The Sea Above Us: Enemy of a Peaceful Land

by DAVID CORNEL DEJONG

1

COUNT them,” Father said. It was a brilliant Sunday afternoon, and we were standing on top of the two-story-high dike and looking landward, with the rolling North Sea behind us. Father was encouraging my younger brothers to count the towers and spires, and the villages and towns that clustered tightly around them. It might be a lesson in applied geography — though that was not very likely on this day of the Lordbut it was certainly one in human endeavor and patience. Twenty-four spires and towns we could count on ordinary days, twenty-nine when the light was good, but on a clear afternoon like today, as many as thirty-three.

“Now you name them, Rem and David,” Father ordered us two oldest boys. We started on the western horizon where the dike shut off the sea, on toward the east where the dike met the sky once more. We named all the towns in their proper order, the near score of names ending in “um" and all those that had “wier” in them, like our own town, the oldest, gravest, and perhaps bleakest of them all, Wierum. All those names evoked age, and many of them suggested aspects of the sea and man’s endless battle with that sea.

There they lay, peaceful and seemingly - because we were very young and trustful of the presentunchangeable. After all, not one of the thirty-odd towers was less than two or three hundred years old, and every one of the towns was much older, and had been part and parcel of staid or turbulent Dutch history long before their annals were recorded, even if only as bulwarks against the sea.

There they were, redand blue-roofed towns hugging gray churches with slate-blue spires, scattered over a checkerboard of a landscape almost entirely made by man: prosperous golden squares of wheat, bright yellow blocks of mustard, purple rectangles of cabbage, hexagons of blue flax, latticed parcels of white and pink buckwheat, limned everywhere with canals and ditches reflecting the translucent sky. And there curved the humped bridges with their vermilion and orange railings, seemingly helping the ribbons of roads to reach all the hives of towns properly. Over everything, adding up to three-quarters of the landscape, as in all good Dutch paintings, extended the ever-varied cup of sky.

We named all the towns, and Father was proud of us. The vision we saw seemed eternal in peace and prosperity, like a perfect greeting card. From the beginning we had been taught to be proud of the land. There was not a square yard of waste upon it.

But behind our backs, to the north of us, was the sea. Father had not yet asked us to turn around and look seaward. That would be the second step, like appraising an enemy, after we had evaluated our own bounty. My youngest brothers would be asked to name the row of sandy islands ten miles away, which once upon a time had been part of our fixed shore line. Now between us and the islands stretched the gray sea, which nearly everyone in our town still called “the lost land,” even though it had been lost as long as eight hundred years ago. On an afternoon like this the sea looked friendly, but there were the wrecks of old ships, broken piers, smashed-up palisades, and the faraway gaps between the islands to warn us that it was merely slumbering.

The dike stretched west and east, and lost itself against the horizon. It looked secure. Black-and white-cattle stood upon it in solemn conclave, immensely statuesque and enlarged, and looked out to sea while chewing their cud. The sheep, newly shorn and white, together with their half-grown lambs, lay huddled among the ox-eye daisies and buttercups against its slopes, Gulls and terns, rooks and magpies, busy musseling, screamed and skirled over us. Practically with its foot on the dike stood the old tower of our town, its grim gray church saddled behind it. That tower, the most ancient in our province, was more than a thousand years old, and had been built miles from the sea. Now it hugged the elbow of the dike, and was both our sentinel and our comfort.

Around the church, tightly — everything in Holland is tight; there is so little space, and so much need for huddling against the elements—lay the graveyard with its little shafts and white markers, and a few heavy stones, one of which said in Gothic, letters; “How Mighty Are Thy Works.”But that stone faced landward, and “thy works" might pertain to man or God; we were always asking about its meaning and getting devious answers.

In the north wall of the church was a very low door, attesting to the fact that once the Norsemen and Vikings had conquered our town and had forced the then-very-recent Christians to bow low to the north and its heathen gods when they came from worshiping in the church. So whatever conquest the sea had made beyond the dike, it predated the Vikings. And though there were old pavements and foundations beneath the sill on the sea side of the dike, those belonged to a lost and rejected past. Even as children we tried not to be too impressed with the name and fate of the old sunken city that lay a few miles westward in the sea, even if it had once been the largest city in our region. It belonged, too, to a lost and uncomfortable past.

