Into the Unknown

Unsurprisingly, the gate for my flight to Greenland is in a neglected corner of the airport. There are a handful of people waiting for the plane, a tiny turboprop too small to reach the Jetway. We’ll have to take a bus out to the plane.

There are a handful of passengers on the plane, but only one native Greenlander. Most are headed to Nuuk, nestled on the warmer west-southwest coast of Greenland. No one lives in the interior, 85 percent of which is covered by a sheet of ice. Some isolated settlements dot the frigid eastern coast.

The sole Greenlander on board lives in Ittoqqortoormiit, a tiny village of 350 people on the lonely northeastern coast of Greenland. There are no roads to the town — there are hardly any roads in Greenland at all, certainly none between villages. It’s just too impractical to blast through hundreds of miles of frozen rock to build a road trip few people will ever drive on.

Our fellow traveler, a kindergarten teacher, will have to fly from Nuuk to Nerlerit Inaat Airport, about 30 miles from Ittoqqortoormiit, and continue from there via helicopter to get home. There are only ten cars in his village, and most residents are in the business of hunting or trapping polar bears, walruses, seals, musk oxen, or narwal.

Air Greenland, a state-run company, is an essential service. Without it, Greenlanders would be stuck using boats, dogsleds, or kayaks to travel between towns. The company operates 18 helicopters, eight propeller planes, and one jet airliner, all painted bright red. It also provides the only search-and-rescue service in Greenland, which has no military. Until this year, Nuuk Airport was too small to handle much in the way of large aircraft; but the Danish government has invested significant funds in clearing enough land for airliners to operate.

Greenland Airports Authority, another state-run company, maintains 13 airports and 46 helipads around the enormous island. Many of the airports were built by the US military, as part of the network of 17 bases it built and operated in Greenland during World War II and the Cold War.

It’s a smooth flight over the sea; but once we transit the mountains of Greenland, the plane is buffeted by powerful turbulence. More than once, I locate the paper bag in the seat pocket and keep it ready.

The sun struggles to brighten the eastern horizon as we race westward away from it. In the dim red glow, I can make out Greenland’s terrain up close for the first time.

It looks like another planet.

Mile after mile, hour after hour, an endless parade of tall, icy, black mountains, swept with sheets of white snow, march by under the window. In the valleys, lakes and frozen fjords glisten pinkish in the vague light. The scene threatens death by exposure in minutes to anyone foolish enough to wander out there.

Playing Catch-Up

At long last, electric lights, signs of human habitation, come into view beneath us. Nuuk is home to nearly 20,000 people — more than a third of the country’s entire population of 57,000 — and that number is rising. Municipal authorities proudly reported an increase of 145 people over last year, and are excitedly talking about hitting 30,000 — the big three-oh! — in ten years. Overall, though, the population of Greenland is dropping. Nuuk’s growth is a sign of urbanization finally reaching this country.

From the air, it is clear that Nuuk is tiny. There are only a handful of streets twisting around mountain peaks and along narrow fingers of land jutting into the sea, spliced by dark fjords. The impression from above is not the vast spiderwebs of light of Western cities, but individual strings of bulbs. It’s reminiscent of a Brooklyn street decorated for a hachnassas sefer Torah.

Nuuk itself, from the ground, reinforces the impression of a miniature country. The air terminal is about the size of a large house; the plane rolls right up to it, like a bus stopping at the curb.

In the city center, all buildings of any importance are within one block: the Inatsisartut, Greenland’s parliament building, is across the street from the Sermersooq-Nuuk Municipality building, up the block from the police station, around the corner from Nuuk Center mall, and next to the Katuaq Cultural Center.

The mall, Greenland’s first, opened recently, to great excitement. The building is covered with a strange-looking metallic mesh that was supposed to trap snow and make the building shine in the sunlight.

It didn’t work. The wind blows the snow right off of it.

Katuaq, the city’s main tourist attraction, offers exhibits on the culture of the Greenlandic people.

Never Meant for Humans

Speeding through the streets in my shuttle — which I have all to myself — I get an eye-level view of Nuuk. Chilly black-and-white mountains like the ones we saw during flight ring the town on all sides. Even where the land meets the water, more mountains are visible just across the fjord.

