Hollow Land

Polder - A piece of low-lying land reclaimed from the sea or a river. (Oxford English Dictionary)

Aside
Contrary to common usage, “Holland” and “the Netherlands” are not synonymous, Holland being the ...
More

Netherlands Today

The old polder country of my childhood has a distinctly bowl-like quality, as if the horizon curves up at the edges. The surface of the earth appears slightly concave, ringed round by a rim of dikes, high ones and low, wakers and sleepers, dikes with houses or just nettles and grass, dikes overseeing stately rivers or settling down with lowly ditches. But it's not the dikes alone that are responsible for this deceptive counter curve. People have called the land "Holland"—hollow land—at least since the 11th century, at just about the same time the first dikes were built. When Holland was little more than bog, salt marsh, tidal flat, and outright sea and river—water with some mud mixed in—the hollowness must have derived from its unremitting flatness, its barely-there-ness. Now it's mostly the other way round—mud with the water carefully separated out—and the bowl-like appearance comes as much from advanced domestication as it does from the still unrelieved flatness of the landscape.

Almost all horizon and sky, old polder country is nevertheless unmistakably on a human scale, carefully molded to human purpose and proportion. In more solid country, people work with what's given, adapting their endeavors to the forms of what's there. A mountain meadow will be laid out wherever it may, in a shape dictated by the land and the geological forces that have molded it. Structure is supplied by the force and material of nature; human endeavor contributes only decoration. But in Holland, the original habitat was inherently unstable. For centuries, the coastline and major water courses changed continually, drastically, as storms pounded inland and the tides alternately deposited sand and sucked it away again.

In the wake of the last Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago, the coastline retreated several hundred miles eastward, detaching Britain from the Continent in the process. It eventually stabilized at approximately its current location. Maps picturing the country in Roman times, around the beginning of the Common Era, show a largely solid coastline. What later became the string of islands and the Zeeland island cluster is still simply part of the mainland. The estuary of the river IJssel in the center of the Netherlands is relatively small, even though the outlets to the sea change course over time. There are some watery spots in North and South Holland, but the land is there, even if unable to sustain more than a smattering of settlements.

Low Countries in 800

Over the next fifteen centuries, the sea slowly takes most of that firm ground away, and Holland nearly disappears. Around the eighth century, the northern islands are clearly beginning to delineate themselves, Zeeland is fragmenting, and the central estuary has grown to alarming proportions.

By the 14th century, the northern islands—thin strips of land miles and miles away from the mainland—have completely detached themselves from North Holland and Friesland. The IJssel estuary has transformed itself into an inland sea, the Zuiderzee, which encroaches on North Holland from the eastern side. It is known for its fierce storms that continually scour the shores, progressively hollowing out the country from within. The southern half of South Holland is almost completely gone, the remaining islands dwindling to miniscule size. Sometimes they disappear altogether, only to reappear in a slightly different shape, as the local people battle the encroaching water. In fact, Dordrecht, a stiff bike ride southeast of the village where I grew up, looks directly out over the North Sea. All the land I took for granted as a child is just not even on the map.

Low Countries in 1300


800 vs 2000

Land reclamation efforts started in the 11th and 12th centuries, but the general trend was not reversed until the 16th century. Hydraulics engineering did not catch up with the stresses placed on the land by economic success and a burgeoning population until centuries after the problem began to manifest. To compound the difficulty, the local cooperatives that maintained and improved water management systems for a long time unwittingly shifted problems to neighboring communities—it apparently takes some time to realize that if you lower the water levels in one place, they will rise elsewhere, and even longer to act on that realization. Only when regional water boards were established was it possible to create more durable solutions.

Both North and South Holland began to solidify by stops and starts around 1500. After major flooding on the island IJsselmonde, for instance, a series of dikes and dams were built to separate the river Meuse from the Waal and the Devel. My village, Heerjansdam, sprang up at the Waal dam, in the crook of the dike along the Meuse. From that point onwards, Dordrecht has looked out over land to the west. But for a long time, such gains were offset by losses elsewhere. A case in point is the land east of Dordrecht, which drowned in the 16th and 17th centuries. Vast stretches of drowned land were not recovered until the 19th and 20th centuries, as wind energy was finally replaced with coal and oil to drive more powerful pumping machinery that could be in operation continuously. Nevertheless, the total area of the Netherlands is still less than it was in the year 800.

Aside
Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005) discusses these environmental disasters in detail, although he doesn’t mention Sicily.

Ironically, the ascendancy of water over land is the direct consequence of human intervention. Draining land to create pasturage for their cows and sheep, the early colonists rejiggered the delicate ecological balance and plunged themselves into a thousand-year battle with the consequences. It ought to be one of the great cautionary tales of history, together with the story of the environmental catastrophes that struck Sicily, Easter Island, and Greenland. The story of Easter Island is undoubtedly the saddest. The agricultural practices of the Rapanui caused severe deforestation and degradation of the soil. The island gradually became a hostile and infertile prison, as the inhabitants had used up all the trees and could no longer make the canoes they needed to escape. The history of Sicily, once known as the granary of the Mediterranean, is similar, if not quite so extreme. As the trees fell to the farmer’s axe, the climate dried up and the island became largely unsuitable for farming. Once fought over as a source of wealth to prop up empires, Sicily eventually became a hot potato, passed from hand to hand as nothing but a political liability.

