Letter from Amsterdam

By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor

Dear Leelanau,

I’m sad to be leaving Amsterdam. Not just because I love my niece and her family and they live here, but because Amsterdam is one of the best places in the world.

People are happy here. You only need to walk down the street to feel it. On an overcast winter day with intermittent rain, the buskers in the center of town are playing great music while all around them people are laughing and talking and strolling with their families. You’d think the sun was out.

There are hot French fries for sale and cookies and coffee, as well as vast food markets, like multiple kitchens in a great castle, with steaming kettles of soup, roasting meats, fried fish, boiled lobster, endless vegetables, all kinds of salads, many desserts. The streets are immaculate. There are flower markets on every corner and one whole side of the Singel Canal, is nothing but flowers. It’s winter, but the flowers are inside sturdy little houseboat greenhouses. Carved into the stone lintel above a door to a bank are the words, “Trust is the basis of a good relationship.”

The egalitarianism in Amsterdam is real, an unquestioned sense in every interaction that everyone is different but equal: men and women, rich and poor, old and young, dark and light. In every transaction, from asking directions, to buying a book, to sitting down on the tram, there’s an openness and respect. The feeling on the streets reminds me of San Francisco because of the way people make eye contact, smile, and nod hello. It’s a place where it’s easy to imagine what Traverse City could become.

The Netherlands has good government. There’s universal health care and free education. A person can obtain the highest education level possible based on his interest and ability. Everyone works to capacity. You don’t see homeless people on the street.

It’s no accident that the Dutch are the tallest people on the planet, with men typically being about 6 feet 2 inches and women being about 5 feet 8 inches. My niece is 5 foot 10 and her husband is 6 foot 8. You might think it’s simple genetics, but it’s not: the Dutch were the same height as everyone else 150 years ago.

People in Holland started to get taller about the same time the nation formally codified a liberal democracy, according to J. W. Drukker, a professor of economic history at the University of Groningen, when the government gave every citizen access to the rule of law, individual civil liberties, free health care and free education.

Holland doesn’t have an unblemished past. Although there were many Dutch citizens who protected and hid their Jewish neighbors in the 1940s, most famously Meip Geis portrayed in “the Diary of Anne”, there were also those who collaborated with the Nazis. The Dutch were involved in the Atlantic slave trade, but they outlawed it 50 years ahead of the United States. They let go of their Indonesian and African colonies after the Second World War. Holland is a democracy and so things are discussed and people try to work through the issues.

One of the country’s top priorities is providing for the nation’s children and they have excellent post and pre-natal care and low infant mortality. My niece had a home health care nurse visit her while she was pregnant and after the baby was born. She had six months leave from her job. Everyone receives this kind of care.

When I was going to school in Glen Arbor, at the building that would became the Old School Hardware Store and is now the Glen Arbor Athletic Club, we studied Holland and learned that the Dutch were famous for tulips, windmills, wooden shoes and building dykes to reclaim land from the sea. Those things are true, but what I learned more recently is that the Dutch figured out, long before most countries, that a rising tide lifts all boats and everyone is better off when everyone is better off. They have one of the world’s highest living standards and one of the longest life expectancy rates.

There are bicycles everywhere in Amsterdam and the city has a system whereby you can leave one/take one. You buy a code for the lock and you can leave your bike for the next person, who also has a code. Later, if you need a bike somewhere else, you can do the same thing. This saves trying to haul your bike into your apartment or figuring out what to do with it when you’re at work.

The Dutch are famously sensible. They have legalized soft drugs, like marijuana and alcohol, but restricted the use to certain areas; and the same with prostitution. This way they can control the negative aspects for health and safety and they avoid the creation of an underground market which is harder to see, harder to control, and more dangerous.

Holland is a tiny country, one-fifth the size of Michigan. It is called the “lowlands” because 25 percent of the land is below sea level. To try to imagine what this looks like, picture the geographical area from Lansing, Michigan south to the Indiana border. Now picture 167 rivers crisscrossing this, plus thousands of canals. Michigan has a lot of surface area that’s water, but Holland, acre for acre, has a lot more.

