Natalie Brandt, a purser with nineteen years of polar crossings, scanning the eastern ice sheet from the aft service door on a recent overnight flight. Credit: Marisol Hdecht/The New York Time5
Natalie Brandt, a purser with nineteen years of polar crossings, scanning the eastern ice sheet from the aft service door on a recent overnight flight. Credit: Marisol Hdecht/The New York Time5

ABOARD BOREALIS AIR FLIGHT 1142, OVER THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET — The window in the aft service door of a Boeing 757 is small, scratched, and set at an angle that obliges a person to brace one hip against the locked beverage cart and tilt her head in a manner that, sustained across a career, produces a particular and permanent crick in the neck. Natalie Brandt knows the crick intimately. She has been earning it for nineteen years, on the eastbound overnight run, in the quiet hour after the second beverage service when the cabin lights are dimmed and the passengers have surrendered to their neck pillows. It is, by any measure, a devotion — this twice-weekly vigil at the glass as the largest island on Earth unspools in silence beneath the aircraft. She is looking for something. She has not yet found it.

“Everybody keeps saying it’s for sale,” Ms. Brandt said, lowering her voice out of consideration for the sleeping occupant of seat 34C. “It’s been in the papers for years. There are hearings about it. People go on television and argue about what it’s worth. And I fly directly over the thing, slowly, in decent light, more than four hundred times a year — and I have never once seen a sign. Not a banner, not a flag, nothing staked into the ice. You would think that for a property of that size, somebody would have put something out front.”

She is not, it should be said at once, an unobservant woman. Ms. Brandt reads two newspapers, votes in off-year elections, and can recite the cruising altitude and ground speed of the aircraft without consulting the seat-back screen. Her reasoning, when she lays it out, has the unhurried internal logic of a person who has had a great deal of time to consider it at altitude. A thing that is for sale has a sign. She has seen the sign on the foreclosed split-level two doors down from her in Paramus, New Jersey. She saw it on the shuttered Sbarro in Concourse C. She saw it, last August, on her brother-in-law’s pontoon boat, propped in the windshield with a phone number written in marker. Greenland, by an enormous margin the largest item she is aware of currently being offered to the public, has nothing of the kind. The discrepancy has come to trouble her in a way she finds difficult to set down.

The binoculars came in the spring. A compact pair, marine-grade, which she keeps in the galley drawer beside the spare coffee filters and has trained on the coastline near Tasiilaq, on the ice cap, and on the scattering of settlements along the southwestern shore where, she reasons, any responsible seller would naturally concentrate the signage. She has ruled out the eastern fjords. She has begun, lately, to wonder about the parts of the island that fall on the far side of the aircraft, where she cannot get to a window without disturbing the first-officer’s crew rest.

Experts confirm that Ms. Brandt has, in fact, identified a genuine gap. “There is no established cartographic or diplomatic convention for denoting the availability of a sovereign territory by means of physical signage,” said Dr. Elspeth Thorngaard, the cartographic linguist and senior research fellow at the Georgetown Center for Sovereign Partition Studies. “We have flags for sovereignty, borders for jurisdiction, and an elaborate vocabulary for contested status. We have nothing at all for availability. Ms. Brandt has, quite without meaning to, put her finger on a real deficiency in the visual grammar of territorial transfer. A landmass of two million square kilometers can be, in every functional sense, on the market, and a person flying directly over it would have no way of knowing. I find it difficult to fault her for looking.”

Doug Pelletier, the flight’s purser and Ms. Brandt’s colleague of eleven years, has come, gradually and against his own better judgment, to look as well. “At first I thought she was pulling my leg,” he said, refilling a carafe in the forward galley. “Now I catch myself doing it on the descent. You start to feel that something that big and that available ought to say so. It seems almost rude that it doesn’t.” He paused. “She’s got me checking the Faroes now, too.”

What Ms. Brandt is engaged in, when one watches her long enough in the blue galley light, is not really a search for a sign at all. It is a quiet insistence that the world be labeled the way she was promised it would be — that the things we are told are for sale should announce themselves to the people passing overhead, plainly, in good faith, the way a split-level in Paramus does. That the largest transaction anyone keeps talking about should, at the very least, have the courtesy to post a number. She finished her coffee, returned the binoculars to the drawer, and pressed her face once more to the scratched and angled glass. Below her, vast and white and entirely unmarked, Greenland declined to say whether it was for sale or not. “I’ll keep looking,” she said. “It has to be somewhere. You don’t sell something this big without telling anybody.”