This Cold Heaven

Author Essay

How I came to write THIS COLD HEAVEN:

This Cold Heaven is a nonfiction narrative about the lives and history of the Inuit people who have lived in Greenland for almost five thousand years. The book is many things: a personal narrative of my time in Greenland, traveling with subsistence Inuit hunters, staying with Danish and Inuit friends in villages and towns, all gathered over a period of seven years. I have lived in Greenland in every season, during the dark time and have traveled and lived on the ice during the bright all-night spring months. Interlaced with my modern narrative are excerpts from Knud Rasmussen’s expedition notes written at the turn of the last century, between 1917 and 1924, in the hopes that the reader will come away with an idea of the spiritual and material life of the Inuit hunter and villager before modernization.

I first went to Greenland on assignment for Islands Magazine in 1993, and before the first week was out, I knew I could write a book there. Cold-hardened by seventeen winters on a Wyoming ranch, I had long been interested in Arctic culture after winter visits to Alaska and a month at a biologist’s spring camp on the ice in the high Canadian Arctic near Resolute. I’d had a taste, but I wanted more. It was suggested that I go to Greenland because they still travel and hunt dogsled there—in Canada and Alaska they have given the dogsled up for snowmobiles, thus enslaving themselves to the world of economy.

Once in Greenland I could only think of going back. Over and over again. Returning from every hunting trip, I always dragged my foot in the snow to slow the sled down. . . . That’s how reluctant I was to leave. Every season I went further north until I finally reached Qaanaaq and Siorapaluk, the northernmost continuously inhabited villages in the world. There I found the heart of Inuit hunting life, much as it had been 100 or 1000 years ago, and was graciously allowed to be a passenger on their dogsleds.

—Gretel Ehrlich, 2001