On sparkling Sunday afternoons in summer it was easy to be confident. In winter we had permissible fears. There behind the heavy dike, with its brick steps leading up to the scudding skies, ten, fifteen, twenty or more feet above us thundered the waves, when the tides were high and when the winds came hurling across the North Sea. On the other hand the sea had not broken over or through the dike for three generations. There had been something of a catastrophe before that, but the people whom it had struck lay moldering beneath their white markers at the foot of the old tower. They, too, belonged to the dead past.

I had been born in this region of northern Friesland like all my forebears, as long as man could remember and the gravestones could testify. We belonged to that sea-hammered land. When I was two years old, my parents moved many miles inland to the city of Groningen. For a few years our ways became citified, and what was said about our town of Wierum and the North Sea took the shape of lore, myth, and, not unaccountably, tragedy.

When a few years later we moved back to Wierum, where my Father’s father had just died, and Father was next in line to take over the family business, we young ones returned like fearful aliens to the sea. I especially did not trust the sea, because dreams and lore had imbalanced my imagination, and the sea seemed to be an enemy beyond all human defense.

2

I REMEMBER some of my immediate impressions, those that contrasted the hungry sea with the peaceful land. Father had gone before us, and I was walking with Mother and my oldest brother along the top of the dike toward Wierum. To our right, the sea pounded, with gray waves and snarling whitecaps. It slapped against the basalt blocks that formed the base of the dike, and hurled itself across the teetering piers. All the cattle we passed stood with their rumps buffeted by the winds, but on the land side of the dike the sheep lay peaceably huddled. Mother’s skirls flapped and rustled like a flag, and slapped against us as we walked along in a tight cluster. “I want you to see the sea and the dike first,”Mother had Said. “It’s the only way to approach our town. And to see how peaceful and secure the land is.”

She spoke an irrefutable truth. For consolation we could look upon the land, all its geometrical greenness, the stately storks treading for frogs in the ditches, the great herons striding like dignified deacons across the daisy-studded meadows. There were the field workers stooping over their rich acres; and all the red-roofed, comfortably placid towns; and dotted between them, in their nests of high elms and strong beeches, the thatched farmhouses.

Even so, Mother warned us: “You won’t find trees in our town. Or very few of them. We are too close to the sea and too buffeted. A few will grow as high as the dike, but no higher. And perhaps it’s just as well, because we need the room. We’ve been there over a thousand years and we need the little room the sea doesn’t want.”

A mile from town we passed the weather mast. It was perched high on the dike, and in it swung a mysterious array of triangles, blocks, stiff flags, and one ominous black ball. “You see, a storm is really threatening,” Mother explained to us. “Perhaps we’d better hurry a bit. The sea is very capricious. But when you start, school in Wierum, you’ll learn very soon what all those storm signals on the weather mast signify. You’ll have to draw and memorize them, so that you’ll ho prepared.”

“Prepared for what, Mother?”

“Oh, eventualities,” she answered. “Now don’t you go tugging at your inland fears, David. Besides, we’ll discuss all that later. The wind is too strong for idle chattering. And we have to heat the storm home.”

That was the way we came back to Wierum, at least in my memory. Even then the old church was of immediate comfort to my nagging and often inchoate fears. It had been there so long, it had seen so many storms come and go. It made it seem quite possible to settle down in that old cluster of a town, without trees and with narrow, jumbled streets, and houses leaning on each other for support, even if it nestled many feet below the actual sea bottom on the other side of that fortress of a dike.

Eventually we would move into a new house with a glazed blue roof, and there’d be dormer windows in it from which we could actually look across the dike and across the sea at the islands of Ameland and Sehiermonnikoog. the erstwhile shore line. The name of our street was Carcass street, and all the dead were carried t hrough it to the graveyard. That was romantic, even in death. At all times the old tower peered down our narrow street, to be our sentinel and our rock of strength; hence it would be decidedly cowardly and even unfaithful to keep nursing my misgivings about the sea.

Also the sea could be glorious, an element of might and caprice, my dourly Calvinistic grandfather would tell me, although his pronouncements seemed contrary to his grave religious tenets. I was named for him, however, and he felt that he had to deal with me sternly, especially with my fears, even if he had to sound flippant in the process.

While our new home was being built, we lived in his old rambling house, which flanked the town side of the graveyard. All its windows faced that graveyard, which was a man-made mound, a remnant from before the Roman conquests. The old Frisians had lived on mounds; it was the Homans who had introduced the dikes. So from the windows in Grandfather’s house we always looked out upon the churchyard, the gray church and the tower in the middle of it, and, hedging everything closely in, the steep green slope of the dike. On top of the dike there we could usually see a small group of old fishwives, dressed in dull black, widows who had lost their men at sea. They would stand there, with their eyes shaded, always peering out at the sea. They never looked landward; constant pessimists, they seemed to me like evil prophetesses.

