“Let us go to the banks of the ocean where the walls rise above the Zuider Zee. Long ago, I used to be a young man and dear Margaret remembers that for me.”
I think I was in fourth or fifth grade the first time I heard the words “Zuider Zee.” I don’t remember if it was when I first heard the story of Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates or the one about the boy who saved the day by sticking his finger in the hole in the dike, but it was the first I ever heard of the Netherlands.
I’m not sure why it was, but I thought the dikes went all the way around the coastline and that the entire country — at least the coastal part — was below sea level. I also thought that Zuider Zee was the Dutch name for the North Sea, and it was only recently that I learned that the Zuider Zee was essentially a large bay to the east and north of Amsterdam.
It had been to Europe numerous times before making it to the Netherlands in 2011, and even though we flew in and out of Amsterdam, most of the time we were in the country we were staying on the west coast at Noordwijk for a scientific conference my wife was attending.
We were there in early July, and at a little above 52 degrees north latitude, it’s the farthest north I’ve ever been. It was fascinating to still have daylight well past 10 p.m. Our hotel was right on the beach, and as you can see from the next picture, no dikes.
I thought I had seen the Zuider Zee, although I never saw anything even resembling a levee. The song lyrics at the beginning are from the wonderful, much-covered song “The Dutchman,” which I always thought Steve Goodman had written. As it turned out, it was someone else, and singers as wonderful as Liam Clancy, John McDermott, Jerry Jee Walker and the group Celtic Thunder have all done memorable versions of it.
We travel very little anymore. In fact, our 2011 trip to the Netherlands and Greece is the last time we’ve been to Europe. We will probably go to France next year on our way to see our daughter and her family in Tunisia. That’s pretty much the only place on our list right now, at least outside the U.S.
I never got the joy out of traveling that my parents did. In their later years together, it became the biggest and best part of their life. I know they visited every continent outside of Antarctica, and that was in their plans when my dad got sick for the last time.
I’ve been to something like 15 countries, all in the Northern Hemisphere. Both of my kids have actually lived south of the Equator, Pauline in Indonesia and Virgile in Paraguay. The only time I crossed the equator was for a week at Club Med in French Polynesia, which doesn’t count as a separate country because it’s technically part of France.
If we do make it to Africa next year, it would be my first visit to one of the southern continents, but Tunis is well north of the Equator. In fact, it’s more than 5,300 kilometers (and a 76-hour drive) south from Tunis to Yaounde, Cameroon, where Pauline had her first posting.
And that’s still north of the Equator.
Other than Australia, another place I’m unlikely ever to visit, most of the places I would still like to see are well to the north. I still have four states to visit to make it to all 50, and the toughest one will be Alaska. I made it to North Dakota four years ago, and I still need Wisconsin, Arkansas and Mississippi to complete the list.
But I would still like to see the Zuider Zee.