Noise2Signal

I’m writing this under a tree in the Noord-Hollands town of Onderdijk, watching the late afternoon sun and listening to the waves of the IJsselmeer break behind me. Today’s ride was shorter than the last two—63 kilometers—but it contained the stretch I was most concerned about: the Afsluitdijk.

Also, I was late getting started. Yesterday evening, I overheard someone giving directions using the Catholic church as a waypoint. I was surprised to hear there was one in Makkum; I’d looked on the web, but seen nothing nearer than Bolsward, which was too far out of my way to attend. (Let’s just say that the Dutch Catholic church isn’t very internet-savvy.) But there it was: the church of the Blessed Titus Brandsma, the Netherlands’ own Holocaust martyr. And the sign on the door said there was a service at 9:30 every Sunday. So in the morning, I went.

It was a communion service run by a deacon rather than a mass led by a priest. It was practically deserted; there were maybe ten people plus the fifteen-strong choir. The deacon himself turned out to also be a choir member, so the service was full of music, all sung-with rather than listened-to. Well, except for the bit at the end of the sermon when he moved smoothly from speaking to singing, and made it the most natural thing in the world.

The sermon was mostly about a city in the Philippines that he visited a few years ago, and to which he now sends all the lightly-used and unused school supplies he can lay his hands on. It was a heartfelt and effective version of the standard “here’s my cause; please give at the door” sermon. Even if it hadn’t tied in so strongly to my thoughts about wealth and its uses, I would have been touched.

After the service, I checked out of the hotel and got on Grace. My first destination was the Afsluitdijk, the 32-kilometer earthwork that closes off the mouth of the IJsselmeer. There are great 1930’s sluizen, sluices, on either side of it, each flanked by its own small drawbridge and lock system for boats. I crossed the eastern bridge just as the booms were about to come down, cutting it fine enough that the lock-keeper wagged his finger at me in (mostly) mock censure. I’m afraid I grinned ruefully rather than being truly chastened.

Then the dike. I’d built it up in my head as some kind of great obstacle; it’s one of the reasons I chose a hotel only 60-plus kilometers from Makkum for tonight. And to be fair, had the wind been in my face, or the rain fallen, it could have been a very difficult stretch, because there is no shelter at all. Just IJsselmeer, road, bike path, dike. Today, however, the sun was playing with the wispy clouds and the wind was at my back. I started relatively slowly, stopping to take a panoramic photo from the dike top. But at the halfway point, I realized that if I pushed just a little, I could make the entire length in an hour. I would have managed it, too, had there not been a statue of Cornelis Lely to take a picture of just before the end. So I missed by a minute.

Still, 61 minutes across the Afsluitdijk on a city bike, in a skirt, for a basically non-serious cyclist, isn’t too bad. And I still had attention to spare for the variety of wildflowers that grow in the dike beside the road, for the pale yellow butterflies that darted across my path, for the flocks of starlings that settle in the grass only to fly up, startled, whenever a cyclist comes by. I still had energy to laugh with sheer joy at the immediacy and pervasiveness of nature, taking over our serious, planned works with its unthinking, directionless force. It’s not even that nature itself is joyous; there was a dead rabbit on the bike path at the end of the dike, a memento mori if ever I have seen one. But still, I was joyful. Might have been the endorphins.

I celebrated by going to the fish stand just onshore and buying a broodje haring met uien, raw herring on a roll topped with chopped onions. I’ve developed a taste for it over the last few years, which makes me unusual for a foreigner. As I was walking away from the stand, the vendors were marveling at the Engelse vrouw die haring wil eten. (I ordered in Dutch, but my accent is hard to miss.)

The ride down the coast from the Afsluitdijk was both like and unlike Flevoland. The northern chunk of Noord-Holland was reclaimed earlier than the new province, but it was created as part of the same project. You can tell when you look on the map, because it has the same long, straight roads, widely spaced, and the same blocky feel to the land. But it’s got more trees, and the buildings are older and distinctly Noord-Hollands in shape and structure. It felt to me, having lived in Noord-Holland for eight years now, surprisingly like home.

