Borderline Weirdness

So...the wind is from the northwest, the forecast favors the Netherlands' northeast, the bike is fresh from its tune-up. Let's put it (and myself) to the test. The largely uninhabited (by Dutch standards) Groningen province. Three hours in train connections through Amersfoort and Groningen. I have a ticket to Uithuizen ("outhouses", not the best of omens), but I am moved to disembark (a strange word) at the previous stop, Usquert (which I've learned even the Dutch can't guess how to pronounce). The bells are pealing for noon as I pull the bike through the doors and onto the platform. I am the only person in sight. There's diesel smoke, and the train pulls away. I fire up the GPS, quickly check the tires, and start for...

This picture never fails to elicit roars of laughter from the Dutch. The sign announces your arrival in the town of Doodstil, which means "dead still" with a strong connotation of: "morbidly silent" or "quiet as a corpse". Which it is not, actually, on a sunny Saturday afternoon with the lawn mowers and weedwhackers going everywhere. Now, Nieuweschans (at the end of today's ride)--there it's dead quiet. Every teenager's nightmare.
 

By the way--the path above isn't a bike path, but the main roadway into Doodstil.

Groningen province is not, on the whole, exactly glamourous. Very much the feel of godforsaken silo towns of Indiana or the Texas panhandle. As they say: not the edge of the earth, but you can see it from there.
 

And so of course, this is where the industry and really large-scale agriculture happen. No one here worries much about urban ideas like "visual pollution" or "cultural heritage." There's a job to do, and these folks do it, and that's that. These sheep look at me like they have never seen a human before.
 

What we're doing now is riding east along the north shore. Not really a shore--there are high dikes blocking our view as we make the long curve, and at one point atop the dike is this monument to...I can NOT imagine what. I park the bike and climb. Ah--this marks the northernmost point in the mainland Netherlands. The Waddenzee beyond. Even on this beautiful day, this is a lonely spot, no matter how geographically interesting it is--no one to pay attention but a few puzzled ovine types.
 

Looking down from the monument--little to see inland, either.
 

The long, convex coast is interrupted by the huge, rural, and as yet little-developed harbor of Eemshaven. I waste too much daylight and leg stamina riding around its monstrous expanse. In the west jaw is moored an enormous, gray, unmarked battleship, around it much activity and many trucks and tanks behind the fence. The entrance is guarded by four guys in camouflage with nasty looking machine guns and even nastier snarls. They don't wave back. Ahead, two Dutch soldiers are trying to tackle a sheep that somehow escaped. Back and forth between the fence and road, they can't quite manage it. I ride past them, but when the sheep and two soldiers turn my way, I turn my bike off the path to the fence, cutting off the sheep, who is promptly tackled and carried back. For my part, I get not a look, not a simple Bedankt. They look sullen that I helped. Well, if I get that treatment, I shudder for the sheep's fate.
 

A lot of Eemshaven looks like this: automated freight trains and power generation and industry going full blast--not a worker, driver, or even automobile in sight. Heaven for birds, I guess, but otherwise resembling Hell.
 

I escape out the east side of Eemshaven toward Delfzijl, an isolated, unmemorable industrial port town of its own.

But on this sunny Saturday afternoon, the residents in the rather nice tile-and-brick city center are making the best of it, including handing unrecognizable balloon animals to the local kids. This is as good as it gets, here.
 

I thank the fates that I wasn't born to a town like North Zulch, Texas, or Red Level, Alabama, or Delfzijl, Netherlands.

And out the southeast side of Delfzijl, across a long bridge with no bike path, no alternate road, and a sign forbidding bikes from the roadway. This is a new and very unpleasant experience in the Netherlands. It's getting too late in the day for this, but still I shrug and walk the bike along the 50-cm/20-inch-wide bridge siding. As I emerge out the other side, sure enough there is a police car writing a ticket to a cyclist who had started across in the opposite direction. I wave to the policeman, he doesn't wave back in approval, even to appear puzzled. At least the sheep in Groningen province have sense to appear puzzled.

Away from Delfzijl, towards the nearby northeast corner of the Netherlands. Most stretches look like this, separated by fields of sheep, lots and lots of sheep. And all the, er, decorations they leave on the bike paths.
 

This canal crossing is unremarkable except that...those distant sheep at left are in Germany. A hundred meters or so beyond this drawbridge, Germany starts. Now, in old movies you see Checkpoints and Passport Control ("why sir, this picture doesn't look a BIT like you, now does it?--please step into this concrete room, we have some QUESTIONS for you.") and uniforms. These days, nothing. There was no one to hinder or even record my riding across the border into Germany, not even to notice it. In this strategic little glade in which countless guns have been fired in countless smoky, hellish deathfests over the centuries, I could have fired off a gun of my own now, and there would simply have been no one to hear it (OK, a few thousand sheep). So much for international intrigue. My current situation reduced to this: the German path to Nieuweschans was closer, so I crossed into Germany. I never saw a border, and I still don't know where it was.
 

After a while, of course, you know you've crossed over. The ugly telephone and power lines overhead (all neatly underground in the Netherlands), and those unreadable signs with little thingies over the letters (misspelled Dutch, my coworkers like to call it). The weird shape tiles. The American-style STOP signs. All quite weird. Uncomfortable. Mostly, I just want to cross back over, to the Netherlands, to home, where things make sense to me and I feel safe.
 

And cross over I do, though much too late in the day. Terrific, I've missed the Groningen train by 5 minutes, meaning I have a 55 minute wait in Nieuweschans, which appears to have been evacuated. Though, of course--in the Netherlands on the German border--this is simply NOT a joke one would make.

The windturbine is in Germany. There is only a single track in each direction from Nieuweschans. A German girl wanders lost in the open-air station. She speaks no English, French, or Dutch, but I (with my one year of German, 32 years ago) finally understand that she has no way to get home. I would buy her a ticket, but the day's last train east has gone. I figure she might be hungry, but what she really wants is the police station. Which is closed. A Dutch woman walks by with her dog, and I point to the mobile phone in her purse and ask in NederDeutschEngels if the girl can call Germany. That works. I ride around town until the next train, and when I return, the girl is gone. My train arrives from interior Netherlands. The conductor gets out and walks to the other end for his return trip. I ask him, to be absolutely sure at this hour, that this is the train to Groningen, and he answers with the most unexpectedly funny remark a Dutchman has yet made in my presence: Helaaaaaaaas, Groningen.. "Unfooooooortunately, Groningen." I haul the bike on, and we start. There are three of us on the train, including the conductor. I have three hours of riding ahead of me, and I am eager just to lean on my bike and rest. But there is this Italian next to me who is desperate to explain in his 100-word-vocabulary English why he has no teeth.