A writer escapes the usual expectations by leaving the city for a house of her own in rural Denmark.
At one point there were geese. But before the geese came, I stood in the garden. Storm season, December 2014, afternoon, on the North Sea Coast in Denmark. A big beaten-up horse chestnut was to the right, and the wind had ripped the apples off the apple tree way back in October. The shrubbery down at the property’s end: ragged. And then came the drizzle, and soon it was raining, and I had the house keys in my hand.
The last time I was here, I was with a real estate agent. I’d told him I had considered moving here after years of living in Copenhagen. I added that I was a writer, and I swear he might have giggled. It was a good little house, though. A young electrician and his wife were selling it, and the real estate agent showed me all the updated electric installations. A healthy house, he said, and then we found ourselves at the end of the garden. On the horizon the enormous dunes, called sea mountains, protected the hinterland from the brutality of the North Sea. Leading up to these sandy giants were the windswept plains on which this healthy little house hunkered down in the rural village I considered calling my home.
The real estate agent had cocked his ears and pointed into the landscape:
“Can you hear that?”
“Sounds like heavy traffic,” I said.
“But it’s not,” he stated. “It’s the sea.”
It was a sales trick in these parts, and I expressed my enthusiasm. I signed the purchase agreement, and, a few months later, there I was with the keys to the house. The first thing I’d noticed on my arrival was the “for sale” sign. The real estate agent had left it in the little garage next to the house. Leaving it there would save him a trip, he’d thought. She won’t last long out here, he’d thought.
But there I was, all on my own. Around winter solstice it grows dark at 4 p.m. in our latitudes, so the sky looked like cabbage soup. The plains were wet and sad. In the harvested corn fields, big flocks of muddy whooper swans were eating leftovers, but apart from them, not a bird sang.
I walked around my new garden, and it didn’t seem like much. I tried to hear the sea but only felt the rain. I turned around and looked at the little house I’d bought with all my savings. Red bricks, one floor, plus a rotten and wind-beaten patio enclosure. I liked the look of the wood burner’s chimney poking at the sky but still I wondered, What had I done?
I was born 90 miles inland from the North Sea Coast, in rural Denmark on the Jutland moors, and all the way through school I was taught that if I wanted to amount to anything I would have to move to the big cities in the east, preferably Copenhagen. So, I did. I educated and urbanized myself, and I did it even though all I ever really wanted, apart from love, was to have a house in a vast landscape. And to write. “But you can’t make a living off that,” I was told. “And don’t you want a nice family?” I was asked. And I halfheartedly tried to be who society wanted me to be, until something finally hit me one day in Copenhagen as I was lying on the floor of my apartment. I had a heartache over some man, and my neighbors were tormenting me with loud music and the stink of marijuana. I downloaded an app that played cute and cozy nature sounds, and I was listening to that while trying to meditate. And then suddenly, in the middle of all that terror and idyll, I remembered what I wanted:
Storm surges. The northwest wind. A horizon. Yes, I wanted to open my eyes beneath a gray and two-dimensional sky, only to see it explode in light when the weather fronts arrived across the North Sea from the British Isles. I wanted a view, a garden and a house of my own. No more waiting for a man to make these things come true. I could do it myself. About time, I thought, and opened my eyes, and that’s how I gave up my Copenhagen apartment. Three months’ notice. Destination unknown.
And so I ended up on the North Sea Coast. I stood in the garden looking at my leap of faith: A little house that my Copenhagen friends described as “faraway from everything,” thereby implying that they themselves were in “the center of everything.” They thought I was nuts, and yet I’d held on to my decision like grim death. I wanted to go as far west as possible in this little country, and there I found myself: Far away from somewhere. In the middle of nowhere. Keys in hand.
But why here? I asked myself in the rain and decided that it must have been my ancestors calling. My grandmother grew up out here. In fact, all my forefathers and mothers were connected to West Jutland, the fjords and the sea itself. They were farmers, land laborers, ship carpenters, fjord fishermen, freeholders and mothers of dozens of snotty-nosed kids. They were survivors, strugglers. And mostly poor. But they knew how to read the wind and the sea. Out here on the East Atlantic Flyway, they understood the behavior of migrating birds, plants, light, and they knew that only nature (and some of them called that God) ruled over them.
And nature did rule. The rain poured down that day in December, so I went indoors and placed myself soaking wet in the middle of my new living room. The house echoed, and I had two days to paint the whole thing before my belongings arrived. It was obvious where the electrician and his wife had had their posters, their couch, their double bed, and I had already covered the floors in plastic. I had opened the paint buckets, prepared the brushes, but there I stood. And then I sat down in the middle of all this uncertainty. And I cried like you do when you don’t know what you’ve done.
It was shortly after that I heard the immense conversation. It came from above the house, and it wouldn’t stop. It sounded like a piece by Philip Glass, only better, so I made my way back outside. I looked up, and there they were: an enormous flock of barnacle geese migrating in a southerly direction. My mouth open, arms hanging useless down my sides.
“There’s a woman down there,” the geese chattered.
And there was no end to them. They kept on crossing the house till the light came ashore, the chestnut trembled and I knew exactly what I had done.
Dorthe Nors is the author of the nonfiction book “A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast,” the short story collections “Wild Swims” and “Karate Chop,” and four novels.
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Home at Last in the Wind, Rain and Isolation of the North Sea Coast - The New York Times
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