A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast

by Dorthe Nors

But a landscape is beyond the telling, like the telling is beyond itself. It takes a person to take up the line somewhere, to open, look and make a cut. This coming year it’ll be me, gently guiding the scalpel as I write.

It was there, one day when I was eleven, that I was nearly dragged out to sea by a wave. I was holding my mother’s hand; it was August. In those days I wasn’t familiar with the currents, and I didn’t appreciate their strength. But as we walked along the beach, letting the waves splash around our ankles, one of them dragged me out. My mother grabbed my leg, and we both skidded on the shingle until it let us go. Afterwards we sat and cried a bit. Grazes on our legs, blood. My mother was clutching my hand and wouldn’t let go. Since then I’ve called them Valkyrie waves, the kind that rove in from the North Sea in long, elegant swells

on otherwise mild days. They’ll take you to sea if they can.

I’m afraid of them, and every time I see them, ...

I want to wake beneath a sky that is grey and miserable, but which creates a space of colossal dimensions in a second, when the light comes ashore.

It’s possible to have an unconditional relationship with a place.

You carry the place you come from inside you, but you can never go back to it.

The things you’d rather not recall, the things you bury, they take on lives of their own beneath the ground, but truth will out!

A tidal drop, an old channel, a dim thicket of seaweed, who knows—but this boundary between the

fine, soft sandy bed and the unknown has stuck with me, like a trapdoor in my soul.

This line is made of sand, quarrelsome but easily consumed.

I don’t belong here, according to the locals, but I have roots here. Strong roots. They run through

my senses, my family, our history, and they reach my love of the Limfjord and the North Sea. They run down through the sand, the marine clay, to the groundwater and the ochre.

The paths through the landscape are a feat of memory that we create with the landscape and with the other people who have walked and are walking through it.’

The landscape is an archive of memory.

I sit there for a while, taking it in. Thousands of other people’s memories coexist here: memories of a summer’s day, of a stinging jellyfish, of a storm. Memories of blind man’s bluff. Memories of violence. Of people who came and went, of houses that once stood but stand no longer. People on foot, people on horseback, and now the sky is high with summer.

It’s a good thing too, because when I’m forced into silence, language starts to rise menacingly inside me.