I grew up using figure skates, but they’re poo-pooed here. The Dutch are all about long blades – for speed, for endurance, for those long strokes you take with your hands clasped behind your back.

I’d never tried them before, but there weren’t any figure skates around, and there was no way I was going to pass up skating on the canals.

It was a gorgeous day, and people were out in droves.

There was a concert on the ice at the Pulitzer,

and some were even using the ice because it was easier to walk on than the streets, or just because they could.

The ice is gone now, but those handful of days where walking (or skating) on ice was possible, instilled a wonder in everyone I know. It was the only question people were asking each other at work, on the streets: Heb je geschaatst? Did you skate?

Yes, I did.

Not enough for the Elfstedentocht to go through, but that’s such a traumatic decision for the Dutch that I won’t dwell much on it here. Suffice it to say that there was talk about whether ducks were quacking at night or what side of the moon would shine. One thing is sure: nature decides.

Now, I grew up skating rounds at the local ice rink to a soundtrack of Supertramp, eating sponge toffee during 15 minute breaks when the Zamboni cleared the ice, and I loved it. But I have to say that I discovered much too late in life that indoor skating, despite the dependable conditions of the ice, does not even begin to compare with skating on natural ice.

Once you get used to the pings and ricochets and the bizarre sounds rumbling under your feet, and trying to figure out how thick the ice actually is,

it’s bliss.

We were lucky enough to find virgin ice.

Others were not so lucky.

So, I’ll let the rest of this just be a bit of a photo essay, because the pictures speak for themselves, especially in a place where this only happens once every fifteen or twenty years.

Now, this is not the season to be trying to identify trees via their leaves,

but I’ve been noticing lately that it’s a skill that’s scarce. I saw this on Facebook a few months ago, and it scared the crap out of me:

I have a friend who’s in her early 50s who can identify just about any living thing, usually by its Latin name. No, she’s not a biologist – she’s just interested. Going for a walk with her is like speaking a different language.

As more and more of us move to cities, where trees are often regarded as a challenge or obstacle, and definitely not worth identifying, how useful will her kind of knowledge be? It’s certainly useful to her. She lives in the middle of it and interacts with it everyday.

Now, I don’t consider myself to be particularly knowledgeable in this area. Suffice it to say that I know the basics. But last year, I was on a Dutch website where you can mark where there’s wild fruit or plants to forage. I went to about a dozen of the places on the map to have a look for things to pick, and nearly every identification of the bushes or trees was wrong. Where there were supposed to be pears there were crab apples instead. A series of supposed plum trees turned out to be a row of sloe berries. No real harm done, as there were things there to pick and eat, but in the grand scheme of things, these are kind of big mistakes to make. Every time we think we’ve got nature licked, or that it’s worth ignoring, she comes and kicks us in the butt. Perhaps we should pay more attention.

A big one.

Now, owls aren’t rare, but you don’t see them all that often. Certainly not 15 minutes by bike from the centre of a city of a million people. But this one’s here, all the time, because he’s privately owned.

He’s a beauty, with orange eyes, and a head that swivels with such ease it reminds me of how inflexible I’ve become as I grow older. He’s an oehoe, or a Eurasian eagle-owl, a species similar to the great horned owl, that lives from Morocco to Norway, from Siberia and southern China to Japan, and everywhere in between, even Iraq. They sit about 60 cm tall, have the colouring of a golden eagle, and ears that look like very bushy eyebrows that extend past the skull.

When I first saw this owl, nearly five years ago, he was tethered to the canal side of the log house, which had just been put together. I used to ride by the owl when I needed wonder, or calm, and seeing him, sitting silently, slowly blinking, always did the trick. Then one day, I rode by, and he was gone. It was fall and the leaves were just staring to fall, and I thought he’d somehow broken free and flown away. His perch was empty, his tether hanging below it, swaying back and forth in the breeze.

It was only a couple of months later, when all the leaves were gone and the trees on the property were a thin lattice of empty branches instead of a shield of green leaves, that I saw him again. He’d been moved to the back of the house, where he now sits in a large cage. I found the back way in, through the cul-de-sac, and had a look, just to make sure.

