Flying into the Sunset
Sweat ran freely down my forehead as I finally sank into the seat, gasping from the dash across the terminal from the security check to the departure gate—it had to be over a mile through a shopper’s paradise, past gleaming displays of books and gifts and duty-free goods. Shame that the check-in didn’t open until 90 minutes before the flight. Since I had stayed outside to smoke, the first I saw of it was a massive queue curling its way around the departure hall. They could not surely all be destined for Kangerlussuaq?
They were. My visions of flying there in a twin-Otter with six passengers on board evaporated.
Shame that there was a group in the queue who lost one of their members and let everyone wait until he/she/it was found. I didn’t mind the wait as I chatted to a woman from Nuuk who told me she could watch humpback whales from her living room window, but by the time I got checked in, it was ten minutes to departure.
The queue in front of the security desk was longer than the one at check-in. At last, the officers in charge relented and directed us another desk—at the other hand of the departure hall. So began the relay-race of getting there, up the stairs and back again to the gate right above the previous security check, stopping at the half-way-point to pick up vodka and cigarettes (hell, did you think I’d go without? But I wasn’t the last on the plane by perhaps ten seconds).
All this after a 24h delay getting to Copenhagen.
One the plane at last, as I staggered down the aisle, I spotted a kid in my window seat. No doubt, it would sleep through the entire experience, but I could obviously not shoo it away.
One good thing about being almost last on the plane: I just slumped down in a vacant window seat a bit further down the aisle. By then, the cabin crew were too flustered to check boarding cards.
Finally we took off.
The plane skimmed the shadow of the night which was descending over Europe, flying right at the edge of the dark cone on the video display; into the sunset, which was moving just ahead of us.
I struggled to stay awake, but there was a uniform blanket of cloud almost all the way from Denmark. Occasional pin-pricks of light shone through little pockets of black when we passed over a city: Bergen, then Rejkjavik. But only the brightening sky ahead gave any indication that we were approaching Greenland. An hour away from our destinaton, I gave in and nodded off.
The increasing brightness eventually made me blink, just as the pressure in my ears told me that the descent had already begun. Underneath, everything was white-on-white. But then I made out lines of clear blue sneaking across the featureless white plateau like a web of fine capillaries. There were rivulets, and then lakes of the deepest blue and turquoise: circles and ovals in a featureless landscape like a giant plain of salt. Only, this was a desert made of ice. And the lakes should not be there at all.
The coastline came into view.
Grey, dust-coated ripples indicated where the ice was pushing up against the rocks, and suddenly, the white expanse was gone, replaced by an alien landscape of brown-grey and faint purple: slopes which, seen from the plane, looked like crushed velvet dotted with pools of deep indigo. Between them, fingers of milky water reached towards the sea, tinted grey in the otherworldly light. The plane turned back towards the coast for the final descent. Moments later, we had arrived.
It was half past ten, and it was daylight.
Denni
September 2nd, 2006 at 01:25
Hey there, I came across your page while looking for blogs from Greenland. I was just curious, how long have you lived there? (I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada (America) originally but now I live in Tucson Arizona while I go to the university of Arizona. I am a “resident assistant” for 14 girls in a dorm, and every month we are visiting a new country through the blogs of one random person that lives there. It appears that you are it for this month, if that’s okay with you!I thought of Greenland because I was in Iceland this summer and when we flew over Greenland I had never seen anything so gorgeous in my life. 🙂 If you feel comfortable, would you tell me a little about you so that the girls will have an idea of who is writing the blogs? My email address is pmeuph@email.arizona.edu
September 2nd, 2006 at 15:01
Hi Pam,
I didn’t live in Greenland, I just visited for ten days. However, I llived in Denmark from 1985-1987.