Somewhere between Iceland and Canada
Greenland felt like a place between things.
Geographically, it's that big comma between Iceland and Canada, the thing you sail to, around, and eventually out of if you're in for the Viking route. But beyond geography, this trip was happening between one feeling and another. It started before we even got there.
Crossing from Iceland, the engine died mid-ocean. As soon as I realised what happened (Anne had just woken me with “we have an issue”), I found myself between panic and surrender. Panic that this was new, this is bad, and that I need to do something. But soon, panic burned itself out and gave way to surrender, a kind of calming clarity. I surrendered to the now real possibility of having to throw all our plans overboard.
In the end, we made it to our first Greenlandic anchorage, where soon we had to decide what to do next. We could relax there, temporarily safe but with the risk of an iceberg blocking the only exit for who knows how long, or we could raise the anchor and go, with the risk of not finding a suitable place to shelter from the forecast gale and ice. I was frozen between going and staying. We stayed for almost two days, then a snap decision, and we went.
Sailing south from this first anchorage, we were threading a passage between storms and ice, and I mean that with no poetic license. Too far east in the open sea, and there was gale-force wind. Too far west close to shore, and ice growlers started showing up in numbers we didn't like. All of it upwind, with a strategy nobody ever taught me: stay on a starboard tack until the wind got mean, tack to port until the growlers got too frequent, tack back. We sailed like this all the way down the coast, zig-zagging inside this narrow, five-nautical-mile corridor, just hoping it stayed open long enough to let us through.
Underneath all of it, and for the whole time I was in Greenland, ran a low current between awe and dread that never switched off. Awe, because this enormous place is stunning in a way that reset my sense of scale. Dread, because "enormous" cuts both ways when you're the size of a plastic toy in it.
It's part of why departing from Greenland was emotionally complicated. Deciding to sail away from this otherworldly place stirred desires pulled between discovery and safety. Greenland is a once-in-a-lifetime place, and everything in us wanted more of it. But the feeling of being bone-deep safe didn't arrive until we'd actually made landfall in Canada. Safety, it turns out, is what we were quietly homesick for the whole time we were choosing discovery instead.
The passage from Greenland to Canada handed us a new pairing, one I'm not sure has a proper name, but that was somewhere between kind seas and range anxiety. We generally wish for wind, because sailing is great, except the wind in those latitudes is rarely kind, and sailing often means rough, bumpy, slamming days. But this time we had no wind, and motoring meant flat sea and comfort, except our diesel tank is small, and every hour of motoring became an hour of anxious fuel math in my head. I didn’t know what to wish for.
Zoom out far enough and a lot of this trip lived between fear and frustration, with almost nothing comfortable in the middle. Do I push forward, be adventurous, discover something, and do it fearfully? Or do I hold back, play it safe, stay put, and do it resentfully, knowing I probably could have handled more. I swung between these two constantly and never really found the balance.
And now, in a busy harbour in a capital city, I’m left between regret and satisfaction. Regret for not having let myself enjoy the opportunity deeply, free of worries and full of adventurous spirit. Satisfaction from knowing we did it, with our little Capsula. And that it went well.
Maybe that's what this trip leaves me with. An acceptance of that permanent, low-grade discomfort with living between things. We don't really arrive anywhere on a trip like this. We just get slightly better at holding the tiller steady, physically and mentally, between this and that.