by Willem Meiners
BACK from ten days in the Netherlands. Hadn’t been there for over seven years, the last visit was before Covid. In that period the Dutch added a million more people. One could tell, right away, as soon as you leave Schiphol.
Oh boy.
So many small cars everywhere, and all within ten, fifteen feet of one another at speeds of sixty or more mph. It all ran smoothly, though, and I didn’t see a traffic accident anywhere in Holland, but that’s partly because the country suddenly appears to have five- and six-lane roads. No one has an NL sticker on their car anymore. Those are now all part of the license plate, left of the numbers. That’s why it does not immediately stand out that the Randstad is packed with traffic from D, B, P, DK, PL, RO and UA.
Now I sound like a tourist, and that’s more or less how I feel, but really: I am a born and bred Dutchman. My children and grandchildren live there (I hugged the air out of their lungs so hard for ten days that sometimes they could only squeak…), and at some point in time I used to have a two-decades career as a newspaper journalist there. But in elementary school we were taught that Holland had a population of eleven million. And when I was fourteen, comedian Wim Kan counted twelve million oliebollen cooking on natural gas. Caveat: my visit this time was limited to the Haarlem – Almere – Amersfoort triangle, but I have never seen the Netherlands so full. Eighteen million.
I EMIGRATED almost 35 years ago. Twenty years I lived in Maryland, and the balance in South Carolina and Maine. I have traveled America by bus, car, bicycle, walking shoes, plane, boat, train, and helicopter, all fifty states. Seen every major city, from Miami to Seattle, San Diego to Boston, and all the big cities in between, I’ve been there. More than a hundred times I flew to Holland. Never before did I notice the difference in scale so clearly. Driving a car in Detroit or Los Angeles or Phoenix or Manhattan is no picnic, but good luck navigating the Gedempte Raamgracht in Haarlem.
Has all that change suddenly occurred during those nearly eight years I’ve been embraced by the quiet of Maine’s 24 billion trees? Or has the change been going on for much longer, and previously the intervals were too short for me to notice the difference? Perhaps the answer to that is yes, because I also noticed something else entirely.
Everybody is friendly. Lola from the restaurant, Nina from the pancakes, Jan from the peanut butter store who is flying to Charlottesville next week, the lady from the Almere chocolates store who herself had just returned from Long Island, the coffee lady on the cold castle square of Muiderslot, the boy from the take-out Thai, the two bakers in Spakenburg, but also the neighbor around the corner in Haarlem who was cheerfully planting colorful flowers on the sidewalk, and the two Afghan men sitting outside drinking a cup of coffee, everywhere everyone had a warm word and a friendly face. I thanked each for their kindness every time, and each reacted with surprise. They themselves thought the Dutch were much more unfriendly than in fact they actually are.
THE SOCIAL media. We now hear, see and read our horizons first and foremost through X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. We tell each other, both in the Netherlands and in the United States, that everyone has become grumpy, and cold, and hard. That’s not the reality though, on the contrary. The vast majority of people are kind and nice and welcoming. I see it every day in America, I also saw it for ten days in Holland.
That said, my motherland has changed. To be sure, there were oliebollen everywhere. Tompouce without pudding but with some foam vla. Crompoucen without the puff pastry layers but with croissants instead. A hundred million bicycles everywhere. Stores selling only peanut butter. Dirt-cheap flowers at the farmer’s market. Rookworst from Hema about which granddaughter Anne indignantly said that within a year the price had gone up from 2.50 to 3.50 euros. But also, I walked in downtown Almere-Stad and saw almost exclusively storefronts with English names: Douglas, Foot Locker, G-Star Raw, Snipes, Boss, Manfield, Specsavers, Skechers, New Yorker, Grand Optical, McDonald’s. To me, that is new.
NOWHERE in the Randstad did I spot a daily newspaper. It’s because of everybody’s cell phone and its social apps. No city parking spaces, except in Almere which is the greenest and most spacious Dutch city, and which I think, partly for that reason, I am correct in calling Almerica. Moving step by step everywhere, literally: pedestrians insist on the right of way in the old inner cities. I kept staring everywhere I went, in surprise, in awe, in discomfort, but feeling safe nonetheless.
The drive from Boston back home to Maine took Alice and I over wide roads with ample space. A five-hour drive, which turned into six. America has 18 times the population of the Netherlands, yet 60 times the number of traffic casualties. In New Hampshire, two cars collided head-on. Both drivers died on the asphalt ahead of us. In all those ten days in Holland I had never been concerned about such a thing.
* Willem Meiners is the Editor of De Daily Dutchman.
