The shrieks that the teenagers from Kleve let go when they first felt themselves sliding knee deep into the black Friesland mud might not have been quite loud enough to waken the dead. But they certainly put the wind up the oystercatchers. Piping frantically, the birds with the shell-cracker red bills went skimming round our walking party as the screams, giggles and cries of ‘Scheisse!’ echoed across the salt-marshes and tidal mud flats of Langeoog island.
Arvid Männicke, his blond corkscrew curls flapping in the sea wind, laughed heartily at the trap he’d led us all into. Toting a shrimping net and a garden fork on his shoulder, he strode on ahead towards the open shore. An impish sense of humour allied to a broad knowledge of local wildlife, weather and tides make Arvid, owner of Langeoog’s sailing school, a good man to go mud-walking with. He’d invited me to join the school party in order, as he had put it, to ‘have a really good time getting muddy and dirty and wet!’
Langeoog is one in a chain of twenty-three North Sea islands that lie in a giant arc some five miles off the coasts of Holland, Germany and Denmark. The islands are remarkably similar. Almost all are attenuated strips of green-carpeted sand dune, each one with a red-roofed village, a north coast consisting of a giant windswept beach, and a southern shore of marsh and mud. Germany owns seven of these little sea-bound slips of land: the East Friesian islands, in whose flotilla Langeoog takes position towards the middle.
Apart from their lonely, moody beauty, what gives the Friesian islands their unique character is the nature of the shallow tidal sea, the Wattenmeer, that separates them from the mainland coast. This Wattenmeer is an enormous tidal sea some 280 miles long but only a few miles wide at best, filling and emptying twice a day as the North Sea tides ebb and flow between the islands. Here is the largest continuous area of tidal flats in the world, home to an astonishing number and variety of birds, plants, fish, insects and organisms too small and far too numerous to list. And the best way to get to know it, Arvid Männicke had assured me, was to get out there in your bare feet at low tide and feel that cold black mud squidge up between your toes.
Whatever those teenagers from the German/Dutch border, youth hostelling on Langeoog for a week, had been expecting of their Wattenmeer expedition, it obviously wasn’t this. Cawing and shrieking like gulls round a tip, they plodged through the mud. The girls threw their arms supportively round each other; the boys tripped and shoved one another. All good dirty fun, and the sheer effort of keeping their feet had sobered them by the time we reached firmer ground towards the edge of the salt-marshes, every pair of legs now clad in black stockings of mud like some saucy Berlin chorus-line.
‘OK,’ said Arvid, gathering us around him in a circle, ‘here we are in the salt-marshes, which the tide floods twice a day. So you can see that everything that lives and grows here has to be able to put up with salt, with being covered in water, and with lots of wind. Eat and be eaten – that’s the Wattenmeer’s rule. And humans eat out here, too.’
Arvid picked a stem of pink, papery thrift, and plucked up a fistful of feathery wormwood. ‘The islanders of Langeoog would make tea out of this,’ he told the youngsters, showing them the thrift, ‘to help them pee.’ Tee-hee-hee, went his audience. ‘And this one’ – he thrust the wormwood under their noses to let them sniff the sharp smell – ‘you could make into a very bitter tea, or put into your schnapps to make it delicious. An easy decision, I think!’
We reached the point where the salt-marsh gave way to the mud proper. This was no soft, treacherous slough of the kind that Arvid had led us through for fun, but a giant swathe of firm mud flats, ribbed by the tide. They stretched for more than a mile in breadth, out to the edge of the gradually incoming tide on the skyline. A thin spatter of rain brushed by. The air was full of the squeak and bubble of wading birds – oystercatchers, sandpipers, redshank, plover – and the raucous cursing of black-headed and herring-gulls.
When you walk out onto the Wattenmeer mud and feel it cold and faintly sticky under your bare soles, you are walking into a world of horizontals – the softly glinting mud flats, the line between sky and earth, the faint bar of the mainland across the water. Only the sinuous wriggle of a pale silver creek defied the straight and level, along with the stubby upper works and masts of the ferry inching its way along the narrow water channel through the mud banks to its mainland harbour of Bensersiel.
