Oh, Canada

I do not like to sit still. Long airplane rides make me batshit crazy — imagine Jack Nicholson in The Shining set in a 747 instead of the Overlook Hotel. You get the picture. When we finally took off for our expedition to the top of the earth, we traveled from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Canada’s busiest airport: Pearson International in Toronto. That’s around 337 miles. I could deal with that.

What I did not know, however, is that Pearson International is the Great White North’s Guantanamo Bay — a nauseating labyrinth of despair and insurmountable torture unlike anything I have ever encountered in my time crisscrossing America by plane. I’ll spare you the bloody details, but let me just say this: Canada may have dropped infuriating little cluster bombs on my home country in the form of Justin Bieber, Nickelback and Céline Dion, but they are all baby shit compared to the living Rakshasa that resides at 6301 Silver Dart Drive, Mississauga, ON L5P 1B2, Canada. Seriously, I would take a caning in Singapore if it meant I never had to return to Pearson International again.

I wondered if I was alone. I recently looked up my new favorite airport on Google and here are a few chestnuts I found in the reviews:

• “What a bloody nightmare.”
• “Pearson is an embarrassment and a liability for Toronto and has been for years.”
• “This was the worst airport I have ever went to.”
• “I could write a book on what’s wrong with Pearson.”
• “Waiting for luggage is worse than waiting for luggage in Kenya or Nepal. That speaks for itself.”

OK, good. I wasn’t alone. So the point is this: If you’re going to Iceland, fly direct. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. And stay the fuck away from Toronto.

Despite all this, Pearson claims it handled 36,109,469 passengers in 2013. I cannot confirm how many souls actually made it out alive. Fortunately, we did. And Iceland was next on the agenda. Onward and upward.

Misty Mountain Hop

This picture, taken by a local photographer named Gaaba Jensen, was published just a few hours ago on the Facebook page of Greenland Today. That is a mountain of ice passing by Ilulissat. Let’s recap: That is a mountain. Of ice. Floating. In the Ocean. For scale, check out the people on the bottom right. (Click on the image for a larger version.)

On another note, Jensen’s work is absolutely beautiful. You can view more of it here and here.

Chasing Ice

From YouTube: “On May 28, 2008, Adam LeWinter and Director Jeff Orlowski filmed a historic breakup at the Ilulissat Glacier in Western Greenland. The calving event lasted for 75 minutes and the glacier retreated a full mile across a calving face three miles wide. The height of the ice is about 3,000 feet, 300-400 feet above water and the rest below water.”

This extraordinary footage is from the documentary film Chasing Ice. It is the largest glacier calving ever filmed. Aside from being incapable of comprehending the scale and enormity of what I am watching here, I am hypnotized by the sound. Good God, just listen to that.

In a few short days, I will be standing at this very same spot.

Fear and Loathing in Ilulissat

The town that we’re going to in Greenland is called Ilulissat. It is 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle and, as of 2013, the population is 4,541. The entire city, including outlying settlements, is roughly 18 square miles. By way of comparison, the suburban town that my wife and I currently call home is 21.9 square miles and is jam-packed with 41,864 of New Jersey’s most highly proficient assholes. That’s 1,930 people per square mile. There’s not a lot of legroom.

There are no connecting roads in or out of Ilulissat leading to other towns. The same goes for all towns in Greenland. You have three primary ways to move around country: by air, sea or dogsled. The sea, however, is filled with mammoth icebergs. Some of them can be 3,300 feet in height. On the other hand, the highest point in the state of New Jersey is in the imaginatively named High Point State Park. It tops out at 1,800 feet. So yeah, Greenland has floating, arctic mountains that are significantly taller than any natural thing in New Jersey. These are the very same Gargantuan Ice Cubes of Death that like to eat the hull sections of unsinkable passenger liners.

While it varies from place to place, your average commercial airport runway is around 7,000 to 10,000 feet in length. The Ilulissat Airport has one asphalt runway that is 2,772 feet long. Landing there looks beautiful; the flight path skims over top of the colorful buildings of Ilulissat, offering panoramic views of the ocean and endless ice-covered tundra. However, since there’s just one short runway encircled by glacial mountains and sea, the final touchdown promises to offer a high level of ball clenching anxiety I haven’t felt since I jumped off a bridge into the back bay of Avalon, New Jersey, sometime in the ‘70s.

