Terschelling (2)

One can only sit here and imagine who I would be, I suppose, if that Schaap family, C. C. and Neeltje, never got taken with this "new country" business. The best questions rarely have easy answers.

And yet, this much is clear. If the Schaaps had stayed, I wouldn’t be me. I wouldn’t be who I am at all. Even though it’s always struck me as foolish, even deadly, to presume that we are nothing more than the sum of our experience, it’s just as silly to assert that the America west of Ellis Island hasn’t shaped me through four generations. It’s silly of me to imagine who I might be because if they’d stayed there, I most certainly wouldn’t be a me at all.

And since there wouldn’t be, the truth I’m left with is worth celebrating. Thank goodness they left this lovely island. Thank goodness their son married a preacher’s daughter in America, who bore my father, who then found a wife and brought me into this world, cultural light years from Terschelling’s ancient lighthouse tower.

But if all that’s true, then why am I drawn to sit here and dream of what might have been? This is, after all, my second visit to the island. Why do I look dreamily at this landscape and ask unanswerable questions? Why do so many of us travel to County Galway, the Rhine Valley, Hunan Province, Krakow, Yucatan, or even the Ivory Coast? What draws us back to a place of origin, years and generations removed?

The best questions are based in mystery, I suppose, and our mortal selves seem forever drawn to such mysteries as emerge, for me at least, from the sandy soil of the island of Terschelling. Maybe it’s not the place itself that attracts me, but the questions such places pose inescapably when we visit them, the most fundamental questions of our own mysterious selves.

Emerson claimed that traveling is a fool’s paradise, deluding empty-headed people into believing that what they discover in faraway places is somehow more enlightening than what they could well discover in the unexplored regions of their own human souls. I like Emerson, always have, even though he strikes me as a man I’d rather know in a book than next door.

But I don’t know that I buy his argument. I don’t think of myself as a fool today. This afternoon yet, I will leave Terschelling with just a bit of the reluctance my great-grandparents likely had more than a century ago, yet not without some anticipation too, anticipation they must have felt themselves as they watched the lighthouse disappear slowly from the North Sea horizon.

I’m going home. On this island, no matter how delightful its seacoast villages, how charming its centuries-old lighthouse, and how redolent with my own family lore, today I am little more than another tourist toting a Nikon.

Terschelling is not my home. For better or for worse, I am who I am, no matter what the mysteries of my origins--or yours--no matter what I may have been. My home is far away.

I knew all of that before I came, I suppose, but I didn’t know it as fully as I do now, having been here. And that fuller realization has made it worth coming, that single idea--and, oh yes, the island’s miles of sandy beaches, its quaint towns, and a huge lighthouse, centuries old.

I’ll probably come back to Terschelling. I'd love to. I don't think it's quite finished with me. It’s a beautiful place, as full of seafaring history as it is the silence of my own mystery. That’s what I’ve discovered on the island. I may be no smarter than I was before I came, but, having been here, I’m no fool either.