by Martyn Tranter
Elderly masked person in helicopter, Narsarsuuaq, 27th June 2020
I have been locked down at home in Monkton Combe, just outside Bath, for three months. I have been no further than 10 miles from home about three times, and mostly within a mile of home, and this to fish in a very quiet stream at the bottom of the valley, where I barely see a soul. My wife drags me out of the house for a few miles walk on a Sunday morning. We have socialised not more than 10 times, and with both our adult children at home we barely had time to keep in touch with friends as much as we would have liked. Most interactions were via the internet, and those flat 2D interactions are not as subtle as 4D meetings with folk in person.
I booked a COVID test at Bristol Airport on Monday morning (22nd June) and assumed that I would test positive, a false positive of course, and be unable to go into the field. The 17 mile drive to the airport seemed a bit like this man’s first trip to the moon and a little surreal. I didn’t really like being taken out of my routine of loading up the computer and doing e-stuff, remembering to stand up every hour, and trying to finish around 5 with my daily Danish lesson, else you can always find something to work on. Now, it was interacting with real people outside my close family, friends and neighbours again. I didn’t get tested for COVID, I did a self test, which I thought was bonkers, since I could easily bias the result, but I did my best to pierce my tonsils and one of my sinuses with the lethal plastic cotton bud with a long stem, messed up breaking the stem at the wrong place, but still did sufficiently well to be deemed a success at self testing. I drove home slowly, enough to hiss off most cars behind me most of the time, and then felt in limbo. I was convinced I’d test false positive.
The text came at about 05.30 I think, not being great in the mornings, and I was a negative. It was game on for Greenland, and shit……. I had to get ready for the journey. My son drove me to Heathrow, allowing two hours to my doddery three or four. It all seemed a bit fast on the motorway to me. Then, we put on the dreaded face facemasks about five miles from the airport, looking like we were going to draw our guns and rob the place – we’d have been shot for sure with all the security around by the way. The mask gives you a good idea of how stale your breath is and mist up your glasses. It was a pain in the front side to wear, and I kept lifting it when I talked to folk, who were very patient with me to be fair. Ieuan drove off and I was by myself with a rucksack, a large bag of clothes, field equipment and magazines I hadn’t read over the past three months, and my laptop bag containing instructions on where to be and when. Ieuan had loaded them onto a trolley, and I pushed out into Terminal 2. All those people in masks, everyone looking at each other in case of a cough or an unprotected nose or mouth.
If there is a silver lining to COVID, then airport check in and security hassle being minimised just has to be it. I was apprehensive about being around a multitude of equally nervous masked folk, but folk were very friendly, matter of fact and there was so little queuing I didn’t know what to do with the extra two hours I had in the departure lounge. There was plenty of room, folk positioned themselves the maximum distance possible from each other, I was away from my computer screen, and so I made a few phone calls to my family, and spoke/txt’s/e-mailed/What’sApp’d friends that I’d neglected this last three months.
Another silver lining was getting onto the plane. We boarded strictly from the back to the front. Bugger the elite card holders and first class passengers. Elderly folk and folk with young kids get preference of course, but COVID has made the rest of us more equal in place queues. SAS ran the flight with Nordic precision and treated us like adults in terms of telling us what they could and couldn’t provide on the flight anymore. Most of us sat with the gap of a seat between each other. I had to fly to Stockholm first, and change within 40 mins to board the Copenhagen flight. SAS managed that very well too, because despite being 10 mins late departing, they held the Copenhagen flight 10 mins to let 37 folk make the connection. All the luggage made it too. My thought at the time was that I’d make it to Greenland but without any clothes or equipment……
Copenhagen was busy – there were people without masks outside the airport, and they seemed to be relaxed around each other, albeit at a distance of 1m. Liane Benning and Rey Mourot had already arrived from Potsdam, via Frankfurt, and we had to stay in the Clarion Hotel at the airport. The receptionist and staff were relaxed about having a masked old git turn up, looking anxiously around, with too many bags and too little control over his trolly. I could even take the mask off, which by that time was driving me nuts. Then I saw Alex Anesio and Rey at the bar, and it was like old times, except we didn’t know whether to shake hands, so elbow bumped. He rest of the team turned up over the next hour, and slowly I got used to talking to 4D people again. We ate together – my first meal with folk outside my family in three months – had a few beers in public, and life didn’t seem to be that inward looking, bounded by a mile radius and quite so bad anymore.
