South with the Sun Read online

  We turned and I slid to the left in my seat and had to hang on. I could see the wing coming up. I hoped he’d turn again. I’d seen birds turning in flight: blackbirds, ravens, hawks, sparrows, robins, and seagulls. They were all different sizes and shapes, and they all turned, but they did it differently, some fast, some slow and with a long glide. I wondered how they turned without falling from the sky.

  Mr. McGraw was looking at the gauges in front of him, and there were needles moving slowly up and down. It was a special language you had to see, to read, I guessed. The needles moved depending on how the plane was moving. There was something that looked like a compass, and there was a gauge with numbers and slanted lines and something else that looked like the gauge in my parent’s station wagon.

  “The gauge with the numbers on it is the altimeter, it tells you how high we’re flying.” And he said we were flying thousands of feet off the ground. How many thousands of feet would it be to the moon or the sun or the stars? I wondered.

  “This is the fuel gauge. Looks like we’re going to have to head back very soon. But we need to do something first,” he said.

  What could we do more than this? Could there be anything more to do in the world?

  He smiled and asked, “Do you want to fly the plane?”

  “Yes, I do! But I don’t know how to fly a plane yet.”

  “That’s okay, I’ll help you. Put your hands on the yoke and I’ll put mine on top of yours to help you steer.”

  I looked at him and thought, The yoke? He was pointing to the steering wheel. That must be the yoke. I put my hands on top of it, and felt the fast vibrations of the plane’s engine through the yoke.

  It was like the time I cupped my hands around a slow-flying bumblebee so I could feel the buzzing sound it was making. This time I could feel the plane’s buzz, and I didn’t have to worry about being stung. It was amazing. I waited, though, expecting him to put his hands on top of mine, and finally I had to say, “Are you going to help me fly the airplane?”

  “You’re doing just fine on your own,” he said.

  He was letting me fly the airplane on my own; I was eight years old and I was flying an airplane. I knew then that I was the luckiest kid in the whole world. I probably flew it all alone for five seconds, but it seemed so much shorter.

  “I’m going to have to take the yoke now, so we can turn and fly over there.”

  We flew over Emerald Lake, and it changed color. It became the bright blue of the crystal-clear autumn sky, and it reflected the puffy white clouds sailing across the sky. What would it be like to fly through the clouds? Could we open our windows and reach out and touch them? What would they feel like? But I was distracted. I looked down into the mirror of the lake.

  The whole world below was reflected by the lake—the forests of tall dark pine intermixed with snow-white birches topped with dazzling yellow leaves, and thick-trunked sugar maples capped with leaves the brightest shades of red, yellow, orange, burgundy, and yellow-green reflected at angles across the lake, and they rippled in the water. I knew my life would always be different now. I had seen something so special. I had seen the earth from the sky.

  The engine sounds changed, and we descended slowly.

  The world came up to greet us as Mr. McGraw lowered the plane onto the runway, and my dad and Uncle Edward were waiting for us.

  My cheeks really hurt from smiling. My first flight was a freedom that I never felt on earth, and it was different from swimming. My life changed. I knew I would always want to fly to places I’d never been. And see world below and beyond the horizon.

  Before leaving California I found it was difficult to get specific information about tides and currents in Greenland and where to find a support boat. I thought of Tom Pickering, a good friend who had been the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and various other countries around the world, from India to Russia; he had also been the undersecretary of state. Once, when I was planning to swim across the Gulf of Aqaba and trying to get in touch with Queen Noor to get permission for the swim, I called Tom and told him that I had been trying to get permission through the Jordanian embassy but wasn’t getting anywhere. But a friend who grew up in Pasadena had been Queen Noor’s neighbor when she was growing up. Did it make sense to write a letter directly to the queen, I asked Tom, and he said something that I would always remember when I got stuck: “Use every channel you have.” I don’t know if he meant it to be a double entendre, but that made me smile. And in addition, he suggested writing to Ambassador Talhoum, a friend of Tom’s who had worked at the Jordanian ministry in Washington, DC.

  The queen gave her approval for the swim and arranged for a reception afterward.