The city is literally carved out of the mountains that feature constantly across all of Greenland. The streets are steeply sloped and coated with inches-thick layers of snow and ice, winding around the peaks, cut into the mountain side. Travel is an adventure — turning a corner may suddenly reveal a breathtaking vista onto a landscape below you. On all sides, the mountains are the ever-present backdrop, black rock and wind-driven white snow resembling powdered chocolate cookies in a bowl.

If Nuuk natural landscape is a relentless black and white, the manmade environment is intended to counter it. Homes and businesses are resplendent neon hues, spanning the spectrum from red through violet, perched in a random assortment on cliff edges and in deep valleys — a handful of jelly beans tossed into the cookie bowl.

My hostel turns out to be a wooden structure carved into the side of a mountain. To get to the entrance, I must climb three flights of exterior wooden steps, covered in ice, of course. My room is at the back of the house, and the rocky cliff meets the outer wall about two inches below the windowsill. Looking out the window is like pressing your cheek against the mountainside and peeking upward to the peak.

The room is small and sparse but pleasant enough, clean and comfortable. With average winter temperatures of about 14 degrees Fahrenheit (-10 degrees Celsius), Greenlanders like to be warm. Although their enormous island is blessed by infinite resources of rock, but no trees, all the homes are nevertheless built of wood — a much better insulator than stone or steel.

Air conditioning is unnecessary in Greenland — summer temperatures in Nuuk rarely get much above 50°F (10°C). In 2016, the city recorded a record high of 75°F. There is no spring or autumn in Nuuk — it’s solid winter from October through May.

Later, a scheduling snag leaves me waiting an hour in the cold, at the end of a dark street. To keep warm, I hide in a nearby apartment building. Inside, it’s remarkably similar to the smaller buildings in Ramat Eshkol or Bayit Vegan. The design of the stairwell, color of the tile, and layout follow the European style, familiar from Israel. There is even a button to turn on the stairwell lights for a minute when you leave your apartment. Beneath the stairwell in Greenland, however, kids have stashed sleds, not bikes.

Everything in Nuuk is within walking distance, and I figured walking would be the best way to get to know the city. But I can hardly move two inches.

The streets, sidewalks, stoops, and steps all over the city are covered in ice like a massive, contoured skating rink. I struggle to take a step or two without slipping. Snow banks, rising to heights of four to five feet, line the roads.

The locals march around comfortably — over their shoes, they wear rubber webs lined with metal studs. The cars, all sporting snow tires, zip effortlessly up and down steep grades. But I’m skating on thick ice and permanent, hard-packed snow.

I thought carefully about how to dress. I needed to keep warm, but if I was going somewhere no ben Torah had gone before, I wanted to look the part. I settled on several layers of thermals, sweaters, and black snow pants, topped off with a white shirt and yeshivish dress coat. I had sturdy, all-black boots… but no spikes.

Jews in Greenland

The history of Jews and Greenland is short and unremarkable. There has never been an organized Jewish community on the island, and most of its Jewish experience derives from people — like me — passing through on assignment; US or Danish servicemembers, whalers, nurses, meteorologists, and journalists.

There is currently one known Jew in Greenland. Paul Cohen is an American-born translator living in Narsaq, a rural village of about 1,300 people in southern Greenland. He has been very helpful to me, and we remain friends.

Juaaka Lyberth, the closest Greenland has to a celebrity, reported that his father-in-law was a Russian Jew who moved to the island to escape persecution in his hometown.

Most of what we know about Jewish history in Greenland comes from Alfred J. Fischer, a world traveler who visited in 1955. He tracked down several Jews on the island: Rita Sheftelovich, a Jewish Dane who spent a year in the town of Aasiat; Gunnar Saietz, a Danish commando with a hair-raising story about an avalanche crushing his home while he stepped out for a moment; Jørgen Chemnitz, a Danish civil service interpreter whose ancestor, Jens Carl Wilhelm Chemnitz, came to Greenland in 1834; Robert J. Mezistrano, a Sephardi from Casablanca; Louis Helish, a Holocaust survivor from Berlin; and Fritz Loewe, a Jewish meteorologist who left his toes at a data collection camp called Eismitte in Greenland’s interior.

