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

by Dorthe Nors

Herning, Denmark’s answer to Denver, Colorado or Manchester, England.

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

Women’s relationships with the landscape were relatively undocumented. Their feeling for nature was at best irrelevant, at worst dangerous. But now I have claimed the right to see and to describe. The landscape must have an essence that, in itself, can speak. Something that cannot be captured with compasses and spirit levels, that cannot be made harmless with weapons.

Then I had to move on; I had to shift the site I came from inside me, turning it into a memory.

The young girls stand at an appropriate distance, clad in new bikinis, gold crosses and their mothers’ dialects.

A sharp watch is kept on the oldest women. Their skin is tanned leather, their hair clipped short. They have tattoos and big, wrinkled cleavages. They can call a child to their side from the open sea. Now and again, a man in a boiler suit walks past and talks to them. They put up with that, but he can’t sit down. They’ve been skinning fish since before they started school. They’ve ridden Puch Maxi mopeds, they’ve gone cruising with drunken men in Ford Taunus cars by the dam. They’ve cooked more chips than you’ll ever eat. They’ve borne their stormy nights. They have cried when he was at sea, and they’ve cried when he was home, and they’re not for delicate souls. But they are safe swimmers, and if war breaks out, I’d like one of them in my trench. Her and her grandma. They’ve hauled men’s mouths over to the drain in the bathroom. When he couldn’t get up, they let him lie. When he wanted to stand, they carried him. Fat, thin, sun-creased, cigarette-smoking, bathing-suit-stretching beauties in the sand. Always swim near them, because the water is theirs.

identity must be formed in the schism.

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.

While the straightening of the river Skjern shows what a landscape looks like when someone’s been at it with a spirit level, you should take a look at Sønderho to see how paths arrange themselves under women’s feet: organic as the roots of trees.