Jul. 29
5:07 PM
A Dispatch from the Fens
The approach to the Dordrecht Biesbosch does not really set the tone for the park itself so much as subvert it; rather than the jaysus, that’s beautiful and only getting better sensation one experiences when approaching many natural wonders the drive to the Biesbosch imparts one with a deep and uncomfortable how the fuck could, no, how the fuck can we be doing this to our air, our water our soil—tangles of industrial buildings like some too-obvious mirror of the undergrowth squeezing in where it can between road and bikepath and chainlink fence, smokestacks more numerous than an eckeltje’s spines erupting great plumes of exhaust that blend with the clouds and are swallowed by them, camouflaged and invisible almost immediately, a faint briny, chemical stench wafting over the place that brings to mind nothing so much as the impossible aroma of a sea vomiting. What could be a dike to the left is a toxic landfill, what looks at first like a polder through the trees on the right is a golf course. Still, we must not despair, for beauty often lies in contrast, and just as the pristine beaches of Cape San Blas lie across a bay from a papermill now thankfully gone still, the Dupont Miracles of Science! billboards plastered over that depressing jumble of warehouses and machinery serve as a grotesque sentinel guarding the entrance of that verdant labyrinth of willows and reeds and rivers and creeks—the Biesboch, the Forest of Rushes.
It was growing dark as I rode back from dinner but rather than turning into the hostel I shot passed, the circle of my headlight bobbing faintly across the fietspath in front of me as I peddled on to the park proper, the trail leading past the small Biesbosch center and boathouse and into the network of trails. This is the exact route that made me fall in love with the place, the darkening forest holding you for only a moment before the world opens up into the marshy pasture, the reclaimed polder edged by the dike curving in front and the willows far on the other side of the fields. We are wrong when we think of dikes, usually—this example is far more typical, a small grassy ridge crowned with trees and a footpath with a small channel on the other side. The night before I walked that rampart, the cropped willows with their shadow faces and the countless noises of the midnight marsh far more eerie than the wind rustling across the polder and through the silver willows of the gloaming. Massive hares the size of foxes dart out and away, a single standing black ewe eyes me from a clump of prone white sheep, owls bob and sway through the air in front of me, one fine, almost-white specimen scouting the terrain before me, dipping back and forth across the bikepath, her flight almost drunken, and then she wheels up and away as I enter another small patch of wood, the shadows deeper, my light brighter, the sky when I emerge somehow thicker, greyer, even more distant than should be possible. The willows are waiting.
This is all land reclaimed many times over, the village that might once have stood in this little polder so hard won from the sea gobbled up by floodwaters six hundred years ago—laying the foundation for a new swimming pool they found a calf preserved in the silt, and fishermen who troll the creeks and canals still draw up ancient bones, ancient teeth. When the flood made a freshwater sea of the place the Dutch wasted no time in wrestling back the waters—they looked for rushes in that great tidal lake, and when they found them they planted reeds, and when the reeds strengthened their mudbanks they planted willows, and when the willows grew they had islands, and in these islands they dug trenches, osier-beds, and harvested the willows, and harvested the reeds, and even harvested the rushes, the biezen. The willows were allowed to grow to waist height, sometimes shoulder, and then were hacked across, and the shoots that burst from these living stumps were harvested—every year where thinner boughs were needed, every three for the broader shoots. The willow cutters had lives as hard as their hooked blades, as did the reed cutters, as did the rush gatherers, and for centuries they alone knew how to navigate the maze of islands and streams—when war came the resistance hid there, and ran messages across enemy lines, but before and after the only ones other than the men who worked the Forest of Rushes were the poachers and the beasts they hunted to extinction—the last beaver fell in the early 1800s, and only in recent years have imported German acquisitions ushered in a bestial renaissance in this green and silver and brown mess of beauty incarnate.
The willows lining the path are not the broad mourners we think of—they are those I spoke of before, broad trunked fellows that suddenly explode in a riot of thin shoots, hundreds, thousands of them, their leaves the color of swords in the predawn mist but nowhere near so hard, their color bleeding out into the sky and down into the ground, and back I go. Rather than following the same path home along the dike I cut across the field on a trail tramped in the wet grass, the bike devolving into a boneshaker of old as I ride it across the polder, the willows ever constant on my left, geese shrieking in the dark, and home is always too close through the trees. The light is gone but I would not say it has failed, no I would not.