Today is Dutch-American Day, I'm told. It seems as if I've spent most of my life referencing my ethnic and religious background, but here's an old essay that links me to the old world from which just about all my greats came in the late 1860s.
On the North Sea island of Terschelling, the Netherlands, the old lighthouse tower is the landscape’s dominating feature. It rises like a huge, tawny missile from the heart of the largest village, West Terschelling, a harbor town of a thousand souls or so–and a whole lot fewer, come winter. From the ferry that gets you here, the old Terschelling tower seems to grow from the island’s southern-most corner, its highest dune. Today, it’s festooned at the top by technology’s newest search equipment; otherwise, pillar-like, it looks the same as it did 130 years ago, on the day my great-grandparents left Terschelling behind forever on their way to America.
Some Dutch folks have made a game out of identifying country hamlets by the shape of their cathedral spires against a cloudy Dutch sky. But West Terschelling’s most active church barely peeks over the orange roofs of old village homes. It’s the tower that dominates, a square fortress of telescoping dusky sections that guided ship traffic through rough seas all around, and today attends the burgeoning tourist culture, the island’s major industry.
For hundreds of years it has stood there. My great-grandfather, leaving the island in 1865, would have seen it last from whatever vessel he and his young family boarded as emigrants. I would like to think he wasn’t nostalgic as he looked at what he left, but he had to be. The island of Terschelling is a beautiful place.
Far to the north in another small town, he would have seen the spire of the Reformed Church he’d likely attended, a place where lay the mortal remains of generations of his ancestors. Somewhere amid the long line of green fields on the eastern coast of the island, his own family home would have stood, adjacent to whatever land he worked. With two children, a young wife, and little more than a dream of a better life, he must have left with some second thoughts. He couldn’t have looked back on Terschelling without knowing he was leaving home.
The empty masts of a hundred leisure ships sit perfectly still in the harbor today, lines and ropes running down diagonally as if spinning an elaborate web between a perfect arrangement of toothpicks. In the background, the orange roofs of the village lay flat as slate against hillside dunes that descend toward the harbor, where all one can see is streets and storefronts grabbing tourists’ attention.
This morning the low Dutch sky hangs like a false ceiling above the North Sea.
Whatever winds blow carry a palpable dampness so thick it hugs everything--beneath my pen, the paper in the tablet curls up in its own thickness. Terschelling people like to say the sun shines more on the island than it does on the mainland, but one wonders about objectivity in a tourist haven like this.
What my great-grandfather wouldn’t have seen from the ship leaving the harbor may well be the island’s most distinguishing feature, for out there beyond the old towns is a coastline preserve of rolling dunes that seem untouched, except for the ubiquitous Dutch bike paths. In the years that have passed since my great-grandparents left, no other area of the Netherlands has likely changed less than the low-rolling dunes that huddle over most of the island. There’s more open space on Terschelling than most anywhere on the Dutch mainland. At some spots along that bike path, one can survey a range of sand hills that roll as far as the eye can see, the very same view my own ancestral family may well have admired.
There was enough good land to support him as a farmer here, but my great-grandfather could certainly never escape the sea. Perhaps that’s why, in the family genealogy I have, Cornelius C. Schaap is described as landbower and zeeman--farmer and sailor. Terschelling’s farmland is as beautiful as anything in the American midwest–where I live and his family immigrated; but here on the island the sea is everywhere. He and his family must have stood here on some still-existing promontories and admired the open horizon of water, just as I am this morning, a view he wasn’t about to see in on the great American prairies, where he tried to put down roots and finally left this earth altogether.
The air is fresh and salty. At the water’s edge, a single mason chisels stones. His hammer rings occasionally. He works slowly. The hum of a few automobiles carries along the shoreline on the fresh sea breeze, and all the way on the other shore of the island the grunt of an earthmover I saw earlier this morning snorts like some giant sea creature. Things change here. Nothing really stays the same. Terschelling isn’t the island he left.
