BOOK REVIEW: The cold, hard facts of life

‘NEXT month we welcome the sun back. Traditionally, this must be done with a bare head and hands held out, palms up to feel the first rays of sunlight. It was believed that you would not survive the year if you refused to welcome the sun properly as the sun was known to be a great source of life."

Light and dark, the subtleties of ice, the need to understand and use every last "source of life" in order to survive, is central to existence in the north. A romantic view of the Arctic might stress solitude, contemplation, the beauty of the landscape, but Gretel Ehrlich is no romantic. In This Cold Heaven, a lyrical but marvellously unsentimental account of several visits she made to Greenland, from 1993 to 1999, she reveals the near-miraculous qualities of survival in a region so dangerous that a hunter, his sled and a whole team of dogs could disappear in a moment through the ice, and where people could be forced to eat their dogs, or subsist for weeks on lichens and animal faeces when the hunting was bad.

To combat these hardships, Greenlanders must learn how to work together, as communities. Romantic solitude is nothing but a silly pose. In Greenland, Ehrlich says, "solitude is thought to be a form of failure", and privacy is not an option. Her descriptions of the more intimate domestic matters in communal dwellings are both funny and alarming.

The north has attracted its share of romantics and glory-seekers, of course. Ehrlich has little time for men like Robert Peary. What often comes over in accounts of these Great Arctic Explorers’ adventures is how foolish and vainglorious they were. They treated the Eskimos like animals. In 1906, for example, Peary captured a father and son who were out fishing, and transported them back to New York as "living specimens" for the American Museum of Natural History. The pair stayed in the city for some time but when the father died, the son, Minik, asked if he could go home. Peary refused.

"Despite all the attention paid to British and European misadventures in both polar realms," Ehrlich says, "the Inuit people were its first explorers and inhabitants. They are the real heroes."

She does not dismiss all of Greenland’s more famous visitors, however. This Cold Heaven is not only an account of her own travels; it contains perceptive studies of such predecessors as Danish cartographer Knud Rasmussen, who travelled by dogsled all the way across the polar north, and American artist Rockwell Kent, who painted and wrote about Greenland in the 1930s. The difference between these men and adventurers like Peary and Martin Frobisher was that Rasmussen and Kent made themselves at home there, learning to read the terrain and, importantly, becoming part of the local communities they encountered.

As she repeats the process, Ehrlich’s admiration for these men grows: Rasmussen’s death, recounted in the very first pages of the text, hangs over the book like a shadow: "He was struck down suddenly by salmonella after eating a big bowl of kivioq - an Arctic-style delicacy made from dead auks sewn up into a seal’s gut and left to rot for two months. Antibiotics were still unknown. He rallied for a few weeks, was shipped home to the royal hospital in Copenhagen, but died in 1933. He was 54 years old."

The saddest thing about this death, perhaps, is that, by now, "home" was the place Rasmussen was leaving behind. What human beings do, if they are honourable, is learn, first to recognise, then to share a home in the world with others. Rasmussen was a generous spirit: he loved an impromptu celebration; he spent his life creating and renewing a connection to one of the most difficult, provisional and treacherous regions on earth. It seems terribly cruel that he had to die in a hospital bed, alone in that way a human being is always alone when he is far from home.

Yet, in his life he had learned the essential truth of being at home in the world. He once asked a shaman: "What do you think of the way men live?" and the mystic answered: "They live brokenly, mingling all things together; weakly, because they cannot do one thing at a time." All the characters in This Cold Heaven, including Ehrlich herself, strive to live, not brokenly, not weakly, but appreciating the sun’s gift of life. For us, their stories are exemplary, especially when we consider the fate of a botanist named Wulff, on Rasmussen’s second expedition, who refused to welcome the sun, dismissing the rite as a foolish superstition.

He died within the year.