Pebble Bay, Nuuk, Greenland in March 2020 – by Katalin Laszlo
“It’s -20 degrees, and at first I can’t see anything in the blindingly white frozen world. After a minute, I start to make out the sprinkles of grey mountain rock and a few colourful houses that are almost swallowed by enormous piles of snow. Even before things started getting weird, I was surprised to find out how many people keep their peace of mind by wrapping up every centimetre of their body and taking long, solitary walks. That much hasn’t changed. Occasionally I see another person in the distance doing the same but you’d really have to make an effort to get close enough to even be able to hear each other. I’ve never been anywhere so quiet, muffled.
Every day, I walk past the cemetery in front of our current home, down to the bay where you can see the melted ice-water from Nuuk’s fjord system meet the salty sea. Right where the two waters meet is where the Aurora pours into the sky on a clear night. When the sun comes out, the blue of the sky and the water are almost shocking against the white, with sprinkles of grey mountain rock and a few colourful houses almost swallowed up by enourmous piles of snow. There’s a big group of ravens that hang out in this bay, and sometimes an enourmous Artic eagle floating ovehead. All I can hear is wind, the odd howling husky, even more occasionally a child laughing, and the sound of myself walking on the snow. My footsteps have all different types of crunches, and it’s taken me days to figure out that the strange long creaking sound is when you are walking on snow that is on top of ice.”
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