Margriet de Moor - The Storm

The sea itself was not to be seen. But she had its unmistakable smell in her nose as she hit the gas again and put her face up close to the windshield, peering out at the landscape with the first stirrings of alarm. Landscape? In contrast to the huge arch of space above, the ground was almost erased. The solid rain cover had been shredded by the wind. Clouds with glistening edges were being pushed in front and behind one another like flats of scenery across the panorama on the other side of the windshield. To what extent were there any inhabitants in this panorama? She overtook only two disheveled cyclists with the wind at their backs, and once a farmer waiting on a side road with horse and cart waved when she honked at him. Tops of steeples, farmsteads, windmills with flying sails, a horse behind a fence — everything buried by the sky all the way to the dike, which wasn’t that high but still drew your eyes away from the sea. Ghostly, she thought. The harbor took forever to come into view. She wished she could see both land and sea at the same time. This was still the province of South Holland, a sort of betwixt-and-between area with bare black polders that was, however, familiar to her. Her plan was to get to the harbor in Numansdorp and take the ferry across to Zeeland, a province she had never set foot in, but whose shadow she had already been sensing all morning, because it was the goal of her journey. That her compass needle was pointing her toward a group of completely unknown people, a family in a little rural town that didn’t interest her, had never interested her, and doubtless never would, was something that she was gradually coming in the course of these few hours to find completely normal.

And when were they actually expecting this godmother?

It was now two o’clock. On the coast, the wind was strengthening to thirty knots, which corresponds to a full 7 on the Beaufort wind force scale, and from now on, was going to increase at the rate of another Beaufort number every hour. Lidy reached the port and drove into the town square. To her delight, she saw that she could continue her journey exactly as she had planned it that morning. Next to a couple of rocking freighters, the ferry, Den Bommel , was waiting at the quayside, and there was space to load her car. That part of the jetty was completely submerged didn’t strike her as being in any way out of the ordinary.

Nor indeed was it. Twice a month on average the water in the Hollands Diep rose to the level known as the boundary-depth gauge, and even regularly topped it. That brought with it the regular local flooding without anyone making a fuss about it. She got out. The way to the booth where the ferry tickets were sold was blocked by an uprooted tree. She clambered over it and made sure she worked her way into the lee of the wind by the harbor office. As she joined the queue, her face was as flushed as the faces of the other passengers for the Numansdorp-Zijpe ferry, all of them talking cheerily, even with relish, about the weather. We know what storms are. When it blows, it blows, it’s pretty strong today but we’ve seen worse!

Ten minutes later she reversed down a pretty steep ramp and over the metal plates in the hold, and got out of the car. An iron interior stairway led her up into the passenger lounge, which had a billiards table and a bar. The ferries were stable old tubs. Den Bommel registered 10,000 tons and had a 400-horsepower diesel engine that could power the ship at ten knots all the way to Schouwen-Duiveland in two hours. Bad weather, i.e., a storm out of the west or the northwest above gale force 9 in this treacherous area, demanded great skill from the pilot. Wind speeds of forty to sixty knots could transform the waters of Haringvliet, Volkerak, and Grevelingen into seas of steep, relentlessly oncoming waves. No boat should if at all possible present itself to them broadside.

Find a fixed point and keep looking at it. The feeling is worse than being drunk. Sitting at a table with a fried egg sandwich and a hot chocolate in front of her, it didn’t take her long to realize she’d be better off in the open air. The tilting floor and the heaving of the world outside the windows bore no relation to what she was perceiving with her eyes or any other of her senses. Deathly white, she hurried to the middle deck, where more passengers were standing in the shelter provided by the engine room and staring fixedly at the massive volumes of oncoming water.

Her sick feeling vanished in an instant. Then she became aware that she was being observed from the side. A passenger standing next to her was just opening his mouth to say something to her, but she pointedly kept her eyes fixed in the distance. Reading the map in her mind’s eye, she knew that what she was crossing right now was the junction of Haringvliet and Hollands Diep en route to the smaller arm of the Volkerak, but the tide was on the rise, and it was clear that the North Sea was now the master here. Genuinely beautiful. The surface of the water was coming at her in wave after wave of blue light, overlaid with such white streaks of foam that it was impossible to understand where the reflection was coming from.

Why can’t I see any shoreline, why aren’t there any steeples or roofs? Surely there’s land all round me?

“Just look at that!” a voice said next to her.

It was her fellow traveler. A bear of a man with a red face was pointing something out to her with an outstretched arm and a serious expression. She looked at where he was pointing and nodded thoughtfully as she was told that there was usually excellent rabbit hunting on the foreshore of the dike, but the whole thing was now underwater. Then, as if in answer to a question, the man told her his occupation. “Chief engineer with the Royal Hydraulic Engineering Authorities.”

What? Ah. Disinclined to diminish the spectacle of the sea with idle conversation, she nonetheless replied, “So that means this magnificent view is — your field of work?”

“Yes, exactly.”

The chief engineer bent closer to her. She got a strong whiff of alcohol. “What you’re looking at, miss, is a tide that will rise way above the depth gauges at a whole number of monitoring stations, I can tell you from experience.”

She said nothing and frowned.

Her companion was now looking at her intently. “What you’re seeing here,” he said slowly, emphatically, “is the rising sea level, nothing special in and of itself, since it occurs with every tide. Obviously you’re familiar with this. An affair of the sun and the moon, which exert a pull on the water.” He balled both hands and lifted them to demonstrate. “But sometimes, umm, the tide speaks the language of the wind, not of astronomy.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yes. Sometimes it’s the storm that gives the water here along the coast an additional brute of a shove and lifts it higher.”

She wasn’t looking away anymore. She turned halfway toward her interlocutor, which didn’t mean that the expanse of water that the ship had now left behind was ceasing to have an effect on her — on the contrary, she reached for her lingering sense of direction and transformed it into a kind of anesthetic, through which the voice of the chief engineer echoed with all the logic of a dream….

“My God,” she said.

“I take it that you’re ready for me to give you a few facts and figures. Or …?”

She nodded.

“Well …” The chief engineer glanced upward for a moment to focus his concentration. “This century has already seen quite a number of storm tides, and most of them were minor; we get a minor storm tide here almost every year, and things are underwater all over the place, you know. Medium storm tides, which is what we call them at the Hydraulic Authorities, pack a bigger wallop, they occur, let’s say, between once a decade and once every hundred years. Remember the winter of 1906, when a hurricane drove the North Sea near Vlissingen up almost fourteen feet above the Normal Amsterdam Water Level, causing enormous damage. I’m sorry? No, nobody drowned. Or maybe just one or two.”