Balkbrug and dogwood
Published in Onomatopee’s The Vendor
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Late April, you and I went to stay in Balkbrug in the province of Overijssel, west of Dedemsvaart. We sat on the hot bus where the seats released a sickly perfume, decades of dust. Balkbrug was founded in 1811 when local diggers formed a peat colony. The town is named for a simple bridge that connects both sides of the town. The N377 now passes under it. At the crossroads in the town, there was a supermarket and a Chinese restaurant called ‘Princess Garden.’ I read a review that said the service was poor and dessert came with rotten whipped cream: A yellowed mush, deflated and sunken.
We stayed in a triangular structure that was once a pig sty and imagined the spectres of thick pigs, wandering souls, grunting into eternity. We drank coffee and stared at the green meadow before us, smelling the peculiar sweetness of chicken shit wafting from a distant farm. Tractors chugged past. A long-beaked stork peaked under elms searching for twigs to construct a nest. We admired its wide wingspan. Jan, our neighbour, called them freakish beasts. He was frustrated as they caused havoc and clacked constantly on his wattle and daub roof. We ventured out and befriended a donkey, rough and bristled as an old brush, with horseflies stuck to its eye sockets.
We passed under flowering dogwood blossoms in the brown of the forest, exploding white, fragrant and luminous. We admired the pendulous jaws of chewing goats and spotted Highland cows in the midst of browning heather.
We arrived at a lake where farmers used to dig peat. When the peat was all cut they flooded the land and the birch trees there drank themselves to death. The dead stumps now peer above the waterline. The farmers called it Spookmeer due to its haunted form. I read that a couple once went to the lakeside for an evening picnic when suddenly a spiral swirled in the water and a figure caked in dark muck rose up from the centre of the lake and screamed a shriek so loud that it was heard in Zwolle. The couple fled, never to return. For us, the lake remained still, the brimming pool mirroring the grey sky.
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Later in front of the fire, tired, full of spuds, you stared into the orange glow, the gentle light illuminating your beauty. And when I think of Balkbrug, I don’t think of muck banshees of the Spookmeer or wide cow pats, ghostly swine or rotten whipped cream, I think of you, turning back to look at me, the wind whipping up, the dogwood blossoms falling softly from the dry branches, a vision, entangled in the bark.
