NETHERLANDS, CONT.

Like everything in Holland, those flowers by the zillion came down to the lay of the land. We were taught that the Netherlands in general, and Holland in particular, belong by nature beneath the sea. We learned that on a map of any other country, the dozens of thin lines that run parallel to and crisscross one another would be streets and roads, going from town to city through the countryside.

This was a trip to the real down under --- the sea at least --- where we learned about things that were very old, very new and contrary, topsy turvy as through a looking glass. There were both antique and modern windmills, looking down on waterways which in turn look down on homes, yards and gardens. We saw skinny houses, some of them tilted beneath ornamented gables that are stepped like stairs toward the sky.

Very tall and thin, athletic-looking people ride bikes in business suits, pedaling to and from work, with twice as many bikes as there are cars.

We learned too that the Dutch eat chocolate for breakfast.

While we slept that first night, the River Navigator, the Vantage Deluxe World Travel cruise ship we traveled on, silently carried us from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, where we docked on the River Lek beneath the red-lit Willems Bridge in the industrial sector that makes up the largest port in the world.

That first morning, impatient to begin exploring, my American-bred logic went overboard when, map in hand, I approached a ship’s officer and asked if we had traveled “this route here,” tracing an index finger over the North Sea.

His initial shock melted to a patronizing smile, and hand upon my shoulder, he said: “Dis wessel iz not build for da Nord Zee!”.

Tracing the ship’s night-time path down a thin canal line on the map, index finger going right, then down, then left, he added cheerily, “Velcome to Holland!”.

Perplexed as I was that first day, the oddities and contradictions of Holland kept piling up. With 16 million people, it’s a country heavily populated, yet seemingly uncrowded, with water everywhere, but channeled so neatly there is hardly a puddle to step in. We saw a land that has been totally engineered, its beauty, tranquillity and industriousness governed by walls of dikes, locks, canals, and big storm barriers. Huge pumps, now computerized, measure the tides and strong surges. They keep away the ever-menacing North Sea from the Theme Park clean countryside, so tidy that even garages have lace curtains. In what other nation would the foremost governmental agency be --- not Parliament, not the royal palace --- but the national Water Control Board?

Ask anyone what are their main reasons for visiting Holland and the answer, most likely, would be “to see tulips, windmills and wooden shoes.” They are its quaint fixtures. You see them in medieval like cities, with twisting canals and cobblestoned streets. Conversely, the fields of Holland are careful rectangles, each divided by laser-straight drainage canals sucking off just enough excess water to allow all those beautiful things to grow.

Like tulips, which aren’t supposed to be there.

Learning that tulips are not native to the tidal flats of the Netherlands, but would rather grow in the snowy mountains of central Asia, is like finding out that Santa Claus is from the Fiji Islands. A botanist named Carolus Clusius brought tulips to Holland in 1593. He grew them and hoarded them, refusing to sell or give any away. It took a burglary to satisfy the Dutch instinct for horticulture and big business. Today, the Dutch-bred flower power is represented by three billion tulip bulbs a year, with $750 million worth of exports, with $130 million of them going to the U.S. alone. Aalsmeer’s flower auction on Monday morning, San Francisco flower shops the next day.

In retrospect, we saw our first tulip in Holland most probably the day we arrived at Schiphol Airport outside Amsterdam. The flowers are ubiquitous, seen everywhere, but we encountered our first bulb field while riding in our bus through Friesland in the north. It is a scene that arouses and fascinates, pleasing the eye beyond measure.

We came upon Amsterdam’s famed floating Bloemenmarkt (Flower Market) in a dark-of-night canal cruise, and having to look up, caught glimpses of illuminated flowers poking from their beds (they leave the light on). It prompted a daylight visit, which captures an essence of Amsterdam that has continued for centuries, row upon row of tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, lilies, gladioli, narcissi. The market is only a few blocks from the old city’s Red Light District. We floated past that too, likewise catching glimpses of shadowy figures in windows, illuminated by real red lights. Even at night, it was easy to see that the architecture --- thin Gothic buildings --- has more class than the clientele.