It was difficult to take them for granted. No matter at what hour the tide was high, even long after midnight, when my brother and I lay in our cupboard wall-bed, we would hear the lonesome clatter of their wooden shoes over the cobbles. When it was a calm night, we might not hear them return. We’d be asleep. But when foul weather threatened, we would wait, because they’d come back with messages, which they’d shout to others of their kind and to neighbors. Occasionally, above the sea’s roar and the thunder of the winds, we could hear their voices shrilling: “It’s already swollen above the basalt blocks. It’s coming on in long rolls and sweeps. Now back in 1887 . . . Now when my man was . . . Ah, the sea! Oh, but the Lord’s ways are merciful!” Very occasionally during the winter months one of them would come tapping on our windows. An old, weather-beaten face would be pressed close to the pane, warning: “ I would keep a little watch tonight, if I were you. It’s coming in real troubled. It’s gliding high up the dike.”

After a few years I did grow used to them, especially after we had moved into the new and secure house. But that first year left too strong an impression ever to be erased.

3

I REMEMBER coming home from school one stormy November, and finding Grandmother, wrapped in black shawls and securely st udded on wooden shoes, on her way to the dike. She was of peasant stock, and she insisted on keeping a couple of sheep, who grazed on the dike and the narrow stretches of reclaimed land behind the dike, east of town.

“The tide is coming in very fast,” she told me. “Come along and help me bring the sheep in.” She held my hand tightly as we climbed the wagon path to the top of the dike, where immediately the galloping winds pounced upon us. All along the dike went other shawled old women and boys on their way to rescue the sheep. I hardly dared to look at the sea racing, white-maned, against the dike, but there behind the battered pier was a flock of sheep, perhaps a hundred of them, allowing themselves to lx* engulfed by the onrushing tide. They were crowded, sheep-like, in a close huddle on a little elevation which couldn’t possibly last another fifteen minutes.

“We must get through to them,”Grandmother said firmly. “They are all doing it.” Clutching her hand, I followed her into the swirling water. I didn’t dare to be afraid. I was obediently imitating what all the other old women and boys were doing. Through the cold gray-green water we approached the foolish sheep. We surrounded them, and then, through water washing over our knees, all of us solemnly herded the sheep to the safety of the dike.

“Now you will understand something of the sea’s tempers. I am so glad it was you who could come with me,” Grandmother said, after we had taken off our wet clothes and were warming ourselves at the fire, sipping a cup of tea in front of the Delftblue tiled hearth, while the sea kept thundering behind the mighty dike. I wasn’t afraid now when sometimes a spray of water fountained above it. After all, Grandmother and I had in our small way countered that sea.

We were still living in Grandfather’s house when it happened, the real thing. Our new house was almost ready, but Mother was not in condition to move into it. My youngest brother had been born only the day before. He had been born with a caul, which all the old fishwives said boded nothing but evil. By that time, however, I thought I had made my peace with the sea, and I did not suspect it of impending evil.

But it happened. It was an utterly quiet night in March. There were no high winds, no scudding clouds, there had been no warning signals on the weather mast. Even so, the clatter of wooden shoes over the street cobbles seemed to keep going incessantly before we fell asleep. Yet there came no tappings on our windows, no warning cries outdoors; and of course Father and Mother wore very busy with the new brother. We boys were more or less on our own.

It came silently like a thief in the night. The old women on the dike wore aware of it, but everything went beyond their direst expectations. The sea silently waxed great and high and swelled to the very top of the dike. The first intimation we had of danger was the tolling of church bells, the wailing of several foghorns, and the voices of people shrilling like gulls through the dark night. The house seemed to be suffused with strange rustlings, and then with sloshings and gurglings. Above us footsteps creaked along the unused attic. Then footsteps came treading through water, and Father was there carrying a lamp.

“Now just stay calm.”he said gently. “We’ve carried your mother and the baby to the attic. Now one by one, Grandfather and I will carry you piggyback to the churchyard. Just stay calm.”

