The Old Fishing Village

By Holger Klein:

For us it was once a landmark, the old rusty wind wheel beside the channel connecting the small fishing harbour with a large lagoon, a former bight of the Baltic. The wheel was the first we saw when we approached the harbour on the new road from the west. Once the wheel drove a wooden Archimedean Screw which drained the surrounding wetlands for agricultural use. In our early years, we visited the wheel occasionally, musing how it works. 

The lagoon was separated from the Baltic by a spit which was extending westward over centuries until only the small channel-like outflow was left. During the last decades I often visited the harbour at the mouth of the channel, but it was only a few years ago when I realised that the wheel is no longer visible from the road. Rusty and motionless, it is now hidden behind high trees and only to be seen from the small bridge crossing the channel. 

In early summer, I took the small path (No Trespass!) through high reeds towards the wheel. I was curious if the Archimedean Screw was still in its place, possibly even workable. But there was no way through. The shaft for the inflow was totally overgrown by thick brambles, unpassable in shorts and without a machete. But a few metres away I found a new drainage ditch where an electric pump took over the wheel’s work. 

For me, this wind wheel stands for all the things that changed during the last decades, in the harbour and in the old fishing village about 2 km to the east. It was by the late 1960s when we discovered the village and the harbour, surrounded by lakes, large beech woods and endless fields in the hinterland. 

On our first visit to the village, we took the old small and curvy road leading north-eastward from the main road directly to the beach near a row of green wooden sheds. Here the fishermen stored their gear, mended their drying nets suspended between wooden poles, or repainted their boats. In the shallow bight small open fishing vessels were gently rolling at their moorings, gulls and other waterfowl soaring in the wind. We instantly fell in love with this place and for me it felt like paradise.

On both sides of the village the cliff line changes into smooth shores. In the west lies the former bight with the channel and the wheel, the spit secured by a long dike. Eastwards lies a smaller lagoon, separated from the sea by a barrier beach. It is also a former bight, connected to the sea by a small, meandering outlet. Both lagoons are surrounded by extended wetlands and reed belts, partly protected as bird reserves. 

All along the coast are broad sand and pebble beaches, surrounding the shallow bight with a seabed of sandy patches, big boulders, and seagrass beds. The colour of the water changes according to the weather, offering a range from a dull steel grey over all shades of blue and green, culminating in a tropical turquoise over the sand beds on sunny days. I especially love sunny days when cloud fields are drifting moderately over the sky, causing a pattern of continually changing water colours with different intensities.

One or two years after our first visit my father bought a holiday apartment on the backside of the cliff. Here I spent most of my leisure time for years: First school holidays and weekends, and later, with my own kids, also a lot of our vacations. Right from the beginning I loved to walk the beaches for hours at all seasons, becoming a real beachcomber, a passion I’m still following today. 

However, gradually things were changing. The little harbour was enlarged and is now a marina for leisure boats, the fishery declined step by step, many houses have been renovated and enlarged, and of course new houses and hotels were built. The pub favoured by young people was closed and a spacious golf course was laid out just a few kilometres away. New green sheds were added to the old ones, hosting a sail and surf school and a cosy café. Today there are only one or two part-time fishers left who still use their sheds for the initial purpose. 

The coastline changes gradually too. Due to heavy landslides after strong, eastern gales the cliff retreated metre by metre over the years, an accelerating process due to climate change with severer and more frequent storms and higher sea levels. On the other side, the local campground at the small lagoon was closed, removed and changed into a nature and bird reserve, a place we often visit to observe birds. Not all changes are bad. 

The surrounding landscape changed only marginally. The lagoons are still surrounded by their broad reed belts, the large beech woods not cleared. Like a long swell on the open ocean, the seemingly endless fields are still waving over the soft moraine ridges, partly still owned by local counts. A few weeks ago, I swam together with my youngest brother out into the bight and we realised that, compared to the last decades, from this perspective only marginal changes are recognizable. However, the locals have to make their living and must adapt to the demands of modern tourism and therefore there are more changes to come during the next few years. 

Some years ago, the municipality set up a couple of plates along the promenade, showing old black and white pictures of the village. They were taken in the first years of the last century, about 120 years ago. Some photos show the proper village and we recognized a few things which we could still remember, though they disappeared during the last decades. Other pictures show the old fishermen sitting together on a bench in front of a shed, smoking their pipes and looking over the bay. Other pictures show them mending the nets or processing their catches in a small smokehouse. 

