Here is Chapter two of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book. We'll publish each chapter over the course of the summer. You can order the entire book direct from EarthPhotos Publishing, or at Amazon.com. The accompanying photos, and additional commentary are available at The Common Sense and Whiskey Companion.
2 GREENLAND
You know those gauzy coffee commercials where cozy people savor their morning brew, steam rising in circles from the cup? In the midst of a scene like that, cradling our cups in our hands in Silva’s kitchen, with a great low rumble an iceberg broke apart just offshore from Ataa camp, Greenland.
Boulders of ice plunged into waves around the berg, now off balance, as it rocked side to side in slow motion. Silva stoked the commotion, cursing and scurrying for his video camera (he did this more than once). He was sure someday he’d be in National Geographic.
•••••
Silva ran the Ataa Holiday Camp. The tourist service down the coast in Ilulissat cheerfully recommended it, because Silva was a Man Of Some Repute in Ilulissat.
He was in year eighteen in Greenland, first as an itinerant musician from Denmark, invited up here to play hotels for a month, then three, then a year and one thing led to the next. Now he ran Travel Nature Touring Company and he was having a go at redeveloping this abandoned trading post into a tourist camp.
In 1915 Ataa boasted 59 residents: 58 Inuit and the station chief, the only Dane. They lived in six houses and three tents, with a school, the manager’s house, a workshop and a storehouse for seal blubber.
Seal hunting kept Ataa alive, and that year they collected 137 barrels of seal blubber, 42 barrels of shark liver, five blue and eleven white fox skins, 70 seal skins, eight and a quarter kilos of tusks and four and a half kilos of eider down.
Nobody lives there full time now. The nearest settlement today is at a place called Qertaq, thirty kilometers away.
Ataa camp sits at the base of ancient, rounded low hills of less than 1000 meters, Precambrian gneisses finally exposed only 7000 or 8000 years ago, when the ice cap most recently melted away. Ataa means “its lower part” - the base of the hills.
My wife Mirja (it’s Finnish, pronounced “Mir - ya,” sort of) and I got there by speedboat. A Quicksilver 3000 Classic bounced us across choppy water, under mean, lowering gray, 70 kilometers from Ilulissat to Ataa. Its pilot, Jergen, with his broad, expansive head, buzz cut and ready smile, was Greenland Man.
The wind kicked up. We spied the spray of a finback whale, spun around and saw him dive, and in the spinning spotted a seal.
Jergen pounded the Quicksilver’s butt into the tiny harbor at Ataa, where Silva bobbed aboard a Zodiac, perched uncertainly and growling. He wore the only clothes we ever saw him in, Nikes and a running suit.
Welcome to Ataa Holiday Camp.
Silva’s own hand, improbably, built the yellow plyboard breakfast and general headquarters shack where we warmed up over coffee. It perched on rocks some few meters from freezing, lapping water.
His sister Lilliana and her husband Filita were visiting from Florence, original Home of All Culture, and I suspect just maybe they considered Silva a bloody wide open, straight ahead idjit.
Loud and fifty, soft-hearted, quick to take a stand and quick to back away from it, Silva, with an impossibly full graying mustache and tousled hair, was a real piece of work, with eight bambinos - four in Italia and four in Ilulissat.
Silva shuffled across the kitchen, singing, whistling, posing, acting like supervising his sister Lilliana, who did all the cooking. What would he do when she went home to Italy?
Silva got caught up in the drama of the changing weather. We’d been there half an hour. Eyes widening, palms spread wide, he told us, “We cannot risk our lives to take you back if the weather is worse tomorrow!”
We sipped our coffee and watched him realize that since we’d just arrived he might be getting off on the wrong foot. He retreated behind his hand and allowed as how on the other hand his sister had to fly to Denmark on the same flight as us. When you can sit and watch a man think, his is a disarming guilelessness.
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