Rolling up the tarmac

Holland is a very well organized country. Really well organized. There are rules and norms for everything.  Everything has been touched by a human hand in this 30^th most densely populated country in the world.

The Dutch even have a saying “God created the World, and the Dutch created the Netherlands."  It’s quite a legitimate statement: almost twenty percent of the country (there we go! The first percentage in my blog! For someone with an aversion for numbers, that’s quite an achievement. Let’s celebrate!) is located under the sea level, majority of which is land regained from the sea. Ok, it would be more precise perhaps to say “God created the World, and the Dutch created almost 20 percent of the Netherlands”  but I’m sure everyone agrees this is not a very catchy phrase. Let’s not argue about the details: if it was God who created the World, that probably was a certain percentage, too. He didn’t create tarmac, for instance, did he? There we go.

The Dutch, in turn, who perhaps did not create tarmac themselves, did build great roads in their little sweet home-made country. Streets. Highways. Bike paths. Jogging paths. Horse paths. Pavements. Whether by car, by bike or on foot, I enjoy them incessantly, and probably will continue to do so till cows come home (I don’t actually have cows, nor invite them home or particularly enjoy them, as they are huge and we have no communication media in common, which means I’m afraid of them whenever I meet them on my jogging path, but nevertheless the expression “till cows come home”, meaning “forever” is particularly suited for the Netherlands. Who’s been here in the countryside will understand why.)

Anyway. That brings me away from the topic, just as cows bring me away from my jogging path on the heather fields (being afraid of the creatures, I need to make last-minute route adjustments). Let’s go back to the Dutch roads. One road in particular. I was cycling there one evening, my yoga mat in the cycle bag, and suddenly I can see an incarnation of “That’s it” in front of me. The road stops suddenly. The road is over. What stretches in front of me instead is sand, mud and stones. I did continue cycling though. It was a very special feeling, I imagined it was a street in the Middle Ages, and I was a visitor from the future on my bike.

 

It is at that moment that this thought appeared: the Dutch are surely proud of the level of infrastructure in their country, which however doesn’t stop them from being curious to see whether civilisation reached any deeper levels than what’s on the surface. They remove the tarmac to see whether the sand and the soil underneath already transformed themselves into something more civilised. More organized. More structured.

They didn’t. What a relief! There’s still a beach underneath.