I first saw Greenland on my first trip overseas, on my way to England and all my dreams. At thirty thousand feet we flew over Canada, which amazed me; then out over the sea, which I had never seen, vast and blue and indistinct from the blue sky and scattered wisps of cloud below the plane. After a time I looked out the window and saw land. It was the southern end of a large landmass, tapering to a point in the sea under the clouds. It was Greenland; I was seeing Greenland. I recognized the shape from the maps I had studied all my life, hoping for the chance to ever see the places represented on paper as mysterious lines.
Every transatlantic crossing is different. My second trip to England took a different route; I looked for Greenland but did not see it. Perhaps it was hiding under the clouds, or perhaps our route was too far south, or perhaps it was too dark by the time we flew over the point of land, silent below us.
On my third trip to England I looked again, but did not find Greenland. I was disappointed, but after all, every trip is different; and many wonders lay ahead. But after an extraordinary time in England filled with many gifts, the flight home was not what I expected.
On this flight home we crossed England and Wales and headed over, I thought, the Irish Sea. I was pleased; I thought I would be able to see Ireland. I had visited Ireland on my second trip, but not this one, and I wanted to see it again. But Ireland was not where it should have been. After a time I saw an island, but it was too small to be Ireland. Then another island. I was puzzled; I looked at the direction of the sunlight on the sea-cliffs of the islands below me, and I looked at the coast of the mainland from the other side of the plane, and suddenly I realized we were flying over the Hebrides, the Western Isles, the long chain of islands off the west coast of Scotland. I did not understand why we were so far north, but I was thrilled beyond imagining. We were not yet at high altitude. We flew northwards over the Western Isles, and I watched as each island emerged from the sea in cliffs and crags and beaches, and watched the light fall through a green shallow sea to the seabed on the other side, as the cliffs fell down into the sea, and then away. My ancestors lived and died and are buried on some of those islands; I got to visit them, even though I do not know most of their names, nor the names of all the islands we passed.
Finally we passed northwest over the sea. I was stunned by my extraordinary good fortune; I thought perhaps we would fly over the southern end of Greenland again. But the trip had one more gift for me.
On the back of the seat in front of me was a map, showing where our plane was at all times. I had avoided it because I like to pretend I do not need such things, and because I become very airsick when I read anything on a plane. But as I sipped my ginger ale I glanced at the map, and I saw we were two hundred miles south of Reykjavik, at the southern end of Iceland.
I was stunned. I could not imagine why we were taking such a northern route. I peered out the window, but by then we were at altitude, and I could see only the haze of the cold blue sea.
I kept looking. And finally I saw, not the distant pointed shape I had seen before, but the edge of an expanse of ice. Frozen rivers flowed from it, fanning out as they met the half-frozen sea. I was seeing glaciers with my own eyes.
We flew over the interior of Greenland. It was a vast expanse of ice, broken into different levels, uplands and lowlands all crossed by the glaciers grinding down to the sea. Here and there was a small blue lake, geothermal, each with its own little puff of cloud above it. I saw no sign of human habitation or settlement at all. We were too high in the air to see what life must have been there, whatever white-furred creatures who must creep among the ice and the blue lakes.
We passed over the wondrous isolated beauty of this place, and then left it behind, and at length took a strange jagged course over Canada and then due south to land in Chicago.
O'Hare was in shambles and chaos, even for O'Hare, and finally we learned the reason for our strange northern route. A major storm raged the length of the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. We had flown north in a high loop to avoid it. Many other flights had been rerouted and we had great difficulty maneuvering our connecting flight, and then home.
But that strange flight home was the last great gift that trip gave me. I knew as I looked at the glaciers that I was seeing something that might soon be gone. Greenland's ice has receded since that time; I do not know, flying over again, if I would be able to see the difference at altitude, or if enough is gone only to be a cold eddy in the frozen air, drifting far below my plane.
I was a visitor only to Greenland, stumbling in from the sea, permitted to see splendors I had never looked to find before being ushered out of the ice and away. My only claim to Greenland is of the extraordinary ice-shattered memory it gave me.
