My dear cousin Sam, who’ll soon start featuring as an occasional guest photographer with us, asked what’s happened to my “Lake Living” series after viewing a recent post. As in, has it stopped being about lakes and started being about living on water. So herewith a few principles I’ve been working on for these “coasting” and “lake” categories. Because you might look at these photos and say “it’s not a coast, it’s a river.” Or you might look at the previous post that Sam questioned and say “that’s not a lake, it’s a bay!” But in our recent explorations here at smw, slt we’ve learned much more about water management & what what water connects to what other water, than we knew when first we got close enough to Zeeland to see the maeslantkering, which we featured in an earlier post.I’m proposing that a lake is a body of water that’s primarily fresh because it’s protected or cut off from the tidal flows that would come with extensive connection to an ocean. And that a “coast” is where a body of land that’s connected directly to a mainland-continent type landmass meets a body of water that’s close enough to the open ocean as to make nearly no difference. To whit,the city of Vlissingen, which is what you’re seeing here and which just happens to be the last stop for any train heading into the province of Zeeland from the rest of NL, is the only place south of the maeslantkering itself where the North Sea has free access to the interior of Zeeland. In other words, though Bergen Op Zoom – subject of that Lake Living post Sam queried may look on a map as though it connects by estuarial channels fairly directly to the North Sea, it in fact deliberately no longer does, due to all the massive water works NL did after the floods of the 1950s to build dams, dikes and the maeslantkering in order to protect as much of the interior as they could. If curious, please see a clear map in this link of all the many places where the North Sea’s access has been cut off by dikes and dams, which are now generally being upgraded to rise higher due to global warming and NL’s natural hope to remain an inhabited country despite American consumer’s addiction to gas-guzzling cars…and other carbon over-use issues. I’ll do one more explanation later on, when we get to the large body of water to the north and east of Amsterdam…which, until my visit two weeks ago to the castle so beautifully introduced in a recent post, I thought incorrectly was also salty & connected to the North Sea. But otherwise, assume these are my current working definitions of coast & lake…and ponder how global warming and Dutch ingenuity + determination give rise to interesting questions :-).
a) This canal’s actually well within the city of A’dam, so it’s urban even if it’s doesn’t look like it; b) Oops, I skipped this series on the last run of numbers :-/.
That’s the coast of North Holland at the top, with the port of Ijmuiden (“mouth of the Ij,” which is the industrial-sized canal that runs from Amsterdam directly over to the North Sea) in the top-left quadrant and the lovely town of Castricum to the right. All as seen on Tuesday morning as our plane oriented itself towards the runway at Schiphol.
Two shots from an afternoon walk in early January at a moment when the sun had managed to break through the clouds briefly. I’m back in A’dam now with far longer days than when these shots were taken – so you’ll be seeing more A’dam and still lots from the recent US visit, in weeks / months ahead.
These are all of Erasmus Park, a smaller park which is mostly on an island created by – you guess it – the Erasmus canal. All taken on the 7th of January, one of the first reasonably sunny and clear days we’d had for several months. Below and right you’ll see the standing water which, there and other parts of town, is still standing. Everything feels waterlogged and muddy, even now when the rain hasn’t been quite so constant…
Yes, we’ve shown you this dramatic maritime museum before, and by night as well. It really does stand out when one’s walking over to the Muziekgebouw for a concert, as was the case here in early March, during (brother) Steve’s latest visit.