(The area was also the site of one of the more serious pieces of ecological vandalism during the war, when the retreating Germans blew the dikes and flooded the new-drained land. There are still signs and monuments about it around the area: what happened, which pumping stations moved how much water to remedy it, what was lost.)

The new bit of Noord-Holland ends at Medemblik, a charming (but possibly overly self-conscious) little town. In addition to the brick buildings, the cafés, the brick fort, and the bus museum, Medmblik is the northern end of a little steam railway. I arrived in time to watch the engineers (one of whom looked startlingly like David Tennant) fill the tank with water, stoke the coal, fire up the boiler, and at last send the little train full of tourists on their way. It was all rather adorable.

Then I went further south and found my hotel, which was not, on first impression, adorable. My room is small and in a dark corridor. It’s not frightening or anything, but it was incentive enough to go find a tree to sit under and draft this instead.

I can’t say, looking back on the day, that I had any connected thoughts about wealth (at least not after the service). Although there’s still more traveling to do on the bike trip, the fietstocht, it feels to me like the first two days were a philosophical journey in themselves. Perhaps it’s returning to Noord-Holland, though I’ve never been this far north on a bike. Perhaps it’s just that I only had two days’ worth of thoughts on the issue before I have to start using what I have so far.

I seem to be asking myself a new question, or the same questions in a new way: what wealth do I have in this situation? where in it am I poor? Today my wealth was time, and I spent it watching the train. As for poverty, I’m not sure that I have any today. I don’t know what I could want for the moment that I do not have.

And I have two random thoughts, which don’t connect to any theme. The first is that I would not have enjoyed this trip nearly so much a few years ago, because my fears about my competence in the language would have put me off. But although my Dutch is still very far from perfect (or even good), I am now confident that I can make myself understood and understand what is said to me in reply. And the people I interact with pick that up; no one has spoken more than a few scattered words of English to me on this trip.

The second thought is that I said that I was going on this trip alone. That’s not true. Not only have I brought my friends and internet acquaintances with me on Twitter and through these blog posts, but I have also fallen in with a wonderful variety of people along the way. A better way to phrase the matter might be that I have gone on this trip without choosing my companions myself, but rather leaving their choice to fate.

A few useful links:

• The Long Ride: Day Zero
• The Long Ride: Day One
• The Long Ride: Day Two
• Flickr photoset of the trip, growing daily.
• Strava page of today’s ride
• My Twitter stream, with photos and tweets from the day.

Tonight my bike is parked in Makkum, a lovely tourist town in Friesland.

The day started well: a beautiful sunrise painting the skies as I got up, then a Dutch breakfast of bread, cheese, meats, and egg (a double-yoker, even! My first ever.). The hotel-keeper gave me a plastic bag and told me I should pack something for the road as well, a gift that made me think of a passage from The Left Hand of Darkness:

he had set out all the ready food he could find done up in a packet as fuel for my three days’ run. That kindness saved me, and also saved my courage, for whenever on the road I ate of that fruit and bread I thought, “There’s one man thinks me no traitor; for he gave me this.”

Not that anyone is calling me a traitor. But food can be flavored by the hands that give it, and he was kind to me.

I set out on the first leg: a 20-kilometer stretch between a sheep-mown dike and the IJsselmeer, all the way up from Urk to Lemmer. It was fascinating riding, because they’re tearing down old windmills and building new ones. I took several photos for my growing collection of Sheep & Windmills album covers.

Unfortunately, it’s also about the most isolated stretch of road I’ve been on. Virtually no one was cycling that way, and there’s nothing but a closed-off service road over the dike. Which is why, precisely in the middle, ten kilometers from the whole world, my back tire went suddenly and lethally flat.

Fine, I thought breezily. I have a repair kit, and I know (in theory) how to patch an inner tube without taking the wheel off (a necessary skill: getting the back wheel off of a Dutch bike is not a roadside job). I was still feeling my way through the process when a group of three men and two women, all looking to be in their sixties, pulled up. They were on their way to Lemmer, and I happen to have pulled over right by their coffee spot.

