me his forthcoming master's thesis may get a lot of attention once it's published and picked up by the local media.

In two days, the future globe-trotting technocrat Lars will begin his job in Nuuk dealing with the same Home Rule elite he's studied at the University of Greenland. Today, however, he's reconnecting with his traditional roots.

Lars Kleist is one of many Greenlanders who logs onto the Internet for personal use, research, and work. Here, he revises his master's thesis.

Like most Greenlanders, he and his family would rather be outdoors, hunting and fishing, as their forefathers have done on the world's largest island for the past 4,000 years. I have a difficult time imaging Lars in an office, having seen him outdoors, in this natural setting.

An hour after laying the fish nets, Mogens takes a much needed nap, while Lars, Samuel, Frederik, and I head for the fjord's north side at a hillside the Kleists visit annually to collect the coveted fjeld kvana. We hope to fill four large plastic bags full of the bitter-tasting plant, which fetches about $3 for a small celery-size bundle. A large haul could mean several hundred dollars. Samuel, who's on welfare, will eat some of his harvest and sell the rest; the Kleists will sell my pickings and some of theirs for profit and feed the rest to visiting relatives and friends.

We land on a sandy point beneath a 2,000-foot-tall peak near a broad valley. It's covered with waist- and shoulder-high bushes. One finds no trees on Greenland except small saplings on the island's southwest corner. After an hour of thrashing and climbing we find a wet, shady basin where the fjeld kvana thrives.

Mosquitoes, Greenland's royal air force, are relentless in their search for blood; clouds of them torment hikers between Sisimiut and Kangerlussuaq.

With my Swiss Army knife, I cut the stalks individually, then the leaves, and place them in my bag. I'm clumsy compared to my Greenlander friends, who carefully trim their stalks, knowing prettier stems will fetch a higher price back in town. In about two hours, near 4 a.m., we have filled our bags and our bellies with the green herb just as Greenland's royal air force, the mosquitoes, awaken.

A strong morning light now fills the fjord. I look east to the headwaters and see a beautiful bowl valley and snow-covered peaks of a glacier-covered range called Aqqutikisoq. The surreal play of northern light on peaks and their reflections in the water make me feel like I've walked inside an Alfred Bierstadt painting. Except this landscape is quite real and frequently used by Greenlandic hunters and fishermen, especially in the brief summer north of the Arctic Circle. In the winter, locals will come here by dog sledge.

At around 2 a.m., light bathes Kangerluarsuq Ungalleq, just north of Sisimiut.

Soon, the "White Whale" is puttering at 10 knots back to the two gill nets. Mogens feels refreshed, and we all have another cup of coffee. It's probably my eighth cup, though I've lost count in my effort to stay awake in the cold.

The tide in the fjord has dropped considerably, and it looks like we've caught nothing but seaweed. I board the skiff this time and help the Kleist brothers pick out the cold, green slime from the nets that we haul on the boat. This takes an hour. Our catch is small, two catfish and one char.

"We'll cook those for lunch when we get home," says Lars, tossing the fish on the bottom of the boat. We've already bagged a female mallard duck, which Lars shot on our way here with a shotgun. That too will be eaten back in town after Lars' mother cleans the bird. "Some Greenlanders will only eat fresh meat," he says.

The remains of dead reindeer abound in Greenland's backcountry.

Besides store-bought meat (beef, pork, hot dogs, and poultry) Greenlanders also eat fresh musk ox and reindeer, animals that live further inland near Sisimiut.

Once hunted to near extinction, the musk ox are thriving once again in this region, near Kangerlussuaq. Hunts are controlled on a lottery basis. A visitor will see musk ox furs drying outdoors in front of homes in Sisimiut.

Though more numerous, the reindeer's numbers in this land just west of the massive polar ice cap have dropped from an estimated 30,000 in recent years due to disease, say Greenland officials. The stocks fluctuate on 30-50 year cycles, and currently the cycle is swinging low. Reindeer carcasses and bones litter the open tundra the entire 180-kilometer distance between Sisimiut and Kangerlussuaq, victims of hunting and disease. I lost track of the antlers I saw on my walk between the two towns.

Seals are still commonly hunted and regularly eaten by modern-day Greenlanders.

