by Willem Meiners
THE DUTCH in the US have known it all along, but not all Dutch people in Holland know it: America is not all big cities and towering buildings. It is primarily countryside, even though official numbers will tell you that 85 percent of Americans live in urban areas. The term urban, town, city, in America is misleading. There are almost twenty thousand incorporated municipalities, with an average population of six thousand each. That’s on average, so for all those nine million New Yorkers there’s also a large number of other towns with only a hundred or five hundred residents. And then there are two hundred million other Americans who live outside any town limits.
Oh, they enjoy crowding, Americans. At concerts, sports, the beach, the bar, and an occasional mass demonstration. But if you’d follow them from the crowd on their way home, the ride usually ends on a quiet street in a calm community outside the big city. America has two north-to-south mountain ranges, the Appalachians and the Rockies, three if you include the Sierra Nevada. In between it is flat, a pancake, interspersed with prairies and rolling hills.
ALMOST every state has one or more towns named Stillwater. It says what it is, there is still water nearby. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam displays paintings by Golden Age Master Willem van de Velde. They show what still water was for the Dutch. Ships lay there, at rest, catching a breath before the next great adventure. The first Stillwater town was built in New York State by a Dutchman, Piet Schuyler.
America’s countryside is where the vast majority of people live, work and dream. They don’t need to go to the big city for living their lives, all the big stores come to them. Four corners from where I live, Stillwater Avenue hosts all the major chains, Walmart, TJ Maxx, Lowe’s, Kohl’s, Old Navy, Michael’s, you name it. The avenue ends in the town of Stillwater, on Stillwater River, which springs from a still lake.
STILLWATER, Oklahoma is where Garth Brooks comes from. Watch his two-part documentary on Netflix. Everything and everyone in Stillwater was and is normal and as American as anything and anyone can be. Lots of space, an abundance of green. It’s where people live who dream of a future full of success, and Garth is their hero because he succeeded.
It’s a remarkable phenomenon, the American Dream. All over the world, at some point, people have started countries and built societies. But you never hear about the Australian dream, the South African, or the Canadian one. The American dream was here from day one, because it was a Dutch dream, dreamed by the Dutch immigrants who were the first to start building the country. It was not the dream of the Pilgrims who came on the Mayflower to isolate themselves and hold on to something old, and who failed. No, it were the Dutch, almost ten thousand strong. What they found was one big countryside. They often did not know what precisely they came looking for. But they would find something, of this they were convinced. And that was the dream.
* Willem Meiners is the Editor of De Daily Dutchman. He traveled all fifty states, and lives in a tiny township in Maine.
Enkele schepen in stil water, by Golden Age master painter, around 1650.
