This book is about an American woman's travels in Greenland, and global warming. At first glance, this seems like the kind of book that I like to read to see things from a fresh perspective:
Cold lands, warm heart
Writer Gretel Ehrlich finds she's most at home in icy, wintry places
Sunday, January 02, 2005
JEFF BAKER
Gretel Ehrlich's been to Greenland 13 times in the past 11 years. It's expensive, it's difficult to get around, and she loves it. She goes there sometimes without an itinerary and just travels from place to place with the people she meets, living with them for weeks at a time as they travel across the ice.
"You just have to wear the right clothing," she said, grinning at the memory. "You have to wear what they wear. I let the wives dress me. I wear sealskin boots and polar-bear boots and three pairs of gloves, and the outer pair are polar-bear. They're not macho about the cold because if you're not careful, you can get frostbite really easily."
Oh, yeah, the cold. It gets cold in Greenland. The average temperature in the winter is 25 degrees below zero. It can get much colder than that -- and that's not considering wind-chill factor and other variables -- and stay that way for days. When it gets too cold and people are away from the towns, which are all on the coast, they "lay up." When you lay up, everyone (including the sled dogs) wraps themselves together and waits it out.
"One time, we were laid up for four days," Ehrlich said, gesturing with her butter knife in a downtown Portland restaurant. "Eight people and 57 dogs in a space about as big as these two tables."
She paused.
"Those were four of the happiest days of my life."
Ehrlich's feelings about Greenland are summed up in the title of her 2001 book "This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland" (Vintage, $14 paperback, 400 pages). It's the January selection of The Oregonian Book Club and is a book Ehrlich was happy to talk about on a recent trip to Portland, even as she cautioned that the land and the way of life she described is disappearing.
"It's amazing how quickly the climate is changing," Ehrlich said. "It's happening really, really fast -- not just in geologic time but in ways that you can see. The ice cap in east Greenland is melting so rapidly that it's dumping cold water into the North Atlantic. It's possible that Europe and the U.K. could be quite a bit colder, in the short term, and that the weather could become a lot more violent."
Global warming leads to early onset of spring and affects species migration, which in turn affects the traditional culture of the Inuit people who make up a majority of the approximately 56,000 residents of Greenland. Ehrlich recently took a helicopter flight over Greenland with some Inuit friends and watched them as they looked down on what normally is a solid sheet of ice but now is sections of ice and open water.
"They were shocked," she said. "Kind of suicidal, really, and that's not their nature. They can see their culture coming to an end. Some of them aren't teaching their children the traditional hunting methods and when you ask them why, they say, 'Why bother?' And these are people who've kept their hunting traditions alive for thousands of years. . . ."
Ehrlich doesn't come across as the kind of person who would travel to Greenland, get dressed up in layers of furs, and happily set off on a walrus hunt that might last for weeks. She grew up on a horse ranch outside Santa Barbara, Calif., loving books and the outdoor life. A move to Wyoming in 1976 resulted in a life-changing experience ("I saw it and thought, 'This is Nirvana' ") and her book "The Solace of Open Spaces." She has written eight books, including "A Match to the Heart," about her experience being struck by lightning, which indirectly resulted in her first trip to Greenland.
After the accident, Ehrlich "found it difficult to go to an altitude where I felt at home," she wrote in "This Cold Heaven." She "came to think of the treeless polar north as a mountain lying on its side" and now thinks of Wyoming and Greenland "as my heart's homes. They look very familiar, in a way. If the meadows of Wyoming were ice, they'd be the same."
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