Trout Fishing in Greenland

More about Trout Fishing in Greenland

I went trout fishing in Greenland even though Greenland does not officially approve of trout fishing the way America once pretended to. The streams were made of memory instead of water, and the memories were cold enough to keep themselves frozen without help.

The first stream I met was a childhood. It ran sideways across the tundra, refusing gravity, carrying small silver thoughts that looked like fish if you squinted or believed. I cast my line into it and caught a dream from 1972. It wriggled briefly, then became a cup of coffee on a Formica table, steaming in a house that no longer exists.

The Greenlanders nodded politely. They understand these things. They fish for weather, for silence, for the long patience of ice. Nobody laughed when I released the dream back into the stream. Dreams here are strictly catch-and-release.

The trout were made of sleep. Some had scales shaped like old maps. Others were translucent and contained entire afternoons inside them—missed buses, half-written letters, the smell of wet wool. When you held one up to the light, it remembered you back.

I walked upstream until the landscape simplified itself into black, white, and one thought at a time. The memories grew narrower, faster. The dreams got bigger. One trout leapt completely out of the stream and became a sentence that refused to end. I admired it and let it go.

In Greenland, trout fishing is less about catching and more about standing still long enough for the past to brush against your legs like cold water. Sometimes a dream bites. Sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, you go home lighter, as if you have been briefly borrowed by the world and gently returned.

That night I slept inside a stream. The trout dreamed me back into existence.