Canal ice helps Dutch rediscover national identity
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NIEUWERKERK AAN DEN IJSSEL, Netherlands: For the first time in 12 years, the Netherlands' canals froze this month, bringing the Dutch, who like their tulips in neat rows, a heady mix of pandemonium and euphoria.
Hundreds of thousands of skaters, their cheeks as red as apples in the freezing temperatures, took to the ice, and hospital wards were filled with dozens of people with fractured arms, sprained ankles and broken legs.
Train engineers were ordered to go slowly to avoid hitting skaters who clambered across railway tracks to get from one frozen canal to another. Even the minister of defense, an avid skater, fell and broke his wrist. His ministry announced that the national defense remained in safe hands, even if one of them was in a cast.
In the 19th century, when Hans Brinker, the hero of the novel in which he tries to win a pair of silver skates, coasted along Holland's ice, the canals froze almost every year. But water pollution and climate change have made this so rare that today a boy of 15, Brinker's age, may never have seen a frozen canal, or at least remember one. Until, that is, this year.
"For us, it's in our genes," said Gus Gustafsson, 68, a retired insurance executive, explaining why he and his wife had rushed out to buy new skates and take to the ice under a cloudless blue sky. "It was like a frenzy that came over people, including lots of kids, like my granddaughter, who is 5." With thousands of others, they skated northeast toward the cheese capital, Gouda, then toward Utrecht.
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With an influx of immigrants, the country has been struggling to maintain what it considers its Dutch soul, and Gustafsson was one of many here who thought the skating experience enabled the Dutch to reconnect with their identity. "There were only Dutch people on the ice," he said. "I saw no people of Arab descent."
But Andre Bonthuis, who has been mayor in this town of 23,000 people for the past 20 years, said he had seen Indonesians and Moroccans, among other newcomers to the Netherlands, on the ice. "It's rather new for people from Morocco," he said. But he agreed that there was something very Dutch about canal skating, which is depicted in paintings by Dutch masters as early as the 17th century.
"Water is our friend, and 10 percent of our area is water," he said. "From the oldest days, in very little villages, people could skate to each other."
Bonthuis, 59, said he had skated with friends recently but also had spent a lot of time just skating meditatively alone, leaning slightly forward, arms crossed behind his back. "It's nice to skate when there is a beautiful view of the fields," he said. "You see a lot of people skating alone."
Asked whether the skating frenzy had an economic impact, or perhaps had helped the Dutch forget the downturn, he replied: "Everybody took days off." He added: "A lot of Dutch canceled ski holidays, so that hurt the economy, at least in the ski resorts."
But over at Haitsma, a big hardware and skating supply store, Henk Haitsma, 62, the owner, was not complaining. His shelves were swept clean. "I sold 3,000 to 4,000 pairs of skates in the last 10 days," he said. In that much time he would have sold several hundred in other years.
The Dutch, famed for their champion speed skaters, like to go first class on the ice. The most expensive pair Haitsma sells, fancy skates with hinged blades, retails for $1,190. Other expensive models have removable linings that are put in a microwave oven, then pulled over the skater's foot, where they shrink to the perfect size. Many of the store's skates have removable blades, enabling skaters to walk off the ice without damaging the edges.
Monique Matze says she just hopes skaters stay off the railroad tracks. She is the spokeswoman for ProRail, which operates the Dutch railway tracks, and she was troubled by the numbers of skaters crossing the rails, many wearing bulky skates.
"When our tracks run over water and people want to get from one side to the other, they just climb over," she said. There have been no accidents, she said, but she added: "This weekend there were a lot, lot of skaters, and we had no means to facilitate crossings, so the only thing we could do was to caution them."
There may have been no railway accidents, but there were plenty of other mishaps. The defense minister, Eimert van Middelkoop, "fell on a rough spot on the ice," according to a statement by the ministry.
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