“Watch a grey spot. Don’t look away. … Always look at each spot for five seconds. When they stop, they look like a stone.”

I’m on the deck of the ferry M/S Sarfaq Ittuk, steaming south along Greenland’s western shore, and Qulutannguaq Hammeken is teaching his 12-year-old daughter, Beathe, (and now me too), how to spot a reindeer. Hammeken is traveling south for the summer, and his conversation is full of hopes about the things he wants his daughter to learn now that the city of Nuuk is behind us: “All that experience I have, I want to show her [how] to travel in the landscape in the old ways.”

“Watch a grey spot. Don’t look away. … Always look at each spot for five seconds. When they stop, they look like a stone.”

I’m on the deck of the ferry M/S Sarfaq Ittuk, steaming south along Greenland’s western shore, and Qulutannguaq Hammeken is teaching his 12-year-old daughter, Beathe, (and now me too), how to spot a reindeer. Hammeken is traveling south for the summer, and his conversation is full of hopes about the things he wants his daughter to learn now that the city of Nuuk is behind us: “All that experience I have, I want to show her [how] to travel in the landscape in the old ways.”

Ferry passengers scan the shoreline south of Nuuk on June 30.

I’m here to find out what Greenlanders think as their country comes under extraordinary and unprecedented geopolitical pressure. What many tell me, in different forms over the course of this voyage, is that the choice between Denmark or the United States or independence is ultimately secondary. More important, they insist, is that they be understood and treated as equals in any discussion about their island’s future.

Qulutannguaq and Beathe see two reindeer on the shore. Despite their careful pointing, I see only the stones.

HDMS Hvidbjørnen ( known as the Polar Bear), one of the Danish Navy’s four Thetis-class ocean patrol frigates, off the coast of Nuuk on July 2.

It is June 29 when I arrive in Nuuk, the harbor still busy after midnight and the sky still light. I walk downhill past the buildings of the Danish military’s Arctic Command. Fishermen are coming in off the sea, silent in their bright waterproofs. A Danish arctic patrol boat is pulling out, one lone gun on the foredeck.

Clockwise from top left: The building housing the new unmarked U.S. Consulate; portraits of members of the Trump administration reflected in its window; the headquarters of the Danish military’s Arctic Command; and fishing boats in the harbor, all in Nuuk in late June and early July.

The city feels thrown together along a low peninsula of granite and moss. There are rows of colorful houses, many still adhering to the colonial-era color coding schema: yellow for doctors, red for teachers and priests, green for tradespeople, blue for fishermen, black for police. There are also long, 1960s apartment blocks, and, incongruously, a handful of taller modern buildings, including one housing the new U.S. Consulate. The building is painted grey and black, and behind one dark window, U.S. President Donald Trump’s portrait hangs on the wall.

When we board the ferry early the next morning, the quay is crowded. The efficient rhythm of departure is only interrupted when a car arrives late, and we lower the gangway again to let it on board. People complain to me about Nuuk: The city is changing; it is getting too big and too impersonal. At moments like these, though, it still feels to me like a village.

First leg: Nuuk to Qeqertarsuatsiaat

Soren Svenningsen rides the ferry on June 30.

Soren Svenningsen leans on the rail as the grey hills slip past and the seaway begins to build. The ship rolls in the waves beneath our feet. In his younger years, Svenningsen braved the seas in his own boat. Retired now, he is riding the ferry again, like he did as a boy. “The sea train,” he calls it, recollecting voyages from his childhood. In the 1960s, they’d sit in the canteen watching John Wayne films, while the Labrador Sea raged outside across the deck.

It does feel like a train. The boat runs up and down this coastline like clockwork in a 12-day loop, carrying passengers and mail and bits of cargo all year, except January. There aren’t any roads between cities or towns in Greenland, so for many places, the ferry is their only all-weather link to the outside world.

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