Where are you going for summer vacation?” Today, we’re likely to answer with place names that give off a powerful warmth of their own, names of “true” summer lands by the Mediterranean. But back then — between 1939 and ’49 — we were usually going either “no place” or maybe “over to the summer cottage.” The first answer meant that we’d stay home in Vejle, where we lived in an ordinary apartment on an ordinary street; the other meant that when my father’s vacation came up, we’d move a little way out of town, to the south side of Vejle Fjord near Munkebjerg, where the Tailors’ Union owned a cottage.
It was at home or in “The Tailors’ House” that the word summer gained meaning for me and grew full of the experiences that I’ve later used to top up all other summers to extra fullness: summer as a morass of luxuriance. Yet at that time I tended to see it as having a lack of experiences — especially during a summer when we didn’t go “over to the summer cottage.”
The reason we said “over to the summer cottage” instead of “out to the summer cottage” must have had to do with its placement on a high hill — actually tremendously high, when we had to push our loaded bicycles up — but on the other hand it provided the satisfaction of being called “Blaze Mountain,” a name that gave off the powerful warmth of a true summer land.
And that warmth is probably the most powerful summer experience, the feeling of warmth filling your body so completely that there’s no difference, no perceptible boundary, between the air and your skin. When it gets to that point, someone always says, “Today it’s summer,” with extra emphasis on “-day,” meaning both “Summer is finally here” and “Tomorrow it will all be over.” You sink down into a chair or the grass, in either shade or sun, with that sudden and afterward enduring feeling of warmth throughout your body — the scent and the heat blended in a relationship that lends immediacy, or the possibility of immediacy, to all hot, muggy, sultry, scorching, etc. experiences.
In the same way there’s a whole string of glimpses, images, moments of awareness, when summer became apparent and instilled itself in us: the path behind the gasworks, where black pieces of coke crunched underfoot and where there was always a multitude of yellow slugs on the sunny side, moving like slow flames — that was on the way out to the garden by the cove, where the earth got so dry it cracked, and where we were always making finds because there had once been a trash dump; sometimes the earth was so hard and gray-white that you could scratch it like the shards of porcelain we found — or that evening when, wending our way back to the cottage, we learned the phrase still as glass. Or that evening . . . or that evening. Today it’s summer, we’d say then. Black coke, porcelain, and a sea shining like glass.
But in that string of warm summer images, some experiences stand out especially. I’m thinking of three: a wide meadow deep with the pink wildflowers called “lady’s smocks,” a noontime that I spent bouncing my big beach ball against the glowing wall of the house, and a night when a thunderstorm came up, and we gathered in the kitchen and ate strawberries.
They’re three banal experiences, nothing out of the ordinary; many people must have seen and done the same things, but for me they stand out. They were for many years almost supernatural, are still nearly indescribable, and I know by now that I have to let them stay beyond words, because they’re about a child’s — a human being’s — in this case, my own — first aesthetic experiences. Even back when they first happened, these three images were already what I can now call them: three images — open, endless beauty; pointless energy; and the security of not being alone.
If we could just go “over to the summer cottage,” then summer was saved. Then we had a real summer land to conquer. And we had a house. Although it belonged to us only because it belonged to others, I don’t think that mattered much to us — maybe we preferred to ignore it — and over the long term, it worked its way in and became, to say it dramatically, an image of freedom, equality, and fraternity. The solidarity of the union members’ volunteer work on the house and yard on Sundays was striking because it was so unremarkable — at least to us children, it seemed unremarkable, something we never thought about; it was simply all of us working together, pruning trees, making steps out of railroad ties, picking apples, painting garden furniture, spreading gravel, lowering the little pier into the water, having coffee and snacks, playing ball, raising the flag, singing, and swinging in the swing hung from the August apple tree. Now, much later, I know there were some members who didn’t participate, and I’m sure there was some muttering about them. That’s part of the adult world. (Besides, this must have been wartime, but we didn’t notice the war during the summer; it belonged to the basement back on our street at home, where rows of benches were set up in an underground shelter, it was basically only there that we belonged to the war, especially at night, especially during winter; it was absolutely a winter experience; even if we were home all summer, we didn’t notice the war. During the summer, we forgot so fast.)
It seemed unremarkable that we belonged to that group of union members, where the old tailors sat around on Sundays talking about the days when they barely got a Sunday free from work. The fear of that kind of endless work week made us worry that something might threaten the house — and especially the apple trees, before the apples got ripe. But the two very old, thin, white-haired tailors who were the best storytellers always laughed so loudly when they talked about the old days that we almost thought it was something they’d made up, and not a true account that had elements of the exotic slavery described in children’s books.
