The old town

by Jacob A. Riis

If the flood came before the mail had got in, an anxious outlook was kept at the town gate, where the sea could be seen rising higher and higher, threatening with each swell to wash quite over the roadway. White-painted posts were set on both sides of it to mark out the way for the driver even if water covered it knee-deep, but in spite of this precaution, the trip was full of peril. If the coach were blown over, or the team succumbed, the passengers had but a slim chance of escaping with their lives. On such nights a band of resolute men gathered in the shelter of the farthest houses ready to go to the rescue on the first warning of danger. I was very proud to be one of these when I was a big boy of sixteen. But big as I was when the summons came and we sallied forth to bring the exhausted team in, it took all my strength to stand against the furious blast. The waves beat upon the causeway and were carried across it in a pelting rain of brine that stung like whip-lashes. In water halfway to our waists, in utter darkness and numbed with cold, we groped our way toward the lights of the town scarce a hundred yards away. How that driver had lived through it, I shall never understand. The relief when we reached shelter was great, but greater my pride when the stern old Amtmand, the chief government officer of the county, caught me by the shoulder and whirled me around to have a look at the fellow who had lent him a hand in need.

“Strong boy,” he said, and rapped me smartly with his cane; “be a man yet,” which was praise indeed from him. And I forgot that I was cold and wet through, in my pride.

They used to tell a story of another Amtmand who, fresh from his snug berth at the capital, had come out to take the post in the Old Town, as ill luck would have it a passenger in the mail on just such a night. It was too much for him. He waited only till the tide fell enough to clear the way, then fled the town, with the parting shot that “Ribe might be good enough for ducks and geese, but not for men.” He never came back, but set up his office in another town where he was out of reach of the North Sea. Well for him he was not there on that awful Christmas Eve when the water reached the very Domkirke itself, and rose five feet or more over its floor. Many years before, another flood had torn thirty parishes from the coast. The sea swallowed them up. It stands in the old records as “de grote Mandranck” (1362) because of the loss of life it caused. Shortly before the Reformation the water rose so high in the streets that the cloister of the Black Friars stood in a lake, and the monks caught fish for their supper in the portico that enclosed their garden. One may be permitted the hope that this flood came on a Friday to fitly replenish their larder.

Indeed, the history of the Old Town was one long succession of such disasters that had craved lives and wasted treasure without end, yet had never taught the people the lesson their southern neighbors had learned early. “Preserve, O Lord, the dikes and dams in the King’s marshlands; watch over the widows and the fatherless,” read a petition in our old prayer-book. The King’s marshlands went their way when the Germans stole them, but the Old Town stood, and stands still in its undiked plain, heedless alike of warning and experience. One may see all I have written here, by evil chance this very winter, if he cares to go and risk it.

When after a storm-flood the waters ebbed out, field and beach were covered with the drift of the Gulf Stream, driven in by the long gale, and amid the snows of the northern winter we boys roasted our potatoes, and an occasional dead bird, over bonfires built of the bleached husks of the cocoa-palm, banana stalks, waterlogged Brazil-nuts, and other wreck of the tropics.

Fanö Women.

It could not well be otherwise than that the sea, which knocked upon our doors so often and so rudely, played a great part in the lives and in the imagination of the people. From the islands I spoke of the whole male population was absent in summer, and often enough the year round. They were sailors, all of them, and a Fanö[2] skipper to-day walks the bridge of many a ship that ties up at its pier in New York or Philadelphia. The women, left in charge of the little farms, did all the chores, including the getting in of such crops as they raised in their sand-dunes and tending to the stock. The Old Town, too, left stranded by the sanding in of the mouth of the river, nevertheless furnished its full quota to the merchant marine of more lands than Denmark. The sea gave it lime to build its houses with, and the lime that was burned of sea-shells held what it was laid to bind. It gave the fisherman a living, and the housewife cleaner and cheaper carpets than our day knows of. Clear pine floors, scrubbed spotlessly clean and with the white sea-sand swept in “tongues” over them, had a homelike something about them which no forty-dollar rug harbors.

The thunder-storms, which in the dog-days were often very severe, came and went with the tides. The same storm, having gone out to sea with the ebb, would come back on the flood tide and keep the farmers awake who lived under a roof of thatch. Good cause; I have seen as many as half a score of farm-houses burning after a long night’s storm. Thus, too, people died when the tide ebbed. One who was on his death-bed could not find rest while the tide was in, but when it went out he went out with it. There was something in all this of the old days when Odin and Thor were worshipped where the Domkirke now stood, something of the nature worship and of the fatalism of pagan times. Was it Oliver Wendell Holmes who said that we are omnibuses in which all our ancestors ride? Sometimes I find myself struggling with a “fate” which I cannot bend to my will or purpose, and then comes to me out of the past the Jute farmer’s calm “When a man’s time is up, he must die;” along with the recollection of a friend’s experience, a clergyman in that country. A woman with a child born out of wedlock sought poor relief because of her handicap. When he remonstrated gently that she had saddled herself with a needless burden, her curt reply was: “No use talking that way; the children one has to have, one will get.”

The philosophy of one of my teachers in the Latin School was of a different kind. It was custom in the Old Town for the members of the Fire Company to get up and get ready at the third heavy clap of thunder, and though my father was not of the corps he followed the custom. Dressed for the street, with his insurance and other valuable papers ready to hand, he sat the storm out in his easy-chair, the better to marshal his household in time of need. His friend could not understand that any one should break his sleep for a thunder-storm and go to all that trouble. “What for?” he asked.