Illusions

In July 2010 I spent the night in a ship's cabin that made me think of a hobbit house. It had the same round windows. It was on board the Stena Hollandica in which I sailed from Harwich to Hoek van Holland. It was a cabin right under the bridge, looking forward to the prow. I woke up just after five in the morning when the sun began to rise. It looked like the day would be rainy, as the clouds overhead were traveling east like us, towards the narrow brightening line of the Dutch coast. The Maasvlakte was barely recognizable from a wisp of smoke.

Imagine you embarked in Harwich full of expectations after flying to London from some backwater in the USA. Your head filled with the idea that Holland is a country of flowers, particularly tulips, of green fields with a variety of cattle, of low skies painted by Roelofs or Weissenbruch, and of seventeenth century windmills, inhabited by people walking on wooden shoes and an idiot sticking his finger in the dyke saving the country from a disastrous flood. There still is a fair amount of people in the States that share these illusions, like the roughly thirty million loonies that believe Judgement Day is imminent.

Such a traveler will see how the plume of smoke on the horizon grows and finally arrives in Hoek of Holland, where he is greeted by a mass of horrendously looking modern windmills in a cloud of polluted air. After landing he has to travel by car through the Botlek with its ugly chemical industry and oil refineries or he has to set off in a train without toilets for Rotterdam which looks like a gigantic building site inhabited by ill-mannered cutthroats. To avoid a culture shock it's probably preferable to believe in that other nonsense story going about the USA telling people that you'll find someone selling dope on every Dutch street corner and that you'll see almost naked girls eager to have sex with you behind every window.

I disembarked in the rain, took the train, changed trains at the everlasting building site and observed, as we crossed the railway bridge over the Oude Maas, how the tower of Dordrecht cathedral dominated the view with an imperious dignity. Another illusion I thought.

©C.A. Klok