Dr. Frank's What's-it

The Rural Voyeur

I've written a bit here and there and now and then in this blog about the glories of rural Norfolk's scenery, though I suppose I really mean "atmosphere" rather than scenery per se. That is, it's not so much the way it looks, as the way it feels. It's a total accident that I ended up even knowing about it-- I'm related to it by marriage. Yet I've been coming here periodically for a few years now, and it's like nowhere else I've ever been. A bigger sky than Texas and ten times the atmosphere, along with a unique sort of spookiness.

Though he can hardly have been the first to notice, Noel Coward famously invoked Norfolk's "flatness" as a metaphor for an unsatisfactory emotional state in one of his plays. I think that's taking things a bit too literally, though I'm sure it got a laugh. Yet "flat" it is, especially compared with the terrain in England's other regions. It takes no more than a slight upgrade to make you feel as though you're the tallest thing for miles; you often find yourself standing on the center point of a horizon that is as close to a perfect, level, unbroken circle as anywhere you're likely to see. (Outside of Kansas, maybe, and trust me: it's a bit more impressive than Kansas, somehow.) Thus, a decided lack of claustrophobia, a novelty especially if you're used to navigating the Frogger-like streets of London. It also means the sky is huge, obstructed only here and there by the occasional scraggly tree or distant church tower. In the monochrome winter, when the trees are at their most skeletal and the sky proves, during the three hours or so of "daylight," just how many different shades of grey there can be, it conjures an otherwordlyness I've never felt anywhere else. It's just you and the sky, and you're basically standing in the middle of a black and white photograph. Yet even in summer, at those times when the sun is unobstructed, there's something "funny" about the light. The colors are muted, distant. Even the summer feels bleak, somehow. It's a matter of temperament, taste, and, I imagine above all what you're used to, but I find this distant-feeling, spacious, lonely, uncanny bleakness incomparably beautiful. You walk out the front door and step directly into a watercolor painting. I'm sure there are other places on earth where this happens whenever you step outside, but this is the only one of them I've ever been in.

It's an atmosphere that invites introspection, a feeling of detachment from the "real world," almost a painful awareness of oneself. I'm no expert on nature or naturalists or anything, so I don't know what I'm talking about, but I think I've heard that there's a notion among people who are "into nature" and hiking and so forth that they like to lose themselves in the landscape, feel as though they're "one with nature" (if indeed anyone ever says phrase that un-ironically-- someone must, sometimes, or must once have done so at any rate.) For me, though, what makes the Norfolk coastal countryside so impressive and striking is precisely the opposite: you can't blend in to it. You feel like an alien substance, almost utterly separate from what seems like a static, or at least a slow-motion, backdrop, like you've been cut out and pasted in to a world which has been punctured and the color slightly drained from it. It's a weird and powerful sensation.

And have I mentioned the dear little hobbits? Biffins, Bofurs, Bracegirdles, Proudfoots, etc.? They'll bring you back to earth, so to speak. They live in sweet little houses built from stones gathered from the seashore; I'm quite confident that when we are safely out of earshot they turn to one another and say things like "there's queer folk about, and no mistake," rolling every "R." But they don't quite seem to blend in all that well either. The landscape sets itself apart from hobbits and Big Folk alike. Believe me, I realize how fortunate I am to have been able to "live" the north Norfolk coast (or at least to spin it) as a quaint, Nazgul-free Lord of the Rings fantasy rather than as some kind of Straw Dogs scenario... And yeah, I may be exaggerating just a teensy, tiny bit about all this, but what the hell... it's really nice out there.

Posted by Dr. Frank at September 8, 2003 01:34 PM | TrackBack