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Irrigating
time with the Kinderdijk windmills
Serge
van Duijnhoven, Dutch writer. |
When winter arrives, out come the skates: a feast on ice in Kinderdijk.
Netherlands
Hear the creaking ribs of the woodwork.
Being inside a windmill is not unlike stepping onto a boat rocked by the seas.
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Serge
van Duijnhoven
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| A writer and
historian, Serge van Duijnhoven is an all-round artist. Born in 1970 in Oss (Netherlands),
he lives and works in Brussels (Belgium) where he created the group De Spooksprekers,
with the rapper Def P. and the saxophone player and poet Olaf Zwetsloot. In collaboration
with a theatre troupe, he also founded the MillenniuM review. His works include
Obiit in orbit, a CD of poems and music (Bezige Bij/Djax Records, 1998), as
well as poetry collections and fiction. |
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The
farms and cottages lie quiet and dejected in the barren land and the only things
alive are the windmills . . . whose strong sails catch the force of wind thrashed
with the rains.
Henri
Polak, Dutch politician and writer (1868-1943)
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It’s
impossible to picture the Netherlands without windmills, but they have done far more
than inspire the great Flemish painters. Without them, half the country wouldn’t
exist
As a child, I thought
of windmills as helicopters flying over the landscape of my imagination. Their astonishing
shapes looked both archaic and futuristic to me. They were strange, timeless machines
sailing on the elements: earth, water and wind.
Sometimes my father, a hydraulic engineer in northern Brabant, took me on a polder
(land recovered from the sea), where a humpbacked mill-keeper taught me the “language”
of windmills: “a windmill with its sails puffed out walks ‘on its head,’” the gentleman
told me. “During a storm, it walks ‘bare-legged.’” Windmills could be either “happy”
or “in mourning,” they could work alone in the solitude of a polder or in couples
on the banks of a boezem (the basin of a polder near a river and above its water
level). Each visit was an adventurous expedition to a land of make-believe, a world
made up of still, dark water covered with white foam, of musty reservoirs, rustling
wind and strong scents.
When I went to Kinderdijk-Elshout, located northwest of the Alblasserwaard (“land
on the water’s edge”), I joyfully discovered that it smelled like the pumping stations
of my childhood. A smell of fresh water, cool stones, diesel fuel, grease and tools.
Curious, the first thing I did was walk over to the plant. I wandered around the
big machines, and ended up in the repair shop. The sight from the bay windows took
my breath away. The polder, the dikes along two canals, the broad bed of the Lek
river, the waving reeds in the two upper basins, the 19 windmills stretching out
as far as the horizon, proudly holding up a dark and threatening sky, looked as if
they had been painted by Ruysbroeck, Rembrandt, Mesdag or some other brush-wielding
magician. Only a distant grey building and an odd-looking apartment complex shaped
like a ferryboat reminded me that I was in the present.
The Alblasserwaard, which lies close by the sea and at the mouth of several swollen
rivers, has always been threatened by water. It has been flooded at least 30 times.
The last deadly tide swamped the area in 1953, killing 1,800 people. But the saddest,
and most famous flood is still the one that occurred on the night of November 18
to 19, 1421, when the water swallowed up some 60 villages. Legend has it that a cat
managed to keep a baby rocking in its cradle in the middle of the roiling waves.
The dike that the cradle landed on was named Kinderdijk, “the child’s dike.”
Ready
to serve if modern equipment breaks down
Dutch
history owes much to the windmills. True, the western Netherlands could not have
been built without the dikes, but the windmills are what keep the diked land habitable.
Without them, half of present-day Holland would not exist. The Dutch would have ended
up leaving the land, worn down by their futile struggle against water.
“God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland,” said René Descartes.
The French philosopher was very familiar with the country for having lived there
a while, but he wasn’t entirely right. More than 5,000 years ago, many places that
had been wrenched from the sea were already inhabited. The remains of a canoe and
a female skeleton (named Trijntje) were discovered during work on the Betuwlijn,
a new, highly controversial railroad line.
The Alblasserwaard’s earliest long drainage canals were built in the 11th century.
A hundred years later, a dike already surrounded almost the entire area and the basins
of the two rivers that flow across the Alblasserwaard, the Alblas and the Giessen,
were developed. They became the districts of the Nederwaard (“the low land”) and
the Overwaard (“the high land”). In 1277, Count Floris V of Holland set up the district’s
Water and Polder Administration, an organization in charge of dike upkeep. But these
efforts would not suffice. In the aftermath of a major flood in 1726, it became obvious
that drainage mills were indispensable.
A first row of eight round, stone mills was built in the Nederwaard in 1738. Two
years later, the same number of mills was erected in the Overwaard, parallel to the
first row, but this time they were constructed of wood and had eight sides with thatched
roofs. As the years went by, this complex grew with the addition of new mills, locks
and pumping stations. This innovative hydraulic irrigation system acquired a reputation
and became known as “drainage by stages.” First, the mills drained water in the lower
basins and polders. Then, they channeled it to raised reservoirs. Lastly, the excess
water passed through half a dozen locks before draining into the river.