  For this trip, I thought of contacting the Danish embassy, but I couldn’t quite figure out whom I needed to contact. Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark was a swimmer and a frogman, and he had spent some time in Greenland. He might know water temperatures in Greenland in the spring and if there was a coast guard base where I might be able to find out more about tides and currents. Being a swimmer, he might be willing to help. But what I was planning to do wasn’t the usual, and this route required a lot of explanations and time. By the time my letter got through, he and his family were off on vacation. I kept trying to figure out what channel to use next and decided to go back to my mentor.

  I called Tom Pickering, and as always, Tom was enthusiastic about the swims. He had traveled to Greenland, and his voice filled with warmth as he recalled the days he spent in Thule at the U.S. Air Force base. I asked if he would write cover letters for me to the Danish ambassador, to the prime minister of Greenland, and to the Canadian prime minister, for later swims. Tom wrote the cover letters and I attached mine and sent them off together.

  A week or so later, I received a call from Jakob Alvi, the assistant economic adviser on U.S. relations to Greenland at the Danish embassy. Jakob was very excited about the project and willing to help. I got a number of contacts at the Greenland tourist bureau and at the offices of Greenland Home Rule. Greenland had been governed by Denmark, but had now become a self-governing Danish province. One of the main proponents of Greenland Home Rule was the former prime minister (from 1991 to 1997), Lars-Emil Johansen.

  While waiting in line to board the Greenlandic airplane, I noticed that Lars-Emil Johansen was standing in line, only five feet from us. I shook my head with disbelief. Who would know more about Greenland than the former prime minister?

  Lars-Emil was a compact and muscular man, maybe in his fifties, with a round face bronzed by the sun and a thin coarse white mustache. He wore thin metal-framed glasses that gave him a studious look, and when he spoke, in what I think was Greenlandic, his brown eyes lit up. He became animated. He looked as if he was approachable.

  Upon hearing my story, Lars-Emil was intrigued. I asked him if he was an athlete; he nodded and said that he had been a soccer player and was great fan. He said that it was popular here and that we’d see kids playing late into the evening in summer because the sunset came late at night.

  Talking about sports was always a great way to begin a conversation, as well as a great window into a different world, finding out what was culturally important in a different country, but I asked why he was visiting the United States. His expression completely changed. He said that he’d been in the United States to talk with officials about the rapid climate change occurring in Greenland. The glaciers that covered most of the country were melting at an alarming rate, and the air temperatures and ocean temperatures were getting warmer. The second part of his talk had been about cooperation among Greenland, Denmark, and the United States. Then he gave me a copy of his book. The title was Tamatta Akuusa, and he said it was about Greenland and how they had won home rule.

  “Oh, you’re the one who’s known as the Daniel Webster of Greenland!” I said.

  He seemed pleased that I knew that about him, but he nearly floored me when he quoted General John Stark.

  “ ‘Live free or die,’ ” he
said.

  “You know that saying—the state motto for New Hampshire?”

  From the inspiration of our American forefathers he must have developed his own ideas about freedom and leadership. Amazing. Who would have thought we would have this conversation standing in a line waiting to get on an airplane? “Are you and Jonathan Motzfeldt and Moses Olsen the ones responsible for creating a political party in Greenland?”

  “Yes, it’s called the Siumut Party. It is like the Whig Party during Andrew Jackson’s time in office. The Whig Party was against the government’s autocratic rule. The people wanted more of a say in their government, and we wanted more of a say in the way we are governed,” he said.

  Lars-Emil had invited us to join him at a reception that evening in Kangerlussuaq at a restaurant near the airport, and we accepted.

  Bob, Bill, Gretchen, and I entered a lodgelike building along with VIPs from the United States, Denmark, and Greenland. We were pointed to a beautiful Danish and Greenlandic buffet. There was a magnificent variety of local meat and fish—musk ox, reindeer, beluga whale, bay shrimp, and cod—prepared in a large variety of ways, from roasted to boiled to sautéed. There were also many different salads: Waldorf, grated beets, tomato and lettuce, and shredded-carrot salad. It looked delicious.

