Where the country ends

The guest room of the estate in Drenthe where I am staying looks upon a green world surrounded by high hedges which makes you think of England. You'd love to enter it as naked as Adam and Eve, but it's fifteen degrees so for the time being I'm wearing a pullover. A plane is drawing a white line across the sky. It comes out of Germany, right round the corner. Just the peat bog separates us from the border. The peat bog. A desolate plain without trees, where sex killers prey on girls cycling through the loneliness. The hair-raising name of Tweede Exloërmond is still on everyone's mind.

I try to find Radio 1 on the small set in the room, but all I receive is a local pirate blaring out rubbish. The voices of the hosts, two guys who obviously very much love their boring witticisms, sound like those of men who stayed somewhat too long in the local. While I turn off the device my eye catches a field mouse running across the patio. An act of bravery considering the many birds of prey around.

I arrived at Emmen, four miles away, by train at the beginning of the evening. Emmen means the end of the railway, almost the end of the Netherlands. Every half hour a train from Zwolle will take you to this beginning of nowhere. They used to be real Third World these trains, even in the first class you got the idea that any moment a farmer would guide his goat into the compartment or a woman would enter carrying a score of chickens by the legs. They have new trains now and modern farmers usually endanger the roads in pickup trucks, but still the line goes dead at Emmen. The guard who checked my ticked seemed a friendly man but hard to understand. At the station I was met by a driver from the estate. There's no public transport in that direction. Only private carriages. Today the carriage was called Peugeot.

That evening we drank home made cider. On the patio surrounded by pots full of herbs. It was very quiet, though occasionally we heard one of the sheep, hired from a farmer friend to mow the lawns. I was told that the local pub went bankrupt, that such and such killed themselves by drunken driving and that my friend has entered local politics as becomes a village squire. People are worried about a possible pyromaniac, maybe a member of the volunteer fire brigade. As the evening proceeded preparations were made for supper. Far away I saw a lonely girl on a bike. I prayed she wasn't heading for Tweede Exloërmond.

©C.A. Klok