Five great estuaries feed the Wattenmeer, and the North Sea’s twice-daily tidal flood doubles the amount of water in the shallow sea. From a boat at flood tide, the Wattenmeer seems an immutable part of the North Sea, its islands truly isolated and marooned in the ocean. Someone sailing here for the first time would never guess that much of this mighty sea is shallow enough to stand in and still have your head above water; nor that the water is a timid impostor, regularly fleeing away between the islands to leave only thin curls of streamway and isolated pools behind.
We sifted shrimps and tiny molluscs out of a sea puddle, working from side to side, our hands held flat in the manner of shelduck beaks. Cockles and tellins seemed to float into our palms. Arvid pounced on a cockle before it could withdraw its digging mechanism into the shell, and passed it round the group so that we could admire the transparent, rubbery foot.
By now the teenagers were completely absorbed in the fascination of watching multiple forms of life emerge from the seemingly dead and empty mud. But they were still teenagers enough to want to make farting noises in the mud with their bare feet and to go sliding monstrous distances in a spray of black filth. Arvid, though, knew a trick worth two of that.
‘Right,’ he said, drawing a circle in the mud with the garden fork, ‘gather round here.’ The youngsters shuffled into a ring. ‘Just mud, isn’t it?’ He smacked the ground with his hand. ‘Can’t see a single living thing, can you? But all those birds we’ve heard and seen, the ones with the long delicate beaks, the curlews and the avocets – they can’t deal with the tough shellfish, can they? So there must be something in this mud for them.’
The fork plunged into the mud and brought up a fat wedge. Arvid broke it apart. Inside the foot-square block of stiff black matter were at least a dozen lugworms, fat and somnolent. They lay pulsing on Arvid’s palm. ‘And there’s millions of millions more down there,’ he told us, stamping with his bare foot. ‘The whole Wattenmeer is literally solid with them – one enormous larder for the birds.’
We made it back to the sand dunes and the island road without too many more muddy mishaps. The youngsters departed for their youth hostel. Back in my room at Langeoog sailing school it took me a good half hour to scrub myself clean. A faint, persistent fragrance of marine mud followed me round all day. And images followed me, too – impressions of that strange, bleak Wattenmeer shore packed with wildlife seen and unseen, the sense of endless space and time, and the melancholy, haunting piping of oystercatchers.
SLITHERING OUT
MAP: Langeoog Inselkarte map available from Langeoog Kurverwaltung (see below)
TRAVEL: Fly to Bremen with BA (www.ba.com), Lufthansa (www.lufthansa.co.uk), BMI (www.flybmi.com) or KLM (www.klm.com)
Train to Esens. Bus to Benserseil and ferry (04971-9289-25; http://www.langeoog.de/, or plane from Harle (04464-94810; www.inselflieger.de)
Island ‘train’ will take you and your bag to Langeoog village. Someone from Segelschule Langeoog will meet you.
WALK DIRECTIONS: This is a guided walk with Arvid Männicke (contact details: see Accommodation below). Route can vary, but always takes place on south coast of Langeoog and includes dunes, salt-marsh and mud. Cost: £3.50 adult, £2.50 child.
LENGTH: 2 hours approx.
CONDITIONS: You’ll get filthy up to your knees! Wear shorts or easily rolled-up trousers, and a warm windcheater.
REFRESHMENTS: None en route; cafés and bars in Langeoog.
ACCOMMODATION: Segelschule Langeoog, Postfach 1423, 26465 Langeoog (tel 04972-6699; fax 6611; segelschule.langeoog@t-online.de; http://www.segelschule langeoog.de inexpensive self-catering (apply for details)
Many other self-catering, hotels, B&Bs etc on Langeoog – see Information below.
INFORMATION: Kurverwaltung Langeoog, Hauptstrasse 28, 26465 Langeoog (tel 00-44-1972-6930; fax 693-116; kurverwaltung@langeoog.de;