On the move,
on Föhr

While half of southern Germany was under water from all the rain, you could easily see the seabed from the ferry in the North Sea, that’s how thinly distributed the water was here during low tide. I wondered how the ferry managed to get from Dagebüll to Wyk at all. It was heavily loaded with cars, all of which looked bigger than the island in front of us. Ahead of us lay Föhr, a fairytale-like German backdrop, jutting out of the mudflats in all its beauty. Our goal: relax and unwind a bit before taking our Porsche Turbo for a spin.

On our little SSST trips for ramp, we sometimes end up in surprising and special places, I thought, watching as a huge patch of mud moved towards us. A group of children were romping through the mud next to the harbor, looking for lugworms, examining all the holes on this “largest unbroken system of intertidal sand and mud flats in the world”, as the Wadden Sea is described by UNESCO. A paradox. How can it be both a sea and a tidal flat? But after the ferry had made it all the way to the island with almost no water beneath its bow, I was no longer surprised. The mudflats are said to be home to thousands of different species of creatures, though the most famous is undoubtedly the invisible lugworm, or so the tourists told me. Young people, in particular, want to see it up close – though few of them do. Worm hunting is an attraction of its own on Föhr. The lugworm burrows itself into the mud, leaving behind a coiled cast of sand for the young people to see, prompting them to try and get the worm out of its hole with small shovels or simply with their fingers – more often than not to no avail. Just wasn’t meant to be, the young people then think, and off they go to the ice cream stand next to the oversized outdoor chess set to eat ice cream. The worm is used to being hunted, it can camouflage itself very well. Our test car, a light blue-gray Porsche, also looked well camouflaged on the shore of the Wadden Sea, with the mudflats and the sky over a similar light blue-gray hue.

Germany’s second largest North Sea island is a popular travel destination, with miles of sandy beaches and a maritime climate favored by the Gulf Stream that has earned it the nickname of “Frisian Caribbean”. Families and active holidaymakers love Föhr, explains Michael, who for many years looks forward to spending a few days or weeks on the island. Sylt is like Munich, Föhr is like Tübingen, he says cheerfully with a sly nod. As a Tübingen native, he should know. Boris Palmer, the (formerly Green) mayor of Tübingen, has probably been here more than once. Though probably not in a Porsche Turbo.

Michael had been on the road for over ten hours to get to Föhr from southern Germany, and he didn’t even look tired. He wasn’t driving the latest Porsche Turbo either but had taken the previous model. You don’t always have to swap what’s good for what’s new, says Michael. In academic circles they even have a word for this kind of addiction to the latest craze: neomania. The boffins tell us that we humans tend to ­reflexively overestimate the value of new things, which is why the phenomenon was immediately included in the category of cognitive biases as an aberration of thought. So Michael and I ignored everything new and happily drove a few rounds across the island.

With the ferry, we had left the turbulent civilization of the mainland on the other side of the sea. We now wanted to lean back and focus on the timeless substance of this planet – on the Wadden Sea, which changes beyond recognition every few hours, but always remains true to itself. We could see it from the terrace of our hotel, which bears the almost unpronounceable name of Upstalsboom. I couldn’t sit in the hotel for long. I regularly went out to the shore to take a close-up look at the sea, because, according to the tidal schedule, high tide was due at some point soon. I had heard from the other tourists that the water comes flowing back in when you turn your back to it. So I pretended not to face the sea and tried to spontaneously turn around. All in vain, the water didn’t come. Sometimes a little, but not everywhere. The ebb and flow of the tide is magic.

There is no watertight scientific explanation for this phenomenon. Some say that the gravitational pull of the moon is to blame, but the moon appears the same everywhere on the planet, so why should it attract the water here in the North Sea more than in other places? There are also those who say that the water in the North Sea is pumped out every eight hours, an old capitalist trick to attract tourists. In the neighboring, formerly socialist Baltic Sea, the water is available at all times, not much, but always in the same quantity for everyone. On Föhr, the water dances, it rocks back and forth, coming and going as it pleases.

I courageously broached the subject with a few local women. “What’s wrong with your sea?” I asked them. “The water ( … )"

→ You can read the full story in ramp #65 ‘Surfing Cowboys’.