For a short period beginning in 1954, there was a minyan in Greenland, at Thule Air Base, a US military installation, now called Pituffik Space Base, in the northwest corner of the island. As many as 53 Jews at any one time were stationed at Thule, and a minyan of at least 15 men met weekly. The minyan was actually started by a fluent Hebrew-speaking non-Jew named Captain Robert Holt, and was later led by Maurice Burk, law student and lieutenant from New Orleans. In 1955, Burk organized a Seder on the base, which was well-attended. For the following Rosh Hashanah, the Air Force brought in Rabbi Kalman L. Levitan, a chaplain from New York.

There was at least one Orthodox Jew stationed at Thule, a 22-year-old librarian known only as Kleinmann.

Greenland had significant strategic importance in World War II. It straddled a key shipping and air route, and supplies, planes, and ships sent from the United States to England to support the war effort often stopped here.

On February 3, 1943, the Legend of the Four Chaplains was born. The US Army Transport Dorchester was torpedoed by German U-boats off the coast of Greenland. Four chaplains were on board, including First Lieutenant Rabbi Alexander Goode. The four chaplains gave up their life jackets and spots on life rafts so that others could live, and continued encouraging and calming the men — many knowing they were living their final moments — with messages of faith and support.

As the ship tilted and began to slide beneath the waves, the four chaplains stood together on the bridge, silhouetted against the fire burning behind them, arms linked in an expression of strength and support. Survivors of the disaster have called it “the closest vision of heaven on earth imaginable.”

Today, the US military honors the memory of the Four Chaplains each year on February 3, and has created the Four Chaplains’ Medal, to recognize the spirit of selflessness and dedication of the four.

See the Light

Several hours into my first day, I’m bewildered — I’m feeling far less excited than I should be at this stage of a new adventure. I can’t shake the feeling that the day is almost over, even though I haven’t accomplished anything yet. I keep checking my watch, but it reads just 12:30 p.m. Eventually, the penny drops.

It’s the sun.

During the winter this far north, the sun doesn’t rise more than a few degrees above the horizon. It was after 10 a.m. when we landed, but the sun had not risen yet, and the ambient light resembled twilight. Throughout the day, the sun barely made an appearance, and never dispelled the gloomy, dim feeling. It’s no wonder the suicide rate in Greenland is high, and the country is struggling with an epidemic of alcoholism. One in four children here have suffered from alcohol-related violence. Ittoqqortoormiit has hardly seen the sun in almost three months, and still has some time to wait for the return of the light.

I’ve booked a nautical tour of the fjords, and I walk to the harbor to get there. It’s an opportunity to explore, if not to locomote. Slipping, sliding, and several sudden snowy street spills along the way, I eventually find it.

The harbor is a smattering of docks, warehouses, and a crane or two, on a thin strip of land between two fjords. I ice-skate my way across it, steering clear of the edges and the steep, unprotected drop into the frigid waters.

Several boats are moored at the docks. The Swedish flag flies from a navy frigate tied near a ferry that takes Greenlanders to small towns up and down the coast. Some freighters are anchored offshore. The pungent odor of fish hangs over everything. Fishing is Greenland’s primary industry, with exports like halibut making up close to half of its $3.2 billion gross domestic product.

Because of its strategic location, military ships, freighters, and cruise ships often stop here briefly. A local tells me that when a cruise ship disgorges 2,000 passengers, increasing the town’s population by ten percent in ten minutes, every public bathroom in the city is occupied for hours.

I find the dock at which my tour boat is moored, in an inlet choked with floating sea ice. Glum-looking birds huddle on slabs of ice in the water, searching for scraps to eat. The boat is accessed via a flight of stone steps cut into the rock. The steps are covered with a thick layer of uneven ice — frozen, splashed seawater. There is no guardrail, and a slip means a plunge into the icy waters. I stick to the far wall and inch my way down.

The tour boat is a little cruiser, with a warm, enclosed cabin for my five fellow passengers and me, surrounded on all sides by open deck. The boat moves slowly through the masses of ice, picking up speed once we are out in open sea. We head for an iceberg floating a few miles out in the fjords, and circle it a few times.

