I arrived just after ten, when the sun had shaken off its early haze but the air still felt cool against my face. The village was almost silent, the station already behind me after the short walk past shuttered cafés and sleepy gardens. The path into the pines began without ceremony at the edge of a housing estate, a thin ribbon of sand slipping into shade. One moment I was in Berlin’s orbit, the next I was stepping into a soft, resin-scented hush.
The first thing I always notice here is the sound, or rather how thinly it’s spread. Pine cones crack and shift under my shoes, a quiet, irregular rhythm that seems louder only because there’s so little else. Birds call from somewhere high above, hidden in the lattice of branches, their notes catching and drifting away. The wind threads itself through the needles with a soft, dry whisper, and beneath it all there’s the faint, steady wash of the sea, as if the whole forest is breathing in time with it.
The light falls in long, slow columns, catching dust and pollen in the air so that the space between trees looks almost solid. It is one of those uncomplicatedly beautiful days that would pack any Berlin park to the edges, yet here the paths are empty. Every so often I hear a bicycle pass on the lane nearer the water, or see a lone figure in the distance, but mostly it is just me and the pines. The absence of people feels less like loneliness and more like a gift someone forgot to wrap.
This is my third visit in less than a year, and I realised on the train up that I never even considered going anywhere else. The journey is just long enough to feel like an intentional departure, just short enough to be folded into a single day. Each time I come, the city seems to loosen its grip a little as soon as I see the first glimpse of water through the trunks. By the time I reach the beach, the emails and delays and crowded platforms have thinned to background noise, no more pressing than the distant gulls.
On the way back to the station, I catch myself walking more slowly than I need to, as if speed might wake the place up and draw attention to it. Part of me wants to bring friends here, to share this strange, easy quiet, but another part hopes it stays awkward to reach and slightly overlooked on the map. For now it feels like a small, borrowed corner of the coast that Berlin hasn’t quite noticed yet, and I’m in no hurry to correct that.
daily musings 