Two of the men looked kindly at my tentative fumbles and helpfully took over (not in an egoizing “sit over there, little lady” way, but in a respectful “here, let me do the bits you don’t seem to know” fashion). We found the two holes. They shook their heads over my tire repair kit—too old; the patches were degraded—and fished out a patch from their own. I did the glue, they slapped the patch on and reassembled inner tube and tire. Inflation, right the bike, repack, and…the tire was flat again.

I shrugged and told them it was time for the student to demonstrate her knowledge. They nodded, a little relieved, and sipped their coffee. I flipped the bike, exposed the patch, noticed it hadn’t taken on a couple of the edges. Added more adhesive, pressed it home, re-inflated, and…flat again.

They gave me the number of a bike shop in Lemmer that could send a car along the dike road, but I decided to give it one more try first. It’s not a mystery, after all. It’s just known substances, rubber and rubber cement, fixing a mechanical problem. I shook hands with my teachers, waved the party off, and sat down to apply their lessons in the meticulous style that I can only do alone. Rub off all the rubber cement. Sand. Smear inner tube and patch with rubber cement. Wait for it to dry entirely. Press patch home, hold. Check, check, double check. Then reassemble the back tire, flip the bike, repack it. Check again before riding off.

I was sure the tire was losing air for the first few kilometers. I stopped and repumped it, thinking I could limp to Lemmer with a slow leak. But then, whether because riding improved the adhesion or because it was OK the whole time, it held. I passed my benefactors on their second coffee break, and called my thanks to them as they waved and gave me thumbs-ups.

Then I stopped at the bike shop in Lemmer and bought a new repair kit.

The entire episode completely failed to sink my spirits. Some of that is endorphins, but more of it is the kindness of the people who stopped. I was reminded of the St Christopher medal zip-tied to my bike, and the story that probably created him. Without a flood, without the danger to carry the child across, there is no saint. I begin to think his value is more in dealing with travel disasters than preventing them.

I had no further chances to find out after Lemmer. That was my gateway from Flevoland the much older province of Friesland. The difference between the provinces was immediately apparent in the absence of that sameness that I mentioned yesterday. There are no long stretches of unchanging road in Friesland. Nothing aligns to a grid. There are more trees and fewer windmills; more cattle and fewer sheep. Unfortunately, there are also long stretches where nothing runs along the coast, and I had to veer inland rather than sticking to the IJsselmeer. But inland was beautiful too, with actual (low) hills, cattle, and farm fields full of swallows in murmuration.

I saw oddities: a literal bridge to nowhere, designed so that the viewer can see over the dike in one particular spot. A wooden frame for photographing the landscape through like a postcard, opposite a strange openwork concrete tower. I ran into a local festival in Hindelopen, complete with women in traditional dress singing a haunting a capella piece in Frisian (also, a laundry rack hung with traditional underclothing). I outpaced a tractor for five kilometers before it came close enough to overtake me (very Rush). The day was hot and the wind sometimes against me, but I still made good time, arriving in Makkum at about 5:30. Particularly considering the lost hour in the morning, this is completely acceptable.

And what was I thinking about when I was riding? Wealth, of course; my mind continues to worry at it like a dog at a bone. Because it occurs to me that, despite all of my material and immaterial possessions, I don’t feel wealthy. My sufficiency is all but invisible, while a different kind of poverty grinds away at me: time- and attention-poverty. I never have enough of either to make my cognitive rent (work and family), pay my intellectual subscriptions, and have much left over for the pleasures of the mind. I make do with threadbare thoughts, the discount goods of skimmed reading, and the street-corner salvage of summaries whose details I haven’t the energy to pursue. Sometimes I salt away a few hours’ worth of original reading or a bike ride’s connected thinking as an investment for future dividends of insight. But mostly I live thought to thought, hoping no large intellectual bill will come due.

Then I got that flat tire, which (#irony!) interrupted that train of thought, probably for the best. Self-pity is not a good look on me.