I found a great horned owl once, by the side of the road, in broad daylight, on the day that my grandmother died. Just sitting. And staring at me. One of its wings looked strange, like the owl was sitting on it. He was calm, didn’t seem concerned that I was close. He just looked at me and blinked once, slowly. Like I had no right to have done all the stupid things I’ve ever done in my life.
I stopped by a nearby ranger station to tell them about the owl. The ranger looked at me and smiled, and said, “oh, yes… the one who makes you feel like you haven’t done anything useful in your whole life?” I nodded. He said, “alright then, I’ll go take a look.” And he pulled up his collar and smoothed down his shirt and straightened his cuffs, as if he was on his way to defend his character against something he hadn’t ever expected to have to defend his character against.

A couple of days later, I was returning home from a bike ride, and found the same owl sitting on the railing of my veranda, as though waiting for me. He looked right into me as I approached, and I stopped walking when I was a few feet away, because I wanted him to keep looking; I didn’t want him to fly away.

Every day for a week that owl came back to the railing when I was out of the house, and waited for me until I got back. It was eerie. I thought maybe it was my grandmother, saying goodbye. So I did, and I never saw that owl again.
I still visit the oehoe regularly. I don’t think this one’s my grandmother, but it reminds me of a time when a wild thing let me get close – the kind of wild thing you don’t see too often in your life. So I keep going back. One wise look from him puts everything in perspective, brings me sanity when the world feels like it’s more and more careering toward anarchy.

I know it’s hypocritical – after all, keeping an owl tethered or caged seems cruel, but because the owl is tethered, I can visit it. This is not lost on me. I think about it every time I see the owl. And I don’t think it’d be crazy to say that the owl knows that. It’s clear in the way he looks straight at me. Straight into me. Asking me to answer for everything I’ve done.

But one of the bonuses of nighttime in Amsterdam (aside from the obvious, which don’t really interest me) is the view, and I don’t mean this kind:

No, I’m talking about peeking into people’s houses.

The Dutch have a centuries-long practice of not pulling their curtains shut, or having no curtains at all.

It started back in the Golden Age, when people left their drapes open to let by-passers see how rich they were. If you walk along the canals even now, the mansions are all lit up, and you can see centuries of wealth on display,

through large, smudge-free windows, but you’ll also find the habit exists in the less wealthy parts of town.

But I suspect the lack of curtains have got to do with a number of other things as well. Light, for one. Claustrophobia for another. Houses are relatively small and squished together here, and if you’re ever in one with the curtains shut, the lack of space tends to close in on you fast.

And although I wouldn’t call this latent voyeurism a national pastime, it’s certainly acceptable to look inside.

In the interest of privacy, I didn’t take any photos with people in them, though it’s quite common to walk past an uncurtained window behind which a family is having dinner, or watching television, or reading the paper in their pajamas.

My grandmother found the habit distasteful, but I love it. I was once biking along a dike north of Amsterdam on an early winter morning, and happened to see the then-minister of finance in his kitchen, and his underwear, making coffee. It thrilled me to bits to be able to see him at home, doing something perfectly normal, exposed and at all not minding it. I developed a small crush on him after that, not because I found him attractive, but because he felt accessible, like one of us, and the idea of an honest politician has always set my heart racing.

Whether it’s true or not, I have no idea. But being able to look into houses gives one the impression of a rare kind of directness, an openness, that there’s nothing to hide. Or at least that there’s an accountability for how one lives. And being on the inside looking out has its bonuses too. It keeps you aware of what’s going on. It prevents you from sheltering yourself against what you might not want to see.

Normally, it’s a pretty busy place. Car use is restricted (i.e. they charge a pretty hefty price to bring a car into the park), so they have thousands of bicycles at the entrances for the young and old to use to ferry themselves about. Usually, it’s a bit of a battle on the bike paths, but the day we were there, things were pretty empty.

