SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
When you're on the road as a reporter, you're bound to pick up some local vernacular.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
There is this word that a woman that we met in Greenland told us. It's called sila, which means weather, but it also means, like, you can't control the weather. You just have to adapt around it.
DETROW: That, of course, is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED cohost Juana Summers. Last month, she and a team went to Greenland for a reporting trip and encountered a ton of sila.
SUMMERS: One thing to know about traveling in Greenland is that there are not roads between the major towns and cities, so you've got to take these little, small flights on Air Greenland to get from place to place.
DETROW: One place they were trying to get to was a little town north of the Arctic Circle called Ilulissat. But the sila had other ideas. They hit days of high winds and icy tarmacs.
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SUMMERS: We were supposed to leave on a Thursday. No flight happens. The next day, we get up. We pack all our stuff. We get to the airport. We get on a plane. Plane gets diverted. We land in a completely different part of Greenland. We're there for, like, a half hour or something like that.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Yeah.
SUMMERS: Back on the plane.
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SUMMERS: The cycle plays out over and over again. Finally, I think this is on Sunday - pack up all our stuff, leave the hotel, get on the plane again. Plane gets diverted again to this place called Aasiaat.
So we're now here at the Aasiaat Airport in Greenland. On our way, we're attempting again, for the third time, to fly to Ilulissat. We're going to see if we're going to make it.
And finally, after about two hours of sitting there and wondering what's going to happen, there's - announcement comes over the loudspeaker.
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UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: (Non-English language spoken).
SUMMERS: It is in either Greenlandic or Danish - languages I do not speak. I didn't have to understand those languages to know what was happening because everybody started cheering. And we actually made it four days later.
...Understand that. It seems like we're going to make an attempt to fly to Ilulissat. I don't know if you can hear - the crowd got pretty excited. The small group of us that have been...
DETROW: What was Ilulissat like when you finally got there? What did it look like?
SUMMERS: I mean, it's one of the most stunning places I've ever visited. It's this sort of scenic, beautiful tourist town. It's a place where lots of people go to set out and see the icebergs, to take boat tours. All of the houses are super colored. There's beautiful snowscapes, and I think the thing that sticks with me is the fact that you can just hear the sled dogs howling all the time. Like, even before you see them, you can hear them. And then when you see them, they're also pretty darn cute.
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DETROW: Juana and the team went to Greenland because of the bold claims President Donald Trump has made about taking it over. But it's a place with a lot more to cover than political jostling. So today, for our weekly "Reporter's Notebook" segment, we are on the road in Greenland, and we will start in that little town with those pretty darn cute sled dogs, Ilulissat.
SUMMERS: So we did this story - and this is something I wouldn't have thought about before we started researching this trip - about the intersection of dog sledding and climate change. So we actually got to go out with this woman who's a dog sled musher named Stella. And when she took us out, she kind of warned us, you know, we don't have a lot of snow right now. It's actually pretty hot here, and when we don't have as much snow, it's harder for the dogs to pull.
STELLA DAVIDSEN OLSEN: All right, I think we've righted things. They're picking up speed again.
SUMMERS: And we're kind of looking out in front of us, and you can see some snow, but there's, like, also these stretches of just sort of rough terrain. There are rocks and moss.
OLSEN: And we just went across a pretty big rock.
SUMMERS: It's kind of brown-looking.
DETROW: Yeah.
SUMMERS: So we're seeing this in real time. And that is definitely the case when we took off on this dog sled. Like, it just - there wasn't enough snow in some stretches, which meant that we were getting off the dog sled at times and running alongside of it.
DETROW: Had you dog sledded before in your life?
SUMMERS: No.
DETROW: How would you say you were as a dog sledder?
SUMMERS: I mean, I'm - I would like to say that I'm very good at following directions.
DETROW: (Laughter) OK.
SUMMERS: I think it helps that, like you, I'm a runner. So running alongside of it, I was definitely looking at my Garmin like, man, maybe I should have started my Garmin. My heart rate is really up.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Just get on.
SUMMERS: Just get on - easier said than done.
(LAUGHTER)
DETROW: Before we talk about the other topics, what - for the people who didn't hear the piece, what is the general feeling, though, of people whose livelihood depends on this tourism industry, depends on snow, when north of the Arctic Circle in February, snow is a problem?
SUMMERS: Yeah, I think it touches every part of life there. When we talked to Stella, the woman who took us out with the dog sleds, or when we talked with a man named Jan Cortsen who took us out on his boat to the icebergs, there's a concern. These are people who have lived in Greenland their whole lives, and they're pointing to these tangible examples every day of how climate has affected them. And the other thing that we heard from them, and particularly from Jan Cortsen, is these are all people who depend on tourism, right? They want more people to come to this small town of fewer than 5,000 people, to go on their dog sleds, to go out on their boats, but they want to make sure that as Greenland opens up more to the world - the island has invested a ton of money in new airports and stuff - they want that money to stay locally rather than to benefit outside operators. And that's a really big tension in this small town that we went to, too.
