And/But/Also/Then
Half a kilometer(2) or so outside of Maniitsoq proper we make a wrong turn and come to a dry river bed just below a small dam. Across the river bed: a large pipeline, a hillside, a reasonably steep ravine entry point to the granite mountains above. Brandon says, "Let's go up there," and I sort of make noises because my backpack weighs +/- 32 pounds(3) and Brandon says, "I'll go check it out and you can just stay here" and I say sort of brightly, "Fine", which is my way of saying, "
Fine
". Brandon crosses the river-bed, ducks below the drain pipe, works his way up the hillside and then -- a few hundred yards up -- disappears. I just stand there. For awhile I look at a guy who is painting a fence. The guy is painting slowly in a way that says, "I was born for better things" and then he sees me and I imagine we have a moment where we recognize in each of us just how awful it is to be Men Clearly Born for Better Things, Painting. Then I hear Brandon clapping like, "Come, boy" and I do.
One hundred yards up the hillside is a wash of rock -- loose ankle sized stone, dumpster size boulders -- and we pick our careful way through. The wash turns solid, we scale ten or fifteen feet of granite, and there it is: a three foot deep wading pool, rock for miles, a tent-sized patch of moss and grass. Three hundred feet below us another riverbed, a valley that cuts through the center of the island and connects the ocean in the north to the south, from where we are we can pretty much see both. Brandon says, "I think we're here" and we are.
We'll spend the next 24 hours or so talking about this new Maniitsoq -- we'll hike the valley, talk about Sha-Na-Na, cook our small dinners, smoke a cigar, take photographs of small blue flowers, nap in the sun, watch a pair of horny birds lock onto each other and begin to plunge to their death the way horny birds do, look around and say, "Wow" an awful lot. The only people we will speak to will be speak A Pair of Men Accidentally Lighting Things on Fire. Around us, glacial detritus and granite mountains -- and on the peak of each the pitch black silhouette of a small cairn. These mountains are solid rock, Brandon will say, "Imagine where they had to get the stone from?" and it will occur to me that it's easy to riff on downtown Maniitsoq in the same lazy and graceless way it is easy to riff on Any Small Town Anywhere in the World and I'll regret everything I've said about Maniitsoq already. And it will occur to me too that there were men and women here who loved something so much they said, "I'll do this thing for you" and carried rock on their backs -- hundreds and hundreds of pounds of rock -- to the crown of these lonely peaks and there made small monuments to the people they loved, and quietly hoped that each of us who looks up at the sky might love them just a little too.