According to Greenlanders I met, seal hunting is even more popular than reindeer hunting. When a boys shoots his first seal, perhaps when he's 10 or 11, it marks his first step toward manhood in contemporary Greenlandic society.

As few as 50 years ago, many Greenlanders were reliant on fishing and hunting wild game for all their food. One 68-year-old women I met in Sisimiut told me how she helped her brothers and father fish cod during the summer so her family and its dogs could eat enough dried food during the winter.

Quoting an Inuit hunter, the observant Rasmussen perfectly describes the harsh reality of the not-so-distant past, when subsistence living prevailed in the Arctic: "... Ah, you strangers see us only when we're gay and carefree! But if you knew the terrors we so often have to face you would understand why we love laughter, why we love food and song and dancing. There is not one of us who has not known a winter when hunting failed, when people were dying of hunger all around us and when we ourselves survived only by some chance. But how should a man who is healthy and well-fed understand the madness of hunger? All we know is that we long to live."

Even at the end of the 20th century, with cellular communication and the Internet available in Greenland, one still feels the power of nature that once completely dominated the lives of native Greenlanders. It's impossible not too feel insignificant in this land.

Pilot John Bjerregaard, right, prepares his Dash-7 Greenland Airlines aircraft for departure.

The scale between humans and the landscape is mirrored in the distorted perspectives that fool the mind and eyes. Without any atmospheric pollution and crystal clear visibility, a visitor will vastly underestimate distances and heights. On clear days on Greenland's west Coast, I would look inland to far-off, treeless mountains and feel like they were within arm's reach, when some were as far away as 40 miles.

"Greenland is less-polluted and cleaner than Alaska," boasted John Bjerregard, a pilot with Greenland Airlines who has visited America's "last frontier." Aboard his powerboat earlier that month, he asked me to judge the distance across Lysefjord, a deep fjord south of the capital Nuuk where engineers have hung the world's longest power cables connecting a hydro plant and the city -- a project some critical Greenlanders called a boondoggle.

Three kilometers, I guessed, looking at the lines strung between the two cliffs, each rising 3,000 feet above the dark blue waters. "It's six kilometers across," he said with a satisfied smile.

When he's not flying planes for Greenland Airlines, pilot John Bjerregaard goes fishing, like this June trip to Lysefjord.

Like the air, the brine-rich waters on Greenland's coast are clean, having no direct pollution, except raw sewage from the 50,000 or so residents who inhabit the more than 1,500 mile coastline of central and southwest Greenland. These waters support a rich ecosystem of sea birds (auks, seagulls, skuas, eiders, among others) and marine mammals, such as whales (narwhale, humpback, orcas, and more), walruses, and of course the many seal species.

Seals, in particular, thrive on Greenland's fish-filled, rocky coast, and Greenlanders still hunt them like their forefathers. In the past, hunters employed cleverly crafted harpoons made of driftwood and bone, thrown from seal-skin-covered qajaqs or stuck through seals' icy blow holes. Today, modern Greenlanders like Lars use .22-caliber and .222-caliber rifles for hunting seals. For hunting narwhales, Greenlanders will use a larger-caliber rifle, like a Winchester .30,06.

We now enter prime seal-hunting waters, and Lars and Frederik feverishly scan the horizon for a seal to break the water. We eventually spot one, a tiny black speck shaped like a dog's head, barely in Lars' rifle range. His shot misses. The seal instinctively dives below.

Greenlandic authorities have not set any quotas on hunting seals, and no one I talked to was worried about dwindling numbers. I saw two dead seals on the Sisimiut docks my first day in town, and none of the dozens of Greenlanders around me blinked at the bloody scene of a seal with a metal rod down it's gullet and another seal with part of its guts in a bag and its head missing. The hunter who stood there, with his rifle over his shoulder, smiled at me as I looked on and took a picture of his catch.

Seal stew, cooked here by a woman in Sisimiut, is a favorite Greenland dish.

Seal meat is still commonly served in many homes, even at Sisimiut's local community center, where I was given a choice of hamburger pizza or seal stew. Though fresh, the dark, rich meat still had a faint fishy taste, with the texture of liver. Cooked in seal fat and a rich broth, a seal dinner is filling, and a perfect high-calorie diet for this northern region. I would have preferred the dish in the cold of winter, when the body craves warmth.

