01 Feb February’s Non-Fiction – 2018

COCKSDORP

by Dominic Francone

Two thousand, fourteen years after the birth of Christ, two friends set off on what was to become the most important quest since Hannibal crossed the Alps. Their singular vision? To stand in front of a sign that says “De Cocksdorp” and take a selfie.  Has there ever been a cause more noble?  Has there ever been a quest so pure?  Not that I can think of. 

It all started when my friend and colleague “Jen” (that’s her real name) gave me carte blanche to choose our activity for our one day off together in Holland.  We had both seen Amsterdam, we had both seen The Hague, we had both done some Antwerpen.  I studied the Google Map like an Army general scratching out possible points of interest, always feeling like I must be missing the Best Idea Ever.  The search led me North to a town on the North Sea with a boat museum.  And from that boat museum was a dotted line indicating a ferry to an Island named Texel.  And on that island, there was a town called “De Cocksdorp.”  I was consumed as if by fever.  I could not see a future where there was not a photo of Jen and me in front of a sign that said “De Cocksdorp.”  I needed that photo.  The world needed that photo.  I began to plan in earnest, checking with the locals about what we might find there (no one had any idea) or even the best way to get there (no one knew what the hell I was talking about.)  We were on our own.  Our gazes turned steely.  We liked it that way.

A journey like this one can only start one way, huddled in misty cold outside a grocery store at 8am waiting for a train.  Jen closed her hands around a cup of coffee, nervous about the wild look in my eye but willing, so willing, to spend her entire day in a mad hunt for this white whale.  The whale is a metaphor.  For a selfie.  By a sign.  That says Cocksdorp.  We jumped on the train and headed into The Hague.  We needed pancakes.  I had eaten at the world’s best pancake restaurant a couple of years before in a weird sub-basement of a government building in The Hague.  That place closed for some reason so we were on the hunt for a replacement.  Also, we were giggling a lot.  It might have been the morning mist, it might have been the sheer lunacy of our plan, but we were high on life that day.  We switched trains for a direct line to Amsterdam and paused outside a station named Slauterdijk which is pronounced “Slaughter Dick.”  The genitalia related signs proving that we were on the right path were all around us. 

In Amsterdam, we checked our train times carefully and searched for panakoken.  We located just the thing about six blocks from the train station. 

I want you to stop what you are doing right now and listen to me: 

The pancakes you have been eating your whole life are gutter garbage from hell compared to pancakes in Holland.  The pancakes in Holland are the best thing that has ever happened to flour, eggs and water and anyone who tells you different works for IHOP.  I had a plate of delicate little koken about the size of a drink coaster with thin, lightly fried apples laid picturesquely on each one with a drizzle of Holland’s own Schenkstroop laid artistically over the top.  Schenkstroop is syrup but not.  There is some serious shit going on in there that takes it to a whole other level.  Some molasses maybe?  Something smoky, perhaps?  Six drops of ambrosia taken directly from Mount Olympus and a dash of Valhallan Mead?  Whatever it is, it’s delicious.  Are you a good person?  Then God would want you to have it.  That’s all I’m saying.  I have become, in recent years, the premier importer of Schenkstroop because some things are too important to be left to Aunt Jemima. 

I ate my pancakes with a pancakey lust mixed with the melancholy of knowing that they would soon be gone.  Jen tucked into her deliciousness with equal enthusiasm and, soon sated, our quest continued.  Our resolve was hard as a rock as we waited for our train. 

Holland has a lot of greenhouses.  Like, so many.  One of the companies we work with in the theater actually does automation for greenhouses in Holland.  They are essentially massive food factories where beds of flowers or vegetables or fruits can be called up by numerical code from the massive greenhouse beyond and delivered via a series of automated rails to the area in the facility where humans interact, weed, and harvest the crops.  It’s a dystopian future sci-fi film for carrots.  You look out from the train on the way to Den Helder from Amsterdam and see nothing but charming towns, little farms, and greenhouses as far as the eye can see.  This isn’t the Europe you’re used to out the train window with a medieval village every twenty minutes mixed up with industry and parking lots, this is more like if you squeezed Wisconsin down to the size of Rhode Island.  The Dutch are serious about their cheese, windmills and dykes and we got the full tour for the hour and a half we rode the rails.  It was a long trip but we were still riding the high of pancakes and adventure so the time flew by as fast as the sheep. 