Aside
Our rather rudimentary history lessons in grade school never failed to mention the “terpen”—the ...
More

The Dutch were much luckier. As settlers began to move in and drained the swamps and bogs for meadowland, the spongy, peaty soil began to subside even as the surrounding water level tended to rise. Where Holland started out 1 to 2 meters above sea level, it eventually ended up a similar distance below. Without artificial water level controls, almost all of Holland and two-thirds of the Netherlands would be flooded now, at least at high tide.

There’s a Dutch saying that luck favors the ignorant. It applies in this case. Many villages compensated for land subsidence by rising, most likely entirely inadvertently, on their accumulated waste products—and often rising faster than the surrounding land sank. Ironically, the principal ingredient in these serendipitous garbage dumps was the dung produced by the livestock for which the pastures were being drained in the first place. Everything, it appears, is connected.

The result of centuries of mud sculpting is a landscape most thoroughly artificial, most thoroughly designed. And yet it has the look of ages. Though man-made, the landscape looks organic, perhaps because growth has taken place by gentle accretion, perhaps because the land adjusts to human intervention. Mud recuperates. Such a human-sized landscape is a mixed blessing. As far as the eye can see, there’s nothing wild. Nothing untended. Nothing unintended. You don’t feel alien to this land: you are contained within it as in an old pair of jeans.

Despite the perpetual winds, humanity and all its artifacts appear attached more firmly to the ground here, as if gravity exerts a stronger pull. Farmhouses are as rooted in the soil as the sugar beets in the field next door. Stiles and fences, gently moldering away as if in the autumn of their bloom, look pressed into the mud with a gentle but persistent force, more likely to disappear into the earth than to blow away in the wind. Even the vegetation, lush and green without end, seems to have a more intimate relationship with the earth than plants in drier and more elevated circumstances. It’s not gravity, however, but the give of the heavy, sticky clay underfoot.

This land does not give up anything it touches, ferociously sucking at your boots and slowly but inexorably enveloping the garden bench in your backyard. You have to build your house on piles to prevent its sinking. You have to repave your garden walk at regular intervals so it won’t disappear into the mud. For much of the year, your shoes turn into giant mud clogs when you stray onto unpaved ground. And farmers wear their clogs like snowshoes, to avoid sinking any deeper into the clay than they have to. If you feel contained within the landscape, it's because you walk within it rather than on top of it.

Aside
Jacques Brel writes about the lowering skies—so low it makes you humble, so gray it begs forgiveness—in Le Plat Pays, though he refers to Belgium, a land not quite so flat as Holland.

Rem Koolhaas, the architect, says "People and things in flat landscapes are forced to be really honest because there's nothing to hide behind .... If somebody stands out there they just kind of poke right up. If you can stand being like that, then you can stand just about anything" (S, M, L, XL). See OMA for more info on Koolhaas.

It is not difficult to believe that here, a few meters below sea level, the weight of the often leaden skies lies more heavily on the spirits of the inhabitants, sucking the joy out of their blood. The Dutch aren’t known for gaiety in general, but there are rumors among the natives that higher suicide rates reign in the low-lying polders. This deadly incline, if it’s real, has been ascribed to the high barometric pressures of low land, but of course it could just as easily be explained by the endless sodden damp of sunless winter months. The rewards of this settled, northerly countryside, real as they may be, have little kinship with the exhilarations of mountain peaks. Despite the endless open vistas, you aren’t dwarfed by nature’s vastness, because, essentially, it’s not on show. The forces of nature are just as strong and inexorable here as elsewhere, just as indomitable as in centuries past. But wind and water have been pushed back, tamed, limited. You can feel safe, at home. You never feel grievously isolated—or gloriously alone.

A landscape like that is not a tourist attraction—not a place to visit, but rather a place to be. And when I left it, I dreamed almost nightly of the old polders. Dreams without stories, they were just filled with images. Or perhaps they were memories—of wind sweeping over the hollow grass land behind the dikes—of sitting on the side of a dike in the weaving grass, eating an orange, watching the ships go by—of bicycling along the Kromme Mijdrecht, almost level with the water and looking down a good 2 or 3 meters to the ditches on the other side.

It doesn’t take very long to adjust to not being at home in just that way, to the vague sense of unreality that comes from not feeling connected to the land. The dreams stopped after a year. After 2 years, on my first visit back, everything had shrunk—the houses, the cars, the refrigerators, and the features of the landscape itself. After 10 years, returning no longer felt like coming home at all. There are rewards for giving up such a connection to home. You are released from responsibility towards the land, living more provisionally, however it suits and as long as it suits. Moreover, home becomes a conveniently mythic place. In the missing, you misplace reality for a land of dreams—the hollow land, the bowl of safety and belonging, free from change, a miracle of design and the gentle accommodation of nature and engineering that is the only choice still open to an overly populous humanity perched precariously on a wad of unstable mud. Dream on.

Marijke Rijsberman

If you have any thoughts to share with me, please drop me a line at marijke@interfacility.com