This One Bunch of 12 Year Old's 9 Hour Reign Of Terror(1)
We board the RAL Sarfaq Ittuq at 8pm headed for Maniitsoq island and we're prepared for the worst -- our tickets are "H Class", there is no "I" class -- but onboard we're surprised to find our compartment is neat and basically above the water line. There are eight beds in the compartment and the other six belong to a kind enough looking family who gives us a nod/hello as they wedge their way to their bunks and pretty instantly fall asleep. The ship leaves harbor an hour later and the small collection of Nuuks who've gathered dock-side to whistle at it whistle at it and Brandon and I stand outside on the top-deck and take pictures of Anything That's At Least a Little Rusty and we speak to a young medical student who is taking his girlfriend on a two week trip through the Arctic. The ship turns for darker water and we pass icebergs and each time we pass one I grab Brandon and say, "Did you see that one?" and he says yes and I try to imagine a time when seeing an iceberg won't be such a thrilling thing but I can't. Half an hour later the temperature drops and we head back below. In a room marked "Videography" we find wireless internet access and also charging stations and bay windows and lounge couches and two older Danish couples drinking beer and after I spend 36 dollars on wifi Brandon says, "I sort of thought this would be awful - but it's great!".
This is the final positive thought either of us will have for twenty four hours.
Three minutes later a lunatic mob of twelve year old boys move into the Videography Room, set up a wifi hotspot, speak to each other in furious Greenlandic sentences punctuated by the only words they know in English - (omitted) and (omitted). The boys are all members of a Nuuk athletic club -- they are handsome and arrogant, they wear matching green jackets. They crash the wifi, loudly play the soundtrack to the movie Colors, boat-race thirteen sodas, play a card game where one 12 year old sometimes has to slap the back of the head of another 12 year old; the two older Danish couples quickly move out of Videography and soon enough everyone else gives up on Videography and it's just Brandon and me and the 12 year old boys. In my head I run through the things you are supposed to run through: be a person of the world/they're probably all really religious/their mothers love them/one of them quietly collects unicorn stickers/if you were twelve you'd jump off the boat to get one of those green jackets/etc. etc. But it's 2012 and Paul Theroux be damned I want to check my email and so instead of feeling anything at all like generosity or context I run through Scenarios Where 12 Year Olds Receive Appropriate Comeuppance Given: Their Behavior and then I go to buy toast in the galley. The 12 year old boys somehow make it to the galley between the time I leave Videography and get to the galley and are already throwing plastic soda bottles at each other, and by the time I get back to the Videography Room four of them are trying to disconnect a flatscreen television with a pocket knife so they can play video games on it. When I've finally given up, I lay in my compartment bunk and listen to three of the 12 year old boys try to buy bottles of soda from the soda machine on the opposite side of the wall against which I'm sleeping. Their coins don't work in the machine but the 12 year old boys keep feeding their coins into it, waiting for the coins to work their loud way through the guts of the thing and out the bottom, and then they shout, "Oh!" and start over. The ship rocks furiously and the 12 year old boys try to buy their sodas; I lay in my bunk and feel sorry for myself because I can't check email and look at icebergs at the same time and I go to sleep because: that's just about as much tragedy as I can handle in one day.
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And as it often seems so to do, the world gives back to you about what you put into it.
We dock in Maniitsoq harbor just after six in the morning. Re: Maniitsoq, the Lonely Planet writes, "Dramatic Maniitsoq blankets a series of outcrops squeezed into a basin littered with islands and backed by cliff walls, canyons, and low, rugged hills. It's traditionally known as 'the Venice of Greenland'". At six thirty in the morning small hints of fog gather around granite humpback islands in the harbor; sheer cliffs rise from the street straight through the sky. Wooden stairways hundreds -- thousands? -- of feet long connect valley to cliffside to mountaintop and beyond. The island is tough, remote, strange, alien. This, you'll think, is what you were really looking for when you were really looking for something.
But over the next terrible quarter mile -- before you put your bag down and just sort of stand there with no sense of what to do next, no buses, the same two empty taxi cabs driving past you every 2-5 minutes without stopping -- you'll begin to see a very different Maniitsoq. All the half-completed and abandoned construction, the garbage, the cracked boats collecting in backyards and along hillsides, the dozen empty shells of former concrete apartment blocks. Graffiti tags on every imaginable surface -- "East-side 97" and "West-side" and "kurt cobain" and "We Need Weed" and "Blink 182" and "Murder Unit" and another few miles of cryptic Greenlandic slang. The only cab driver who will speak to you says, "Everyone left. No work," and leaves you in a grocery store parking lot after the first three places he took you were closed indefinitely. We'll try to frame and re-justify this through a hundred or so absurd ethnographic lenses, but by 7 in the morning those 12 year old boys are terrorizing the 100 or so passengers who have stayed on the Sarfaq Ittuk -- headed for towns with names like Sissimut, and Kangaamuit, and Ilulissat -- and we know absolutely there will be nothing for us here until it returns.