The Ilulissat Icefjord, just a stone’s throw southeast of Ilulissat, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. According their website, “The Ilulissat Icefjord is an outstanding example of a stage in the Earth’s history: the last ice age of the Quaternary Period. The ice-stream is one of the fastest (19m per day) and most active in the world. Its annual calving of over 35 cu. km of ice accounts for 10% of the production of all Greenland calf ice, more than any other glacier outside Antarctica.”

Though about 12% of the population of Greenland speaks Danish, Kalaallisut is the country’s official language. It is the language of the Greenlandic Inuit people. It is an incredibly difficult language, to say the very least. My tongue cannot contort in the ways it would be necessary for me to even begin to speak this dialect properly. It is a physical improbability. For example, take Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which reads, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” In Kalaallisut, that translates to, “Inuit tamarmik inunngorput nammineersinnaassuseqarlutik assigiimmillu ataqqinassuseqarlutillu pisinnaatitaaffeqarlutik. Silaqassusermik tarnillu nalunngissusianik pilersugaapput, imminnullu iliorfigeqatigiittariaqaraluarput qatanngutigiittut peqatigiinnerup anersaavani.” Yeah, good luck with that. I know about 15 words in Spanish, and 10 of them are how to say the numbers one through 10.

So, while Ilulissat can be considered “small,” I have a feeling it’s going to make me feel even smaller.

Meanwhile, just north of Ilulissat, Greenland

Winner, Winner! Chicken Dinner!

I’ve never really won anything. Well, except for $75 on a New Jersey Lottery scratch off ticket about three years ago. With that said, I wasn’t actually expecting to win a trip to Greenland. But when I Love Greenland — The Travel Community of Greenland.com hosted a Facebook contest to win a whirlwind adventure on the world’s largest island, my wife egged me on to enter. And she was damn persistent about it. To enter, people were asked to write an answer to one simple question: Why do you wish to visit Greenland? Seemed simple enough, right? In response, here’s what I wrote and posted on Greenland.com’s Facebook page:

My wife and I were married just a little over a year ago. We’re American – which is to say we’re poor, in our 40s, and struggle every day to keep everything afloat. We buy clothes at the secondhand store, drive a beat-up used Volvo, and have cheap Tungsten Carbide rings for wedding bands. Life together is an endless cycle of mundane tasks: Wake up. Work. Chores. Bills. Sleep. Repeat.

That’s not to say that we’re unhappy or unappreciative. My wife and I are desperately in love and are excited by the simple things in life: Photography, writing, art, culture, nature, exploring, and music make us the most happy. We like to dance and sing together. Looking at the stars is a big deal for us. A campfire in the woods is our heaven. A trail through a forest has an irresistible pull which neither of us can deny. Swimming in a lake at night is a treat. When we’re together, life’s simple pleasures give us the most joy.

In our spare time, we devise ways to leave the country together on epic journeys. We dream. We talk enthusiastically about new cultures, music and food. I’ve never been outside of America, but my wife and I look at atlases of the world and plan amazing adventures. We’re the type of couple that would love to go to some far away land and slip into the new world around us with open eyes, hearts and minds – How does the air smell? How does the grass feel beneath our feet? Where can we try food we’ve never tasted, or hear music we’ve never heard? Where can we meet amazing, new people? What color is the water? How can we best experience and respect the local culture? Are there opportunities, adventures or quests before us that we can dive into headfirst and look at each other afterwards, wild-eyed with giant smiles and say, “Can you believe we just did THAT?!”

But in our hearts, we know that this is a next to impossible task. Our lives and bills and obligations never allow it to come to fruition. So, we dream. And sometimes, it’s nice just to do that. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t convey that I would love to take my wife to Greenland, to let one of those dreams be real. Just for once. I would dance with her to Inuit music, and bask in Inuit culture. Maybe we’d get lucky, and see a polar bear, reindeer, musk ox, or arctic fox. A whale even! I’d kiss her for the first time all over again while dog sledding. We’d sit in silence looking at the beauty around us – the ice and snow, the stunning mountains just outside of Nuuk. We’d marvel at the Tupilaq art, traditional dress, and try suaasat and a Greenlandic coffee for the first time.

But mostly, I’d want to dance with my wife under the Northern Lights and whisper, “This isn’t a dream. We’re really here.”

It took me all but 20 minutes to write this. I just spoke the truth, hit send and forgot about it. Then, just two weeks after submitting this answer, I was in the shower getting ready for work when I heard my wife scream. At first, I thought someone had broken into our apartment to steal my valuable collection of rare Dio albums. But alas, this was not the case. My wife burst through the bathroom door, holding a laptop in her hand showing me this web page. We had won.

