Bitter truths

IN the early 1980s I was living in Iceland, where I would occasionally hang out with the pilots at Reykjavik airport. Make friends with pilots, and they can take you to places off the map or clutching its edges.

One day I found myself having coffee with a bush pilot named Helgi, who had an Inuit girlfriend in Cap Dan, East Greenland. He flew his Mitsubishi turboprop several times a month across Denmark Strait to visit her.

“Perhaps you need a navigator for your trips?” I asked him, citing my ability to read aeronautical charts.

“No,” Helgi said, “but you can come and keep me company.”

So I began going to a part of Greenland unvisited by outsiders until 1884, when Gustav Holm of the Royal Danish Navy fetched up there. Capt. Holm was searching for a lost Viking colony. Instead he discovered a small group of Inuit hunters, the Angmagssalimiut, who were completely cut off from the rest of the world.

On one of my trips with Helgi, I wandered around Cap Dan with a new camera. I took pictures of dog sleds parked like cars in front of every house; I took pictures of the dogs themselves, wild-looking animals with wolfish glints in their eyes; and I took pictures of elders whose wrinkled faces resembled the contour lines on a topo map.

As I backed up to get a panoramic photo, I lost my footing and fell down a steep slope, then crashed through an inch or so of ice into Angmagssalik Fiord.

The cold -- the harshest, most violent I’ve ever experienced -- struck me like a flying brick. The water was probably no colder than 32 F, but water sucks the heat out of you 25 times faster than air at the same temperature. How long I was flailing about in it I don’t know, maybe three hypothermic minutes. I don’t remember clawing my way up the icy slope, either.

Several locals saw what must have looked like an ice-clad apparition moving with stiff-legged steps in their direction. At first they just stared, but when they realized I was an actual human being, not a phantom, they covered me with a blanket and helped me to the village infirmary.

The resident nurse, a young Inuit woman trained in Denmark, had me remove my clothes, which, because I was shivering so much, I did with some difficulty. Then she gave me a cup of hot tea, but my grip was so unsteady almost none of it reached my mouth. At one point the shivering was so intense that I chipped a tooth.

By now half the village had crowded into the infirmary. Little children, elders, burly seal hunters, teenage girls with babies -- they were all gazing at the mostly naked white man who couldn’t stop shaking and who also had one eyelid frozen shut. Not a few found him a source of considerable amusement.

All at once an old woman came over to me. Her hair was dressed in a topknot, her eyes were narrow slits pressed deep into her forehead, and she walked like a duck full of eggs. She looked like exactly the sort of person the village would call on to exorcise the evil spirit responsible for my spasmodic shivering. She would no doubt call on her vast storehouse of native treatments to arrest the convulsions.

She began rubbing a sticky substance into my skin. Seal grease, I thought. Or maybe it was the grease of walrus, whale or bear -- some creature endowed with magical properties of cold suppression. The woman told me that the substance was used when people in the village fell overboard or slipped into icy depths.

I asked the nurse what it was.

“We call it Crisco,” she said. This exotic remedy sealed up pores like a package, thus preventing precious body heat from escaping. The old woman basted virtually every inch of my palpitating body. After 15 minutes, my core temperature was on the rise, and after half an hour I’d more or less stopped shivering. I could now move my limbs without feeling they would break off in icy chunks. I could also drink the hot seal broth the nurse gave me without spilling it.

The traditional balm of Crisco had triumphed.

Years later, I still recall the frigid seas of Greenland every time I eat a cookie that’s moist and chewy or a cake that’s high and light.

-- Lawrence Millman