Qaanaaq – Greenland: Not a country for vegetarians

According to Inuit wisdom, people are allowed to participate in the course of the world, but are not allowed to change it. Unfortunately, very few people stick to it. If you are looking for real, real life, you will find it in the north of Greenland. It also has a lot else to offer: a country with many natural resources that Donald Trump, as the new US President, would like to buy completely, as he recently claimed.

Qaanaaq, at the 77th parallel, is the northernmost city in the world, perhaps the only one in which a regional crime thriller is not yet set. 300 inhabitants, a single hotel with five rooms, no restaurants, a doctor, outhouses, hardly any roads, almost no cars. No cruise ships, but the supply ship from Denmark comes twice a year to refill the supermarket shelves. Planes, Air Greenland propeller planes, only leave every three or four days. There are busier places than this settlement of colorful wooden houses.

As many people live in the whole of Greenland as in St. Pölten, in an area twenty-five times the size of Austria, most of which is covered by ice, a gigantic, kilometer-thick glacier whose melting would raise sea levels by six meters. The Inuit used to believe that the spirits of the dead and man-eating giants lived in this ice sheet. Maybe everything is in this gigantic area where there should be nothing? Today, drilling is being carried out there to extract the CO₂ in the atmosphere of past centuries. Result: Currently, carbon dioxide levels are 80 percent higher than ever before.

You can also feel the climate change in Qaanaaq, so suddenly there are mosquitoes that make your life miserable. The sea freezes over later, the glacier tongues have receded, and the arrival time of the whales is postponed.

Qaanaaq, northern Greenland. What do you want in such a remote place if you’re not a climate scientist? I ended up there because I wanted to research my next novel. In fact, the landscape is breathtaking. The mighty icebergs in the sea resemble palaces or cathedrals, the narrow coastal strip consists of barren scree deserts – no trees or bushes, just tiny flowers and cotton grass that are reminiscent of dandelions in bunny fur. Bare mountains, clear glacial streams and the seemingly endless Inglefield Bay, which exudes an almost eerie calm. Sometimes you can hear the snorting of narwhals gasping for air, and in winter you can see the northern lights, which people once thought were the umbilical cords of unborn children.

If you want to survive here, you have to make do with what the sea provides: narwhals, seals, walruses – all marine mammals whose dark meat, when fried, is reminiscent of game. The Inuit also eat it raw, where the skin tastes slightly of the sea. No country for vegetarians. In the past, the only greens on the menu were the stomach contents of reindeer – pesto in Greenlandic. Today you can get vegetables in supermarkets, but they can’t be fresh. There are wooden racks in front of all the houses on which sock-sized pieces of meat dry. They taste like beef jerky with meat puree and are eaten with seal fat, which melts in the mouth like warm butter.

The specialties are narwhal skin with bacon or grebes fermented in a young seal, which have a slimy consistency and a taste close to blue cheese. I was offered a sliced ​​raw seal. Takes getting used to. Locals feasted on intestines and raved about the fresh liver. I didn’t want to eat much of it because of the flies buzzing around. Torben, a Dane who set up the local museum, said you have to taste it three times and then the taste will grab you. He stuffed his stomach a lot, but regretted it the next day because of colic.

During the two ice-free summer months, people travel in boats or kayaks, while dog sleds are the preferred means of transport during the rest of the year. The Greenlandic sled dog has something wolfish about it, not piercing blue husky eyes, but brown ones. While the young animals, who look as if they have to grow into their overgrown cuddly fur, stroll around, the adults lie listlessly in chains, but let out a wild yelp as soon as a killed narwhal is pulled ashore and cut up. The twisting narwhal teeth, up to three meters long, were previously sold as unicorn horns and were mixed into medicines such as laudanum, created by Paracelsus. Today they are no longer allowed to be exported, but they still change hands for hefty sums (thousands of euros).

New Thule is called Qaanaaq in Danish. The old one is five or six hours by boat to the south and was forcibly evacuated by the Americans seventy years ago in order to build a nuclear air station there. In this restricted military area there are cinemas, sports facilities, bars and a brothel. Thousands of soldiers are still stationed at this strategically important location. Nowhere else can you reach Moscow as quickly as from here. What the Inuit think of it doesn’t matter.

In Canada the word “Eskimo” is frowned upon, but Greenlanders laugh about it. They are a friendly but silent people with no neighbors or xenophobia. Still, you never know what they think about white people. Here’s a little anecdote about the first head of the Thule trading station: When Peter Freuchen arrived, an Inuit woman ran up to him, laughed exuberantly and didn’t stop caressing him. He asked what was wrong. She said the sight of him made her infinitely happy. She is so glad that he exists. Why? Until now she had believed that her daughter, who had been punished with a big tooth, was the ugliest person in the world, but now that she saw the long-nosed, cheerful one, it was proven that there were uglier people.

The Inuit language consists of monstrously long words – as if they wanted to protect the core of the word from the cold with countless prefixes and suffixes. When spoken, it sounds chopped up and monosyllables, but with a pleasantly throaty timbre. The habitat is inhospitable. No wood. The Inuit have survived here with ingenuity and skill. The layered fur clothing is already fascinating: shirts made from bird skins, underwear made from mountain hare fur, moss to keep the inner boots dry, hood trimmings made from dog fur because the snow is least likely to clump there. Everything sophisticated. The old earth houses had windows made of seal intestines sewn together, bow drills, left-hand threads and sophisticated weapons were known – the harpoon was thrown using a lever, its tip consisted of three parts, on the front of which the line with the catching bladder hung.

In March and April you have to deal with polar bears, and anyone who falls into the ice-cold water has little chance of survival if the people here had not survived. There were no chiefs, and marriage was not taken too seriously. If you believe the descriptions, it was like an arctic swingers club. However, there were precise regulations as to who was allowed to be with whom in order to avoid inbreeding. Survival was the priority, and anyone who was a burden to the community was summarily disposed of. Orphans who couldn’t find a merciful family, old people who could no longer hunt or chew fur, infants with disabilities? They were all strangled or pushed down cliffs. There was no jurisdiction, things were worked out among themselves.

Many things are different today. Although people try to preserve their traditional way of life, even small children play with cell phones and adults love chips and cola. On the beach I not only saw many whale skeletons, but also half-rotted sled dogs that had been disposed of there. Next to it is a landfill that can be smelled far away, where there are thousands of black garbage bags next to tons of bulky waste – the innards of outhouse toilets. You cannot dig holes in rocky soil because there is no soil for the rotting process.

There is not a single Greenlandic restaurant in the entire country, only Thai, Sinhalese or Danish. Greenlanders want to be independent. Does that work when rich countries are hungry for natural resources? Denmark is still a kind of evil mother-in-law who provides the child with sweets (social benefits) and protection (national defense). Not all Inuit are happy with this. In their eyes, Westerners are talkative, pushy and – a particular vice in their eyes – immodest. We can learn a lot from them. Even if we participate in the course of nature, we are not allowed to change it.

Franzobel is an Austrian writer. Zsolnay’s new novel “One Hundred Words for Snow” will be published in mid-February, about a Greenlander in New York at the beginning of the 20th century.