The Dutch were among the first people to reclaim land from the sea; now they’re among the first to return it. The salt marshes and mud flats are important to prevent flooding along the edges of the North Sea. Building dykes to create farmland was a good idea until, with new and better information, it wasn’t; and so they changed.

Six thousand years ago the population along the North Sea was sparse. The area was tundra, barely thawed. Three thousand years ago people were living in long, low, windowless, grass huts that looked like an Iroquois long house with a low door you had to crawl through and a smoke hole at one end, but instead of being made of birch bark, they were made of thatch. So how did the Dutch get from there to where they are now?

It appears to have been a gradual process. A few hundred years ago when other countries were trying to deal with the Spanish Inquisition, the Dutch started inviting the immigrants and refugees, including Jewish merchants from Portugal and English Dissenters, to come to Holland. Just like America’s policy of encouraging immigration, the got the best and the brightest.

We often forget that the Dutch were in the New World before the English. The Dutch system of laws and protection of individual rights — the humanism that was formulated by the 16th century religious scholar, Erasmus — became part of the culture in America, too. That’s one of the reasons Holland today feels so comfortable to an American: a lot of what the Dutch brought to the New World became the foundation for our own democracy.

Other than my niece and her family, the only person of Dutch extraction I’ve ever known was my neighbor in Lake Leelanau, Anneke Wegman. Her father immigrated to Canada after the Second World War and she came from there to Michigan. Her mother’s family had lived in Haarlem, about 30 miles from Amsterdam, and had a seed and bulb warehouse on a canal. The family had been there 400 years when the Nazis came to Haarlem and blew up both the warehouse and the bridge. The warehouse and bridge were in a strategic location.

Haarlem was a wealthy trading center for a thousand years. There are still some huge mansions in a forested area close to the North Sea. In the fog and rain and blue-gray Vermeer light, my niece’s husband points out the thatched roofs on some of the large, gabled homes and says that thatched roofs are the latest fashion and are very expensive because few people know how to make them and it’s difficult, dangerous work.

Thatched roofs, which bear an uncanny resemblance to the old, low grass houses from 3,000 years earlier on the edge of the North Sea, fell from favor because they were a fire hazard and have only recently come back because people find there is quaint charm in a thatched roof. Thatched roofs have to be replaced regularly. My niece’s husband said his grandfather had been a thatcher, a highly skilled trade that was traditionally passed from father to son. It went out of style, as those things do. He jokes that if his father had learned the trade, and if he had learned it from his father, he could be making a handsome living in Haarlem as a thatcher.

The North Sea has a wild and gray look, fierce and dangerous, like Lake Superior. Between the town of Haarlem and the North Sea, there are low dunes, like those in Glen Haven where we have our family reunions. The wind is blowing. Not hard, just in that constant way that you get near a large body of water, especially in the winter.

The morning I leave Amsterdam I get up at 4 a.m., moving carefully and quietly so as to not disturb my already sleep-deprived hosts and their new baby. Later my niece will tell me she woke up and saw me from the window, down on the curb. She waved, but I never looked up.

It’s raining lightly, almost snowing, as I wait for the taxi that will take me to the airport. A duck in the canal is happily floating on the slight current. Ducks like fog and cold rain. Or at least, I’m guessing they do. There are few people out at this hour: once a car; another time a man on his bicycle, peddling madly, perhaps on his way to work. Just before I get into the taxi I say hello to a family of four out for a bike ride: a mother, a father, a little girl and a little boy, all on their bicycles; clearly it’s a recreational outing, but at 4 in the morning? In the rain? Yes, but only in Holland.

Kathleen Stocking is author of the acclaimed book, Letters from the Leelanau (University of Michigan Press, 1990). Her Letter from Romania, Letter from London, and Letter from Istanbul appeared earlier this summer in the Glen Arbor Sun.