An iceberg is not like anything I had imagined. It doesn’t look at all like an oversized ice cube or popsicle in your drink, but like a small white island. This one is the size of several large buildings, a pure ghostly white in the gloomy sunlight. It’s hard to conceive that 90 percent of this massive thing is underwater. I can easily see now how Mr. Berg took out the Titanic.

We move out, speeding through the fjords. The arctic wind howling across the deck knifes into me fiercely; it is impossible to stay outside for more than a few minutes. I remove a glove to take a picture, my fingers are numb within moments. Inside, the cabin is well stocked with hot drinks — coffee, tea, and hot chocolate. These are ubiquitous in Greenland, I will see them everywhere.

Mountains line the water on all sides, jutting up steeply from the shoreline. We visit some frozen waterfalls, glaciers, and a mountain cleft by a meteor’s impact. Most of these mountains have descriptive names; I don’t give the locals too much credit for creativity. One is called Sermitsiaq, which means “has a glacier.” Another, Qingaq, means “Nose.” I guess it looks vaguely like a schnozz.

A Day in Nuuk

I’ve got a meeting scheduled for 10 a.m. the next morning — I didn’t realize that the earliest times for tallis, tefillin, and davening are just a few minutes prior.

When I get to the meeting — in the home of a cultural and political leader in Nuuk — I am met at the door. Fortunately, I have read that one does not enter a home in Greenland with shoes on, so I leave them at the entrance. We sit at the dining room table, and I am stunned by the view. It brings to mind the words of Chana’s shirah — “Ein tzur k’Elokeinu,” and Chazal’s reading: “Ein tzayar, there is no artist,” like Hashem.

The entire wall is taken up by glass sliding doors, and the house, like so many others, is balanced on a cliff edge. Below the window, a half-frozen inlet of water gleams between two mountains of stark rock sprinkled with snow and ice. The scene is otherworldly, beautiful and harsh at the same time. The contrast with the conditions indoors has a startlingly comforting effect — it is warm and cozy. Of course, I am offered hot drinks — tea, coffee, and hot chocolate.

After our conversation, I leave and climb to the top of a mountain between the winding streets of Nuuk. The sun, bright today, is just edging the mountains surrounding the city. On the street below, children play in the snow outside a school building. The city is alive — cars zip by on the icy roads, and construction is all around — Nuuk is building for its expected population growth. The airport is one street over; a military transport jet races down a runway that seems to bisect the middle of town.

I take a walk along the shore. The sun glinting off the water, the icy cliffs, and brightly colored houses all coalesce into an austere tableau.

I have brought all the food I need to survive during the trip, but I check out a supermarket. There are some familiar American products, and a whole lot more European products that I recognize from Israel, including an entire wall of soup and nuts made by Knorr. Nothing has a hechsher. There isn’t much by way of produce, either — save for a small region in Greenland’s southwest, there is no arable land, and all produce must be imported at great cost. Here, too, Greenlanders are trying to modernize; a new company in Nuuk, Greenlandic Greenhouse, has started growing produce indoors, hydroponically. Greenlanders may soon be able to enjoy fresh lettuce and other vegetables that are bug-free.

New Nuuk vs. Old Habits

A group of tourists — the same five who were on the boat with me — gets together for a walking tour of Nuuk. The guide points out several statues and monuments placed around the city, each a nod to an ancient Inuit legend or story. These tales are built around pagan spirits, but the guide is quick to label them myths that no one believes in anymore. Nevertheless, much of Greenland’s culture still bears the mark of the Inuit stories.

About 89 percent of the population are native Greenlanders, descended from the Inuit people, with roots tracing back to Mongolia. They were hunters and trappers, spreading out across the polar ice from Mongolia into northern Canada and Greenland hundreds of years ago. Many did not intermarry with Europeans and their descendants have decidedly Asian features. A local complained to me that 2,000 recent Southeast Asian immigrants look too much like Greenlanders, even he cannot tell them apart.

The country is wrestling with many internal questions and competing values. They want to be part of the modern world, with Wi-Fi in every building, American sports and music, but they also want to preserve their native heritage and culture.

“We are professionals, but never far from our kayak,” one man said.

Overall, the Greenlanders are quiet, reserved, and respectful people. They think before they speak, and do so in fluent English with a mild, unfamiliar accent that lends a pleasant flavor to the words.

