A Line in the World

It's early summer and far beneath me is a coastline. I have it folded out, a map on my desk. It begins to emerge at the northernmost tip of Jutland in Denmark. Yes, that's where it begins, in the North Sea, on a tapering spit of sandy ground. Then it drops south like a slope. It meanders downwards. Now it has begun, the line. It charts a coast and continues, curving faintly outwards. Then come the cervical vertebrae. They settle one by one, stacked each on top of another, sandy islands. And the line persists, breaking borders, into Germany and on. The islands settle like smaller delicate vertebrae into Holland, now charting not a line but a living being.

A rugged Northern European coastline of roughly 600 miles, from Skagen in Denmark to Den Helder in Holland. From a northern sandy spit wedging itself between Norway and Sweden's unyielding massifs down to the Wadden Sea, where the birds take rest, the hours are counted and the living being whispers.

The line has been a part of me since the beginning. Physically, but on large maps in classrooms too, on television, in the A-Z in my parents' car. Seen in context with the rest of the country, it looks like the back of a dozy Jutlander with a silly cap and big nose, facing east. Always read from top to bottom, from left to right. Never turned on its head, fragmented, joined or transgressional. On the map beneath me, the land lies as it lies. A distant coast. Unfamiliar and raw, considered from a centre of power. At one time there were scarcely any roads across the broad heaths of the Jutland peninsula to the shores of the North Sea, and there were no bridges between Denmark's countless islands, large and small: the land was matted, impenetrable. But today the distance between this border and its faraway metropolises is largely psychological. There are roads into the system now, bridges over the water, airports and civilized infrastructure. The land coheres, and now it's spread on the desk beneath me, fixed by a map-maker.

But if I could do what I wanted with time, if I could accelerate it like a piece of time-lapse footage where the roses turn from bud to blossom, the line would be alive. The drawing would always be moving. It would bend forwards, shift backwards, open, turn, perforate; then close, then open up again. It would vanish in part beneath heavy masses of ice but be revived as something else, and it would dance, its tail one moment twisting like an eel, fluttering the next like a pennant. It is a living coastline made of sand. Always becoming, always dying. Determined by the forces of the galaxy streaming through the universe, marked by the storms, the wandering of the sun and moon, and human intervention (although the latter is always short-lived), the coastline has all the time in the world. It is a long and living tale of tidal waters, subject to the rhythms of day and night, but, in its reckoning of time, to be considered an eternity.

One line in the world. Just one. It could have been elsewhere and known other experiences, other dramas and silent reflections. What might the line from Utqiagvik, Alaska to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico have to tell? Myriads. Or the line from Gibraltar to the Cape of Good Hope? There are no borders to the stories told along a line. But a landscape is beyond the telling, like the telling is beyond itself. It takes a person to take up the line somewhere, to open, look and make a cut. This coming year it'll be me, gently guiding the scalpel as I write.

At first I didn't want to. I was supposed to be starting a novel. Then I was approached to write a book about the west coast of Denmark. I said no. They asked me again. And again. I said, 'I'll have to think it over,' and I did. Or I dreamt. In the dream, I was setting off across the landscape in my little Toyota. I saw myself escaping several years of pressure from the media by driving up and down the coast. Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It's a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct.

My own geography began in a suburb of Herning, Denmark's answer to Denver, Colorado or Manchester, England. A young, imaginative, knocked-together provincial town in the middle of the Jutish heath. When I was four, my family moved five miles west. My parents bought a tumbledown farm in the large parish of Sinding-Ørre. One half of the parish: green, lush, hilly. The other half: vast stretches of heath and forest beneath a kind of prairie sky, and from the moment I dared to move from place to place of my own accord, I went walking in the landscape. That parish is the only place on Earth where I know all the shortcuts, all the paths, and I know who lived in which house and whose children were whose. I know all the family names on the gravestones. When I come to die, that is where you should bury me.

My family was tied to the place where we lived, but beyond that, we were oriented west. That was where our kin came from; the coastline was our place of origin. My family has had a little house tucked away in a deserted backwater out there all my life. And when on warm days we itched for a quick trip to the beach, we drove plumb west. This was the fastest way to the sea, driving in a straight line until we hit Vedersø Dune. Then we walked across the sand, laden with blankets, thermos flasks and cool boxes.

It was there, one day when I was eleven, that I was nearly dragged out to sea by a wave. I was holding my mother's hand; it was August. In those days I wasn't familiar with the currents, and I didn't appreciate their strength. But as we walked along the beach, letting the waves splash around our ankles, one of them dragged me out. My mother grabbed my leg, and we both skidded on the shingle until it let us go. Afterwards we sat and cried a bit. Grazes on our legs, blood. My mother was clutching my hand and wouldn't let go. Since then I've called them Valkyrie waves, the kind that rove in from the North Sea in long, elegant swells on otherwise mild days. They'll take you to sea if they can. I'm afraid of them, and every time I see them, I remember love.

While my family was oriented in a westerly direction, the rest of Denmark was looking east. That was where the big cities were, and thus the university places. It was the direction you migrated if you wanted to 'amount to anything', as they put it. You had to urbanize, speak proper Danish, live up to your potential over in the east.

It was a shift grounded in the past. In the Middle Ages there was a strong centre of power in Viborg, in central Jutland, but the balance tipped towards Copenhagen, and it's never the losers who get the chance to write history. In the eighteenth century, the golden age of Danish art, painters were exhorted to depict landscapes that defined what the real Denmark looked like. The nation's true nature was to be found around Copenhagen, and it looked like a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, a Biedermeier idyll, bare of squalls, wilderness and drifting sands. If the harsh natural world at the periphery was described, it was mostly by the wasteland's priests and parish clerks, who wrote educational tracts about the rows of dunes, about drainage and property rights. Generally viewed from above, looking down. Or with a hunter's gaze, within range and at arm's length.

Women's relationships with the landscape were relatively undocumented. Their feeling for nature was at best irrelevant, at worst dangerous. But now I have claimed the right to see and to describe. The landscape must have an essence that, in itself, can speak. Something that cannot be captured with compasses and spirit levels, that cannot be made harmless with weapons.

I was in contact with this something when I was a child, but like many other bookworms of my generation, I also travelled east. In my first paper at Aarhus University's Department of Scandinavian Studies, I wrote: 'It is in the schism that all identity is formed.' I wrote that sentence in a concrete building in Aarhus, with a view towards the place I came from. A terribly long way from home.

When I think about it now, it feels as though the schism in which all identity is formed made me sew great tacking stitches into the world. I was drawn east, but then back west. I specialized in Swedish language and literature. Looking east, in other words. But it was the Danish and English languages that preoccupied me in everyday life, so west-no, east, zig-zig, zag-zag. I zigzagged until I ended up in Copenhagen, and one day, after several years in the city, I was lying on the floor of my apartment. I had hash dealers below and a young woman who blasted loud music next door. When I pulled back the curtains in the morning, I found myself looking out at a hairdresser's and a block of flats. There was no courtyard to speak of, nothing, only some nearby churchyards and parks. Every day, I tried to find the landscape I missed in one of the metropolis's green spaces, but I was never alone. Never myself. And so I lay there on the floor above the dealers. I'd downloaded an app that played nature sounds from Bornholm, an island in the Baltic Sea. I shut my eyes and listened to the water splashing and chuckling against the cliffs. As far as water noises go, you can't get any further east in this little...