Rebecca’s Reporter’s Notebook #2: To Ittoqqortoormiit We Go
Photo Credit: Rebecca Hersher
By Rebecca Hersher
Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland sits about 400 miles above the Arctic Circle, at the edge of the largest fjord in the world. The ocean around the town (population 398) is frozen eight months of the year. To get there, you must fly either from northern Iceland or, as I did, on a zigzagging itinerary across the Greenlandic ice sheet from the capital, Nuuk, north to the former American airfield at Kangerlussuaq, and then east to Kulusuk airport and north again to Nerlerit Inaat.
There, unless you have $500 lying around or happen to be related to an intrepid resident of Ittoqqortoormiit who is willing to pick you up by snowmobile, you’ll spend the night in a bunk house called (of course) The Hilton. I give it five stars, if only because I could see the northern lights out my window.
The final leg of the journey is by helicopter. It’s a fifteen minute ride through the fjord to Ittoqqortoormiit, with snowy mountains in three directions and ocean pack ice to the horizon. IMAX movies about the Arctic are trying to copy the experience of this helicopter ride. It’s dizzying and electric and quite scary.
I was in Ittoqqortoormiit for one week. At the end of that week, the sun rose for the first time since before Thanksgiving. It was, predictably, gorgeous.
But life in Ittoqqortoormiit is also harsh. It’s a town that is still dependent on hunting to bridge the gap between income and food prices. And hunting is dangerous. Hunters have been known to set off by dogsled or boat and never be seen again. More often, people lose fingers to accidents or to the cold. The animals they’re hunting are dangerous. Polar bears are, obviously, aggressive, but walrus are also potentially lethal when they’re in the water and can move quickly. Those tusks.
For those who don’t hunt, there are other risks that come with living in such an isolated place. Pregnant women leave town a month before the due date, to give birth in a larger hospital. Most women return just a few days after the birth, bundling up the newborn for its first snowmobile ride home. There are very few resources in town for acute medical problems. Last year, a man with heart disease died waiting for an emergency evacuation. It wasn’t the first time.
So, the isolation that makes Ittoqqortoormiit so beautiful, also makes it difficult. This is a place where people routinely come face to face with death.
Which brings me to my other reason for visiting this remote part of Greenland. East Greenland has an alarmingly high suicide rate. Last year in this town of about 400 people, two people killed themselves. To put that in perspective, it would be like if 3000 people had killed themselves last year in Baltimore, where I live. (Instead, the number is about 50).
How to prevent suicide — and how to talk about it as a society — are things people in Greenland are thinking about a lot. That’s what I’ll be talking to people about in the coming weeks. —RH