  We wanted to try almost everything. We were invited to sit at the table with Lars-Emil and his colleagues. We talked about his childhood in Greenland, where he hunted, fished, dogsledded, and played soccer. We talked about Greenland, the largest island in the world, and we talked about Denmark and how Greenland was still a Danish province. And we talked again about politics.

  Bob Griffith joined the conversation. “Do you want your party to become more like the American Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Paine? They fought for independence.”

  Lars-Emil smiled and pursed his lips. “It is the natural progression of things,” he said.

  “But there are only sixty thousand people who live in Greenland, and a lot of financial support comes from Denmark. How can you maintain your sovereignty?”

  “These are questions we are finding answers for. The United States of America wasn’t a large and powerful country when you gained independence from the British,” he said.

  We were having dinner with Greenland’s former prime minister. I never expected to be discussing American history with Lars-Emil. I wanted to understand how people shaped their lives in a way that they could make a difference in the world. And now, here we were talking to Lars-Emil, who had studied American history, and those ideas that began with our Founding Fathers had not been forgotten; they were inspiring him and his friends.

  The meal was so delicious, we went back for seconds. I was returning to a platter of reindeer with a local-berry sauce and took a small piece, and then continued on to the Waldorf salad and scooped out a spoonful and put it on my plate. The Danish chef, who had been watching us through an open window between the kitchen and buffet area, saw me. He was a tall man wearing a chef’s white uniform and a cap. He gave me a nasty scowl, and he said something loud and angry in Danish and then in English, “No, you can’t do that!” and he tried to reach through the window and grab my plate, but I was just out of reach, and so he sent his assistant, who grabbed my plate and whisked it away from me. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She explained that I was forbidden to put meat and Waldorf salad on the same dinner plate. She came back with the small piece of reindeer on a new plate for me. No one else made that mistake and encountered the wrath of the Danish chef.

  Toward the end of the evening I asked Lars-Emil, “You want Greenland one day to become an independent country?”

  “Yes, that is what happens. It is the nature of things. When you grow up you want to be independent,” he said. “When you get to Ilulissat, make sure to meet with Hans Enoksen. He’s an old friend of mine.”

  “The prime minister?” I asked. “We wrote to him. Can I just go up and talk with him?”

  “Yes, he knows that you will be there. He received your letter and the one from Ambassador Pickering. Hans will be meeting with your Speaker of the House, Representative Pelosi, to discuss climate change, but he will probably have time between the meetings.”

  The next morning Gretchen, Bob, Bill, and I made it to the Greenlandic DH-7 just in time. And I think I was even more excited now than I had been on that first flight. I had previously studied Greenland from thirty-eight thousand feet, and now, finally, we would be flying lower over this magnificent island. Maybe we would have the chance to see Greenland up close, a land that I’d dreamed of exploring for so many years.

  The flight attendant stood up in the front of the plane and gave us safety instructions in Greenlandic, Danish, and English. It was strange; I never expected Greenlandic to sound familiar, but the sounds that she made were very similar to people I’d heard speak on Little Diomede Island, in the Bering Strait.

  We would be flying closer to the glaciers than I’d ever flown before, those glaciers that I had seen more than thirty years ago. And now we would be flying right over them, and over Greenland. What a dream this had been.

  I couldn’t help but think of Amundsen, and how he must have felt when he sailed out of Christiania Fjord, the excitement he must have felt when his crew cast off. That sense that, finally, this was the beginning of something he had dreamed of and thought about and worked for, for so many years.

  Once they were beyond the city lights they celebrated and toasted their attempt to be the first men to sail through the Northwest Passage, a course that would take them to Greenland, across Baffin Bay, between the Canadian islands along the northern edge of Canada, across the top of Alaska, and into the Bering Strait.

  The Gjøa was tiny, only seventy feet long, and it weighed forty-eight tons. It is hard to imagine that something so small could sail such vast, powerful, and unknown waters. But the Gjøa was what Amundsen needed to explore uncharted waters, places where the waters could be very shallow and where a larger ship might run aground.

