Travelogue 840 – February 24
The Dutch Ceiling

They are sitting along the wall, like rooks, if rooks could cross their legs or could draw their knees up to embrace them. If rooks could drink beer. The outdoor tables are all occupied. Undeterred, the human rooks pull themselves up onto the low brick wall and they order their beers. The wall is higher on one side than the other. On this side, the drinker’s toes may still reach the brick of the narrow alleyway, this roadway running the length of the canal that gives the district of Delfshaven its historical purpose, constructed in the seventeenth century to connect the Schie and the Maas Rivers. On its other side, the same brick wall extends down to the surface of the quiet canal waters, waters glinting today with reflected sunshine.

Cross the few metres of the canal-side brick road, and you find my regular pub. I’m cheered by the high spirits of the rookery along the wall. The Dutch are a race particularly sensitive to sunlight. Sunny days, especially in winter, never fail to release good cheer. Who doesn’t enjoy the sight of people enjoying a fine day?

Inside, tables are empty. I choose a place by the window, and I abandon my work almost immediately to stare out at the bright sky above the Dutch gabled roofs across the canal, above the masts of the old-fashioned little barges. A few months ago, the sun would have been getting ready to set at this hour. I feel real, palpable relief at the lengthening of the days.

The sky fills the top of the window frame, smiling down on the rooks on the wall. The smiles of the rooks are an acknowledgement of that wide open sky, but no one looks at it. The sky is like a parent. We love it, but we find enjoyment elsewhere, with friends and conversation. Or with our phones. There’s no point to staring into the void, I suppose. Though I admit that I do it often enough.

The breadth of the sky, harbouring all this air and the architecture of complex chemistry, the structures of condensation, white and insubstantial, and as big as downtown’s buildings, this breadth of the sky I find the best sort of meditation. It provides beauty. It provides awe. It provides a hint of eternity.

I wonder about the psychological effect on the Dutch of having a finite roof of cloud cover over their heads so much of the time. Our small homes are compact spaces inside nature’s confined space, and everything appears finite. The country is crowded. Land is limited. The landscape is geometrically simple, flat and divided by straight canals. The lack of light might be depressing, but it’s a world with its psychological comforts. Borders are clean and close. There’s a kind of certainty in that.

I’ve lived in a number of places, all different. Everywhere, there is geometry and space. Above every place is the limitless sky, tall as space. It’s this formal imposition of dimension that I find puzzling, humbling, suggestive of awe. Formal in that it follows consistent, unchanging laws. Laws that never abate. I find this hard dimensionality an effort – an effort to live with, an effort to imagine. Conjecturing gods ruling us, I see them straining to hold dimension together.

In fact, it’s lack of effort, it’s inertia, holding it together, lazy dimension entire lying in our path, making us step over it all the time. I step over it to get to work, counting the same kilometres every day, climbing the same stairway six flights to the offices, returning by the same rigid route home. No shape, no stretch of it ever wavers. I wonder at the commitment. I wait for the glitch, the lapse, the tell giving away the game. But it never comes.

Just days ago, I entered the sky itself. I flew south to Ethiopia.

Travelogue 839 – February 8
Kites in the Wind

The water is choppy in the Rijnhaven. I’m in a third-floor classroom, looking out the window. It’s warm day, so I’ve opened a window. Though I’ve opened it only a crack, the wind is whistling in with some force. It’s that kind of day, a taste of spring, blue skies and gusting winds. The surface of the harbour is like a miniature sea, accented by ranks of little whitecaps.

I like this view. There are reasons to miss the school’s previous location downtown, its convenience mainly. But this site has its charms. It’s across the river, in the south of Rotterdam, in neighbourhoods that are discovering themselves in the new century.

The world goes on. Humans sweat in their sleep, dreaming about the end of things. The world serenely sails along. It might be sailing along this river, the one I see out the window, the river lined with old and new city. The old city looks like the port city, the spooky silhouettes of cranes lining the river to the west. The new city is just below, represented by the buildings of revitalized districts. Only a dozen years ago, these city blocks along the southern bank of the city were humble and decayed.

Rijnhaven is an open and domesticated body of water, shaped somewhat like a damaged kite, abandoned on the ground in the middle of a bustling city, usually placid green water now driven by the winds inside its basin lined with clean stone. On one side the water is bound by the Wilhelmina Pier, a long strip of land that stands by the river and hosts Rotterdam’s second and most modern skyline. On the other side is Katendrecht, another pier and a district once famously unsavoury, where sailors and longshoremen sought their sordid entertainments. It has been undergoing a regeneration of late. From this window, it looks like an extended construction zone. Where the harbour opens to the river, a pedestrian bridge connects the two districts. On the Wilhelmina side, there stands the New York Hotel, a vestige of nineteenth century steam traffic to America. On the Katendrecht side, there is a warehouse converted into a kind of foodie dream mall, stalls with specialty items and a micro-brewery onsite. These two installations on ether side of the bridge describe the contrast well, between an area established as class and an area hip and aspiring.

The city centre has many of these little harbours, many now hosting pleasure boats and lined with restaurants and bars, crossed by fanciful bridges that were designed by one of the many firms quartered here in a city known as a destination for ambitious architects. I enjoy it, fond as I am of open water and of architecture. A minute by the window is restorative, looking over the broken green kite and the high-rises by the wide river.