By Malin Jennings

As a single gunshot ripped open the Arctic silence, I realized that both the seal
and I had been duped. I’d been staring down a 2-foot-wide hole in the ice into which a young grey seal had just disappeared, eluding, I thought, the Eskimo hunters that surrounded me. Unlike most Greenland Eskimos who have paying jobs and hunt only part time, the Thule Eskimos [or Inuit, as they preferred to be called] live the old way, surviving entirely off what they hunt. It defied logic that the five men would stand at the breathing hole, smoking cigarettes as the seal swam blithely off.

What the seal and I failed to appreciate was the hunter who had slipped away from the group. He tracked a crack in the ice from the breathing hole where we stood to another one nearly a quarter mile away. The muzzle of his battered rifle pointed a few feet from the hole and, in the 15 below cold, his bare hand poised on the frigid trigger. He didn’t need to see the seal to know when to fire; all he had to do was listen for the animal’s soft exhale as it surfaced.

As the echo of the gunshot faded, the hunters around me wordlessly put out their cigarettes, whistled to their dogs and rode their sleds to the second hole. No one asked whether the seal was dead. They didn’t need to. This far north, nothing is wasted, whether it’s a single opportunity or a single cartridge. The fact that a bullet had been spent meant the seal was now dinner.

But that’s the High Arctic, a demanding place where you think constantly about how to meet your most basic needs and outwit a fiercely withholding environment. Either that or you die. The ability of the Inuit to think relentlessly about what they need and how to get it, without regret or ambiguity, is one of the reasons I’ve gone north three times since being diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer.

I’m one of those almost pathologically nice people, hardwired to care more about the needs and desires of others than my own. The kind who learned to say, “I’m happy doing whatever you feel like doing” before I learned to say “Mama” or “Papa.” The kind who cancels mammogram appointments because someone needs my help at work. The kind who could never survive in the Arctic.

It’s an old axiom that cancer changes you…

After facing the disease, many people reshuffle their priorities and alter directions. I assumed any changes cancer produced in me would be ho-hum garden variety. Maybe I would write daily affirmations or start a journal.

True, I used to be fairly adventurous. I moved to Alaska after college and lived there for several years as a journalist. I was enthralled by the rawness of the state and how easy it was to hear myself think in a vast, empty land. But that was before life intervened, before I moved to Washington, D.C., became an executive, married, divorced, remarried and grew into a middle-aged woman driving a mid-sized SUV.

Over the years, the Arctic faded from my thoughts like the northern lights under a rising sun. So I was as surprised as anyone when, after a mastectomy, six months of chemotherapy and two reconstructive surgeries, I didn’t just veer from the middle of the road. I flew north for three straight days to a place that didn’t even have footpaths.

My Arctic fever began in 2000 during chemotherapy. I’d recline in the big leather lounge chair on the cancer ward, hooked up to the I.V. drip, and daydream about icy seas. I’d doodle pictures of dogsleds on legal pads while on the telephone at work. I got to be like Richard Dreyfus’ character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, seeing snowdrifts in my mashed potatoes. The Arctic spoke to me from thousands of miles away.

I answered back.

A few months after chemo ended I flew to the Magdalen Islands, a cluster of rusty nail-colored rocks in the Gulf of St. Lawrence where the white fur seal pups are born each spring. I watched the pups learn to swim and listened, like a mother seal, as the pups’ distinctive “maw-maw” cries mingled with the wind. I was infatuated with the place, craved full-body contact with it. I lay on the ice and felt the sea undulate beneath my scarred chest.

The Magdalen Islands are not far enough north to qualify as the Arctic. But I figured if these sub-Arctic islands were blissful, the High Arctic must be sublime. So I took another trip, this time by icebreaker to central Greenland and Canada’s new Inuit territory of Nunavut. I photographed polar bears on sea ice 95 miles from shore, breathed impossibly clean air and was besieged by Inuit children who wanted to learn to use my digital camera. I taught them how to focus and click and when I got home, I sent the kids copies of the pictures they had shot, secretly hoping they’d invite me for a return visit or better yet, adopt me and make me their pet Kabloona (an Inuit word for white people).

After that trip, the Arctic became my obsession. My desire to politely sip the north was replaced by a need to swill it, gulp it, pour the whole polar bottle down my throat. The High Arctic had become my drug of choice.

So in April 2004, in pursuit of a massive fix, I flew to the most northerly inhabited place on Earth—the tiny hamlet of Siorapaluk, Greenland.

Greenland is an extreme country…

Two-thirds of the island nation lies above the Arctic Circle, and an ice sheet that is 2 miles thick in places covers more than 90 percent of it. Only the coastal fringe is inhabitable. Most of the 56,384 population lives within sight of the sea, most are Inuit and just about everyone hunts and fishes to supplement their income. This is a land where, because transportation costs are high and there is no arable land or growing season, a single banana can cost $1.

Yet Greenland, as extreme and isolated as it is, becomes a dense metropolis when compared to Thule. Although larger than East and West Germany combined, only 1,000 Inuit live in the Thule district. They speak a dialect incomprehensible to other Greenlanders and pursue a piteously hard subsistence living.

