The story of

A beauty of a region or a landscape is that you feel at home there. Not from an attachment to your roots or a romantic nostalgia, but because of the contradictions, which exist in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen.

The road, between the vast fields, seems endlessly straight. This feeling is reinforced by the tight demarcation of the ditches along the fields, a row of poplars on the horizon, embedded in the austere horizon.
The playfulness of the random tangle of clouds in the clear blue sky accentuates this feeling. Underneath, a tangle of pipes, chimneys, cranes and cooling towers. Nothing like a straight line, but a frayed edge, like the edge of a badly torn stamp, threateningly defining the view.

It is wonderful to stroll along the waterline, jumping aside for the rising water, leaving deep footprints in the greasy mud and getting lost in the meandering gullies of the tidal area. Nothing is the same, everything is slightly different every time, changing all the time and giving a very different tranquillity for that very reason. And then on top of the dike you find yourself right in the middle of chaos and social engineering, between nature and culture, between letting go and following agreements.

A container ship looms in the distance. Standing atop the round streamlined forms of the ocean giant are hundreds of them. Side by side, precisely measured, stacked and in order. It looks like chaos but all those metal boxes have a number and are efficiently loaded.

At the bottom of the dike, the taut mudflats glisten and the stilts chase elegantly strutting. Involuntarily and unpredictably, they tip over the soft soil. Their weight leaves a subtle paw print, as if they seem to float.

On the other side of that massive dike, a tractor ploughs deep ruts in the greasy clay. Lines are added with every pass and before you notice, the whole field is shaded. Many times higher than anything nearby, the enormous container glides gracefully behind the tight line of the dike. Somewhere at the bottom of the picture, a group of houses stands randomly unordered leaning against the dike. More practical than planted. As if it was agreed, tacitly: must it be tight? Then we'll do it loose. Neat? Then at sixes and sevens.
Or is it the other way around? Has the fragmented, naturally grown landscape been tightened to better reflect the messy hamlets and half-villages?

Every time, as I pass through the region, I marvel at the sharp contrasts, which we as inhabitants have created ourselves, knowing that the tightly regulated landscape is unsustainable in the long run. Every time another one of those dark jagged thunderclouds drifts over, I am pleasantly reminded that with a hefty downpour, chaos will take over again. That is what I find the beauty of this region; knowing that the rectilinear can so transform into a savage mess, where we are at the mercy of an apparent disorder, forgotten and misunderstood by us, called nature.