Windmills on My Mind

When I took Mother to The Netherlands to visit the Bouw Family,  Kees insisted we go to Kinderdijk, a village a few miles east of Rotterdam. 

Before I went to The Netherlands the first time, I imagined a land dotted with windmills.  On my first trip with David, we drove south from Rotterdam to Oud Beyerland and, on another day, went 90 miles north to Amsterdam and did not see a single windmill.  I began to think that windmills as a symbol of Holland were as scarce as eagles in America.

At Kinderdijk we saw windmills - and how!

Kinderdijk means “children’s dyke.”  Before I saw it, I imagined a place where the Dutch boy stuck his finger in the dyke to keep the sea from flowing through.  That story is impossible.  A dyke is a big earth barrier, high enough that the sea laps a few feet below on one side while farmland stretches away many feet below on the other side.  On top the dyke was so wide it had a paved road with grass verges.  Margaret’s husband, Joop, drove us on a road on top of a dyke as we approached Kinderdijk. 

There we saw an amazing sight: 19 windmills all in a row.   Yes, amazing!

Uncle Dick had a windmill on his ranch in West Texas.  A tall structure, made of metal pipes like the Eiffel Tower, it clanked constantly as it turned in the wind, pumping up water from deep underground to provide water for his cattle, and for us.

The Dutch windmills are different.  They look like the pictures I saw in National Geographic, only bigger.  Kees had an uncle and aunt, now deceased, who lived in a windmill.  The windmills at Kinderdijk were erected in the 1500s and did not make a convenient home, but it was considered a privilege to be in charge of a windmill. 

Another thing I learned: the Dutch did not build windmills on their inland farms.  Rain brought plenty of water for their livestock.  Dutch windmills are on canals near the sea.  They pump excess rain water off the land and pour it back into the sea.  Just the reverse of what Texas windmills do.

This was another day of getting rid of preconceived ideas.  “Things are not always what we think they are.”