In that way Sundays became an experience of the fact that there were families other than ours, whom we didn’t know, but with whom we were in a community. (Of course nobody said that; that’s not the kind of thing people talked about.) And it might have seemed like all we were doing was drinking coffee and chatting and gossiping and eating picnic lunches — but beneath the surface, there was that image of summer: we’re not alone.
Every spring, my brother and I would start pestering to go “over to the summer cottage,” not only on Sundays and on especially warm, clear summer evenings, but also for our father’s whole vacation. And every year, I think my mother thought it was too much trouble. It certainly was, for the adults: feather comforters, clothes, food, everything had to be bundled up and tied onto the bicycles, and with those enormous loads, which could be almost as tall as my father who rode in front, we pedaled along the narrow, twisting, rutted, and incredibly hilly forest path, in and out along the fjord, until we labored our way up the last steep hill and triumphantly took possession of the cottage.
Then for eight or fourteen days we would live not in an ordinary apartment, but in a house, with gardens, a forest, and a view out over the fjord. We had a bedroom with a balcony and a basin and pitcher, and we drank our morning coffee on a terrace with its own nest of swallows. There was a plate rack in the living room, a window seat, colored panes of glass, and white-painted furniture — all things we didn’t have at home — a fancy stove in the kitchen, and a deep, cold cellar with bottles of beer and Star brand soda. And there was the room with hangers and a mirror where the women changed into their bathing suits. And there was the shed with the chopping block, and the blue plums that never managed to get ripe.
The house itself was half-timbered, with a tarred foundation, and way down at the bottom of the broom-covered hillside lay the railroad track. We could see every train that ran between Vejle and Fredericia — between us and the rest of the world — and not one escaped having its cars counted, and being waved at, and listened to long beforehand and long afterward — we maintained that they kept us awake at night.
The yellowness and blackness, the tar, the railroad ties and broom, the dangerous train and the blinking signal lights, the sun and the dizziness when we lay out for too long, these all stretched summer out and kept it in motion, as much as the black coke and yellow slugs behind the gasworks.
And without really realizing it, we also experienced anxiety at the core of summer, when we were out picking wild blueberries or blackberries and our father and mother disappeared into the depths of the thicket where there were poisonous snakes. But we did have our rubber boots on and we were heroic, and we nourished high ambitions of picking the most berries of all.
For it wasn’t an anxiety that overwhelmed or overshadowed other things. It was a natural kind of anxiety; it had the same lightness and the same weight as joy; it was part of an interplay where first one, then the other was more apparent, a light uneasiness, as the wind turned the fronds of bracken so that all their black spore eyes stared out.
Or my brother and I would lie on our bellies down on the pier, watching crawdads and fish and flickers of sunlight, and waiting for our father and mother, who had gone into town for groceries, watching for them in every tiny dot that moved along the curving coastline, guessing whether that might be them, and when it finally was, exploding into such a fast run that our whole bodies became outbursts of emotion, as dogs’ bodies do.
Summer was warmth and many other good things, and thunder and poisonous snakes and many other forms of excitement. And of fear. Early on, mine focused on a turkey who was my first deadly enemy, and from whom I was rescued by a dog named Bitsy. Next it focused, more silently and deeply, I think, on a statue that was — at least at the time — huge. It stood in front of our nearest neighbor, the summer cottage of the “navers,” carpenters who traveled from town to town, literal journeymen. Once I was lifted up to shake the statue’s tar-hot, outstretched hand; I looked into the giant face under the broad-brimmed black hat and was terrified. I don’t remember specifically, but I’m sure I thought that he was alive. But I do know that I thought these beings in their odd, traditional garb, the navers (the word sounded like “knaves” or “gnawers”), were some kind of underground creature, like trolls or unusually large dwarves. And when they sat around their warped picnic table, drinking and roaring “Skaal!” and we all had to walk past, I was afraid for the tailors. They couldn’t possibly be a match for giant statues.
Of course I later learned that it was fun to shake hands with that stiff, peaceable traveling tradesman with the kindly outstretched, painted hand of stone — especially in daylight, it was fun. But when I think back on it — and I almost always sit on the side of the train where I can see him, when we go past — I know that I had to transform him into an image of something that threatened, every year, to prevent us from “going over to the summer cottage.”
He had taken up a position at the entrance to our true summer land. We had to get past him, and we had no chance against him. Normal human anxiety, which a person encountered every day and understood, that was part of summer. But this stone colossus belonged to a different world — a world beyond the realm of aesthetic experience.
(1966)