We were too amazed to be anything but calm. In the lamplight, we saw the straw mats of our rooms floating on the water, the chairs lay toppled and the table stood uptilted and half submerged. Water eddied and bubbled to Father’s and Grandfather’s knees. The strangeness and confusion of it all, and the absence of any roaring wind, were deeply disturbing, especially after we had been carried outdoors and deposited on the graveyard mound among the stark white markers, in the midst of the other people crowding there. Only then could we hear the water come washing across the dike, and genuine cries of alarm in the distance. Voices around us were saying in awed tones: “It has come. Already Zevenhuizen has been swept away. The people were swept from their beds and drowned in the canal.”

Father and Grandfather returned to rescue others. Lanterns flickered fitfully across the water everywhere. The cries on the dike became louder and more anxious. But the encroaching sea was silent. It spilled mutely across the dike into the town. Yet no one said: “The dike can’t hold. If will break, and then we’ll be lost. Absolutely lost.”We knew that was a real possibility. But we couldn’t afford to think about it.

Just before the gray light of dawn came, the water stopped edging across the dike back of the lower, “The tide is turning. The tide is turning,” we heard voices repeat to one another in the dimness around us. “We are saved.”

The tide had turned. The sea started slipping away behind the old dike again. When daylight was fuller, we waded back home. But we were told to sit still and keep quiet, or help the womenfolks clean up the house. We were not yet allowed to go to the dike, or to that part of town called Zevenhuizen, between the dike and the deep canal, all of which had been swept away. All able-bodied men were busy filling the gaps in the still-threatened dike and children would be in the way.

We were allowed to look at Mother and the new baby in the unfamiliar surroundings of the attic. They impressed us very little; our concern was with the flood. When at last all immediate danger was over, Grandfather came and took us to the battered dike. “If God had willed the waters to be a little more violent, the dike would have been broken through,”Grandfather said. We looked in awe at gaping holes, but were especially impressed by a row of clean washed skulls; the water had scoured out an old, forgotten graveyard on the sea side of the dike, where a large part of the town had been centuries ago. But there were also wrecked boats on top of the dike, and drowned cattle against its slopes. The town’s square was still deep in water; and when we came to Zevenhuizen, where the dike had been just a fraction weaker and lower, we saw the shells of houses, and roofs and eaves floating in the canal. While Grandfather led us on, we saw our father and a group of other men lift the body of a woman from the canal. Momentarily we caught sight of her wide-open mouth, filled with silt. Then Grandfather said sternly: “It’s time for you to go to school and be counted.”

Reluctantly we went to school, and to our dismay found it fairly dry, because it had been built on a man-made knoll on the southern edge of town, which also housed the parsonage. Our schoolmasters met us gravely, and called out our names as we came in, counting us off as saved. Maps of our province were unrolled across the blackboards. The French doors between the three classrooms had been pushed wide open. A little later the headmaster came in, and while the younger masters stood beside him with bowed heads, he said a long prayer in which he named those who had perished. All this seemed very significant, very solemn.

Next, each of our masters led us to a map, and pointed out just how far, but for the grace of God, the waters would have swirled inland had the dike broken; just how many towns and villages would have been doomed. We counted them, we named their names in unison. We recited them as in incantation, as if taunting the sea. They had been saved this time again, and perhaps forever more, if man watched out and God remained merciful. It had not happened for three generations, it might never happen again. The dike would be strengthened, surely. But the sea remained our enemy, never to be trusted or underestimated. And the sea was always above us, that too we must remember.

The headmaster came in again and the French doors were pushed open once more, and while he lead with his great basso voice, we all sang with him the Dutch rhymed psalm 03:

Even while we were singing, an anxious woman came to the door of the school and asked: “Is my Tjedde in school? Is my boy here? We have not seen him since night.” We watched her face light up with relief when she saw young Tjedde at his desk singing with us: “Mightier than the waves of the sea.”

When I returned home, I found the old house scoured clean once more, and Mother and the baby were downstairs. Brawny women were sweeping the town square with twig brooms, and our headmaster and the three younger masters went hurrying to join the men repairing the dike.

When I climbed to the top of the dike, I once more turned landward and saw, along the pale roads, people streaming along from the neighboring towns to see what had happened to us in Wierum. I looked at the fertile land that the salt water had not ruined this time, because the little sheep-dikes along the canals had been high enough. But directly below me, the town gravediggers were digging new graves in the crowded churchyard.

Behind me lay the sea, silent and with the remoteness of full ebb tide. Only sea birds wailed over and against it. The land was busy reshaping itself.