The park is also home to the Kröller-Müller Museum, the private collection of a pair of Dutch shipping magnates – most renowned for the outdoor sculptures that are scattered throughout the property.

It’s a place where art meets nature, and where the relationship between the two appears to be constantly questioned (and answered).

Inside, as part of a temporary exhibition on the perceptions of nature, there was a long walkway with egg-like stones protruding from its surface.

The idea was to walk barefoot across them, several times if you could stand it. Kids ripped off their shoes as soon as they saw the walkway – there was an instinct in them that said “I want to feel the stones under my feet – without shoes!” – while most of the adults looked at the stones, read the board telling them to take their shoes off and walk over the stones, and then balked at doing so.

While different groups of kids raced back and forth over the uneven pathway unimpeded, I heard someone say that people who were healthy wouldn’t feel much under their feet other than an uneven walkway, much like Hundertwasser’s house in Vienna with uneven floors, while those who weren’t would find the walk too painful to complete.

Hundertwasser believed that we have an extraordinary sense of touch in our feet, and that flat floors make us forget how to experience things and become emotionally unbalanced or even ill. He called uneven floors “a symphony, a melody for the feet”, and watching the kids vs. the adults at that installation, it was hard to deny the difference between childhood and adulthood: that of a willingness to experience everything vs. a jaded reluctance to try something different or new, especially if you suspect it will involve a measure of pain.

I walked on that pathway of protruding stone, and it was lovely. The tops of the stones, which varied in size and number with each step, felt soothing, almost like a massage, with a satisfying coolness. And when I got to the end of the pathway, I didn’t need to read the sign that told me to do it more than once. I went back again and again and again.

Most people do, but regardless, it’s a spectacle to behold, mostly because it takes place on the Museumplein, next to the Rijks-, Van Gogh- and Stedelijk museums, out in the open air.

All afternoon, residents drag their Christmas trees to the square,

and pile them up high,

then higher,

then even higher…

And finally, at dusk, a fireman comes along and lets the whole thing go up.

It goes up surprisingly fast,

to many cheers and shouts of awe – flames licking 50 feet into the sky, pine needles turned to glowing ash in an instant, shooting into the night sky like fireworks.

And it lasts a good hour and a half. Free admission and hot chocolate included.

Somehow, burning things has always brought me more hope than sadness,

perhaps because it’s a bit like cleaning the slate, a pruning of excess, and I think most of the people there this year felt the same.

Otherwise they wouldn’t have shown up. So here’s to a Happy New Year.

It was quite a party. There was hot chocolate to be had, a roaring fire to warm the hands and feet,

and a brass band playing, led by, who else? Santa Claus, of course.

This was no quaint Canadian experience where someone owns a large piece of land and invites a select group of friends to drink mulled wine and pick a tree out of a place that needs thinning, or you plant another one to replace it. This was a social happening, and even made the evening news.

As alarming as it was to see masses of people clearing a small portion of a forest of its trees,

hauling them out and piling them on top of their cars, the thought that the money they’d paid would go toward keeping the (rest of the) forests intact was only slightly comforting. It all had me feeling more like the Once-ler than the Lorax that I thought I was.

Because that tree was a cinch to cut. It took less than a minute, and I didn’t even break a sweat, didn’t give it a second thought. All you need is a sharp saw, as the politicians in the Hague know all too well.

Postscript: To compensate for our cut tree, I’ve taken part in the Partij voor de Dieren’s protest against the planned budget cuts, and bought three trees from them, which we’ll plant in the spring. Trees are 5 euros each, and if you’d like to buy one, fill in the form online, email me your proof of purchase, and I’ll plant it for you.

I was wrong, but frequently, the best moments come out of being wrong. (I know this because I am hardly ever right.) I often forget that though, and then remember again when something goes awry and make a note to be wrong even more often than I already am. For those who know me, this may explain a great deal.