Without the seal, the Inuit people who migrated to Greenland in successive waves could not have continuously survived here and built a society from a nearly inhospitable land. Seals provided blubber to light and heat their homes. They provided food to sustain their families and dogs through the long winters. The skin provided shelter and clothing, plus water-resistant material for qajaqs and umiaks, or women's boats. Bones provided useful raw material for carving or tools.

Knud Rasmussen high school teacher Fali Kleist holds up a traditional kayaking "anorak," made of seal skin. Photo by Rudy Brueggemann.

Even today, when Greenlanders see a flock of seals off the coast, they become excited, pointing to them and talking loudly. They completely transform before your eyes into hunters, just as Lars and Frederik had changed on the boat.

The excitement of the hunt is contagious, and I join the Kleist brothers and Samuel surveying the horizon, constantly changing my gaze. Any fuzzy thoughts I had about furry seals as Greenpeace poster children are replaced with a carnivore's desire to kill and eat its prey. It's a powerful rush. I haven't felt this alive in years.

The seal's playful nature, long known to Greenlandic hunters and explorers like Rasmussen, makes the hunt more exciting. On a trip north of Thule in 1916, Rasmussen noted that the seal "is an animal just as fond of its life as are the rest of us; furthermore, it is an expert at the art of teasing. As soon as we approach, long before we can get within range, it dives down through its breathing hole; but hardly have we turned towards land before it crawls up again, repeating this comedy every time we continue to hunt."

A traditional seal-skin tent, used for centuries by the island's Inuit residents, is on display in the west coast city Sisimiut.

As soon as we spot a dark head on the water line, we aim our boat in that direction, and then the seal dives, before Lars fires a shot.

After an hour of fruitless hunting, Lars retires below for a nap. Ten minutes later Frederik and I spot a flock of seals, at least 10 heads, about a half-kilometer ahead. We laugh out loud at Lars' bad timing, then yell at him to come back up. He does, but not before the tricky seals dive again, never to be seen by our party again. Later that day I heard similar stories from another hunter, who cursed the crafty seals.

At 9 a.m. we pull back into the harbor on a sunny day. The leaky boat needs to be hauled out of the water again and fixed, which we tend to immediately. I go back to my hotel room for a nap and show up at the Kleists home for lunch.

The whole family is there, plus four visiting relatives. I can't understand any of their conversation in Greenlandic, the local Inuit language of the island, but they all make me feel welcome.

Fjeld kvana is a popular vitamin-C-rich herb collected in the summer and sold on the streets.

Lars' mother offers me a bowl of catfish, the same fish we caught that morning, plus some bitter, frozen cowberries, leftover from last year's harvest. I also grab some fresh fjeld kvana. One of the visiting relatives smiles at me, dipping her green stalks in sugar. After lunch, we all move to the living room to drink coffee and watch a World Cup match. The scene is repeated in hundreds of homes that day in Sisimiut. Greenlanders are soccer fanatics, rooting for the Danish squad of tall blond players who look nothing like this roomful of smaller, dark-skinned Greenlanders.

The next day, Frederik gives me a roughly $25 cut for my harvesting work. He's already sold all our fjeld kvana at Sisimiut's fish and meat market. Lars and I hug goodbye before he boards a Sikorsky helicopter back to Nuuk. It's a Sunday, and he starts work the following day.

Lars Kleist on a final hunting and fishing trip near Sisimiut before beginning his job with the Home Rule government. Photo by Rudy Brueggemann

On Monday morning, I prepare to leave on the Sarpik Ittuk ferry, which is traveling south from Sisimiut, back towards Nuuk, where I'll catch a flight to Iceland, and then back to the States. While waiting, I walk down to the docks, where I see Mogens. He's in the "White Whale," smoking (and coughing) as usual, looking off to the harbor. He smiles and me, and in his broken English he tells me the boat is fixed, though I think it's not.

He's probably there pumping out the water of the leaky vessel and thinking about his next trip. I don't think I've seen a happier man in a long time.

| Home Page | Nonfiction Stories Page | Greenland Page |

| Copyright 1998, Rudy Brueggemann. All Rights Reserved | Contact Rudy |

| Page created September 1998 |