This Cold Heaven : Seven Seasons in Greenland

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Summary: A paean to the Inuit and to Greenland
Review: "This Cold Heaven" is more than anything an ode, a paean to Greenland by one woman. I think in some ways she loves that icebound land as much as Lawrence of Arabia was reported to love the desert, and perhaps for somewhat similar reasons. Her book was full of poetic descriptions of towering icebergs, driving snowstorms, crisp nearly eternal nights, and sheets of mirror-like ice. Admiring the vast ice sheet covering the island, which she described as "a siren singing me back to Greenland, its walls of sapphire blue and sheer immensity always beguiling," she really put me there on that island. An American writer, she was drawn to Greenland again and again over the better part of a decade and in this book she chronicles her experiences there as well as much information on Greenland, chiefly about the Inuit people of that land, though to a lesser extent about some of its fauna, flora, geology, and climate. She recounts her travels - mainly by dogsled, but also by boat and helicopter - throughout this largest island in the world, a land under which 95% of it is still locked in ice, a land in which some say the Ice Age never ended at all.

The stars of the book are the Inuit, both as a people and as individuals. Clearly a people she greatly admires both as a culture and as individuals, the reader will learn much about them, descendents of Asians who crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia perhaps 30,000 years, settling Greenland some 5,000 years ago. Their culture - stretching some 6,000 miles from Greenland through Alaska - is a surprisingly unified one, largely speaking the same language and telling the same stories. Indeed not only have they been very unified across distances on land but also across distances in time; many Inuit in Greenland are still essentially using stone and bone age technology (though one increasingly threatened by the arrival of modern technology and the Danish welfare state), even creating string figure art of woolly mammoths, a unique societal memory of a species extinct for many thousands of years.

The Inuit we find are often a people of vivid contrasts and to us perhaps strange habits. Though they enjoy the summer time, which in their part of the world is short though one of unending daylight, they most enjoy the completely dark winters, something perhaps counterintuitive to those not native there; it is only in the dark time of the year that fjords and bays are ice, allowing long sled trips for hunting and for visiting friends. Clocks and calendars are nearly meaningless to the Inuit; Ehrlich often found it to be the case either in the unending night of winter (we also learn by the way that the Inuit word for "winter" also means "a year") or in the unending day of summer people would be awake at any hour, whether to fix dinner, socialize, or begin a hunt. One on occasion when a visitor remarked that a dogsled expedition should be gotten off to an early start, Ehrlich recounted how one of the Inuit laughed, stating that their day had more hours.

Inuit food may appear equally strange to the typical American or European; they eat a virtually all- meat diet, the climate and terrain of Greenland completely unsuited to agriculture. Seal, walrus, polar bear, whale, dovekie, auk, and fish are the mainstays of Inuit diet, many times boiled or dried, sometimes eaten raw. One of the more interesting foods they eat is kivioq, a delicacy made from dead auks sewn into a seal gut and left to rot for two months. Though upsetting many Western environmentalists, Ehrlich does an excellent job of showing how the Inuit hunt for survival, not for profit or ritual. Many times she went on dogsled expeditions during which if a hunt for seal was unsuccessful dogs and later people would starve. Clearly the Inuit of Greenland hunt for food and for furs to make warm clothing, doing so with the greatest respect for the animals. Any money they made from their hunts went to buy necessities, such as fuel oil or pencils for children in school.

Ehrlich makes much of the strange dichotomy of seeming cruelty and community. On the one hand during times of hardship, after their much beloved (and utterly important) dogs were eaten (as well as their sleds; we find that in the past that sleds were sometimes constructed of edible materials, with skins soaked in water and frozen into place for runners and even solid frozen chunks of salmon or seal flesh for other parts) the Inuit would turn to cannibalism, even eating their own children. The very old were often expected to die if they became a burden to their community, and orphans, particularly if outsiders, could often be quite harshly treated. Inuit parents she noted often laughed at their children's misfortunes as they learned to handle a sled or hunt, all in an effort to teach them survival skills, however cruel that might appear to an outsider. On the other hand though, the Inuit could be thought of the ideal Communists to some degree; no one owned land. When meat was available, it was freely shared to all who needed. Dogs were always fed first (though this was not entirely altruistic, as aside from kayaks in water this was their chief means of locomotion) and even widows in villages would share in the bounty of a great hunt. Ehrlich spends a good deal of the book recounting the adventures and travels of the ethnographer Knud Rasmussen (a Danish researcher who launched seven expeditions between 1910 and 1933 to study the Inuit people all over Greenland and west to Siberia) and his friend Peter Freuchen, clear outsiders who were warmly welcomed into village after village, whose lived were saved by Inuit, people who brought them into their homes, shared their food, their stories, their way of life.

A wonderful book.

