Today, Sunday, we should have been in Akureyri, ready for our flight to Greenland tomorrow. It’s 9C and cloudy there. Tomorrow, we would have arrived at Canning Land, where the temperature is 4C.
But we are not there. I managed to contract Covid at the last minute and we have had to cancel the trip. This morning I put away the clothes I had laid out for packing. I have yet to do the same with the camping equipment.
Here in North Wales, it is 30C and sunny. It is so warm I have retreated inside. Even in my hammock under the shade of the tree, which the squeaking of the baby wrens, issuing forth from the hawthorn stump, it is not cool enough.
Tomorrow, it will get even hotter. It is unprecedented.
Meanwhile, I am in mourning for our trip.
‘Oh well,’ more than one friend has said; ‘maybe you can rearrange it, for when you are better.’
That is impossible now, for this year at least. The summer in Greenland only lasts three weeks. It was a trip of a lifetime. It took my husband a whole year to organise it. It has cost a fortune. One that he has slaved to earn. And one that we doubt the insurance company will fully pay up either. Even though the insurance alone cost each of us around £500. More than many people spend on a holiday in the first place.
My sense of loss around this trip is deep. I have lost a small part of my identity - the adventurer who travels to Greenland and comes home to write about it. It is much more than a trip that can ‘be rearranged for when you’re better’.
A trip.
A small word that does not begin to convey what it was actually about.
I remember once that Caitlin Moran wrote about how, if she uses the word ‘dragon’, we each conjure up a different idea of what that dragon might look like, often with more than one idea about what a dragon might look like.
The same is true for a trip. There are many different ideas about a trip.
If I said expedition, it might bring people closer to what I mean. But the full ideation is outside of most people’s experience. It was a dream. It was to take place in one of the last true wildernesses on the planet; most people’s idea of hell but for me a paradise.
We’d have been dropped off by small plane on a sandy beach, no runway.
There would have been 24hours of daylight.
We’d have had to keep watch for polar bears and had weapons with us, just in case.
We’d have had all our food in dehydrated packages and would have had to dig our own latrine.
I’m not sure I fully believed in it in the first place. A small part of me always sensed it was not going to happen. And as we got closer to leaving, there was a sense of all the lemons lining up, little things that each affected how the expedition would play out; we had been batting them away one by one, but now, we had no choice but to cancel it. It would simply be too risky in such a remote location, even with a highly qualified anaesthetist in the group – if it took a turn for the worse, there is nothing she could have done. It may be too late by the time we could have arranged the plane to come back to pick us up.
I was so keen on going. The sense of escape, and peace and tranquillity. To be free. To be fully myself. To completely lose myself in the stark landscape. To be everything that this poem expresses so much better than I can. Untravelled Lands by Ben Silvestre
Today was also the day that many of us said goodbye to a young man, a colleague and friend to me. Someone who I was privileged to have known, who showed me a respect I didn’t show myself when looking at my achievements, always striving for more. A man, only 30, who fell from the mountain, doing what he loved, and died. A man who left behind a fiancée and a life of love and laughter and passion and energy and drive. My heart goes out to his nearest and dearest. I couldn’t be there to pay my respects. I should have been in Greenland. Instead I am at home with Covid.
Just before I knew I had Covid, I listened to The Adventure Podcast, with Matt Pycroft talking to Kenton Cool. He reminded me so eloquently of why I love going on expedition. He talked about leaving technology behind and finding true connection, with the landscape, with the team, with oneself. But he also spoke of the biggest fear he carries - that of something bad happening to someone and not being able to do anything about it, just having to watch. That sobering thought is why we are not going to Greenland, with the big risk that we would all get Covid, but also the much lower but highly consequential risk, that someone would get too ill for us to be able to do anything about it.
And so, whilst for me, the loss is huge and it feels like part of me has been abscised, we are counting our blessings.
We still have our lives ahead of us and, indeed have lived at least 20 more than my friend and colleague.
We live in a very beautiful place that we love.
I still have my vegetables to tend, the ones I was going to leave to chance and to Simon’s mum to water, but only if she felt like it.
We have each other and we can make each other laugh with our various sillinesses.
I am fortunate enough to have been to Greenland already.
This year I have also spent many days doing The Cambrian Way, purely for myself.
I also was lucky enough to guide Wainwright’s Coast to Coast and The West Highland Way, two iconic and stunning walks in the UK. I have loved being an International Mountain Leader.
I have a new life beckoning, beginning with studying for an MSc in Sustainability and Behaviour Change. Visiting Greenland last time, in 2019, made me realise just how close to the edge we are to climate disaster and just how precious the landscapes of Greenland are. I want to make a difference; I hope this is the right first step.