We arrived in Den Helder bleary and directionless.  We knew the trail to de Cocksdorp was close by but the trailhead eluded us.  Then we saw a sign that said “der Wienerhoff” and our confidence was restored.  If I’m being honest, Den Helder is kind of a shithole.  I mean, I’m sure there are people there who like it and everything but it’s pretty dirty on the surface and there was a distinctly vagabond element all around the train station.  Also, I paid 50 cents to use a bathroom at the station and regretted it immediately.  I advised Jen to hold it forever rather than brave the metal self-cleaning stall that was clearly out of order and mostly used for heroin, I’m guessing.  It had that feel about it.  There’s a tower that’s kind of abandoned and some sad looking shops but we cared nothing for local commerce.  Our destination was elsewhere and we quickly left the town center behind for better things.  We located the sea on the other side of a massive sea wall that runs the length of the coast.  We hiked up the side and were greeted with grey, flat water fading out into the mist with the shores of Texel barely visible on the other side.  Our hearts yearned to leap in and swim for it but we had to be all like “look, hearts, we know you’re excited, and we’re excited too.  But today is about the journey, not the destination.  Regardless, I think we both can agree, we should go walk around in a submarine.” 

The maritime museum there is cool.  If you like model boats, then holy shit, you would love that place.  It is jam packed with the considerable sea-faring history of the Dutch people from city-state days when Holland ruled an empire connected with its respected navy to modern exhibits on container shipping and defense.  Jen was finally able to use a restroom, we saw a million model ships, we walked all around a submarine and imagined ourselves sailing under the ocean blue.  It was cool.  We dug it.  Den Helder appears to be a navy town in all ways and the life of sailors gets full respect here.  One side note if you’re interested in such things, was the way that the modern military might of Holland is represented in the museum.  Military museums by nature are pretty “rah rah” about bombing the crap out of people for national security purposes and this one is no exception.  What was interesting to American eyes were the boasts in an informational video loop about the “several attack ready” aircraft purchased from the US in the last few years overlaid with what appeared to be F-16 promotional videos.  I know in my head that America is the armory of the world but seeing the proud footage of a recent satisfied customer felt a little like being at a friend’s house and having them show me their new X-Box.  I mean, they didn’t MAKE the X-Box, they just went out and bought it.  And they’re totally prepared to kill bad guys with it whenever the need arises. 

Boats are cool, model ships are even cooler, but our hearts still screamed “are we there yet!”  We had to heed their call.  The ferry is a short walk from the museum and, as it turns out, a pretty big deal.  Texel is a popular vacation destination because it combines many of the favorite national pastimes of the Dutch people.  It’s flat, it’s green, you can sleep outside and ride your bike amongst sheep, you can visit a kind of drearily beautiful piece of the ocean and then leave that all behind for the exciting nightlife of little harbor towns filled with wool shops and sailboats.  Actually, why am I being racist?  That sounds pretty good to me, too.  The ferry makes this all possible because you can drive your car into what is essentially a floating three story parking garage, wait a few minutes, and exit on the other side.  We walked past the line of idling cars waiting to board and lined up with a few families and cyclists boarding the pedestrian section. 

The crossing was uneventful much to the disappointment of intrepid adventurers such as ourselves.  We were prepared to slash and hack at pirate grappling hooks as they whistled and clanged on the open rail around us, fight tooth and nail amongst the cannon fusillade and acrid smoke of gunpowder muskets.  We could have broadsided the shit out of anyone who came our way.  Instead, we just bought a bag of chocolate sheep from the snack bar and stood outside for thirty minutes watching the seagulls mess around in the airstream.  I’m not saying it wasn’t nice.  I’m just saying our trigger fingers were twitchy but our crossing was calm.    

From what we could see on Google Maps, there are two attractions on Texel in the off-season.  There’s the Juttersmuseum Flora which has the world’s largest collection of Beachcombing artifacts and there’s a sign that says de Cocksdorp.  Coincidentally, there are two bus lines.  One starts at the ferry terminal and goes past the museum and the other starts at the ferry terminal and goes past de Cocksdorp.  Given that the selfie with the sign was specifically designed to be the culmination of our adventure and assuming that the beachcomber’s museum might actually close at some point, we scrambled onto the cross-island bus to see some shit washed up on some beaches. 