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Summary: This Heavenly Chronicle
Review: Greenland isn't green at all, but the world's largest island is covered by the biggest continental ice shelf in the world. Sparsely populated on the rocky outer fringes of its 840,000 square miles, it's probably as unknown to Americans as anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Gretel Ehrlich knows its ice leads and midnight sun as well as any American, and probably as well as any non-Inuit except for a handful of Danes, whose territory it is. That's because she's obsessed with the North in general and with Greenland in particular. Over the past decade, she has traveled to the frozen island at least seven times, staying for months at a stretch, traveling long distances by dogsled, making friends with hunters and villagers, and participating in seal and
polar bear hunts. Erlich chronicles her trips and relationships in a new book called "This Cold Heaven." ((...) 377 pages, Pantheon Books) She does far more than record her own journeys, however. She also puts Greenland into cultural, historical, and anthropological perspective by weaving her trips with those of Knud Rasmussen, who died in 1933 after traversing the polar North from Greenland to Alaska. Even now, some of Greenlandic culture is largely unchanged from the days when Rasmussen and his close friend Peter Freuchen made "first" contact with some of the bands of isolated Inuit (Eskimos) on the island. Bears, seals, hare, fox and walrus are still hunted for food, clothing and fuel made from blubber, dogsled is still the chief method of land transport, and ancient stories and religion abound. There are modern encroachments, however - Danish bureaucracy, snowmobiles, alcohol, helicopters, and cars, to say nothing of the enormous American military base at Thule. Erlich is enticed by the old ways, which seem as pristine and "unbroken" as Greenland's vast ice. She is also enticed by the ice itself, communal life, the land, and the dramatic ways with which Inuit culture deals with a nature it cannot dominate. Her own use of language sometimes approaches the poetic, which isn't so surprising when you learn that she's a poet, too. Using the specialized language of poetry, Erlich is able to render what might seem a static and frozen environment into one that lives and breathes on the page. She's at her best when she describes the physical world, whether populated by other humans at the time or only by 25 varieties of ice, snow, and the midnight sun. She does a good job, too, of delving into the lives of both exiled Danes and Greenlanders, and when she doesn't know something, she's not afraid to say so. More often than not, she finds out and lets the reader know. Sometimes, I found certain facts repeated and wasn't sure why. Not a huge deal, but distracting. Also, I would have liked to know a little more about the personal relationships Erlich cultivated on the island, although that wasn't the purpose of the book, and is almost a compliment, rather than a criticism, because I found her such an interesting person. Her aim was to view history, cultural observation and travel through her own prism, and to create a picture of Greenland that is simultaneously unique and universal and conveys the essence of the unlikely place she has come to love. If those are, in fact, her goals, Erlich succeeds.

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Summary: This Cold Heaven
Review: Gretel Ehrlich's wonderful book has been a nightly treat, savored at the fireside. Since the lives of the Greenland Inuit are so remote from daily experience, it takes quite a bit of adjustment to enter into their perspective. Ehrlich accomplishes this through an obsessive, recurring immersion, reminiscent of her hero Knud Rassmussen. She went back to Greenland seven times, for goodness sakes! The focus she achieves through these revisitings, and our chance to re-encounter characters and experiences, builds a powerful emotional bond. I felt a real loss when I had to say goodbye to these characters for the final time. This is a deceptively beautiful, powerful book.

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Summary: An Interesting Read
Review: Having never heard of Gretel Ehrlich I came to this book without any idea of the author's past experiences. The book is incredibly intense. The first half of the book is more difficult to read that the second half. The author alludes to personal trauma and a need to confront her own fears but does so in a disjointed style. Her musing about the effects of total darkness and the climate made me wonder exactly what she was trying to say. Better editing in this section might help. What made me persist was my need to find out more about Greenland and its Inuit people as well as to try and understand what made Ehrlich keep going back. At times I wondered if she was hoping to die out on the ice. There is a deep sadness that seems to run through her during this time that is reflected in the effect of modernisation and outsider intervention into the lives of the indigenous people. Throughout the book she is always living on the edge of the society unable to find a way in. The lonely curious outsider. Her usage of Rasmussen as a guide to many different facets of the history and exploration of Greenland, and the American Artic improves over time. His travels and travails seem to have been a large part of her inspiration during the trips to Greenland.
An unusual book that is worth the effort it takes to read it.

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Summary: Sloppy writing mars a very worth project
Review: My fellow Wyo resident Gretel Ehrlich has never been a personal favorite of mine - I have found her writing a bit bloodless and strident. This Cold Heaven is no exception. Fortunately in this case, bloodless not only works, it is preferable. The native residents of Greenland are a hardcore bunch of seal-eating, dog whipping, communal living Last Best Men and their stories rival any on the planet for sheer toughness. Ehrlich packs her book with tales of ice explorers like Peter Freuschen and Knud Rasmussen, who make the cowboys, Marines and murderous I have known seem as simpering as Boy George and Anne Heche off their Wellbutrin. The author weaves their tales cleverly among her own personal accounts of more modest contemporary adventures, although we never really get to see what drives Ehrlich to this place. Maybe that doesn't matter. Ignore the Luddite whining that stains books like these and you're in for a treat.

