Biking along the Edge of the World

Sometimes you need to go someplace just because it's there - because that black hole sitting on the edge of your mental geography goads you and it's within your power to extend the boundaries of your known universe by some small increments.  At least, that's how I felt as a fat ten-year-old trying to bike up unexplored blocks in the 'hood that were inconveniently pitched at 45-degree inclines.

That's also how I felt about the north of the Netherlands - the upper half of the country above Amsterdam which no one else seems curious about. But it's there.

It's also different.  Friesland, the northwestern province of the country, has its own language that is entirely distinct from Dutch. Indeed, Dutch was not the official language of the Netherlands until 1993.  (They might as well have skipped over Dutch entirely and gone straight to English, but that's a different essay.)  In between Amsterdam and Friesland are vast tracts of land - entire provinces - that were under water 100 years ago.  And to accentuate the far distance you can travel in an hour's drive north of Amsterdam, Frisia is replete with funny looking little ponies, so miniature that they turned a grown man (Jeff) into a cooing eight-year-old girl.

Cooooo.

It's good to remind yourself of the power you wield over your own life as a fully independent adult. I wield this power sometimes when I skip the oatmeal Jeff dutifully makes for me in the morning in lieu of a pain au chocolat at my office canteen.  Or when I start watching the movie that comes on TV at 11 pm even though it's a school night and I'm already up past my bedtime.  Similarly, I decided I really needed to see the north of the Netherlands.  So in August I rented a car and dragged Jeff along on an entirely selfish two-day northern adventure.

It did not blow me away; it was different from the rest of the Netherlands, but only as different as, say, North Carolina is from South Carolina.  But our ultimate destination did move me greatly: it felt like we were biking along the edge of the world.

Along the northern coast of the Netherlands, stretching east into Germany and Denmark, lies the Wadden Sea.  "Sea" is a rather disingenuous term in this case; "wadden," meaning "to wade," is more literally correct.  The North Sea breached the land up there several hundred years ago (rather the story of the Netherlands), turning the outer dunes into islands and the interior into vast sand flats that are thinly covered with water only when the tide is in.

The mudflats have their own brown beauty, stemming from their scope and barrenness and the zen feeling one gets from watching the shallow water ripple symmetrically over the sand while flocks of birds skim the surface.  Some people actually spend hours wading through the "sea" (rather like salt-water hiking), but most northern Europeans seem to enjoy the region by ferrying themselves out to one of the barrier islands for beach holidays.

And I have a hundred more photos just like this...

We ended up on Ameland, a favorite of German tourists and scout troops.  It's a human-scaled island, with a few small villages; squat, thatched-roof houses; some miniature green farms with grazing cattle and the afore-mentioned ponies; and dunes upon dunes, complete with dune grass and vistas out over the actual sea.  

We rented bikes and set out along the northern shore, despite the ominous storm clouds which had successfully shooed the other tourists back towards the main town and its plentiful ice cream parlors. 

It was peaceful, the air smelled of water and wild brush, and the look was a little bit savage (as savage, that is, as the Netherlands gets).  Chased by black clouds, we found ourselves all alone 10 kilometers from the main town, facing out over the North Sea and with a strong wind at our back. I felt like I had reached the outer bounds of the knowable world - like there were no more black holes on my mental horizon, just an endless expanse of gray choppy water and gray swirling sky.