Because the lesson of the flat tire, and of the gift sandwich I ate later in the day, is that people are sustainable wealth: kindly people, helpful people, inventive people. The pleasures of conversation and friendship are like the pleasures of acquisition and having, but they impoverish no one else, take up no more room in my crowded attic workspace, add no carbon to the atmosphere. They’re a context in which my children can grow up to be as wealthy as I am, if not more so.

I’ve kind of known this for a long time. When I say that the Netherlands is a wealthy country, what I mean is that the educational system is good, the physical infrastructure is created for the use of people (including the famous public art), and the society itself is rich in helpfulness. Despite companies’ attempts to do an end-run around them, the labor laws and the social safety net are a material contribution to the well-being of the people who live here. And the widespread acceptance of part-time working by both parents and the community mindfulness of everyone’s children are an investment for future dividends, both emotional and financial.

(By the way, this is why when a politician asserts that they are family-friendly, I look at their economic platform. Do they support moves that will make people feel more secure, or do they advocate policies that erode their financial, and thus emotional, stability? It’s harder for stressed, anxious people to be good parents and good partners.)

All of this is also another reason that our treatment—Europe’s and America’s—of our respective populations of refugees is so wrong. The death and suffering of these people impoverishes us all. And the irony is that, trying to hold onto our material prosperity, we forget that it’s the human wealth that endures and grows. The refugees on our borders are wealth, begging to enrich us in ways that will outlast money itself.

A few useful links:

• The Long Ride: Day Zero
• The Long Ride: Day One
• Flickr photoset of the trip, growing daily.
• Strava page of today’s ride
• My Twitter stream, with photos and tweets from the day.

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Urk, Flevoland, typing this.  I know the town name sounds like some kind of interjection, but if it were then the place would more accurately be called Aah, or perhaps Ooh.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

After seeing Fiona off to school (Alex was sick), I loaded my luggage onto Grace (my bike is named Grace. If you didn’t know before, well, now you do.)  I’m packed very light indeed: minimal clothing, lightweight tech, some food for the road, bike tools, towel, rain gear.  And then I did precisely what I said I’d do yesterday: rode toward work, and went straight where I’d otherwise have turned right.

That took me across the Noordhollandsch Kanaal, over the freeway, and along the narrow, cobbled Nieuwendammerdijk.  I crossed the IJ on the Zuiderzeewegbrug, which is the only bridge between Amsterdam and the IJsselmeer (everything else goes by ferry or tunnel.)  Much of the route is familiar to me from the Dam tot Dam walk that Martin and I do every year.  It was all somewhat hard going, because the wind was from the south. Mind you, that was a good thing, since that same wind would be at my back for the longer stretch through Flevoland.

But then things got easier; I turned east and rode through a series of parks and sheep fields toward the tiny town of Muiden.  Muiden is old.  It sits on the mouth of the river Vecht, and has only one single-lane bridge for all traffic that wants to cross it. I adore the place, but it’s kind of a pain.

After Muiden, I took the road that follows the coastal dike.  Like a lot of Dutch dike roads, it’s on the land side and below the top of the earthworks, so one has the sensation of riding beside a tall green slope, with no notion of the weight of the water on the other side.  To my right, the land spread out: peaceful fields and plump cattle basking in the late August sun.  I passed through Muiderberg and headed to the Hollandse Brug, the route to Flevoland.

Flevoland is the new province, built by filling in some of the old Zuiderzee.  It’s beautiful, but it’s also made up of very long, straight, unchanging stretches.  One can lose one’s self in the pursuit of the vanishing point.  I did, several times.  (This is good practice for Sunday, when I will be crossing the Afsluitdijk, the ultimate long, straight, unchanging stretch of bike path).

But no one told the plants or the sheep that they were part of a homogenous landscape.  The birds didn’t get the memo either.  Looking more closely, one sees the individual variety that combines into this illusion of simplicity: the way the birds gather here rather than there, the ragged clustering of the sheep, the surprising variance in the population of grass along the path, the way the trees all look like Old Master paintings.  I suspect that in a hundred years, the landscape will start to vary, in the same way that a development of identical homes gets more character as people start moving in and changing things to suit themselves.