The most northerly community within the Thule region is Siorapaluk. Sixty people live there without running water, streets, sidewalks, mechanized vehicles or televisions. The community shares a single telephone. The school doubles as a church. And hundreds of sled dogs live outside year-round, no matter how cold it gets.

Siorapaluk’s other distinction? The inhabitants are full-time hunters; they survive off what they kill, period. Only about three dozen Thule Inuit hunting families, scattered throughout four communities in the region, still live this way. They are the people I chose to vacation with last spring.

This is the place cancer took me…

It’s a place where, if you’re hungry, rather than open the fridge, you check out the roof of your house, which, if well supplied, might hold a hunk of seal meat or a muskox rib cage. Storing meat on roofs keeps it frozen and out of reach of wandering polar bears. If there’s no meat on the roof, you go hunting or fishing. And should you be skilled and lucky enough to shoot a seal, walrus, narwhale, reindeer or musk ox, you skin and butcher it on the spot before hauling it back to town, which could be a day or more away, depending on how far you’ve had to travel to find the food.

Water isn’t any easier to come by. Siorapaluk squats on the banks of a massive fjord. When I first arrived, a paid guide gave my four traveling companions and me a few basic items and then promptly left for a month-long polar bear hunt. He led us to an empty shack, pointed to the kerosene stove and handed us three things: a yellow plastic bag to use as a toilet, a block of ice the size of a large poodle and an ice pick. Between making tea, washing our meager dishes and brushing our teeth, the ice lasted one night. So the next day I set off looking for more.

Once you get to know them, the Thule Inuit are friendly people. Unfortunately, at this point, I had not gotten to know them. I had sledded with five Thule hunters eight hours a day for three straight days. But to these painfully shy people, I was apparently still a stranger. As I walked through the town of 20 or so buildings, the only people I saw were children at play. The adults who weren’t hunting were inside their homes, peering at me circumspectly through the windows. When I’d approach their house, they’d withdraw, perhaps not wanting to appear impolite by staring or maybe just wanting to avoid me. It wasn’t until I found a half-Inuit/half-Japanese teenager that I got help. (I later learned the boy’s father was a former Japanese documentary filmmaker who, 30 years before, had been making a movie in Siorapaluk, fell in love with the place, stayed, married an Inuit woman and became one of the best hunters in Greenland.)

The teenager spoke some English. When I told him I needed ice, he nodded, went into his house and closed the door. The door reopened moments later and a stocky Inuit woman emerged wearing soft, sealskin kamiks (knee-high boots) and a scowl. She was yelling in Thule, waving one hand vehemently and wielding a heavy rod in the other hand. Without making eye contact with me, she thrust the rod into my hand, shook her head and, still yelling, stormed back into the house, slamming the door behind her.

I stared at the giant ice pick, baffled about what I was supposed to do with it. I was equally baffled about why the woman had been so angry. Fortunately, the young Japanese-Inuit teenager reappeared and waved for me to follow him, with this woman—his mother, as it turned out—still hollering inside the house. She had apparently misinterpreted my request, assuming I expected the villagers to hand over their ice to me. It never occurred to her someone could be fool enough not to know how to find ice in the Arctic.

The boy, who said he once traveled to Japan and perhaps for that reason was more understanding of my Kabloona ignorance, led me to an iceberg, where I banged away until I filled a sled. I dragged the ice back to my shack, hoping secretly the villagers were still at their windows, furtively watching me the great hunter, the proud slayer of ice.

Initially, I assumed it was the landscape that drew me to the Arctic…

I stood knee deep in snow on a cliff overlooking the frozen ocean in the Magdalen Islands, awed by the uninterrupted white horizon. The scale and grandeur made me want to burst into song and spin on that snowy hilltop with my arms akimbo like some kind of Nordic Julie Andrews.

My reaction to subsequent trips was even more profound. I felt more joy in the silent fjords of Greenland and the empty pebbled beaches of Nunavut than I had felt anywhere else in my life. I returned from the trip committed to capture some of that happiness in a bottle, to bring some of it home and release it into my everyday life. My husband and I began working harder at our marriage, which was already pretty good. But pretty good was no longer good enough. I wanted a great marriage, one that would make me as happy as the Arctic.

Yet it wasn’t until my most recent trip to Greenland that I figured out precisely why traveling north gave me so much contentment. It was more than the vast emptiness and the silence so profound I could stand on the sea ice and hear the white noise in my own ear. But it was more than the place and the people. Each trip I took was a gift I gave to myself. It was an act of giving no longer just to others, but to myself.

Ironically, it was probably cancer that helped me discover this gift. During my recovery, for the first time in my life, I accepted help from others without worrying about what to give back in return, without doing a mental calculation of what each gesture and act of generosity was worth and how I would repay it. Accepting care during recovery was my first experience in receiving, my first exposure to the idea that I can’t love very well and can’t give very well until I learn to take.

I literally had to get cancer and travel to the end of the Earth to learn love is not a monologue, it’s a conversation, one that I hope to continue wherever I go.