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essays | places
Netherlands
attuned to the sea
Flat as bread that country. As though the sea was its jam. A nation born to birth seafarers. And on the other side of the dams, everyone’s a bikefarer. Some 18 million people pedaling to escape the emission-fueled rise of sea levels. Or to stay healthy or real or whatever. I like that, and I like them. They got cheese going for them too. And I trust people who understand cheese, and maybe only those. Still a traveling people, they speak good English, which is honey in my ears compared to Dutch, which is whatever comes out when you throw German, English, Yiddish, and a racoon in a blender. No offense. Just a fact. What else? Oh yeah, almost forgot – guess that’s one of the side effects of weed. The Dutch are the world’s marijuana vanguard and with the head start they had on decriminalized consumption, one might think that they bleed weed (if one were to be tripping on an outta space cake). Can’t really go wrong if you go to a country that puts the sea and the weed in seaweed (which they could tone down a little along those shorelines).
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places / stories
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Amsterdam / Red Lights and Bright Nights
My first boyish memory of Amsterdam seems inevitable: my parents, in their goofy, touristy innocence, had led my sister and me straight into the infamous red-light district where a rainbow-variety of women in very honest lingerie sat in shop windows to varnish my sprawling imagination with naked realities. I was just old enough to understand the meaning behind the accelerated steps and silences that guided us around the nearest corner. Many years later I passed by there again, again accidentally, and I have to cut my parents some slack: sitting in the absolute, innermost, atomic core of the city, you can only miss it by keen design.
Common ground connects people across borders. And surfing the same wavelength with somebody means being in sync not only with their ups but also their downs. Hanging out with Simone is verbal delousing, a two-way therapy. Listen, counsel, switch, talk, absorb, repeat. That’s how I met her – when she helped me climb out of some black hole in Greece. I've known her for years, but what are years when you've lived decades? No, our friendship is young, but all grown up. Some people know you better after a day than others after a lifetime.
Caught alone in-between two years, the New Year’s crowds washed over me while I stood anchored to my tripod for as long as the aperture would gawk openmouthedly at the scene ahead. It was then, in that dramatic moment when the old year died in childbirth and the baby year cried with rocket-thunder that absolutely nothing happened in the universe at large. Just one more turn completed somewhere, 365 days of dancing around some sun that wasn’t there for the party. But down here, everything was as old as it was new in that one unblemished instant before the young year started composting the old.
Amsterdam caught a weak start into the night, riddled with clouds and rains, but rose to the occasion before midnight’s zenith and proved to be a loud, euphoric theater, full of spectacular little collisions worthy of all the champagne or at the very least all the Amstel. An hour later I was at the airport to divide this day into two sub-days with the sequel set in Poland.
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Zeeland / Time Isn’t Coming Back
I have always been attuned to the severity of northern beaches. The tense blue-black darkness of the Atlantic skin must be an answer to something. When the high tide pulls it over the amber shores until they yield into the shrubby foredunes, the beachgrass camping out there looks all perplexed, but trust me, it is in on it. And it knows this too: none of those tropical flirts with their aquamarine tongues, licking vanilla beaches all day long and fooling around with clown corals in the shallows, can convey the consequential and uncontrollable feeling of being an ocean. Rough and tremendous, the northern ocean frontier is infinitely more final and does not waste a single molecule on kindness or trifles.
The brick-towns behind the dams are much warmer and more sociable and look at you with googly bay windows. On rainy days they look like they are napping. I have seen them with the eyes of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and never once have they led on a change of mood.
Running my senses over these landscapes to measure them vaguely against my memories, satisfaction settled where the eloquence of my recollections and the refined expectations in tow had set me up for disappoint, disenchantment, and disillusion. Time had left everything in its right place when it moved on, and it didn’t look like it would be back anytime soon to make changes. The wooden breakwaters – marching into the tide in undefeated twin lines – still wore the same tattered coat, crusted with seashells and slick with seaweed, an ambivalent texture you could feel on your eyeballs; the musty Atlantic fragrance lingered; the sea buckthorns were still twitching to the tickle of their turbulent and merry berries; the brick still had that same orange glow as though it had left the kiln just moments ago; and even the bitter winds had not moved past our old arguments and I was still perfectly annoyed with them too. The forests welcomed me back with open branches and, as always, they rolled out a sandy carpet they had borrowed from the dunes next door. I liked them much better than their depressed hinterland cousins. Coming in from the other side of life with adulthood’s monocle tightly fastened to my eye’s orbit, and seeing all unchanged, betrayed the palindromic nature of this little place by the little sea.
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elsewhere
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