There is a strong attitude of vassalship in Greenland, which the locals are struggling to shake off. On the street overlooking the sea, many buildings from the colonial era still stand, some 300 years old. The original home of Hans Egede, a Danish-Norwegian missionary who claimed Greenland for Denmark in 1721, is there, alongside a colonial hospital, market buildings, and government buildings. A large hilltop rises behind the hospital, with a statue of Egede standing proudly at its peak. This is symbolic of the tension within Greenland — a country struggling to break free of Denmark and earn self-determination still pays tribute to its colonizer in a place of honor.

Greenlanders want to be an independent country, but the population is not large enough to fill all the jobs and services needed for a country to function independently. They want to provide efficient and professional education to the youth; but the far-flung nature of the villages and lack of teachers make it difficult. They are struggling to break free of colonialism, both in culture and government, but aren’t quite ready to make it on their own.

We pass Ilisimatusarfik, the one university in Greenland, where all teenagers and young adults must go for a higher education — unless they want to go to Europe. Very few pathways for professional degrees are offered to the 600 students, meaning most doctors, lawyers, and teachers must be imported from Denmark.

The street we are on is a muddle of the new and old, the Western and indigenous. There is a kayak-building workshop, a colonial era grocery store, and a whale dissection facility — a large frame to hold a whale carcass while hunters remove the skin, blubber, and whatever other parts can be useful. Across the street is the modern Nuuk meat market, The meat market offers a small selection of bloody intestines and body parts clearly recognizable as belonging to seals, walruses, and whales; and a line of dead birds lined up for sale — complete with feathers, beaks, and claws. A few buildings further on, we find seal skins and other hides are stretched across frames, drying the in sun and wind.

The guide talks glowingly of Greenland’s favorite dish — seal intestine stuffed with whale skin. I can’t say it sounds appetizing, but at least there’s kishke in Greenland.

On the same street is the prime minister’s official residence and the National Museum of Greenland. It documents the history and struggle of the Inuit people, the next chapter of which we see playing out before our eyes on the street outside. The last display is four mummified bodies discovered in Qilakitsoq, northern Greenland, in 1972. They are the most well-preserved human remains ever found in North America, but the scene is rather gruesome (especially the baby).

Night Hikes and Northern Lights

On my last night, I have booked a night hike to see the aurora borealis — the Northern Lights. Light pollution makes it hard to see the soft lights in the sky over the city, so we head into the mountains.

We begin climbing Qaqorsaat, a tall mountain brooding over the city in the darkness. Temps are in the low teens, and a powerful wind is howling down the chute between the mountain and its neighbor. It’s a steep slope, with a sharp drop on the right. We are outfitted with snowshoes, ice spikes, and headlamps. The heavenly forecast calls for a 50 percent chance of northern lights for tonight. Oh, well — worse comes to worst, at least we can freeze.

As we move up the mountainside, the wind dies down, the scattered lights of Nuuk fade and disappear behind us, and the temperature drops even lower. We scan the sky hopefully for a flicker of green, but all we see is a dismal black canvas.

After about half an hour of climbing, the guide promises those lagging behind that we are almost at a crest, and the slope will level out. He doesn’t mention that when that happens, we will be exposed to the wind’s full ferocity.

We crest the mountain and come to a lonely-looking sign in the middle of a broad snowscape. The guide tells us that this marks the shore of a large lake up here in the mountains. It is frozen and covered with so much snow that we cannot tell where the lake starts, but there is water underneath — the lake is the sole supply of water for the entire city. It drains throughout the winter, and will be refilled with rain and snowmelt in the short summer.

We press on for another hour, across deep snow and ice. It all looks the same to me, and I wonder why we don’t stop somewhere and look for the northern lights, but the guide presses on. But when we start up the side of another mountain and walk into a snowdrift that may be two or three feet deep, and he stops and declares, “This is the spot!”

We stare at him. Is he serious?

“Wait,” he explains. “I’m going to make us a nice bench to sit on.”

He takes a collapsible snow shovel from his pack, screws it together, and gets to work. He quickly carves a bench of sorts out of the snow, which is nothing like the soggy mush we’re used to in the northeastern United States. This snow is dry as ancient bones, hard-packed and firm, but cuttable with his shovel.

