Meijer SEA NOW

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-916806-07-8
Verlag: Peirene Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 232 Seiten

The country is flooding. Every day the sea claims another kilometre of land. The prime minister holds a daily press conference. Scientists try to find an explanation, without success. Sheep drown in the fields, weighed down by their waterlogged fleeces. The museums are emptied of their valuable works. Some people stay. Most leave. Once the evacuation is complete, and the rest of the world is already moving on, a climate activist, a young poet and an oceanographer voyage across the new sea. They are drawn back into the heart of a changed nation, seeking what they have lost in the deluge.

Eva Meijer is a philosopher, visual artist, writer and singer- songwriter. Their fiction and non-fiction has been translated into over twenty languages. Since the publication of their first novel in 2011, their works have received numerous awards, including the Halewijnprijs honouring their oeuvre. Meijer's books have been met enthusiastically by the Dutch but also international press including reviews in the Guardian, Der Spiegel and New York Review of Books.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meijer, Eva

Weitere Mitwirkende

Thompson Melo, Anne

Leseproben

1

It took a while for people to wake up to what was happening.

To be fair, that first day it wasn’t really clear anything much was happening. Some days the sea comes further up the beach than others, and besides, the dykes were high and wide enough. The odd beachcomber had a feeling that something wasn’t quite right. But what? By the time they got home, they’d forgotten all about it.

The second day, the tideline almost reached the dunes at several points along the coast. The mayors of various seaside towns called in the experts from the government water agency, men with cases who turned up in pairs, took their readings and left again. They couldn’t comment on the situation: the readings needed to be analysed first. In the meantime, people began to talk that second afternoon about an unusual natural phenomenon – because that’s what they called it at the start: an unusual natural phenomenon. A restaurant owner in Scheveningen took a photo and posted it online. A metal detectorist in Domburg did the same. Had high tide ever lasted this long before? Was this the rising sea level they kept hearing about?

It’s a little too early in our story to start examining the sea’s motives, but perhaps a brief character sketch wouldn’t go amiss here. To anyone standing on the beach, the sea appears to go on for ever. Yes, there’s a horizon, but that shifts as we change position, it’s just an optical demarcation. The sea is not alive, but it’s not dead either, a state most people find hard to get their head around, however accustomed they may be to its presence. The sea is made up of water, just like people are, only it has no skin. Its colour and shape are determined by what surrounds it: the sun, the clouds, the wind. People are shaped by the weather and the landscape too, but they are not quite so inclined to transform with their fluctuating surroundings. At any rate, not the people of the Netherlands, who are at the heart of this book.

The sea doesn’t think or feel, at least not in a way that people are able to recognize with their own thoughts and feelings, which are inevitably limited by the bounds of their physicality and their capacity for imagination. A poet would point here to the polyphony and fluid nature of feelings, a philosopher to the importance of recognizing the materiality of human existence, but that wouldn’t bring us any closer to the sea. Anyway, as intimated, more of the sea later.

When first light broke on the third day, sweeping aside the night, it was apparent that the sea had advanced a kilometre further inland. A handful of cycle paths and a main road were flooded. The wind had ramped up too, and it was cold for February in the second decade of the twenty-first century. That day and the days that followed, the temperature hovered around freezing. Surging waves broke off sections of the snow-dusted dunes, carried away wooden fences, dragged off the odd bike that had been left behind or stolen, and submerged posts, low walls and pavements. Here and there, the seawater even began to creep its way up the side of buildings.

At half nine that morning, the water agency sent staff to all the coastal provinces. Their mission: to establish the nature of the problem. At around the same time, the fire services were called out to deal with a fish stall the waves were threatening to wash away, an older man who’d attempted to cycle through the water, couldn’t cycle back against the current and was now standing stranded on a bench – luckily, he’d had his phone on him – and several Highland cows who had sought safety on a dune and were now surrounded by water.

Meanwhile, hordes of people flocked to the coast to take pictures, which they shared with the world on Facebook, X and Instagram. #hightide, #monsterflood, #risingsealevel, #climatechange, #climate, #dutchweather, #fakenews, #authorities, #leftwinglobby, #huh?. The first reporters were sent out to cover the story: it’s cold out there, so wrap up warm.

