The wind whipped my hair into my mouth as I disembarked. I gripped my suitcase and duffel with one hand and stepped carefully down the gangplank. Below my feet, the water churned, sucking at the timber pylons. The Marsdiep was deceptive. Seen from the shore, it was a flat sheet of dark water, all its wrinkles ironed smooth. Viewed from above, its secret currents revealed themselves, its estuaries branching arterially through lung-shaped sandbanks and islands uninhabited by anyone but seals and seabirds. A thousand years ago, a catastrophic flood submerged a nearby forest and cut a path through Lake Flevo. The salt water pouring into the channel poisoned the lake’s freshwater fish and gave birth to the Zuiderzee – the lake was turned into a bay. Dutch villagers eventually reclaimed the land, creating the area’s first waterwolf – a soggy, low-lying peat bog. Unlike the swamp in Saeftinghe, the one near the Zuiderzee was quickly drained and dykes installed in an effort to hold back the flood. Materials were chosen carefully. A dyke built on too much sand could collapse while one built on peat could quickly crumble during a hot, dry summer. Muskrats were – and still are – a source of torment, since they loved to chew through peat and make their burrows in the salt grass, compromising the integrity of any man-made water management structures. They were also prolific breeders. For the most part, though, the dykes around Texel held firm. There was only a small number of recorded breaches over the past century. The worst was caused by a terrible storm surge that struck Europe during the winter of 1953 and claimed over two thousand lives. In the aftermath, a national relief fund was established to help pay for the damage. The Dutch government commissioned the Delta Works, a series of construction projects to reinforce the dams and dykes around Holland as well as the creation of a large freshwater lake. On Texel, the solution had been to build more dykes, rather than risk the total loss of aquatic wildlife, which was the inevitable outcome of installing extensive storm-surge barriers. My parents used to joke about it. They had a saying – ‘new year, new dyke’, meaning whenever the council ran out of ideas on how to hold back the rising sea level, they would add another dyke to the ones already rimming Texel’s coastline. Beyond the black humour, there was an undercurrent of tension. An almost biblical foreboding surrounded the possibility that the rising waters might one day overcome Texel’s defences and swallow up the land again, taking everyone and everything in its path.

As I stepped off the ramp, a bearded man rushed forward, seized my shoulders and kissed my cheeks. I put my bags down.

‘Feine! You haven’t changed at all.’