When I was very young, my father told me stories of a cycling holiday he had taken in the Netherlands during his early twenties. One spring, a little after my thirtieth birthday, I took two weeks off work to follow his journey. I spent the days cycling almost without rest, the nights sleeping by the roadside. Windmills on the horizon, the flat plains sliced by canals, the avenues of stiff, plumed pines: it was a bare country, isolating and strange. Expressive as it was of a world before I was born, the landscape seemed an occult place to me, simultaneously fascinating and forbidding, like the realm of death.
Published in Black Static 69 http://ttapress.com/blackstatic/
Absence Club 