On Writing About Places That Are Disappearing

Every account of a vanishing place quietly assumes a moment when the place was whole, and almost none of them say when that moment was.

I have written about a stretch of coast north of Bergen for eleven years, and in that time I have called it diminished, thinned, quieter than it used to be, more times than I can count. Diminished compared to what. Quieter than which spring. For most of those years I did not answer the question I was asking a reader to accept without evidence, and I do not think I am unusual in that. Most writing about a disappearing place borrows the authority of loss without naming the point the loss is measured against, and once a reader notices the omission, the writing stops reading as a claim and starts reading as a mood.

The baseline date

Call it the baseline date: the specific year a piece of disappearance writing states, plainly, as the reference point every later comparison rests on. Not a period. Not "when I was young." A year. My own baseline for that coast is 1994, the first spring I counted there as an assistant, in a notebook I still own. When I write that the eider colony has thinned, I mean thinned against the 1994 count, which was itself already taken after two earlier declines that nobody working the coast in 1994 had personally witnessed. Naming the year does not make the loss smaller. It makes the claim checkable, and a claim that can be checked carries a weight a mood cannot.

Here is the same fact written twice. Without a baseline: "The flat used to be full of birds." With one: "In 1994 I counted an average of three hundred and forty waders across four spring visits to the flat. Last spring the average across the same four visits was sixty one." The second version cannot be waved off as nostalgia, because it names exactly what would have to be true, and checkable by anyone holding the same notebook and walking the same four visits, for the sentence to be wrong.

What an unstated baseline is actually doing

Every generation inherits a landscape already reduced from the one before it, and calls that reduced state normal, because it is the only state they personally measured against. A writer who never states a baseline year is not simply describing decline. They are reporting their own arrival as though it were the world's beginning, and asking a reader to grieve a fullness that reader never saw and that the writer has quietly presented as an unspoiled prior state it may never have been.

I think writers avoid stating a baseline for a reason less generous than taste. An unstated baseline cannot be wrong. The moment I write 1994 and three hundred and forty, I have made a claim a specialist could dispute, a fact someone with an earlier notebook could correct me on. Vague decline protects the writer from correction the way vague grief protects a mourner from being asked exactly what was lost. I no longer think that protection is worth keeping.

The honest objection

You could say a baseline date makes the writing colder, that grief does not need a table of counts, and that turning a marsh's silence into two numbers strips out the feeling that made a reader care in the first place. I take this seriously, because I have cut baseline sentences from my own chapters for exactly this reason, worried the count on the page was doing work an image should have done instead. But I think the objection mistakes what the date is for. It is not a replacement for the image. It is the fact the image is allowed to rest on. My strongest chapter about that coast keeps both in the same paragraph: the two count sentences above, and a single image of my daughter walking the flat last spring, asking where the noise had gone, a noise she had never actually heard, because she was born in 2019, well after the numbers had already fallen. The image needs the date to mean anything specific to this flat, in this decade. Without it, "where did the noise go" could be asked about any coastline, by anyone, about nothing in particular.

What this costs and what it buys

Stating a baseline costs a writer the easy universality of unmeasured loss. Readers who want to feel a general grief about nature, unattached to a place or a decade, will find a dated count less immediately moving than an unanchored lament, and I have had editors ask me to cut the numbers for exactly that reason. I have refused, because the alternative is writing that could be about anywhere, set in no particular year, correctable by no one, which is not a small cost. It is the difference between an elegy and a report, and I think a report a reader can check is worth more, over the life of a book, than an elegy nobody can argue with because it never said anything specific enough to argue against.

What a reader owed the truest possible account of a disappearing place is owed is not atmosphere. They are owed a year, a number, and the difference between them, and only then everything else the writing wants to say about how that difference felt to watch happen, one spring at a time, in a notebook that has to survive long enough to be checked.

A place that is disappearing does not stop being specific just because it is going. If anything it asks for more precision than a place that will still be there next spring to check your account against. Write the year down. It is the only part of the record that will still be verifiable after the count itself has become someone's memory of a coast that used to hold more.