Road Apples by Tim Sanders
July 18, 2011
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The windmills of my mind It is mid-July, and high time we took a deep breath and discussed the many contributions the Dutch have made to society over the years. I was raised among the Dutch. By this I mean I was raised in southwestern Michigan, where if you were to close your eyes and throw a fistful of rocks in any direction, most of them would strike a Dutch person. This is not just idle speculation. In September of 2008, seventeen post-graduate students from Western Michigan University were each assigned his or her own Kalamazoo street corner, blindfolded, given a basket containing 200 small to medium-sized rocks, and told to fire away. These brave researchers fired at will. They also fired at Bob, and Jason, and Carolyn, and whoever else happened to be in their vicinity. Of the 700 resulting lawsuits that followed, 612 were filed by people of Dutch ancestry. But I digress. In the mid-1800s a group of hardy Calvinists migrated to Michigan from the Netherlands (from the Dutch word “Nederlands,” meaning “lands of Neder”). They were conscientious, hard-working, genial folks. And due to their geniality, they bred like rabbits. Soon western Michigan was just hopping with Dutch people with Dutch names like Van Dyke, Van Houten, Van Wagoner, Van Elst, Van Johnson and Van Heflin. By the mid-20th Century it was very intimidating for those western Michiganders who were not Dutch, and they defended themselves with an endless supply of “Hollander” jokes. In the simpler days of my childhood, when Americans had not yet become so culturally sensitive, Hollander jokes were so popular that even Hollanders told them. As in: “Q: What do we call a genius in Holland? A: De toerist. HAHAHAHA!.” They may have screwed up the punch lines, but they told them. And the Dutch certainly do have a lot of idiosyncracies which make them easy targets. For example: • For several centuries the Dutch have worn wooden shoes, which they call “klompen” due to the sound they make on their hardwood basketball courts. • A quarter of the Netherlands is, or are, below sea level. There is a relationship between that fact and the development of wooden shoes, although not one Dutchman in 100 can explain it. • Dutch Masters like Hals, Vermeer, and Rembrandt turned out some excellent paintings, but couldn’t make a living until they went into the cigar business. • And speaking of painters, Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh cut off his left ear and sent it in an envelope to his girlfriend, who'd always said she wished she had an ear for music. Unfortunately he did not affix proper postage, and it came back the next day. • Popular Dutch dishes include waterzooi (stewed carp and leeks), boerenkoolstramppot met rookworst (potatoes, sausage, rook and even worse), and Hollandise Nieurwe (soused raw herring with raw onions and pickles). Thus the term “Dutch treat.” • The traditional Dutch sport is something called fierljeppen, which requires a really drunk Dutchman running full speed at a 42 ft. pollstok (pole) jammed into a riverbank, climbing to the top, looking down and throwing up (not necessarily in that order). • The Dutch are famous for losing things. In 1611 a Dutch crew lost Henry Hudson and his son on Canada’s Hudson Bay; in the late 1700s the Flying Dutchman (which would have been called the Floating Dutchman if only it had) was lost at sea; and in the mid-to-late 1800s several Lost Dutchman Mines disappeared in various mountainous areas of the American West. • Each May, Holland, Michigan holds its Tulip Festival. And each May, when I was in the Thornapple Kellogg High School marching band, we dutifully marched in the tulip parade, gazed in awe at the millions of beautiful tulips lining the streets, and offered thanks to the Almighty that this colorful event only took place once a year. • And if all that weren’t enough, in 1959 two Dutchmen, Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos, founded Amway Corporation. If anyone has ever harassed you about purchasing a trailer load of very expensive soap and joining the Amway family so that you, too, can graduate from Emerald to Double Diamond in no time at all, then I need say no more. I mention all of these Dutch peculiarities in order to share with you the profound discomfort I experienced when, as an adopted child, I grew old enough to find my biological mother and learn that my biological grandparents had immigrated to this country from the Netherlands. If Dutch people are a bit strange, and I are Dutch, then ... well, so are I. Strange, that is. Which brings us to what got this whole Dutch dissertation started. In a July 12 Reuters article, I was shocked (or maybe not so shocked after all) to learn that a serious scientific study released last week by serious scientists at Holland’s Wageningen University had determined that “Dutch motorists kill about 133 billion insects a month, splattering bugs on their vehicles and eliminating important members of the food chain.” An epidemic of bug genocide–insecticide if you prefer–was spreading across the Netherlands. These concerned biologists recruited 250 drivers for a “splash teller” study, in which each motorist was told to wipe his car license plate clean and then total the bug body count at the end of his drive. The article did not say just how the number of bugs splattered on a license plate could give an accurate indication of how many bugs were also splattered on windshields, hoods, headlights, bumpers, grills, door panels, etc., etc., but that is not the kind of question serious scientists worry about. Knowing the Dutch as I do, the serious scientists probably all got together in a serious Amsterdam tavern and tossed darts at some very large numbers taped to a dartboard. Then they tossed down a couple dozen serious beers, got a serious bar napkin, scribbled a serious proposal for a federal grant to study manic depression among fruit flies, and laughed until Heineken shot out of their noses. Them's my people. |