If you love the color green and sheep, Texel does not disappoint.  In between cute little towns of people who do god knows what for employment, there are endless fields of green covered with flocks of sheep wandering around in the damp North Sea climate.  You can tell that this is the kind of island that Vikings hit and then just sort of settled down and did some farming while the more adventurous kept going south.  It’s hard to imagine being happy there but it’s incredibly easy to imagine being content.  Get a few sheep, get a nice shed, get a little house.  What more do you want?

Afraid that we would miss the stop to our beachcombing wonderland, we sat up front in the bus heckling the driver at nearly every stop.  “Is this it?”  “Is this us?”  “Is this the Juttermuseum?”  Finally, the driver kicked us out into the drizzle with a swarthy point across the road at a farm that looked like it had been visited by aliens.  We crossed the street, giddy with the silliness of being here at all and seeing these things before us.  Because the place is crazy.

We walked through the ramshackle buildings around the back to where a field of submersibles of all shapes and sizes lay marooned in the gravel.  Every kind of research submarine, floating ocean marker and weather station lay haphazardly, evenly spaced in walkable rows.  No signs prevented our climbing and no one observed us as we went in and out, through and on top of the thirty or so gigantic structures hauled off of a nearby beach sometime in the last century.  We circled back through the aisles to what looked like a front entrance and found a totally wood-covered room with a friendly greeter who spoke no English.  We found a way to pay her for our entry into the rest of the collection and started our great wander. 

There is almost no way to describe the Juttermuseum.  It is at its base, a series of farm buildings, sheds, former barns maybe, a couple of prefab buildings stuck in between damp wood walls.  All are covered in their entirety with things that crazy people have pulled off the beach and brought back to the homestead.  You can only say crazy people because when you behold a collection this large and think of the investment of years, time and sweat that have gone into its curation and collection, you can only see a singular obsession with flotsam at work. 

The range of objects is staggering.  There are chunks of whole ships, every kind of safety flotation, every possible color and shape of hard hat.  There are old items from wooden ships and a pile of rubber duckies.  There’s a whole bin of shoes.  Anchors, a bicycle, piles and piles of ropes cohabitate on the outside of a shed wall while an oversized sign-style hammer and sickle hangs out by a full sized water tower.  The place is stuffed with crap that was once in the ocean.  Stuffed.  And as often as possible, the good people at the museum have attempted to put the items in historical perspective.  There’s a rowboat that was part of a rescue operation, there’s all kinds of radios and boat parts painted in khaki fresh from the war.  We only stopped looking because our eyes were exhausted.  There’s a café there that sells tea and coffee but no food.  As much as we enjoyed our pancakes and chocolate sheep, we’d kind of expected to encounter food by now and hadn’t. 

We tried to take pictures of everything in sight for later study and walked back to the bus stop, eyes glazed.  On the way, we passed two guys in waders unloading a pile of junk from a pickup truck behind the museum.  Clearly, the day’s haul was just coming in and ready for cataloguing with the rest.  It’s hard to say whether seeing that made us sad or happy.  The mad relentlessness is impressive.  But somehow we felt like the ten euro we just spent couldn’t possibly cover the gas for the truck.  Here’s hoping the sheep business is booming.

A tiny portion of the amazing haul at the Juttermuseum.

Back on the road, legs tired, really feeling the rain now, we wait for a long time by an irrigation ditch for the return ride to the ferry terminal.  There’s a kind of bus schedule that looks like if we get off the bus a stop earlier than the ferry, we can cut a corner on the bus route and save some time and maybe find a sandwich.  We spend some time looking at a cow.  We spend a while looking at some sheep.  We spend a while looking at a spider building a web under the bus stop sign.  We spend a lot of time looking down the empty road for a bus.

It finally comes and we sit happily if damply for the ride back.  We explain in broken English our plan to get off the bus in town and wait for the bus going to Cocksdorp.  The driver says “I’m the bus.”  We know, we know.  “No,” she says, “I am only bus today.  If you wait in the town, you are waiting for me to come back.  Stay on the bus.”  Her perfect English shames us.  We are drying off.  The sun is getting low on the horizon and we know the bus ride north is an hour long.  And that’s when it happens.  There is a crisis of faith. 

