Three Weeks of Research, Two Provinces of Holland

I spent three weeks preparing for the Netherlands, which is longer than I have spent preparing for several consequential decisions in my actual life. There were library books, a small notebook, and a map on which I marked places with the confidence of someone who had not yet attempted to pronounce them. My friend Claire, whom I’ve known since college, moved to Utrecht two years ago and had offered me her spare room. She said we could get dinner, walk around, and perhaps take a train somewhere. I responded by studying the country. Some of this was useful. Holland, for example, consists of two provinces. It is not the name of the entire Netherlands, although enough people use it that I had reached twenty-eight without feeling any urgency about the distinction. Once I learned it, I became briefly insufferable. Lisa received an explanation she had not requested while we were waiting for coffee. She asked whether the Dutch knew I was coming. A patron at the library asked if I would be visiting Copenhagen. When I explained that Denmark was a different country, she said, “Oh, right,” with the serene indifference of someone whose vacation it wasn’t. I enjoyed that exchange more than was attractive. My geography was sound. I had read about trade, water management, and the history of Utrecht. I was going to be a reasonably informed guest. At LAX, a man sitting beside me asked where I was headed. When I said the Netherlands, he smiled. “Amsterdam? You gonna smoke a little weed?” “I’m visiting a friend in Utrecht.” He nodded as though Utrecht was probably where they kept the better weed. I considered explaining that a country could have more than one distinguishing feature, but boarding had started and I didn’t want to spend the flight being the woman who had defended the Netherlands at Gate 153. I did, however, feel quietly pleased with the quality of my own preparations. What I had not examined was the publication date of the Netherlands taking shape in my head. I knew there would be modern buildings. Of course I did. I knew Dutch people owned phones and bought groceries and did not spend their working days arranging tulips beside picturesque canals. But most of the books I had actually enjoyed were older travel accounts, the sort in which a man with ample leisure describes a village for twelve pages and never mentions where anyone buys toothpaste. I had supplemented these with a novel, some paintings, and photographs chosen by people selling vacations. My notes contained quite a lot about houses reflected in water. They contained very little about office parks. On the train from Schiphol, I watched warehouses, apartment buildings, roads, and a parking lot pass the window. A man across the aisle was eating something from a paper bag while looking at his phone. Nobody was wearing wooden shoes. I hadn’t expected them to, but I noticed their absence remarkably quickly for someone who hadn’t expected them to. Claire met me at Utrecht Centraal wearing jeans and a rain jacket. She hugged me, took one look at my suitcase, and asked whether I was staying until Christmas. “I brought options,” I said. “You brought a separate household.” Outside, there were bicycles everywhere, which was reassuring. I stopped to admire them, leaving my suitcase on what I took to be an unusually neat strip of sidewalk. A bell rang behind me, followed by a sentence delivered with considerably more urgency than the relaxed European lifestyle I had been reading about. Claire caught my arm and pulled me aside. A cyclist passed close enough that I felt the air move. “What did he say?” “You’re standing in the bike lane.” “That sounded longer.” “There were some additions.” We walked another block before I asked about one of the words. Claire said it was tyfus. I recognized its English relative from books in which people had considerably worse problems than an obstructed bicycle route. “He called me typhus?” “More or less. It’s a swear word.” “The disease?” “Yes.” I had prepared for this trip by reading about Dutch history. I hadn’t expected any of the diseases to be addressed to me personally. Claire took my suitcase while I was still considering this, which was probably wise. Her apartment had a dishwasher, an unreliable cabinet hinge, and a view of another apartment. We went to a supermarket for breakfast things. I had been in the country for less than three hours and was already comparing yogurt prices beneath fluorescent lighting. Claire asked whether I wanted the bread with seeds or without. This was a perfectly reasonable question, and I resented it a little for being the same question I might have been asked in California. While we waited at the checkout, I told her about the man at LAX. “Did you tell him about my glamorous life?” she asked. “I didn’t have much time.” “You could have mentioned the window that won’t close.” At home, she showed me the broken handle and asked whether pasta was okay for dinner. I thought the man at the airport might have found her whole operation disappointing. That evening we walked into the older part of Utrecht. There were canals, lovely buildings, and people sitting outside with drinks. I felt something in me settle. Here it was. I took several photographs and became considerably easier to be around. Claire watched me crouch to keep a bright orange traffic barrier out of a picture. “You can leave that in,” she said. “I know.” “It’s also here.” “I know that too.” I moved a little farther to the left. Over dinner, she asked what I wanted to do during the week. I opened my notebook. There were museums, a bookshop, a walk I had found, and several other sensible suggestions. Then I mentioned the Zaanse Schans in a tone intended to suggest that it had only just occurred to me. Claire put down her fork. “You want to see the windmills.” “I’m interested in the historical setting.” “And the clogs?” “I wouldn’t make a separate trip for clogs.” She looked at the notebook, where I had written clog workshop and underlined it. We went on Thursday. I enjoyed it enormously, which was inconvenient. There were wooden houses, windmills, water, and ample opportunity to photograph all three together. I knew other visitors were composing almost identical pictures a few feet away. I waited for them to move so I could compose mine. At the clog demonstration, I leaned forward with everyone else. I asked a question. In the shop afterward, I spent fifteen minutes deciding between two small painted pairs, as though one might prove substantially more useful than the other. Claire found me holding a blue pair. “What are those for?” “My apartment.” “What will they do there?” I looked at the little wooden shoes in my hand. “Remind me of this conversation, increasingly.” I bought them anyway. On the bus back, I had the souvenir bag on my lap and my notebook open beside it. Several pages of preparation had brought me to a place where I could buy the things I had carefully explained to myself were not representative of everyday Dutch life. Around us, people were checking their pictures. I checked mine too. The windmill photograph was excellent. The rest of the week was less easy to arrange into a picture. Claire had to work one morning, so I read at her kitchen table while someone drilled into a wall nearby. We bought laundry detergent. I got caught in the rain outside a bookshop and arrived home with wet socks. We had a long dinner with two of her friends, during which nobody asked what I thought of the Netherlands. They wanted to know whether Claire’s landlord had finally fixed the window. I also became much better at identifying bike lanes. By Saturday, I was pulling my suitcase close whenever I heard a bell, with the alertness of someone who had learned a new language through consequences. On my last evening, we cooked pasta and ate on the couch because her table was covered with work. She told me something about a colleague that required a substantial amount of background. I listened with my feet tucked under me and a bowl balanced on my knee. It was the sort of evening I had missed having with her. When I unpacked in Silverdale, I put the little blue clogs on my bookshelf. Lisa came over the next day, noticed them immediately, and picked one up. “So. All that research.” “Yes.” “And you bought these.” “They make them in several colors,” I said. “I was there for quite a while.”