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

by Dorthe Nors

shut my eyes, as I said, and then it came: I want a storm surge, I thought. I want a north-west wind, fierce and hard. I want trees so battered and beaten they’re crawling over the ground. I want beach grass, lyme grass, crowberry stalks and heather that prick my calves until they bleed, and salt crystallizing on my skin. I want vast expanses, wasteland, wind-blasted stone, mountainous dunes and a body language I understand. 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. A horizon is what I want, and I want solitude. Healthy solitude, and I want intimacy, true intimacy. I no longer want to be anyone but myself.

It’s possible to have an unconditional relationship with a place. I let the loss consume me all the way to my makeshift lodgings. Then I had to move on; I had to shift the site I came from inside me, turning it into a memory.

the place you come from is not somewhere you can ever return. It no longer exists, and you have become a stranger. Too urbanized, too acculturated, too loud to assimilate, but all identity is formed in the schism. I will never escape it, and of course I knew that even when I was young. So now I sew my geographical stitches between this coastal world and the savage city. I need the plurality, the conversations, the invisibility and the people. But I cannot cope without the landscape, without nature. I need a broad, still place to which I can return. A horizon. Some friendly, level-headed neighbours. My own place, and a point of departure, where I don’t necessarily know all the names on the gravestones, but where I know the light, the scent, the meaning of the shifting winds, and where all the time that’s running out is raised up in the telling of a story and snatches its piece of eternity. Before we come apart.

The light is here, but the darkness is as well, and now the great wheel turns. We walk to the holy springs and wash our wounds. Herbs in the woods and meadows have drunk from the energies of the universe and drawn rich growth from all existence. We pick the herbs at night, on our guard against the glowworms’ bite. We read omens. We tuck flowers under our pillows. Our brown calves are wet with cuckoo spit, while the bonfires burn down. It is the longest day, the magic’s night. Everything has opened and yielded. A rattling door onto the darkness.

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

Civilization is a snapshot. Forces such as the sea’s, the wind’s, the rain’s, the ungraspability of the universe, to say nothing of the Earth’s glowing core, compared to your reality, strung frail and taut between birth and death? Your concepts of space? The universe would laugh if it knew that you existed and could hear your little joke.

In America there were landscapes so vast that you knew nature had a consciousness all its own.

A seal again, in motion; but then it stopped, staring up out of the current: ‘I drew you under,’ it said, ‘and I pressed into your lungs, so that you would not forget the power of this being.’