Skagen in mid-August is a sleepy brisk paradise where two seas meet. It’s the perfect place for taking pictures, collecting rocks, and starting over. If you’re in the mood for a peek, have a look at the photos. And if you like personal histories, read my lesson-tinged essay below.
A terminus is either a physical/geographic endpoint or a temporal/conceptual one. Skagen in Denmark can be described as the country’s northern terminus, as can the farthest reach of a journey (by car, to Nordjylland, for example). So can the end of something, particularly anything so momentous that its dissolution demands a title and a trip to a coastline. Lesson one: Give your problem a good name and watch it swell with meaning.
I had a Skagen wristwatch long before I had a half-Danish child, so for a good decade I had no idea that the brand name was a placename or that I was pronouncing it wrong. Then I learned about the two bodies of water meeting here, each implausibly separate despite no discernible boundary. And I yearned to visit this outpost with its metaphoric coastal duality. Lesson two: Note how union is sometimes no barrier to independence.
I lead an occasionally histrionic emotional life, about which I try to speak and write with tremendous restraint. Apparently that’s symptomatic of some hardcore histrionics—basically, I’m so afraid of being judged as “too much” that I hold back whenever possible. Alas, it is often impossible (and I could easily swap that “alas” for both a “luckily” and an “unfortunately,” which says more than I could ever say even if I went right out and said it). Anyway, if you get the sense that this post is really about heartbreak and not geography, you are one hundred percent right. Lesson three: If you insist on avoiding the truth, the least you can do is admit it.
Our mother-and-son road trip was an impromptu family vacation undertaken out of practicalities. One class of these concerned my grief, which longed for the sea. Another resulted from my son’s excess baggage, consisting of so many survival items not allowed by airlines, picking him up from Sjælland by car was as necessary as dropping him off had been six weeks earlier. Lesson four: Celebrate the win-wins.
Our expectations were low. For me it was all about getting enough air on each breath to manage the next one. For Anker it came down to doing as little as possible for the longest stretches allowed. As tourists we were depraved, visiting next to nothing, living minute to minute, not even getting a good photo of those two snugly aligned yet fully individuated seas. But as a parent-and-teen duo we were unstoppable, kind to one another but not faking it, generous without going over, feasting daily on our fancy canned fish. (“Aligned yet individuated” comes to mind.) Lesson five: When one of your gardens burns down, tend the one that remains.
I’m not sure if the photos illustrating this post better document a place or a time. Likely both. They’re not my most interesting reportage, but they’re no failure, either. Surely they are the best I could do under the circumstances, which is maybe what always happens, under all circumstances, to everyone. In this case “my best” took will, courage, acceptance, and luck—and got a surprising assist from my son, who all of a sudden handles the Fuji with the same quiet determination he shows for driving lessons, axe blades, and tarp guylines. Lesson six: Let the evidence do the talking.
I mention driving lessons because they may well be the most challenging thing I’ve ever gotten right. You see, a parent showing a kid how to drive is a volatile undertaking, explosive for all the same reasons tango lessons cause couples to fight, plus here you’ve got the steady risk of vehicle damage. Power struggles are multiplied by the frustration of translating muscle memory into verbal instructions under pressure. What’s amazing is not that I never panic when he’s behind the wheel, but that I panic so rarely. I tap into patience I don’t even recognize and it’s for the both of us—the boy mastering the machine and the mom measuring out freedom and safety. Lesson seven: Gain patience by practicing patience. It sounds impossible but isn’t.
Our campground was deserted, high season in Skagen was over. We had chosen a spot on a tree-lined field of eight lots, all but ours unoccupied. Beyond the foliage was an unpaved road, other empty sites, the occasional luxury trailer. On the first morning I woke to doubt I know all too well. Had I chosen wrong? Was there a better place to camp that I hadn’t considered? On the beach or in the woods or closer to town? I felt my dread rise up to my mind, but something new intervened, a half-physical, half-spiritual capacity I am only discovering, of withdrawing all attention from my anxious thoughts and transfering it to the physical manifestation of feeling. So instead of agonizing over the matter of greener grass, I explored the hidden stillness inside me. Later on we were ten minutes into our first driving lesson when it occurred to me that our campsite was perfect—an empty space the size of a supermarket parking lot, every square meter of it drivable and exclusively ours. Lesson eight: Come to new conclusions when you have new information.
This capacity to really feel into my emotions as body sensations? I’ve never experienced anything like it before, even when following outright directions to do so outlined in the books I’m reading in my forties. Since early childhood, my impression of feelings was that they were thoughts, and that most were wrong. The only ones that were safe to have were enthusiasm, awe, gratitude, relief, and pride. Everything else came with the secondary emotion of shame and sent my argumentative mind on a mission to change my attitude in one way or another. Repairing a mainframe as fried as mine probably requires complete disassembly. (And isn’t that a vote in favor of falling apart when the opportunity beckons?) Lesson nine: Let your loss be your treasure map.
Speaking of treasure, my favorite thing about Skagen might have been the rocks. Warmly lit by the low sun and still wet from the salty sea, they dazzled like jewels. Smooth ones and rough ones, some transluscent or bifurcated or lined. Butter yellow, dusty rose, charcoal, cream, sunset orange. Hundreds caught my eye, I picked up and held dozens. The ones I took home are now matte traces of their former sheen, echoes of remembered intensity. Trivets, paperweights, bookends, consolation prizes. Quiet smooth rocks, heavy and cool, my keepsakes from a terminus. Lesson ten: Assign significance to ordinary pleasures.
All photos taken with the Fujifilm X-T5 and the Fujinon XF35mm f/1.4 standard-equivalent prime—most by me, the ones I’m in by my son, Anker.