At ten o’clock, the mayor of The Hague (inevitably a member of the conservative-liberal VVD party) called the Ministry of Infrastructure & Water Management.

Could I speak to the minister, please?

Can I ask what it’s concerning?

The sea.

What about the sea?

There’s no low tide any more.

Right. Wouldn’t you be better off speaking to a scientist about that?

The city’s going to be flooded before long.

Oh come on now, surely it won’t come to that.

Best to err on the side of caution. If I could speak to the minister please?

I’ll just check for you.

A Beatles number without the vocals. Elevator music, they used to call it. The mayor put the receiver down on his desk and got up to look out of the window. The people in the square were walking briskly, huddled in their jackets. They reminded him of pigeons, perhaps because of the hunched-up shoulders. Just imagine, he said out loud, if all this ended up underwater. He’d once seen a documentary claiming that the Netherlands isn’t nearly as safe as you’d like to think.

The music stopped and the minister picked up. The two men knew each other well enough to be on first-name terms.

Jan, we have a problem.

My people are on it. It’s the same story all over the Netherlands. I’ve just been in touch with the Belgians. They’re insisting nothing’s changed there, but, who knows, maybe it’s a case of them not having cottoned on yet. The scientists are thinking it could be some sort of unusual current, something to do with shifting tectonic plates. But look, the tide will turn back again of its own accord, of course. The best policy seems to be to wait it out, and keep a cool head.

The mayor nodded into the receiver. We’ll wait it out. After he’d hung up, he ambled back to the window. Sleet was falling on the square. The street lamps were on.

Meanwhile, hydrologists, climatologists, engineers, ecologists, technologists, marine biologists and all kinds of other authorities on matters sea-related were heading to the scene, whether by choice or at the minister’s behest. Accompanied by their postgrads and their specialist interns (Water Management, Ocean Technology, Geography, Oceanology, Water and Technology, Climate Adaptation, Aquatic Ecology, Marine Living, Aquaculture, Marine Resource Ecology, Marine Governance, Water Quality Management), they arrived on trains and in cars, on cycles and motorbikes, trudging through the dunes and onto the beach to take their photos, log their readings, gather their data. This was an opportunity to gain a better understanding of the world. Perhaps it would even make people more aware of the risks of climate change.

Professor Paula van der Steen from Wageningen University & Research lived in the coastal town of Wassenaar, and as soon as she read the news, she hopped on her bike and set off to see for herself what was happening. Major changes in the weather had rearranged the Dutch coastline many, many times in the past, but she couldn’t remember the tides ever refusing to cooperate. It wasn’t even as if the weather was particularly bad, just a little cold and with a fresh breeze. The dunes were a lot busier than usual, mainly with older men brandishing binoculars, phones and cameras, eager to capture what was happening.

Alongside the dunes, the beach was a narrow ribbon of sand. Steen walked down to the shoreline and took off her gloves to test the water, which was warmer than the air. She licked her finger. Salty. As salty as ever.

At 11 a.m., a concerned journalist published an article on nos.nl under the headline whatever happened to low tide?, prompting reporters from newspapers that hadn’t, until then, considered it much of a story to head to the coast – all except the ones in the east of the country and hilly Limburg, who didn’t feel that this unusual natural phenomenon was the sort of thing that would interest their readers. The magazine show Heart of the Netherlands sent regional reporters to cover the story. NOS squeezed in a brief mention at the end of its midday bulletin, following items on a stabbing in central Amsterdam, the murder of a Russian journalist, the latest diplomatic musings of the US president, and a major department store’s disappointing sales figures. We’re getting reports of an unusual natural phenomenon at the coast. Storms or shifting tectonic plates have caused the sea to come further inland than we are used to. Scientists and the water agency are investigating.

Not unusual, Steen thought. Unique. Unprecedented. When she got home, she rang the Ministry of Infrastructure & Water Management and asked for the minister. She was put through to four different people before she finally got to speak to his assistant.

The minister’s in a meeting.

It’s important.

There are a lot of important matters to discuss this morning, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate.

But I know the literature. I’m a geological oceanographer. And this has never happened before.

The literature.

...