My head began to spin. I closed the shower curtain slowly in disbelief and began dry heaving. I had never left the United States, and now I was going to one of the most remote places on earth — above the Arctic Circle. Suddenly, dog sledding, icebergs, polar bears and the aurora borealis were on my radar. I didn’t even have a passport. Questions flooded my mind: What language did they speak in Greenland? Do we have to eat whale? Am I going to freeze to death? Christ, didn’t the Titanic sink near there? You’re going to need a bigger boat.

Apparently, come March 23, 2014, I’m going to find out.

What Dreams May Come?

My wife, Lauren, is a dreamer. This creates an interesting dynamic in our relationship.

Lauren’s noggin contains paraphernalia unknown to me. For example, she dreams of shoving off and living somewhere like North Sentinel Island. This remote island deathtrap sits between India and Thailand in the Bay of Bengal (a.k.a. Tsunami/Cyclone Alley). It is home to the Sentinelese people, who have remained untouched by modern civilization since sometime before the invention of the sandwich. Much like the fine individuals who inhabit northern Georgia here in the United States, the Sentinelese people don’t take too kindly to city folk. In fact, they’ll fucking kill you — even if you try to bring them a nice fruit basket and a couple of “I ♥ NY” t-shirts. In 2006, Sentinelese archers killed two fishermen who got a little too close to their island utopia. Then, when a helicopter came to pick up the bodies of the two luckless bastards, the tribe drove off the whirlybird with a storm of arrows. Yes, fucking arrows. In 2006. I shit you not.

Yet, despite the proven Helicopter vs Arrow Statistics of 2006 (Sentinelese: 3, Helicopter: 0, Fisherman: 0), my wife is the kind of person that daydreams of going to a place like this and seriously believes she would blend right in. In her mind, it would all be shits and giggles. She’d bond with the Sentinelese. They’d shoot coconuts off each other’s heads with poison arrows. They’d relate to each other by improvising creepy hand signals and onomatopoeic swishes and grunts. They’d body surf tsunamis together and dance, bathed in sea turtle blood, by a massive, undulating bonfire on the beach. They’d eat bugs plucked from each other’s hair. And, in turn, my wife would become one of the tribe and kill defenseless fishermen.

On the other hand, I am shackled to reality. I am not a fan of “unknowns” or taking risks without a complete comprehension of what I have to lose. I dig tangible things. I don’t dream of going to far-off places because, the reality is, I’m 43, work my ass off, live in a one bedroom apartment and have more bills than the Library of Congress. You know what’s exotic and foreign to me? Chinatown in Philadelphia. That’s some other planetary system shit right there. There’s a great quote from the late comedian George Carlin: “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Traditionally, I subscribe to this theory when it comes to “dreaming.” I just believe in me. Yoko and me. That’s reality.

The idea of leaving America to go play murderball with the Sentinelese people on Gilligan’s Island is something that would never enter my mind. And that’s why, in October 2013, when my wife asked me to enter a contest to win a trip to Greenland, I sighed, shook my head and blew her off.

Then, for some inexplicable reason, my Grumpy Son of a Bitch Force Field Generator was temporarily knocked offline. Unicorns perched on icebergs were pointing their horns toward the Northern Lights, urging me to look. I thought, what is this sorcery? Aye, there’s the rub. What dreams may come?

I entered the contest.

Pants? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Pants!

My wife and I live just outside of Philadelphia. The winter of 2013-2014 has cut us without mercy, to say the least. Sparing you the meteorological bullshit (just Google that shit, kid), we’ve had a lot of snow, something called a “polar vortex,” and the sidewalks around my apartment need to be smoothed over by a Zamboni. Salt is not an option. Fuck you, Canada.

Tonight, my wife called me just before arriving home. It was chilly. It was 35°F, but apparently it felt colder than that. So, why not go outside in long underwear? After all, she needed help with carrying packages in from the car. So, I dressed up in my newest wool long underwear, put on slippers and a pea coat, and headed out. I was dead sexy.

Aside from this being semi-normal behavior on my part, I was standing outside in this GQ-inspired ensemble to test the warmth of the clothing, of course.

You see, when you spend roughly $200 on Merino long underwear, that shit better shield you from an Into Thin Air blizzard on Mount Everest. And that’s just what I was aiming to prove. Plus, the black skin fitting long underwear made me look a lot thinner. That alone was worth the money.

So, you’re asking yourself: What the hell was a 250 pound man doing standing outside in the winter, testing the warmth of long underwear? More on that soon. Until then, you go ahead and enjoy that image in your head.