The guide dips back into his pack and takes out an insulated pad, which he spreads on the “bench,” and invites us to sit. There are some mishaps as the adventurers struggle through the drift to get to it, but eventually, we are all seated comfortably, on packed snow, on the side of a mountain in the backcountry behind Nuuk, Greenland, watching the sky for a polar phenomenon.

It must be time for hot chocolate!

The guide reaches back into his bottomless pack and pulls out a thermos of boiling hot water, tea, coffee, and hot chocolate mix. He prepares comfort drinks for everyone.

Now, we wait. And wait.

The guide passes the time by explaining that the Inuit people believe that the Lights are caused by spirits playing soccer with the skull of a walrus. His parents warned him not to make noise when the lights were in the sky, lest the spirits kidnap him to the world of the dead. The scientific explanation is that the aurora borealis results from disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field caused by “solar wind,” a stream of charged particles emitted by the sun’s corona.

In any event, there’s nothing to fear, northern lights have been a no-show tonight.

After about 30 minutes of waiting, we get edgy. The ends of my boots feel strangely roomy, and I can’t feel my fingers, either. It’s time to give up and head back. The guide is apologetic, but of course, it’s not under his control. We pack up and head out.

The cold is extreme at this point, and we have been out here for upward of two hours. I put my head down and follow my tracks, just concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other so I can get to warmth as quickly as possible. Everyone else has the same basic idea, and our line of hikers is spread far apart, when we suddenly hear a shout.

I stop, turn, and look behind me. At a distance, I can see the guide pointing at the sky just over the edge of a mountain. A faint, pale green tinge is slowly spreading upward, like an alien blushing. We all stare, fixated. Some phones come out to take pictures, but the cold forces gloves back on quickly.

We watch, but in moments, the light is gone. Oh, well — at least it was something. We resume plodding, onward, stopping to check the sky every few moments. About ten minutes later, the lights reappear.

This time, they stick around.

Slowly at first, a pale green tinge rises above the mountains, spreading across the sky in a neon sheet. Ever so slowly — too slowly for movement to be detected — the sheet thins, folds, and extends into a line, and then two lines. Then the color shifts to a bright, neon apple-green. The lights now extend almost all the way across the sky.

We stare, fixated, as the colors begin to move faster, now visibly twisting and writhing in the firmament. Lines grow, fade, twist, and reappear, like dancers in some astronomical choreography. One line becomes two, then three, before fading back to one. Rapidly shifting shapes and images form and disappear.

The show is beautiful, inspiring, rarified, dramatic; it transports us to another world, and hints at a reality beyond our mortal lives. All our troubles suddenly seem petty, as we behold evidence of a grandeur that transcends this humdrum planet.

The light show continues for ten, fifteen minutes. We don’t want to look away, but we are really getting cold now. My neck aches from craning upward… I find myself wishing for it to be over. I don’t want to miss it, but I really need to get off this mountain.

Eventually, mercifully, the lights curl up on themselves and roll back behind the mountain from whence they came. We trudge onward, get to the bottom, pull off the snowshoes and head home. It has been unforgettable.

Green Goodbye

My flight is scheduled to depart early the next morning, and it feels like Greenland has given me a cheery send-off. But the mountainous expanse has more surprises in store. A routine check of the Air Greenland departures schedule shows that about 80 percent of its upcoming flights have been canceled or delayed. I’m working a 40-minute window for my layover in Iceland; a delay might strand me for Shabbos, even worse than a cancelation.

Paul Cohen, my Jewish Greenlandic friend you have met in the previous  article, has warned me that powerful and unpredictable weather systems blow in all the time, forcing cancelations and postponements, and that I shouldn’t make inflexible travel plans.

“Travel in and out of Greenland is always an adventure,” he said. “The last time I traveled from Chicago to Narsaq, my flights were delayed, rerouted, and canceled so many times that I spent time in eight different hotels. It took me ten days to travel. It’s the true Greenlandic experience.”

A powerful blizzard is blowing into the southern region of the island, packing heavy snow and winds upward of 100 miles per hour. There’s no way Air Greenland’s little Dash-8 turboprop planes can fly in anything approaching such conditions. Flights to the south are canceled, flights relying on aircraft coming from the south are delayed. My flight is due to travel east-southeast, for now. It is listed on time, but warnings of possible delays are all over the board.

