A doctor’s Arctic year

“It was great. It had every convenience that a home here would have; running water, flush toilets – which is amazing considering your house is on the permafrost.”

In 1989, Cork doctor Geraldine Osborne, her husband Danny, and their three young children embarked on an extraordinary adventure: to spend a year living in the tiny Inuit settlement of Grise Fiord in Canada, over a thousand kilometres above the Arctic Circle.

This week marks the publication of Geraldine’s book ‘Somewhere Cold’, a compelling blend of travel, memoir, nature, and cultural observation as she recounts her year spent in one of the harshest environments on the planet.

“I started writing it soon after we came back but I had to abandon it because my children were very young and I had to go back to work as well,” explained Geraldine, who worked as a GP in Castletownbere in West Cork.

“I actually retired from medicine two and a half years ago, so I took it up again. I got out all of my old notes, my old chapters, Denny's old journals, got out the old materials, because I always wanted to write it, but I just needed the time and the headspace more than anything.”

Geraldine’s husband Danny, a well-known artist and experienced explorer in his own right, provides the illustrations in the book. It was Danny who initially put the idea of an Arctic adventure on the table having previously been part of the first Irish Arctic expedition in 1981.

Geraldine said: “I met Danny in 1980 and he was preparing to go out on the Irish Arctic expedition. I was a medical student in Dublin at the time and he had a warehouse near where I was living.”

In 1989, they set off with their three young children, ages five, two, and one, on a two week journey to Canada’s northernmost settled community called Grise Fiord in the territory of Nunavut, where they would spend the next year.

“We had bought dogs from a dog owner there, so we picked them up in Iqaluit and we flew further north again to a community called Resolute,” recalled Geraldine.

“We had to stay there for a couple of days to take a weekly scheduled flight to Grise Fiord in a small twin auto aeroplane.

“On the first day we arrived, it wasn't furnished or anything. People arrived with tables and chairs and mattresses and all these bits and pieces to make us comfortable and that was really fantastic, but the Inuit are like that, they're just so generous,” said Geraldine.

Geraldine and her family’s time amongst the Inuit community in Grise Fiord left a life-long impression on them, one that has only deepened in the years that have past since their first adventure there.

Geraldine explained: “They're hunters. Private property isn't of any interest to them, and the idea of owning land is very foreign to them.

“Sharing is part of their culture; that's how they survive because you don't know when you'll need help from someone. It’s survival of the group. It makes a lot of sense.

“They only just got television the year before we arrived. You could see ‘Coronation Street’ on the TV in this really remote area, and I think they had a bit of a warped idea that life down south where we came from was just like in Coronation Street,” laughs Geraldine.

With a winter that brought with it temperatures as low as -40 °C and three months of darkness, and with three very young children in tow, the Osborne’s great Arctic adventure certainly had its challenges, but when the seasons changed and the light returned, the simple beauty and freedom of their new world was more than worth it.

“The best times were in the summer when the sea ice was still frozen enough to travel on but the temperature had risen and there was 24 hour daylight,” said Geraldine.

“We were out all the time travelling over the sea ice with the dogs and camping on the sea ice and going to fishing lakes,” she concluded.

Years later, in 2001, Geraldine got a job as a medical officer of health with the Government of Nunavut in the territory’s capital, Iqaluit, where she worked for more than ten years. Geraldine’s book ‘Somewhere Cold’ is available now in bookshops and will be officially launched in Waterstones in Cork city next Tuesday.