The Inevitable Postcript.
At ten thirty Brandon and I make our way from the Hotel Maniitsoq to the Cafe Ajo, which is one of three bars in Maniitsoq and all told a pretty grim looking place. Inside: two slot machines and a pool table, stackable chairs and loose tables, a chest-high bar that looks like it used to be the counter for a sandwich shop, thirteen men and two women -- all of whom are surprised to see us in the Cafe Ajo. We order two beers and a man in a rough looking Manchester United sweatshirt shouts, "Hey!" at us, and "Hey!" and he points to his head and crosses his fingers several times. A second man stumbles into us and flashes at us Hand Signals That Aren't Gang Signs, But, and makes a sort of high-pitched singing noise that means he is either in a terrific mood or he thinks Brandon and I are dating. We drink our beers quickly, we order a second beer and a shot of Original Blah each, a man who drives a taxi-cab makes his way over to us and haltingly asks us where we are from and why we are here. We say, we want to see Greenland. He says, "Here?" An older woman stands next to Brandon and asks where he is from. The woman is very drunk, we've been warned about such women in such bars, we're not sure to whom she is connected. We are drawing a crowd; later, I'll say that I have no mechanism to evaluate threat here. The Taxi Driver tells us that he has to drink as much as he can now because his wife is coming in five days and from then on: no more drinking. We laugh because -- women, right? -- and the Taxi Driver's friend stares at us, through us. The Drunk Woman leans against my arm and works hard to say, "I have been to Canada and Denmark". I nod my head. She turns back to Brandon. We finish our drinks, shake hands with the Taxi Driver, shout back and forth quickly with the guy in the Manchester United jersey, and Not Actual Gang-Sign Guy gets into a sudden wrestling match with one of the bartenders by the front door. It's not a fight, exactly -- it's another drunk guy in a bar who wants to keep drinking and another bartender who doesn't want to deal with this kind of thing any longer. But for thirty seconds or so all thirteen men in the bar turn and look, five or six begin to move in, there's the possibility something might happen here. And then Not Actual Gang-Sign Guy gets pushed out of the bar and the front door is closed on him and he stands in the road and just howls for awhile, we brush by and as happens more often than not everywhere in the world: nothing at all happens.
The Maniitsoq Hotel bar looks out over the Maniitsoq harbor -- you can see islands and glacial mountains, working and recreational boats, a few dozen blue and red and green houses hanging-on-but-only-just-so to the black cliffsides. After midnight we drink a final beer here and we talk about growing up because that's what we both like to do and two whales breach in the bay. This happens often enough that the bar leaves binoculars out so we finish our beers and tell our stories and watch. I do a thing where I want to say, "See? This place really is beautiful -- you have only to wait for it," and then I think, "Why does it matter if it's beautiful or not?" and then I think, "Why are you here anyway?". I think of all the dogs running in the streets, I think of the same thirteen men fighting it out in the Cafe Ajo every night, I think of the mountains and the water, the kind woman at the Maniitsoq museum, the women singing the "Born in the USA" part of "Born in the USA" on the bus today, the Taxi Driver asking us tonight, "Why have you come to visit us here?" and I honestly don't know.
Be sure to check the work of Brandon Stetser in TSO Photoblog here:
Iceland: http://www.flickr.com/photos/77398914@N04/sets/72157630655606208
Greenland: http://www.flickr.com/photos/77398914@N04/sets/72157630669848262
Feel free to follow on the twitter @miketsimpson
(1). I'm writing this quickly on an iPad from the back porch of the Hotel Maniitsoq -- the internet here pricey and "intermittent at best". Apologies for errors in diction, grammar, syntax, typography, factotums, etc.
(2). A final, final postlude. Today the sun is out, it's sixty degrees and the water in the harbor is blue, we've taken 300 hundred pictures, I've walked Brandon through my plan to retire here and open up a vegan clam shack. It's possible enough that the self-absorption above is just: hey, I'm tired. I've sort of been in knots for the last thirty minutes or so trying to decide whether or not I should even post the above, and instead do Another Entry Where Americans Do Zany Things and move on(a).
(a). I'd add too that there's a kind of repetitive thing happening where: 1. We do something zany and I write about it; 2. We drink a few beers and I write about it. I don't know. I do know that this much hand-wringing and self-doubt over a blog that even my wife doesn't always read = symptoms of a much larger problem.