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Summary: Brilliant book
Review: Ten years ago, I thought taking a ferry up the west coast of Greenland would be a great vacation. I'll never get there, but Gretel Ehrlich's book about her several trips to the northwest Greenland towns of Uummannaq, Illorsuit, and Qaanaaq has more than satisfied my curiosity. The book is an astounding look at as remote a spot as still exists on earth today -- an area so isolated by ice and weather that the way of life seems primitive beyond belief -- and the people who live there. Qaanaaq is so far north that the sun never rises from late October until February, and never sets for four months in the spring and summer. Most of the people in these towns are subsistence hunters, relying on the seals, walrus, narwhals, polar bears, caribou, hares, foxes, and birds they can catch to feed and clothe them (there are basically no edible plants there except berries). Until recently their houses were built of stone and peat, and even today most belongings and equipment are made of stone or animal body parts. Ehrlich presents the brutal difficulty of the hardscrabble life in detail, yet still conveys the Greenlandic love of this way of life so well that you are saddened to learn that the encroaching reach of consumer society and global climate change may bring it to an end.

Ehrlich's descriptions of her travels and the people she meets (for example, the dogsled maker "who knew all about trees but had never seen one growing") are fascinating and incisive. There are also several interesting chapters recounting the explorations of Knud Rasmussen, a Greenlandic national hero who traveled northern Greenland and the Canadian Arctic documenting the Inuit culture. Ehrlich's obsession with Rockwell Kent, an artist who spent time in Illorsuit, is less interesting. The weakest part of the book is Ehrlich's tendency to jump from crystalline narration into amorphous, abstract reveries ("Darkness reconciles all time and disparity. It is a kind of rapture in which life is no longer lived brokenly."); thankfully, these moments become fewer as the book goes on. People who are morally opposed to hunting are hereby warned that several long chapters cover Ehrlich accompanying locals on hunting trips by dogsled.

(1=poor 2=mediocre 3=pretty good 4=very good 5=phenomenal)

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Summary: This Cold Heaven
Review: This book was a treasure that fell, I don't remember whether one morning or night, from Book TV. Being of Norwegian ancestry, and having ancient voyagers in my direct line, I became fascinated with the author's story. Hoping to find some tales of native legends and myths of the kind that Sigrid Undset's historical novels had first drawn to my attention, I bought the book.

I was not disappointed. Ehrlich weaves her words by alternating the fabric of her seven seasons with allied chapters of other Northern wanderers and explorers. This organization, I feel, makes the book somewhat hard to read in two or three sittings. Yet every page is worth the effort.

Having flown over both Greenland and Iceland, I can verify that Greenland is white and Iceland is green. But snow and ice is not just white, and a sled is not just a sled. Erhlich's language is richly nuanced and lyrical. She has the gift of writing prose like a poet. Having lived her stories, she knows her subject, and you easily feel yourself in her shoes as she relates her experiences.

Little gems keep falling from her pages, like the story about the artist, Rockwell Kent, who had lived in Greenland. This immediately explains the stark beauty of his block prints. Treat yourself to this book and read it on some dark and stormy night -- or to cool off on a hot summer afternoon. Either way, you will be refreshed by the experience.

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Summary: A Warm Book for a cold winter night . . . really!
Review: This woman truly loves the high north, with all its paradox and ambivalence . . . Erlich paints the beauty and complexity of northern Greenland (before reading this book it never occurred to me to think of Greenland as HAVING a "north" and "south"!) and the struggle a tiny minority are having to maintain their ancient -- and sustainable -- ways of life. I'd classify this first of all as a love story between woman and land, but it is a love story in which the sentient observer is aware of the problems with the beloved, and yet still remains committed.
This is not a "been there, seen that, got the T-shirt" travel book -- Erlich is drawn to Greenland no fewer than seven times, in various seasons, and she lives with the people in traditional housing (including tents on the ice). She encounters the brutality of bureaucracy as well as the incredible hospitality of the Inuit -- and at the same time she does not shrink from the pervasive alcoholism and domestic violence that are a sad feature of northern life, nor does she neglect to mention the impact even in Greenland of the growing pollution in "the south" (i.e. North America). Her thesis is essentially Romantic in a philosophic sense . . . subsistence living was/is hard but authentic. The coming of modernity, with its internet connection, TV, store-bought goods, etc., has removed both the means and the incentive for a life of integrity. She leaves it to the reader to see the Greenlandic experience as paradigmatic of the wider world.
Read this book - it will lift your heart and trouble your mind, and leave you wanting more.