  The Gjøa had been used to fish for herring off the coast of Norway, and after that, a neighbor of mine had told me, her grandfather, who was Norwegian, had hunted seals from it in the waters off Norway and Greenland. When Amundsen purchased the Gjøa, he converted it for his expedition. He refitted it and reinforced it to withstand the forces of the ice. For the Northwest Passage attempt, the Gjøa would be powered by a thirteen-horsepower engine and sails.

  Like the Jeannette, the Gjøa was heavy with provisions and equipment. Amundsen was worried that she sailed low in the water, but he wanted to make sure they had enough food and supplies so they wouldn’t experience the horrors of the Arctic that Franklin and his crew tried to endure. They had died in the attempt.

  The Gjøa sailed across the North Atlantic faster than the crew anticipated, then she moved south along the east coast of Greenland, around the southern tip of the large island, and up the west coast.

  We were following the last segment of Amundsen’s path, flying north above the west coast of Greenland.

  The song of the propellors reached a heightened pitch. The plane raced down the smooth runway, and we rose in a wide sweeping circle, sailed above the stark windblown area around Kangerlussuaq Airport, over the Quonset huts and small silver, white, and pale yellow buildings and dorms that composed the town, and flew immediately into thick woolly gray and white cloud.

  I strained to find holes in the clouds, the portholes to the mysterious world below, but couldn’t see beyond the thick gray clouds.

  About an hour later, the aircraft descended through a world of white cotton-candy clouds, and there, to our right, was the rocky coast of Greenland and the wide, deep, dark blue waters of Disko Bay that separated Disko Island from the mainland. Large mountains composed most of Disko Island and they were covered in an enamel of ice and pure blue-white snow. The island radiated forbidding cold.

  On July 24, 1903, five weeks after setting sail, Amundsen reache
d Disko Bay. He wrote, “A barrier of grounded icebergs seemed to block the entrance to Godhavn. But soon Nielsen, the governor of the colony, came out to us in a boat to bid us welcome and pilot us in. We met a violent squall and had to tack, as the motor could not manage it alone.”

  I had intended to swim off Godhavn, today called Qeqertarsuaq, because Amundsen had sailed there to take on dogs and provisions for the Northwest Passage attempt. But as I gazed below at the water, I could see the entire east coast of the island was blocked by thousands of icebergs. And they were all sorts of large shapes: squares, rectangles, ovals, triangles, and trapezoids. They were drifting on the dark rough blue-gray waters, and they looked different than the tiny white dots I’d seen in the North Atlantic on the way to English Channel so many years ago.

  As the DH-7 descended, the icebergs grew larger. I thought, If I swim over there, it will be like swimming through a glass of water full of ice cubes. It could take a day or two just to sail across the bay and pick our way through the ice to reach Godhavn. We didn’t have any extra days. This could cut down on the options I had for the swim. More than that, it looked like it would be a difficult sail just to get there. The town had about one thousand people, and it seemed remote.

  Off to the right of the plane, the warm northern sun illuminated the spring snow that softened the edge of the island of Greenland. We descended to the base of the mountains, glazed with a shell of ice. We flew over the deep blue fjords and just above Ilulissat, a cozy city of five thousand people and five thousand Greenland Eskimo dogs. The homes and buildings were built on multiple layers of rock and painted the brightest colors of red, turquoise, canary yellow, purple, orange, and lime green, all of this intensified by the white layer of freshly fallen spring snow on the roofs and on the ground.

  There was a series of both wide and narrow bays that could work for a swim, but there was one major problem: there weren’t any beaches, just huge areas of upright rock with at least a four-foot distance from the top of the granite buttresses to the water’s surface. That meant it would be hard to get into and out of the water. I hadn’t thought to ask about this, hadn’t realized it could be a problem. We would have to take time and find a place where I could start the swim safely without cracking my head on the way in or doing what I had done on the Bering Strait swim, slipping and scratching the whole back side of my leg on barnacles and having those open cuts bleed into the water. That had made me nervous, since I knew that there were two species of sharks in those waters, salmon sharks and great Pacific sharks; neither was known to attack humans, but humans didn’t swim in those waters.