This was when having the wind at my back was best. I made good time along the coast and through the city of Lelystad. I had a wrong turn or two before I found the coastal road north of Lelystad, which runs between a vast line of windmills and hills that are kept trim by means of a flock of sheep.  Something inspired me to tweet about a fiddle band named Windmills and Sheep, and now it’s part of my private vocabulary.

Crossing to the Nordoostpolder, the older part of Flevoland, meant cycling athwart the wind, and suddenly everything was harder.  Emblematically, the sheep were more isolated and the windmills under construction.  But ahead of me was Urk, my destination of the day.

Urk was once an island in the Zuiderzee, with a harbor and a village full of fishermen.  But when the province of Flevoland was built, land came to Urk: the reverse of the usual process, when erosion turns inland villages into seaside ones. Urk is a lovely wee place, with a large harbor and a small beach, full of restaurants that serve fish.  There’s a memorial to fishermen lost at sea, with a statue of a woman looking away from the water and a series of plaques listing every Urkerman lost to the waves from 1717 until the present.

I walked along the beach and gathered sea glass, and thought about wealth. It’s a topic that had been rattling around in my head all day, as I anxiously rationed my photographic time lest I be too slow to get to Urk, as I filled and refilled my water bottle from the liter and a half I’d brought with me, as I monitored the battery level on my phone. And I’d been thinking about it as I rode past the vast stripes of undifferentiated, inedible greenery beside the bike paths of a country that had suffered terrible famine in living memory.

This trip is the product of incredible wealth: my household has enough resources, financial and emotional, to spare an entire adult for four days.  More than that: I can stay in hotels and eat in restaurants on the way.  And the land is wealthy, with money to spare not only for grass and good bike paths, but to build an entire province out of an inland sea.

Of course, the construction of the land and investment in the infrastructure is wealth well-used: invested for the future, where it will repay that investment many times over; invested in the happiness and well-being of the people who live here. And there’s a fair argument that this trip is an investment in my happiness, my good emotional health.

But wealth leads to greed the way that spring leads to summer. I like to think I have my own greed, my own desire for more than I need, well in hand. I ride a used bike, shop at secondhand stores, make my own clothes. But when I looked at my collection of sea glass, fifteen or more pieces, mostly green and clear, many of them undistinguished, I knew better. I have sea glass from so many beaches that I lose track. I don’t need more forgettable pieces. And yet there I was.

So I decided to pare the collection down, to only take five from the beach. Five that were special to me, because of their color or their texture. The rest would go back for someone else to find.

That was hard. I chose one of every color I had: clear, green, sky blue, turquoise, brown. But the turquoise and the sky blue were the only specimens of their color that I’d found, so even my five pieces represent a kind of poverty for later beachcombers.

I know it’s only beach glass. But confronting the acquisitive, hoarding impulse and failing to properly overcome it leaves me thoughtful as well as mindful. There’s a passage in the Papal encyclical, Laudato Si’, that speaks to this:

We need to take up an ancient lesson, found in different religious traditions and also in the Bible. It is the conviction that “less is more”. A constant flood of new consumer goods can baffle the heart and prevent us from cherishing each thing and each moment. To be serenely present to each reality, however small it may be, opens us to much greater horizons of understanding and personal fulfilment.

The Pope’s point, and it’s a good one, is that we cannot keep up with our acquisitiveness. There’s not enough stuff in the world to feed the whole planet’s hunger for the shiny. I fear that we cannot change, as a people, in time to save the world.

But I can change. Tomorrow, somewhere along the way, I’m going to leave the five pieces of sea glass behind to delight someone else. The memory of finding them will be wealth enough, properly invested.

Some useful links:

• The Long Ride, Day Zero
• Flickr photoset of the trip, growing daily.
• Strava page of today’s ride
• My Twitter stream, with photos and tweets from the day.