In any case, I was pedalling through the forest, over the flanks of its mountains, but the bike I had wasn’t made for the steep inclines, so I wound up pushing it and walking a great deal of the way. It was a weekday and the forest was deliciously empty. It was nearly winter, but that day was warm and cloudless, and the sun cast a sort of diffused fall glow on yellowed leaves.

The scent of dried pine needles burst up with every step, and the silence was intense. I looked down through a rare opening in the trees at a part of Freiburg and I thought: what a great thing to have just outside your back door.

The next day, I visited and did some interviews at a waldkindergarten, or a forest kindergarten,

on the back flank of that mountain near where, on the previous afternoon, I’d had to haul (with much delight) the bike through a great deal of mud and over some felled trees because I’d taken a wrong turn, gotten a bit lost (see above re hardly ever being right), and wound up on a road that had not yet been built.

Forest kindergartens are hugely popular in Germany, and the basic premise is this: pre-school kids go to daycare in the forest all day, and play outside rain or shine, blizzard or heatwave, instead of being cooped up inside a room with a couple dozen other kids. There are no toys – they play with what the forest offers up: sticks, stones, dirt, leaves, etc. It encourages the imagination.

I stayed with the kids and the daycare workers (all men, by the way, though I was told that day was an exception) for the morning and I can tell you that the kids were having a great time. It was chilly and misty,

but they were dressed for the part and moved around so much there wasn’t time to get cold. There was bread dough to be made (from scratch) and a fire to be lit in an outdoor oven (three year-olds handling the matches deftly),

songs to be sung, sand to be played with. There was no time for crying (nor, frankly, any reason to) and everything that needed to be done the kids had to do themselves – no help was given unless it was absolutely necessary, but also not dogmatically so.

These kids were way more independent than most kids the same age I know. And they were really confident in the forest, and happy. No one complained about anything – they truly liked where they were, and what they were doing, and were never bored. Just like I’d felt for those few hours in the forest, especially after getting a bit lost.

A few days ago, I started reading Peter Pan. At the very beginning, the author describes the difference between adults and children, and how children form imaginary landscapes, or neverlands. “On these magic shores (of the Neverland) children at play are forever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more,” he says.

How true that is. So why wouldn’t we give our kids time to play in forests or neverlands? And why don’t we adults give ourselves permission to do it too?

And then there’s leaving the classroom. Imagine a school built for 400 small people. Then add at least one parent per child, some with baby carriages in tow, trying to squeeze in and out of one very narrow door, all at the same time. (This is the exercise in restraint.)

So imagine my delight when, while in that line of parents, gritting my teeth and desperately wanting to be outside, I heard a few notes of music drifting from the schoolyard into the narrow hallway we were all crushed into.

My knowledge of music leaves a great deal to be deisired, so I don’t know what piece it was, but it was classical, graceful, with a quick step. Flowing up and down the keyboard in 3/4 time… a waltz. That much I do know.

And when I finally got outside, I saw the mother of one of L’s classmates at a piano that had been set by the main door (presumably to be brought into the school later that day). There was no stool, but she’s a concert pianist and was standing, hovered over the keyboard, intensely playing, almost banging out the notes obsessively, while other parents stood in a semi-circle and watched. Her movements didn’t match the music – she was leaping from one foot to the other to reach the notes she neede to, her long coat swinging at her feet, the notes floating through the air and embracing us fully.

When she was done, applause broke out, but she didn’t acknowledge the crowd. She simply walked firmly away, the tails of her coat flipping up above her knee-high boots with each step. And I loved that.

I loved that she couldn’t walk past that piano without playing it. I loved that you can walk out of a school where a North American trend is taking over and experience something entirely European. And I loved the way she walked away. It felt necessary, a kind of metaphor for the cuts to arts funding in Holland (including to professional musicians and orchestras), which she would have found essential.

True enough, she’s moving to Vienna soon, where arts funding remains intact. And I hope there were people in that crowd – parents who are also politicians, civil servants, businessfolk – who got that, or who were at least affected enough by her spontaneous performance to consider that the fading resonance of the notes she’d just played might wind up being all we’ll hear in the future.