Looking back, the vacation in Holland appears to the mind’s retrospective eye to have been bright and cheerful. The truth is that the trip in early April coincided with some unseasonably cool and damp times, but stopped way short of gloom. The people we met appeared serious and businesslike, but most harbor an inner glow that’s not hard to tap. It occurred to me that if the Dutch can’t perceive sunlight for real, they manufacture it in their flower beds. Thus, Keukenhof, the big, public gardens in the heart of the bulb fields of Leiden and Haarlem, exploded before our eyes, even in the midst of such dampness. You can’t count them, but accept the bulb growers’ version that there are seven million flowers at any one time in Keukenhof, growing here and there, beneath towering oaks, besides still ponds with swans swimming in them, along well-marked gravel paths, beside coifed green hedges, and in invitingly warm hothouses.

Off to one side of a flower display there was a gray-haired small man chiseling out wooden shoes from white blocks of smooth willow, a tree producing soft wood when first cut, then hardening when dry. Though our guidebooks told us the durable shoes are worn regularly by factory workers and farmers, I thought I would never see them afoot and actually walked in.

Then, while standing outside the Eise Eisinga Planetarium in Franeker one day, a “clip clop” sound turned my head. Coming down the street was a ruddy-faced middle-aged man in overalls, clearly a farmer. He appeared self-conscious as I stared open-mouthed at the yellow wooden clogs he wore.

Within an hour I saw one more man in wooden shoes. These were painted a dark black enamel, patterned with a floral design. The man, in his 20s, wore a dark suit and carried an umbrella, with the footwear being no doubt a fashion statement. That’s the last I saw of Dutchmen wearing wooden shoes.

The windmills were easier to find. Though ancient and largely ornamental now, the Dutch revere them as landmark reminders of how their peculiar country was claimed from the sea.

Odd contraptions whose latticed stubby fingers can dominate the skyline, they showed up in our travels every day, even though they may exist in greater number in the landscape paintings of Rembrandt and other Dutch Masters that we saw in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. But one memorable day, our guide took us to Kinderdijk, a village southeast of Rotterdam. There, in a row stretching three kilometers, were 18 windmills erected about 1740. To get there, the two-lane highway rides atop a dike, slicing through little towns where you look down on the roofs of houses, the same view seen by storks, who had nests atop tall man-made towers in several back yards.

Kinderdijk (Children’s Dike) was named from a legend: An infant, along with a kitten, was found in a basket floating near where a single dike had held fast during a storm in the 16th Century. True or false doesn’t matter. It’s an inspiring little tale of hope and determination that characterizes the Dutch.

A modern-day version of striving against the odds we heard about in the town of Giethoorn, which translates to “Goat Horn”, so named because of the hundreds of wild goat horns found buried in the wet soil after the land had been reclaimed from the sea.

Founded in 1235, it’s now a declining farming community; its small homes with tended lawns and flower gardens could be suburban America, with a difference. Automobiles are kept parked in one corner of town. Giethoorn’s streets, lanes and cul de sacs are canals. As our motorboat glided past single homes, groceries, restaurants and beer gardens, our amiable guide named Herman recalled a tearful boyhood incident:

“My fadder puts me in charch ov twelf pigs to take vrom our farm to odder end ‘a town. By da time I got da boat to vere ve vanted to go, dere vas only von pig left. De odders had yumped owerboard!”

The up side of Herman’s tale is that, luckily for him, pigs can swim.

Besides that character-building event, Herman recalled swimming in the many shallow lakes in summer and ice skating in winter --- sometimes in a race a hundred miles long, an annually scheduled event that usually attracts skaters from all over Holland. Whether global warming is a factor, it is sad that the thousands of miles of waterways in the Netherlands have not frozen to a safe depth in recent years, thus canceling the race.

Holland’s spider web canal and river system conjures many visions --- of skating, of commerce, of roads, of drainage for agriculture, particularly those flower bulbs. But one image of Holland endures for me. I saw it many times --- a canal barge laden to its gunwales with either ore, coal, or fertilizer, headed slowly up or down stream. A little cabin sits at the stern end and outside, a woman hangs wash on a line. A small sedan sits on deck, as do a couple of bicycles. Some children’s toys are scattered about the deck. I saw it many times, in Amsterdam, the smaller villages, and in Rotterdam, the huge port. And almost always, without fail, in the tiny porthole of the cabin, a lace curtain barely hiding a vase of daffodils or tulips. Just another Dutch style Home Sweet Home!.

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