Today, the mills are kept in working order, ready to serve in the event modern equipment
breaks down. And all of them are inhabited. A swing in a little yard, vegetables
in a garden, a fisherman’s rowboat moored between reeds provide a glimpse into the
occupants’ everyday lives. Just one mill is open to the public during the summer.
Inside, you can see not only the impressively-sized cogwheel, but also picture the
frugal life of a mill-keeper and his family.
Inside the mill itself, you feel as if you’re on a boat in the middle of the sea.
As it turns, all the ribs in the woodwork creak. In the entrance, a dead muskrat
hangs in a cage. At the beginning of the last century, the muskrats were imported
for their fur from America and the present-day Czech Republic, but they soon became
a veritable scourge for the inhabitants; their digging and scratching caused major
damage to the dikes. Even today, they are hunted on a massive scale, cooked in wine
sauce and eaten under the more appetizing name of “water rabbits.”
“I wouldn’t live in one of those windmills for anything in the world,” says Henk
Bronkhorst, who manages them for the polder authority. “They’re too humid, too cramped
and too inconvenient!” And yet, he feels passionate about the mills and is glad to
see them on Unesco’s World Heritage List. “That recognition will probably help us
save them from being torn down”, he says.
Wine
and poetry for the new windmill inspectors
Indeed,
Dutch windmills have suffered a terrible fate. There were nearly 10,000 of them in
1860. Today, just 900 remain. Indeed, it is nothing short of a miracle that so many
mills at Kinderdijk have been preserved. In 1950, the Polder Administration was preparing
to tear down all the mills that were “out of service.” Replaced by diesel-powered
hydraulic pumps that could evacuate water much faster, they were perceived as useless
and too expensive to maintain. But the worldwide renown they have acquired will help
to assure their future, and Bronkhorst hopes it will be easier for him to raise money
for their restoration. “We really need it. The stone of the round mills has become
porous over the years and a fifth mill is collapsing,” he says.
Managing the windmill area is no easy task. The local communities, farmers, Calvinist
ministers, business people and officials regularly quarrel over their upkeep, the
building of access roads and parking lots and the cost of restoration projects. The
site’s inscription on the World Heritage List has spurred the creation of an organization
in charge of managing the interests of all the windmills within the designated area.
At the entrance to Kinderdijk, west of the locks, stands the Gemeenlandshuis, the
community house. This is where officials gather to assess the danger in difficult
times and decide on which measures to take. During senior-level meetings, they share
a large meal in a room adorned with paintings by 17th-century masters. The Overwaard
inspection authority used to welcome its new high-level members by serving them wine
in cups that could contain up to one litre. Each new member was asked to drink it
all in one gulp, before writing a poem in the community house book. One of them goes
like this: “the cup was offered to my lips/with these words: drink up, comrade/because
you took the risk/here we push away water, not wine.” The inspectors used every means
at their disposal in their war against water—even the muses!
It’s easy to reach the Overwaard windmills from the community house. The closer you
get to the central dike, the further back you go in time. Automobiles give way to
peacefully grazing cows and sheep. The only sounds you hear are the chattering of
aquatic birds such as bitterns, purple herons and sea martins, the crowing of a rooster
and reeds rustling in the wind. You can smell the fragrance of ripe apples that have
fallen from the trees. I remain silent at the sight of five moss-green umbrellas
sheltering the patience of a few old men fishing. The wings of the mills turn stubbornly
as gales can reach force six on the Beaufort scale.
But what are the windmills draining? What are they transporting from one place to
another?
The Kinderdijk landscape symbolizes an endangered species, the typical Dutch windmill.
But for the people of the Netherlands, it also symbolizes their never-ending struggle
to keep their land. “The land is still sinking,” says Henk Bronkhorst, “and the water
level has risen in the past few decades. We had to add another reservoir, a sort
of funnel, to the upper basin to be able to collect more water, as well as an extra
pump for the locks.”
Weapons
to push back the sea’s never-ending advance
Galloping
on his nag Rocinante, Don Quixote tried to attack the windmills. With windmills as
their only weapons, the Dutch are trying to push back the sea’s never-ending advance.
According to some forecasts, in a few hundred years the Netherlands will no longer
exist because of global warming. Water will take back from people what they have
taken from her. Time will tell if they will have been as bold as the lord of La Mancha,
Don Quixote.
What do the Kinderdijk windmills drain? They irrigate time. |
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An
ingenious system
UNESCO inscribed
the Kinderdijk-Elshout network of windmills on the World Heritage List in 1997. The
network attests to the ingenuity and bravery of the Dutch people, who developed a
highly intelligent hydraulic system to stabilize and cultivate a large stretch of
peat bog in the Netherlands.
Located on the northwest edge of the Alblasserwaard (“land on the water’s edge”),
the complex helped drain the inner districts of the Overwaard (“the high land”) and
the Nederwaard (“the low land”) until 1950, when the mills were closed. The 19 remaining
mills are still in operating condition.
The site and its upstream and downstream polders, equipped with natural drainage
systems, rivers and streams, windmills, pumping stations and spillways, have remained
virtually unchanged since the 18th century. Today this typically Dutch landscape
is officially protected as a cultural monument and a natural reserve.
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