When we stroll through the village, occasionally times are merging. We ‘see’ how it looked a few decades ago and how things are today. It’s like walking in the same place simultaneously at two different times. And whenever I approach the village on the old avenue lined with mighty oaks on both sides and negotiate the narrow curves and the ups and downs of the road, when I pass the neolithic grave-mound to the right and the manor house and the wide view over the great lagoon to the left, I’m the boy once more on the day we discovered the village. 

***
Holger Klein is a retired oceanographer who spends a lot of time exploring the coasts of the Nordic Seas and isles, and is a regular hiker in Lapland. 

Usedom: A winter diary

By Paul Scraton:

We have travelled north to the Baltic in the lowest of low seasons, to reflect on the passing of another year and another decade at a place that has meant so much to us over the recent and not-so-recent past. It feels like we are the only ones here, in our thatched house divided into apartments, and we move quietly up the stairs despite knowing there is no-one around to disturb. We arrive after dark, so we know our location only from the little blue spot on the map, but the morning will come and we will step out onto the village’s quiet streets, to walk from one side of the island to the other.

The next morning, when we reach the harbour the view across the inland sea is obscured by the mist that has rolled in off the Baltic and covered the island. Is there any point to this? We ask ourselves the question, but still we press on, following a farmer’s track across the field to the lookout point. It is a gesture more of hope than expectation, for visibility is down to less than fifty metres, but we are rewarded. First we hear the call, loud and distinctive, sounding through the mist. And then we spot it, standing tall in the misty field. A white-tailed eagle, its distinctive beak visible even in this strange half-light. After a moment it takes flight, and we catch a momentary glimpse of its impressive silhouette, before it disappears into the mist and the clouds, soaring high and out of sight. Perhaps it manages to get high enough for a glimpse of the sun. We can only imagine. 

It will be a day of shadowy apparitions, of figures emerging and retreating as we make the short walk that will lead us across the island from the lagoon to the sea. We leave the last of the village houses and enter a low landscape of fields, drained by ditches and surrounded by dykes, home to bulls, sheep and horses. In the distance, we spy a couple striding along a dyke-top path that my map tells me is a dead end. In the other direction, two cars meet at the end of a bumpy track beside a collection of tumbledown wooden buildings. I imagine a conversation through open windows and something in the boot, to be transferred from one car to the other.

You cannot help but summon scenes and images when the mist obscures almost everything that would normally be in sight. The footpath enters a forest, rising and falling between dense evergreen trees before we come across a brick house behind a high wall and metal gates. There are empty flagpoles in the garden, three of them, and they suggest a story, a history, that is unavailable to us in the mist. Unhappy is the land in need of heroes, and insecure is the land with too many flagpoles. But those poles were erected in a country that no longer exists, and however insecure we might be, not all of us are waving flags.  

Across the main road and the railway tracks, we enter the resort, where the houses sit on low cliffs above the beach and dunes, with a view across the stilled waters of the Baltic Sea. The kiosks and beer gardens are shuttered and closed, but smoke rises from the chimneys of holiday homes and light shines behind net curtains in some of the windows. In the distance the mist curls around the white towers of a grand hotel, that seems less grand the closer we get. The walls are water-stained and the terrace canopies tattered, with grass poking through cracks in the paving stones and a handwritten note posted in a smudged window to tell us the bar is closed for the season. 

In the 1920s this was the preserve of silent film stars, who travelled north from the studios of Berlin to take the water and the sea air. Now, at the start of the 2020s, the town was quiet, the posters outside the hotel advertising karaoke nights and tribute acts, and evenings with members of GDR-rock bands, the skeleton staff stalking the echoing halls in service of the handful of guests. 

We walk through the dunes, past an old fishing boat long out of service, and for the first time we see the waters of the Baltic. At the beach, the sand, sea and sky blend almost into one as ghostly figures walk the sands. In the mist it has been a kind of half-light all day, and now even that is fading. It is as if the town, the hotels, and the island itself is just waiting. The new year has begun. A new decade. But not here. Not yet. Only when the mist lifts, and the sun starts to shine once more.

***
Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).