DETROW: Speaking of outsiders, President Trump wants to acquire Greenland. This is something you, as a reporter, want to learn about, but you are also an American coming in from an American news outlet to talk to people about this. How were you received?
SUMMERS: We were pretty well received. One thing that we were warned about from people that we were talking to in pre-interviews is that there was just a lot of fatigue around international journalists and American journalists. And you could really see that. I mean, as we were walking around Nuuk, in particular, we saw tons of other journalism (ph). Several other big U.S. outlets were there at the same time we were there.
DETROW: Yeah.
SUMMERS: People were nice, but people were pretty over it at times. I'll give you just one super visual example. We did a story where we asked people, you know, what they thought about President Trump's ambitions and how they felt about if that were to come to pass, potentially becoming a part of the U.S. And we went to a place called Nuuk Center, which is, like, the biggest mall in Greenland. And we're standing there at the doors, and we're just, like, sitting there asking people, hey, do you want to talk to us? Hey, can I ask you a question about President Trump?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Excuse me, do you speak English by chance?
SUMMERS: And at one point, things got so bleak that I was actually sitting there tallying in my notepad how many people said no and how many people said yes. And we got more than a dozen no's before we even got one yes, and we only got one.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Inaudible), thank you.
DETROW: I've been in situations like that where you're going into a community that has just been inundated by reporters. And I found myself that, like, I don't even get the syllables of reporter out before - I'm a - no. Like, I'm a...
SUMMERS: Full stop. Yeah.
DETROW: Yeah. Nope. Like, or they can just tell by the body language as you come up that you're - but then eventually, you were able to make connections. You were able to get people to talk about this. Did you find, like, a wide range? You know, you talk about it's a diverse place, but also, it's a place with, you know, 57,000 people total.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
DETROW: What was the mix of opinions on this strange situation Greenland finds itself in?
SUMMERS: Well, on this topic, people were actually pretty uniform. There was a poll that came out shortly before we arrived in Greenland, and the stat was pretty striking to us. Just 6% of Greenlanders said that they wanted their island to become part of the United States, just 6%. And that really bore itself out as we were going around and talking to people. The thing that sticks in my mind that I kept hearing over and over and over again from people is they would say, Greenland is not for sale. That is something that Greenland's prime minister has said. That is something that's been echoed by Denmark's prime minister because Greenland, of course, is an autonomous territory of Denmark. That just was the thing that people kept coming back to. It is very clear that they don't want to be taken over. I think someone told us at one point, we don't want another colonizer. I'm paraphrasing here a bit.
DETROW: Yeah.
SUMMERS: But I will say we did meet one sort of very big Trump super fan, this guy named Jorgen Boassen. He actually helped orchestrate Don Jr., President Trump's son's, visit to Greenland that happened, I think, a little bit before the inauguration. And what's interesting about him and listening to him when we sat down with him is that even he didn't come out and say that he wanted the U.S. to acquire the island. He made the case that he wants to see Greenland enter what's called a free association agreement with the United States, so he wants to see the United States provide economic support, military support, defense support. But he kind of stopped short of saying that he wanted to be part of this country. He did not say that he wants to be American.
DETROW: What did you - like, I feel like when we're going on a reporting trip, we do a ton of research. We do a ton of prep before we go, figuring out what we want to talk about, who we want to talk to but just also, like, the basics of the story 'cause you don't want to walk in blind. And yet there are always really big surprises. Like, what was most surprising to you about this trip? And what was something that maybe you thought about - I didn't quite grasp this idea at all, or I had it a little bit wrong when I was thinking about it from afar?
SUMMERS: The thing that surprised me the most was how challenging it would be to get people to talk. Like, I knew the influx of journalists would be there, and I know they had had so much attention. And, like, on these trips, you know, you pre-plan so much. You do pre-interviews. You send emails, but, like, that's just not the way that things happen there. It's very much an island where the best interviews we got, I think, were by way of introduction of someone else. The people who really stuck with me the most were people that we were introduced to either by our fixer, Iona (ph), that we worked with or by other people that we had met. The word-of-mouth currency was just so much more important. When I told most people in my life, like, outside of our business, hey, I'm going to Greenland for this trip, most people came in with the baseline of knowing nothing about this island.
DETROW: Yeah.
SUMMERS: And I think that that's really flattened the culture in some ways. So we were really intentional about doing stories. Yes, we talked about President Trump's ambitions, but we also talked about dog sledding. We also went to a kayak club and watched the construction of traditional Greenlandic kayakers. We sat down with an award-winning Greenlandic chef who talked to us indigenous cuisine and the food landscape there. So I think, for me, what was most enriching was trying to open up those other parts of Greenland to a U.S. audience that really hasn't given this place and its people and its history, like, much consideration.
DETROW: Juana Summers, thank you so much for talking to us.
SUMMERS: Thanks, Scott.
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