Süderoog

I saw a photograph of a heart-shaped little island in the Wadden Sea.

Four inhabitants, it said. And a postman who walks across the mudflats at low tide to reach the letterbox.

My first thought was, naturally: clickbait.

My second: the Halligen.

And that was where things went wrong.

Because once my irrassociation radar switches on, there is very little to be done about it.

The Halligen are places where land and water have not yet made any final arrangements. In normal weather there is grass. Sheep walk around. Houses stand there. At high tide, much of it disappears beneath the sea and only the dwelling mounds remain above the water.

Land unter.

We would call it a flood.

But perhaps that is already a modern way of looking at it. As if the water had arrived somewhere it did not belong.

For centuries, it belonged there perfectly well.

Friesland without lines

Anyone driving through Friesland today sees an orderly landscape. Dykes, ditches, roads and meadows. Land here. Water there. And should any uncertainty arise, we have Rijkswaterstaat, Wetterskip Fryslân and probably an Excel file somewhere specifying exactly how much water is wanted in each place.

It was once different.

The Frisian coast was a world of salt marshes, channels, mudflats and pieces of land that disappeared at high tide. People settled on the higher ground and raised it when necessary.

Terps.

Not to shut the water out for good, but to keep living right in the middle of it.

I find that an essential difference.

We have learned to see water as a boundary.

To them, it was part of the landscape.

And then Redbad came along.

Naturally.

Redbad

I never met the good man, so I should be careful about what I attribute to him.

But Redbad lived around the year 700 in a Frisian world that was much larger and, above all, much wetter than the Friesland we know today. Rivers, sea arms and coastal waters were not inconvenient interruptions between two stretches of asphalt.

They were roads.

A boat was not a recreational object brought out of storage for three weeks a year. Water connected settlements, trade and people. Anyone seeking power in such a region probably had to pay at least as much attention to currents, tides and waterways as to land.

And suddenly I was looking at Süderoog again.

That little green heart in the German Wadden Sea.

Perhaps we see an island there.

But would Redbad have seen it that way?

We see water with bits of land here and there.
Redbad saw land with water running through it.

That single difference in perspective changes everything.

The dyke

Somewhere in our history, we began drawing lines.

First small dykes. Then larger ones. Terps were connected. Polders were drained. Water was carried off, directed and controlled. Eventually the Friesland we now take for granted emerged.

A landscape made, to a considerable extent, by people.

There is nothing wrong with that. Without all those dykes, I would probably have had to write this from a boat.

But something disappeared too.

The ambiguity.

The territory between land and sea.

A landscape that did not have to be the same every day.

That still exists on the Halligen.

A meadow can simply be a meadow today and part of the Wadden Sea tomorrow. The house remains on its Warft, and afterwards the water withdraws again.

No disaster.

Just Wednesday.

Valhalla

And then I thought again of Redbad and his Valhalla.

You have to be careful with that, because before you know it you have built a historical story from a few loose stones, three assumptions and an enthusiastically working imagination.

But imagination does not have to replace history in order to make something visible.

Perhaps it is more interesting to ask how someone from that time would view our world.

Would Redbad understand why we built dykes around everything?

Probably.

Would he understand why we then spend millions giving water more room again in certain places?

Perhaps he would fall silent for a moment.

Then laugh very loudly.

Because perhaps, after twelve hundred years, we are slowly discovering what people along this coast already knew:

you do not always have to choose between land and water.

Sometimes something can be both.

That is why little Süderoog stayed with me.

Not because of its four inhabitants. Not because of the postman crossing the mudflats. Not even because it looks suspiciously like a heart from the air.

But because, in the middle of the Wadden Sea, there is still a piece of the world that refuses to make a clear choice.

Land when it can.

Sea when it must.

And people simply living in between.

Perhaps Redbad would feel at home there immediately.

I certainly would, for an afternoon.

After that, I would quite like to go home again.

Across the dyke. 😉