Investigating our roots

After leaving Almelo, we took a weekend detour through Friesland before going back to work on Monday. Yes, for those of my readers who know the word friesian, I do mean that Friesland. For those who don't, Friesland is one of the northern most provinces of the Netherlands.

It has a unique personality because it's the one Dutch province that the Romans didn't conquer when Julius Caesar came up the Rhine in whatever year B.C.E.   Friesland is also the province that has been most reclaimed from the sea. Canals are more popular than roads, boats and bikes than cars, and every house and field backs up to a waterway.

 

Pulling up to Kees and Rie's backyard.  This once was the
location of a WWII farmhouse.  Then it became a thriving boat
 building business.  There is a road out front, but the canal out back is bigger.

 

The Friesian people are proud of their differences and very proud to be Friesian.  The average Dutchman is inclined to roll his eyes if you mention Friesland to him because they've all had a taste of Friesian pride, and they're none of them inclined to think it warranted.  Still, after seeing a glimpse of Friesland, I have to think that the Friesians are uniquely privileged to live where they do and uniquely gifted to have pulled it off. 

 

Those "triangular white things" as seen from far off.

Driving through Friesland is a peculiar feeling because the land is so flat. I didn't realize at first that I wasn't just looking at fields of green grass with cows and sheep peacefully grazing.  There was something wrong with the landscape, and it took me a while to spot it.  "What on earth," I thought "are those white triangular things in the fields?"  Then I saw the bridge in front of us lift up and one of the strange triangular objects glide underneath it, and the reality hit me.  Those were boats, specifically pleasure craft sailing on the canals on a fine summer Saturday.  The canals were that close to the road and cut right down the middle of the fields. 

We spent the weekend with Kees and Rie, Seth's great-uncle and aunt.  Specifically, Rie is Beppe's younger sister.  In their younger days, Kees and Rie operated De Horse Watersports, a homebuilt boat building and rental operation.  Nowadays, they purse their various hobbies (Kees -- the stockmarket and philosophy, Rie -- quilting and gardening), dote on their grandchildren, and show American relatives the special places of their Friesian roots. 

Uncle Kees ("Case") and Aunt Rie ("Ree") catching me in the
act of snapping their picture. 

 

The church in Toppenhuizen.

The afternoon that we got there, Rie took us to see the old churches of Toppenhuizen and Oppenhuizen where generations of Atsmas and Wijnijas are buried (I looked for Roordas or Beibors but in vain.  I did, however, find a lot of names I knew of no relation.  Look for them in a later post.) .  These churches have all the old accoutrements: wooden benches, raised Scripture podiums, liturgical drapings, and Christ candles, but they are in no way out of date.  The fellowship hall in Oppenhuizen has a computer on wheels and was preparing for a gathering with a sister congregation from (Eastern) Germany, and as Rie told us, they have a female minister.  Still, the churches are old and in the process of being restored as historical objects.  The Toppenhuizen church was built in 1695, a time when Dutch Reformed Christianity was not yet a settled business. 

 

Boogaloo finds her favorite animal on the foot of the preaching podium. 

 

The organ in the church at Oppenhuizen.  Seth has a fondness for
large organs. 

Rie was surprised that the CRC churches in the
States no longer use the liturgical drapings or podiums.

 

The next day, Kees and Rie took us out on one of Kees's boats.  Being a boat builder, he has two operational boats and a couple of others lying around. Just behind his house is the harbor that he built on land that he purchased from the government.  The number of boats in it testify to the necessity of water transportation around here. 

A view of the canals heading under the main highway.

The canals themselves are much bigger than I expected.  I was expecting something about ten feet across, something akin to the irrigation canals I had known growing up in the Yakima Valley or the waterways I had seen in Eindhoven.  No, the canals in Friesland are like major rivers.  They support industrial shipping and major transportation.  You'd never know that they are a manmade feature to look at them because they bend and curve just like rivers, and the edges are rough and natural, largely unmarked and seemingly unfortified.

 Water in Friesland is an acknowledged part of daily life.  Children learn to operate boats from the age of six or seven, and the water has its own edicate.  At the revolving bridges, boaters have the right of way, and road traffic waits for the boats to pass by.  In some places, the road has died away, but the bridge still stands open on the canal, like an disused railroad crossing or a superwhammadine lawn ornament.



A Friesian youngster operates his or her first solo boat. 

A disused rotating bridge from a road that no longer exists.
 Notice that the bridge is still painted.  Friesians keep their backyards neat. 

Boogaloo gets her Friesian on.  Kees showed her how to toss the
float outand pull it back.  She thought it was great.  On a side note,
we discovered that Boogaloo is the fifth girl to be named after Beppe.
Beppe also has three nieces and a granddaughter named for her.   



What you are looking at, behind my husband, is a dike. 
Behind that, where the cows are, is a polder. 

  

 I spent the first fifteen minutes of the boat ride looking for a glimpse of the famous dikes and polders before I realized that the dikes are that slight swell of land on the edge of the field and the polders are everything in between. As Seth commented, it can really give you a turn to realize that the land on the inside of the dike is about six inches lower than the water on the outside because when you're out here, you realize that the dikes don't enclose the water.  They enclose the land and keep the water out.    

 

The water is beautiful, but after an hour on the canals,
 Boo decided she was ready to be back on land.