Still, I wish I knew which house he and his family left behind. I’d like to see it, stand beside it, even walk through it; but I know that while the frame might be the same, the foundation still constructed of anciently-placed fieldstone, time itself will have significantly remodeled the place, wherever it is.
This morning, when I look over this Terschelling landscape and try to see it as M’neer Schaap and his wife must have 150-some years ago, I can’t help but wonder who I would be if they had put aside their restlessness or theological discontent or anxious dreams of freedom, and just stayed here. If C. C. had pulled on his wooden shoes and walked to the barn instead of the harbor, I wonder what would life be like for me here today, living here on Terschelling, a resort island known for beaches where clothing is optional.
The churches here are historic, landmarks on the walking tour, but mostly silent today, even in summer when the place swarms with tourists.
The empty masts of a hundred leisure ships sit perfectly still in the harbor today, lines and ropes running down diagonally as if spinning an elaborate web between a perfect arrangement of toothpicks. In the background, the orange roofs of the village lay flat as slate against hillside dunes that descend toward the harbor, where all one can see is streets and storefronts grabbing tourists’ attention.
This morning the low Dutch sky hangs like a false ceiling above the North Sea.
Whatever winds blow carry a palpable dampness so thick it hugs everything--beneath my pen, the paper in the tablet curls up in its own thickness. Terschelling people like to say the sun shines more on the island than it does on the mainland, but one wonders about objectivity in a tourist haven like this.
What my great-grandfather wouldn’t have seen from the ship leaving the harbor may well be the island’s most distinguishing feature, for out there beyond the old towns is a coastline preserve of rolling dunes that seem untouched, except for the ubiquitous Dutch bike paths. In the years that have passed since my great-grandparents left, no other area of the Netherlands has likely changed less than the low-rolling dunes that huddle over most of the island. There’s more open space on Terschelling than most anywhere on the Dutch mainland. At some spots along that bike path, one can survey a range of sand hills that roll as far as the eye can see, the very same view my own ancestral family may well have admired.
There was enough good land to support him as a farmer here, but my great-grandfather could certainly never escape the sea. Perhaps that’s why, in the family genealogy I have, Cornelius C. Schaap is described as landbower and zeeman--farmer and sailor. Terschelling’s farmland is as beautiful as anything in the American midwest–where I live and his family immigrated; but here on the island the sea is everywhere. He and his family must have stood here on some still-existing promontories and admired the open horizon of water, just as I am this morning, a view he wasn’t about to see in on the great American prairies, where he tried to put down roots and finally left this earth altogether.
The air is fresh and salty. At the water’s edge, a single mason chisels stones. His hammer rings occasionally. He works slowly. The hum of a few automobiles carries along the shoreline on the fresh sea breeze, and all the way on the other shore of the island the grunt of an earthmover I saw earlier this morning snorts like some giant sea creature. Things change here. Nothing really stays the same. Terschelling isn’t the island he left.
Still, I wish I knew which house he and his family left behind. I’d like to see it, stand beside it, even walk through it; but I know that while the frame might be the same, the foundation still constructed of anciently-placed fieldstone, time itself will have significantly remodeled the place, wherever it is.
This morning, when I look over this Terschelling landscape and try to see it as M’neer Schaap and his wife must have 150-some years ago, I can’t help but wonder who I would be if they had put aside their restlessness or theological discontent or anxious dreams of freedom, and just stayed here. If C. C. had pulled on his wooden shoes and walked to the barn instead of the harbor, I wonder what would life be like for me here today, living here on Terschelling, a resort island known for beaches where clothing is optional.
The churches here are historic, landmarks on the walking tour, but mostly silent today, even in summer when the place swarms with tourists.
If the Schaaps had stayed, would I still be a believer? Am I simply the passive recipient of a faith I was bequeathed with a chaotic juxtaposition of time and place? Is my faith as historically pinioned as that lighthouse? What would I believe? Who would I be? How fully are we shaped by the world we apprehend?
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more tomorrow. . .
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