Liane, Rey and I had breakfast unmasked with a bunch of other travellers, all 1m removed as a minimum, at about 06.30, and then wandered over to the airport with a bunch of additional equipment that Lasse Degn had left us the previous night, and which Eva Doting kindly brought to the hotel just after breakfast. Masks on again, and the silver lining of fewer people flying made the 09.00 queue for the Air Greenland Flight slightly less chaotic than it usually is. It was going so well – Liane and Rey showed their German negative COVID test results, then I got my UK negative result out. A print out of the e-mail I received. The negative test result did not show the date I had been tested. I showed the text message of the negative result – no test date. I showed the receipt I had been given for my self-tested sample at the airport. Yes, it wasn’t dated. The senior Air Greenland customer services representative who had come across to look after an elderly guy in despair was very patient with me. She said “take a few deep breathes, we can sort this out”, and as I did, it came to me to search my deleted e-mails for the confirmation of the air port test. It came up on my i-phone and I was on my way. Thank you Air Greenland.
@Copenhagen Airport (l-r, elderly old git, Eva Doting, Rey Mourot and Liane Benning)
Our plane in the rain – note the absence of mosquitoes
We transferred from the jet-engined airbus to a twin prop De Haviland (I think). You literally walk out of the door of the airport and walk onto the plane, just like you would catching a taxi. The big thing now was that you didn’t have to wear a face mask. I felt fine without it, but a few other folk kept theirs on.
Flagging down a plane to take you to Nuuk, and then Narsarssuaq. Mosquitoes still notably absent
We flew down the coast to Nuuk in about an hour, had a cup of coffee in the airport, and then flew for an hour down to Narsarsuaq, which is near the southern tip of Greenland, and to the west. It is a quite beautiful place, although you wouldn’t think that from this amateur photograph of the airport.
The airport at Narsarsuaq, and a lot of the town too
We walked out the airport and five minutes down the road was out hotel, where we have since be ensconced. The staff are very friendly and helpful, and the quarantine arrangements are quite laid back as long as we keep our distance from other folk. Flights to Greenland and down to Narsarsuaq were quickly booked up when they were confirmed, so Liane, Rey and I are three days in advance of the main party since they were the only ones we could get. However, we have been allowed to fly with a local helicopter company, Sermeq Helicopters, as long as we are masked, and we took the opportunity on Saturday to do a field recce to establish the location of our main camp site, and to drop some of our cargo to make the the camp.
Rey will post the next blog, since this was his first helicopter flight. I’ve been allowed to say that the general field site is just fantastic for the type of work we do. What is there not to like about an area with this type of surface characteristics?
Dark surface ice on the southern tip of the Greenland Ice Sheet near Narsarsuaq
Well, the ice sheet melts faster because of the darkening, and that is not a good thing for the rate of sea level rise.
What have I learnt from the trip so far? I started off very anxious about travelling and meeting up with other people, even those who I know well in 2D from e-meetings. It’s not the destiny, it’s the journey. I believe that travel broadens your mind and experience, and allows you to see life outside the confines of your regular domain. This trip confirms those prejudices. I am a privileged elderly white man, who is even more privileged to be here in southern Greenland now. Those folk of my generation and older, including friends, neighbours and family who are shielding, seem to concur that the virus is a disease of the elderly and those with underlying health conditions. I don’t think that any of us want to hold back younger healthy folk from having the experiences, negative, neutral and positive, of interacting with other folk and travelling. I would gladly swap places with my children and remain in lock down, and painful as it would be, isolate from them to give them the chance to experience life as I think I did forty years ago. How that happens, and where it can happen, is a complex issue, and the political solution should be nuanced to account for that complexity. What I feel is that life has to go on for younger generations, and if I have to loose liberties or take more risks as a consequence, then so be it. I remain older, simplistic and no wiser, clearly.
Next up is Rey to blog about our trip into the field yesterday. Until next post…… Martyn Tranter.
The mask sure made an improvement