I’ve carried it with me ever since.
* * *
AS I BEGAN to pore over my language books, I was reminded of the complexity of West Greenlandic. Most words in this language are composed of multiple elements called “morphemes,” word parts that often create “sentence-words”; the longest stretches to over 200 letters. Nouns are inflected for one of eight cases and for possession. Eight moods as well as the number and gender of both the sentence’s subject and object inflect every verb. Subdialects spring like weeds. Translation? Sure, I had all my downloaded dictionaries and American movies with Greenlandic subtitles, but in all honesty, I felt screwed. The learning curve seemed impossibly steep.
Fresh cracks on my fingers throbbed. The thin red lines looked like nothing much in the dim light, but often woke me at night with pain. I rummaged for my salve, which gave me a few moments of relief.
To distract myself, I scrolled through images of tiny West Greenland coastal towns––many with fewer than three hundred souls—barren, rocky hillsides dotted with small, brightly painted wooden houses, the great Greenland ice sheet in the distance. In the past, delicacies included fermented meat or fish and fermented seal oil, which apparently tasted like blue cheese. Seal eyes were a treat, as were the half-digested stomach contents of walrus, and fully formed chicks in their shells. I reminded myself of the reason Greenland was called Greenland. One theory held that when the Vikings discovered Iceland, they fell so in love with it they wanted to keep it a secret, so they gave Greenland its attractive name, hoping to lure explorers away from Iceland and to this nearly seven-hundred-thousand-square-mile block of ice—two miles deep at its center—ringed by black, craggy mountains that shot straight up out of the sea.
People still hunted and fished to survive: caribou, musk ox, seal, polar bear, and narwhal. These hunters were so skilled they could read the attributes of polar bears, or “ice bears,” by their footprints: not only their age—but whether they were starving. The culture teemed with myths, but as usual, the language told me more than any single fact. It even betrayed a wry sense of humor: the island with a name that meant “not enough moss to wipe your ass with”; the first known term for missionaries: “he who talks too much.” Taimagiakaman referred to the “great necessity”： that of having to take the lives of animals to feed people and their dogs. The word in Inuktun for climate change translates to “a friend acting strangely”—what a personal and beautiful way of describing a relationship to the natural world.
The legendary plethora of words for snow is no myth, but the number of words for ice—topping 170—taught me more. There were words for dense, old ice: ice that was safe for a hunter and his sled and dogs to cross; words for grease ice, water in its earliest stage of freezing, which won’t support a person but will allow seals to break through and breathe. Dozens of other terms specified various ice floes by shape and size, even by movement: were they rolling, swept along by the current, or stuck among their brethren? There was even a word for a crack in the ice opening and closing due to ocean movement beneath. Perhaps inspired by the necessity of knowing what kind of ice you were dealing with, there were a dozen words for fear, because the reality was that even seasoned hunters could die in a flash if the ice gave way and were often found frozen clinging to the edge of a floe. Among these flavors of fear were words for being at sea in a puny sealskin kayak as a storm barrels down, the fear of calamitous violence as when facing death, a fear so powerful one cannot move to defend oneself, and a fear of someone who must be avoided at all costs. I could certainly have added a few varieties of my own.
The words that stopped me cold, though, were nuna unganartoq, which meant “an overwhelming affection and spiritual attachment to the land and nature.” Something as simple as the warm feel of a rock face baking in the sun, to an emotion as ineffable as the sense of infinity when witnessing a heart-stoppingly beautiful vista. A sensation of being no less a part of the land than a stone, a sprig of moss, or driftwood plying the waves. Nuna unganartoq was something I had never experienced, but I knew where I’d seen those words before.
It was how Andy had signed all his letters.
When we were eight or so, we had a fight and I ran to our mother to tell her how much I hated my brother. She said, Well, he doesn’t hate you. She pulled a box of photos down from a high closet shelf, dug around until she found what she was looking for: an in vitro scan of the two of us curled up against each other. I was busy saying, Yeah, so what, until she pointed out that, even in the womb, his arm was draped protectively around my shoulders.