No Man Is an Island

Texel Island, the Netherlands, North Sea.

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After the ferry crossing, the road along the shipping channel offers my car only cows and sheep. Sheep and cows. Sometimes Germans appear on bicycles—mobile, unarmed units. Tourists. Germans love Texel and, in a certain sense, still consider the island partly theirs. The islanders don’t like that, but they tolerate German tourists far more easily than they once tolerated Germans as occupiers.

The Dutch have two clear reasons to dislike Germans: football and the Second World War. It depends on the generation. In both cases, they feel they lost.

And yet in the Netherlands you can always find a bar that’s a hundred or two hundred years old. Often the owner—or the whole family—lives upstairs. Sometimes they rent out rooms. That’s where I stayed on the island. A small room. A TV mounted on the ceiling and a shower in the hallway. Cheap. At breakfast you can ask for beer, but they usually offer an omelet and coffee.

Every morning at 9:30, old fishermen—men who no longer go out to sea—gather around a big table at Café De Kombuis. They drink coffee from a thermos and discuss fishing news. They don’t read newspapers in the morning. They simply tell each other what they’ve heard—usually from each other. I sit nearby, drinking coffee and working through my omelet.

“Not a lady—a vissersvrouw (fisherwoman),” Ingrid (50) replied. “I was born on the island!” Every morning she pours hot coffee for the fishermen in the bar, where beyond the windows—just like out on the road—there are cows and sheep on one side, and trawlers and schooners on the other.

Ingrid never went to college or university. “I studied where life forced me to study—by living and working. On the island. I’m a fisherwoman,” she repeated with a trace of pride.

“Unlike tourists, fishermen are in crisis,” Ingrid tells me. “European integration hit agriculture hard. We have little land, but a lot of sea. To go out fishing you need a lot of fuel, and fuel is expensive. The costs don’t justify the income. Many fishermen are ready to sell their boats and do something else. These days it’s more profitable to take German tourists out for a fishing trip than to fish themselves. At least that’s guaranteed money…”

The old fishermen, smoking Dutch cigars and sipping thermos coffee, watch with curiosity as Ingrid talks about them to me. To confirm what she says, they nod in unison or throw in a few Dutch words—correcting her, perhaps—without engaging me directly. I like it here. I feel at home.

“No man is an island, entire of itself…” —John Donne.

Oleg Klimov
Photographer’s Diary, Oudeschild Harbour, Texel Island