A tip for JD Vance: Greenland doesn’t care about your frail human ego

In August 2018, I did something that JD Vance and his wife, Usha, can only dream of: I went to Greenland, and I didn’t cause a national outcry against my presence.

- Sarah Ditum

The not-causing-a-national-outcry part of that was easy. All I had to do was show up and not be a thinly veiled agent of Trumpian expansionism while pretending to care about dog sled races.

The other part – going to Greenland in the first place – is harder to explain. I’m not an explorer, a sailor or a climate scientist. I don’t belong to any of the vanishingly few occupations with legitimate reasons to visit the Arctic Circle. I was there, inexplicably, as a literary journalist.

In 2014, a 24-year-old Greenlandic writer called Niviaq Korneliussen published her debut novel, written in Greenlandic rather than the dominant Danish language. (Greenland is self-governing on domestic policy, but has been a Danish territory since the 18th century.) Four years later, it had been translated into English with the title Crimson, and become a bestseller. I had been sent to profile this unlikely literary superstar.

A few days after the editor first emailed me about the assignment, a car arrived in the middle of the night to take me to Heathrow. I was halfway there when I realised that my weatherproof coat was still hanging, supposedly unmissably, next to my front door. I landed in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, with nothing but a big cardigan to protect me from the elements.

My preparation was lacking in other ways too. I’d made contact with Korneliussen before travelling, but intended to call to confirm arrangements when I arrived. Except Greenland isn’t covered by EU mobile roaming agreements, so my phone didn’t work. No matter: I could use the wifi at my hotel to email.