in training

One of the things I love about going to new places is putting something I learned in school into context finally. When I was at university, I had a job in the art history library, showing slides for the art lectures. I got to peek in on American architecture history, French impressionists, and Dutch Renaissance painters. The last one was full of paintings of these huge, low landscapes, often more sky than land, showing fields of perfect flatness edged with a few buildings or distant church spires. The class was taught by an archetype of an art history professor- frizzy brown hair streaked with gray, lots of autumnal tweedy clothes, and perpetually late, but when she spoke about these paintings, I wanted to see these landscapes, imagining this curiously pastoral place like none I'd seen before. Growing up in Vermont meant a farm of rolling hills to me, and these were all sky and just a little strip of carefully sectioned land.

So imagine my thrill at finding that the train ride I have to take every time I go work in Holland passes through these very fields that were being painted so many centuries ago. The names- Delft, Haarlem, Utrecht, are all the names I read while preparing the slides, and in spite of the incredible Dutch population density, the views are still there today. After changing to the southbound train at 's-Hertogenbosch, it's farms and tiny villages the rest of the way to my destination, punctuated even with a few windmills. Last week some kind of floral crop was blooming, so we whizzed past patches of flaming orange and chartreuse, and in between, the carpet-smooth pastures were dotted with cows and sheep. Unlike the wild scruffiness of Icelandic sheep, the Dutch ones are lozenge-smooth and almost all white. For some reason the people in that area are also fond of that peculiar breed of useless horse, the mini. Space may be limited there but I still cannot understand the reason to own such a creature. All the labor and expense of a full-sized horse and you can't ride it.

I've tried to explain this particular breed of glee at finally BEING there to people in Iceland and others I've met on the road, and it seems that only fellow Americans can understand it. So much of American education is devoted to Stuff That Happened in Europe, and it's very difficult to really grasp it without an idea of what the landscape feels like, how the cities are, and the character of these countries. There's only so much you can get out of a slide as you sit in a dark New England auditorium thinking about the chicken nuggets you just had for lunch in the dining hall. Still, I have to hand it to these professors who managed to make these landscapes and experiences so interesting that I wanted to see them for myself, and that when I finally did, I remembered so much of those dark hours years ago.

Ship sighting: The train trip also crosses the Rhine, which hums with shipping activity. Just below the train bridge there's even a little On Time III-style ferry that crosses this massive river.