Urla (LAUGHING): You screamed loudest. I have it all here.
I can play it back to you
Erin: It’s so big. I’ve never seen anything so big. Is it a sperm whale?
Larus: Yes, it’s a sperm whale. We will be safe, they’re not that curious. But it’s very close
— creature resurfaces further from boat — Erin jumps —
Erin: Oh god, it got me again
— nervous laughing — group stand and watch the whale resurface twice more before sinking into the calm water, its mass leaving its imprint in tiny bubbles —
CUT
THE COMMUNISTS ARE IN THE FUNHOUSE
KULUSUK: looks pretend. It is a tiny island ‘settlement’ with only five hundred people in it, which is, apparently, quite large for Greenland. The houses look like they were erected from a flat-pack box, as if they could be neatly folded away and taken with the people if they migrated. They are painted block primary colours: little toy houses, stage props. They are set into the rocks at jaunty angles. The slopes sit vertical against the still water, as if the island is built on the tips of a mountain range that lies just below the surface. The water must not get stormy because some of the houses sit just metres from its edge.
Urla is glad to be back on shore. She was short and restless and pacing in her catlike way, flitting between being happier reading on her own in the bedroom cabin and coming into the wheelhouse to sit with us but not saying anything, as though to remind us of her presence before slinking off back to her book.
I can’t sleep now, my womb feels like it is full of acid and lined with tar, and I can’t flail around like I would in my own bed because I will wake Urla. One of the nearby houses has huskies and they have been howling all night at the moonless sky. My eye mask itches, my Mooncup is uncomfortable and I am scared of leaking on the sheets on our last night with Larus.
This is the kind of period that requires a big fat nappy towel but I am trying to be good to the environment. I am still so glad to have my periods back that I feel no resentment towards it. The pill had stopped them and I went without for the whole time I was on it. I went on it like a lot of teenage girls do, because my periods hurt a lot and would interrupt that steady forward march to the drumbeat of patriarchy, making me take time off work and school. As though being female is an ailment to be cured with medicine.
I have been staring at the first ever picture of Earth for about an hour now. The one taken from the Apollo mission where they flew around the moon to take pictures of craters, the mission before they actually landed. They went up there to take these pictures of the moon’s craters but the astronauts decided to turn the camera around and film Earth rising from behind the moon.
At that moment, for the first time ever, images were appearing on the screens at NASA of Earth from outside Earth. They were watching themselves watching themselves almost in real time from 238,857 miles away. Right then, they reached a new level of self-consciousness that will probably never be recreated outside that room and moment ever again. A Copernican Revolution.
In the 1960s, the space race expanded the human psyche to incorporate a concept of deep space and deep time. The Earthrise photo made people stop and think about Earth more holistically. Maybe that is why people of the sixties cared more about each other and the future.
It is the most reproduced image on Earth, and has become more and more abstract until it has been reduced to an icon for human achievement in the twenty-first century, its significance totally inverted. I am starting to feel a bit strange about it. Because I have been exposed to it so many times that it has numbed me to what I am actually looking at, I am staring at it to try and really see it. It stays on my retina when I blink hard, so when I open my eyes it bleeds into the image on the screen and I can kind of imagine it rising.
They gave a name to the feeling astronauts get when they look back at Earth; they call it the ‘Overview Effect.’ When they are going round in orbit and they are trying to put it into words and it is all cauliflower clouds and dancing green ribbons of aurora and lightning like flicking modem lights and any way they put it sounds so stupid, they get frustrated with their words because it is the most earthly thing on Earth but at the same time it is outside our earthly logic.
It is the same in parts of science that deal with a reality that evades our logic. The scientists have to simplify things using a language we can all understand. Three guesses whose language they use!
But they have to use one language to talk to other scientists, and to distill their complicated theories until they make sense to us laypeople. But in so doing they make them into something nothing like what they wanted to say in the first place and we believe in this end product because it came from the mouths of scientists. They talk about quantum soup and quark flavour mixing and you wonder if it looks more like a minestrone or something smooth like pea soup. And they call their instruments things like THE SUPERCONDUCTING SUPERCOLLIDER, so you wonder if they left the naming jobs down to earnest five-year-olds.
My favourite example of this is physics king and wife-manipulator Albert Einstein’s name for non-local faster-than-light interaction of atoms that are separated in space. The particles were created in the same instant in space but then got widely separated, but they can still be said to be the same particle, and if you measure one it immediately affects the other. I do not understand it fully but I just like what he called it. He called it spooky action at a distance.
And astronauts say things that seem so obvious and dumb, like, ‘You realise that the whole world is interconnected,’ and you snort at how obvious and dumb these clever astronauts sound, but then you think about it and actually maybe they are on to something. They say things like, ‘You realise that we are all already in space, on a giant spaceship, spaceship Earth,’ and you think they are just saying that in a condescending sort of subterfuge to everyone who is not really on a spaceship, until you realise that you had been thinking of yourself as on this anchored point from which they send rockets to space, when you have been out there the whole time. There is nothing underneath you and nothing above or either side for a very, very long way. The moon rolls around a groove in the space—time fabric created by the gravity of Earth.
There should be a flight about every five years that takes all of the current world leaders into orbit so that they can look down at Earth. If the UN wants world peace why have they not thought of that one?
MUSH QUIMMIG MUSH MUSH
Urla has taught me how to say: Hello, my name is Erin, thank you, yes, no, and the food was very nice. There is a Kalaallit Inuit family from the settlement that were travelling today to pick up supplies from Kangerlussuaq (gan-ker-schloo-schooak) on the west coast, where there is a DIY shop that has something specific that they need, and a family member that needs ferrying, and various other menial things which all seem insane to have to travel FIVE HUNDRED MILES for.
They intend to return with a heavy load, so the family are sending the dad and son out with two almost empty dog sleds. The dogs can run between forty and sixty miles in a day, so the thing should take us thirteen or fourteen days. It is too mountainous to get into Nuuk from the east side, but the ferry that goes from Kangerlussuaq to Nuuk only goes once a week. If all goes well, I should get into Kangerlussuaq the day before the ferry.
The dad is called Amos and he loves his dogs. When Amos put me on the sled with his son Umik he made things awkward from the offset by explaining that he might be a bit shy with me because he did not get to meet many girls in the village. Umik is about fifteen, does not say or smile much, wears a beanie with Miley Cyrus on it and a pair of neon orange-framed sunglasses which he never takes off.
Urla switched her mood as soon as we started moving again. She seems erratic, as though a cloud passes its shadow over her but lifts and then sunshine again. I was a little worried