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

by Dorthe Nors

I gaze out across the water, the words of the Swedish writer Kerstin Ekman pop into my head. I wrote my dissertation on her, and she has stayed with me throughout my life. ‘I have come here often,’ she writes. ‘A whole childhood, every single day. All these arrivals are false, because in reality I was born here. Here I can do nothing but return.’1

But that’s just one side of the coin, Kerstin, I think. The other is this: 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.

Humans, with our kerosene and our short fuses, have been ranting and raving in nature for far too long.

It was as if time did not obey the laws that existed in the courtyard, where visitors sauntered around in sandals to the happy din of the swallows that had just arrived. Yes, it was as though there was slushy snow inside the church. Like it was a winter’s day I was visiting, in an age beyond my own, and that only once outside in the courtyard could I pick up my relatively chronological wanderings through life.

We turn off towards the Old Parish Church, settled like a beautiful white laying hen at the end of a gravel road near Ringkøbing Fjord.