I love nothing more than a ridiculous adventure to nowhere and Jen is a fantastic travel companion.  But I am counting the hours in my head and wondering if we wouldn’t be happier having some amazing dinner in Amsterdam than traveling an hour, seeing a sign, traveling another hour by bus and then starting the long train ride home.  This is where Jen shows her true colors.  She turns to me, locks me in her steelier gaze and says “no.”

“We have come to this place to get a selfie by a sign that says De Cocksdorp.  And we are going to get a selfie by a sign that says De Cocksdorp.  We will not be stopped.  We will not be dissuaded.  We will stand under that sign and take that photo or we will die trying.”

I am moved.  I get more choked up than I care to on a bus full of strangers.  I lift myself up by my mental bootstraps.  I know she’s right.  There’s only one thing to do.  De Cocksdorp.  We come for YOU.

The bus ride North up the length of the island is beautiful.  It winds up the East coast, through the real gems of Texel, the little harbor towns that must be a whole lot of fun in the summertime.  There are all the hallmarks of ice cream shops and boutique hotels nestled among sailboat masts and tiny restaurants.  We cross a dyke and then another one.  The bus driver weaves and climbs over farms and stone walls covering the countryside in her daily route.  She asks where we’re going.  We tell her Cocksdorp.  She asks why.  We know that if she doesn’t know already, we can’t explain.  She tells us that there are restaurants by a lighthouse the stop after Cocksdorp.  Our eyes are peeled as we pass through the tiny sea hamlet for the road sign to end all road signs.  We see it and mentally start counting footsteps as we pass it by on the way to sustenance.  She assures us that there is a bus stop in Cocksdorp proper and she will be there at 7:30.  It’s the last bus, she assures us, so don’t miss it.

We climb dunes, clicking photos of a deeply picturesque lighthouse maybe 20 minutes before sunset.  There is indeed a restaurant welcoming us to its white wood and stunning North Sea overlook.  We sit, we giggle, we eat.  I have a massive rack of ribs, Jen has something vegetarian.  We are both refreshed.  Our legs are new, our bladders are empty, our stomachs full.  We thank our hosts and turn down the road, aware that we are sacrificing a chance to walk 20 minutes to the foot of the lighthouse for something greater.  We walk, the sun dipping below the horizon, the sheep on our right with their spray painted butts looking askance at the two strangers in their midst.  The mist is fresh, the wind strong.  We are laughing the laughs of the gods, feeling our goal in reach.  The sign is a speck in the distance, growing legible and finally looming overhead with each footfall.  We turn, we smile, we selfie.

In that moment, did the world tremble?  Had we come to Cocksdorp?  Had Cocksdorp come to us?  I guess I’d like to believe that in some way, somehow, there was a little Cocksdorp everywhere, in all of us, as that photo was taken.  I think you know what I mean.  We walked in a kind of holy silence as the last rays of the Texel sun disappeared, leaving us in darkness.  We huddled in a bus stop next to a phone booth that had been converted into firewood storage and watched the silhouette of the lighthouse in the distance fade to black.  The bus came, we sat in pensive quiet among the few passengers traveling the mean streets at this late hour. 

The bus driver sensed our mood, I think, and kept the ride jolly with a guided tour of the island, pointing out history and culture everywhere she could find it.  She had been a truck driver before and was now enjoying her retirement on the country bus route.  A girl kissed a boy at a bus stop and got on, leaving him in the tail lights.  Her story was painfully obvious to me as we rode, she looking half out the window, half at her own rainy reflection in the glass.  Here’s a girl from tiny Texel, at a school with a hundred other students?  Fifty?  Who can say?  Pondering her life as a small town girl in a house next door to her parents or as a vagabond far from home, living life in a big city somewhere, missing the green dykes of this rainy island.  She called the bus driver by name as she got off in the tiny sailboat town, her parents almost certainly relieved to see her from behind lace shears.  Jen and I called our driver “friend” and stepped off to the last ferry of the day, rounding up snacks from the snack bar for the long train home. 

It was 11:30pm when I finally slid my room key through the slot at the hotel back in Scheveningen.  I was tired and hungry again but so much older and wiser and younger at the same time.  I had been to Cocksdorp.  And no matter what happens, they’ll never take that away from me.