The next morning, I check again before departing; the status is the same. I head out to the airport with plenty of time. As we pull up, my plane is visible from the curb, just behind the terminal building and its chain-link fence. The terminal is nearly deserted, almost all other air traffic is canceled.

Nearly deserted, but not deserted enough. As soon as I pass through the entrance doors, I see three men with sandy hair, dressed in jeans, windbreakers, and combat boots sitting at tables in the atrium. They spot me, exchange a glance, nod, get to their feet and approach me. They surround me in a tight circle, far too close for comfort.

“You’re going to need to come with us,” the man in the center says. “We need to ask you some questions.”

He pulls a billfold out of his jeans and, holding it low and out of sight of anyone else, flashes a badge. They are agents of the Politiets Efterretningstjeneste (PET), Denmark’s national intelligence agency.

Apparently, my uninvited conversation with the prime minister of Greenland has triggered some alarms. When I was seeking comment for President Trump’s plans to annex Greenland, I tried to contact Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede through official channels, and when I got no response, I discovered that I could go knock on his front door — which I did. Although he was deeply unhappy at being approached this way, we ended up having a cordial conversation, and parted on positive terms. But perhaps these three gentlemen think otherwise.

“Okay,” I say. This is getting interesting. “Where shall we go?”

The leader casts around the little terminal, looking for a room or office. There are none. “We’ll go over to this bench in the corner,” he says, pointing.

The agents take my passport. One keeps watch over me, while the other two get on their cell phones, flipping through pages of my travel documents. A supervisor joins the party.

They ask me all kinds of questions about my trip. It is clear they didn’t know my name, who I was, or where I was going. All they had on me was a cell phone picture. Apparently, my unique style of dress here was enough to identify me. I answer politely, and emphasize that I haven’t broken any laws of any country and have a flight to catch. An agent goes to talk to the airline to make sure they will hold my plane. Not that I’m reassured — they can’t hold off the storm.

The agents soon run out of questions, but whomever it is they are calling to verify my identity — probably Interpol — has never heard of me, so this is taking time. I shift to journalist mode, and start asking the questions. They are Danish agents; yes, they have kids; no, they don’t really like being stationed in Greenland; yes, they would like to visit America; no, they don’t think Trump should acquire Greenland.

“How did you know I would be here now?” I ask.

Silence. They are stumped. I know the answer — I had a pleasant conversation with the prime minister, and I told him when I was departing. But they can’t admit that; because it undermines their excuse for suspecting me.

“Uh, we took a guess,” one agent finally offers.

At length, they return my passport and wish me a pleasant flight. My plane is still listed as on time, but when we step outside to board, the wind is doing its best to stir up trouble. It is howling fiercely down the mountains and across the runways. The propeller blades are tied down, so that they don’t spin in the wind and chew us up. Ground crew members are bundled up tight, and the wind is whipping at their gear.

We get up into the air, circle the airport once, and head east, into the wind.

And stop.

The propellers keep spinning, the jet keeps fighting the wind, but our forward progress is near zero. The scenery under the window does not change, our groundspeed has slowed to a crawl — if anything.

The pilot searches for an altitude with less wind, and eventually, we get moving. We land late in Iceland, and because we can’t use the Jetway, we have to wait for a bus. It drops us off at baggage claim — outside security. I have to pass through security and customs again to get to my flight. It’s already boarding by the time I get through, and the helpful airport signs advise me that my gate is the farthest — a 20-minute walk.

It’s time to run for it, snow gear, thermal layers, boots, backpack and all. It must have been quite a spectacle.

Hashem is kind to me, and the flight to Newark is delayed as well. I make it in plenty of time. As I settle into my seat, there is a lot to process. The beauty, grandeur, variety, and power of Hashem’s world has been a constant theme on this trip.

On the route to New Jersey, the flight passes close to the southern tip of Greenland, currently wrapped in violent storms. The plane — this one a full-size airliner — bumps and bounces significantly in the rough air. The pilot turns on the “fasten seatbelt” sign and gets on PA system to say something about turbulence.

I smile. It’s a final wave goodbye to me from Greenland.

I know I’ll be back.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1057)