Land, page 11
The triumphal culmination of the Barrier Dam project came on Saturday, May 28, 1932, when a flurry of barges moved around this last puncturing, and a forest of cranes and draglines worked feverishly in a maelstrom of wild water, and, under the pitiless gaze of dozens of film cameras, managed with a series of enormous splashes and slowly accumulating piles of boulders to staunch the torrent and finally seal its entryway, making it watertight.
At a stroke the Zuider Zee was formally extinguished, and forever. Cornelis Lely, creator of the dam, euthanizer of the Zuider Zee, birth-father of the Ijsselmeer, never lived to see his dream realized: he had died three years before, in 1929. But a statue of him would soon be thrown up at the west end of the barrier. He stands there today, proud and erect, booted and weatherproofed, staring down from a tower of basalt bricks as though willing the sea to stay put, daring it to breach his mighty construction. But at the same time, it is noteworthy that his ulster’s hem is being blown back by a gale—whether for purpose of realism or as augury was never said. But it serves as a reminder of the forces of nature ever present in the Netherlands’ story. And maybe a warning too, that this country above all is now standing into danger: that its very existence will be ever more tested as the world’s sea level rises and the weather becomes ever more extreme, year upon year upon year.
Such thoughts were far from any Dutch minds back in the 1930s, of course. Back then, the North Sea outside might rage and thunder and ram its chest against the country—but so long as Lely’s barrier dam held firm, all the innermost parts of the Netherlands would remain unscathed and untroubled. Moreover, with the dam completed, an array of new and habitable territories could now be created. Solid earth could be raised up from the depths and fashioned into something which to this degree and on this scale had never before been created, and by human agency alone, anywhere in the world: acre upon acre upon acre of spanking-new land.
The Dutch became formidably skilled at creating this new surface area, at manufacturing polders. For the Ijsselmeer they planned four: the relatively small reclamation known as the Wieringermeer tucked into the northwest of the lake; the Noordoostpolder, opposite it, at 120,000 acres, and Flevoland, split into two parts—Eastern Flevoland of 135,000 acres and its Southern sibling, 107,000 acres. Work on Wieringermeer was begun in 1927, before the North Sea barrier dam was fully finished. Work on the monumental pair of Flevoland polders in the south did not get under way until 1957—delayed in part because they were by far the largest and most ambitious of the new Ijsselmeer lands; but also because they would be vastly more expensive, and the postwar Netherlands had something of a trial to scrape together sufficient cash.
Once the money was in the Treasury’s vaults, so the hard physical work began—and all of it, by the time the country got around to the making of Flevoland, conducted along well-honed lines.
First, long lines of twenty-foot-high dikes had to be built around the lozenge-shaped body of water that Cornelis Lely—now thirty years dead—had initially designed. The new island’s point of origin would be in the southwest, close to the outer suburbs of Amsterdam, with enough free water between it and the port city to allow great cargo ships to pass in and out of the docks. The new island’s northeastern end would be connected by a long bridge to the Noordoostpolder dredged dry some twenty years before, and which was now almost fully settled with farms and fields that stretched to every flat new horizon—horizons that exactly matched those of the sea which they had replaced, except that now, on occasion, there were trees, or in time the spire of a distant church.
It took some seven years to build the Flevoland dikes, and to ensure they were watertight. Along them were built an array of four widely separated pumping stations, named for the otherwise forgotten men—Messrs Lovink, Colijn, Wortman, and De Blocq van Kuffeler—who had long believed in the wisdom of the reclamation. In 1966 these four stations were fired up, and their nine gigantic mechanisms (four diesel, five electric) started sucking and siphoning the brackish water out of the swamp. One of the pumps was heroically lifting out some two thousand cubic meters of water—half a million U.S. gallons—every minute, night and day, and pumping it up fully eighteen feet into the surrounding sea.
In nine months, the polder was declared dry. The mud—thick and black and deep and deadly-quicksand-dangerous to anyone walking on it in its early days—was starting to solidify. The pools of remaining water were drying out in the spring sunshine. The mud was ready to become earth, then soil—and to that end Dutch government planes started to fly back and forth over the lifeless mudscape and broadcast thousands of tons of reed seeds, knowing that in the summer warmth of 1967 they would germinate and, in short order, cover the mud in a thick mat of greenery.
By the season’s end thousands of acres were seen to be covered by chest-high stands of rushes, which when trampled down or, as later techniques advanced, deliberately burned down to create a rich mess of ash and stalks, evolved into area on which men could finally walk with safety. Without sinking. These first brave engineers thrust test rods down to see the depth of the gathering dryness—the reeds’ transpiration would help mightily accelerate the drying process—and then devised and planned the routes of, and in turn excavated, drainage channels—for the pumps would continue running, as they still do to this day.
They sowed further clumps of seedlings, first of fast-growing willow trees, and then of moisture-loving pioneer plants like the celery-leaved crowfoot, the marsh fleawort, and the sea clubrush. Twenty-five thousand acres of Southern Flevoland were first covered with willow forests, which cunningly and speedily sprang up, a Dutch version of Burnham Wood come to Dunsinane. By 1968, eleven years after the first barriers had been hauled up, the entirety of the new polder was covered with thick vegetation—and with thickening soil that agricultural specialists now deemed ready to receive crops and to support those who might come to grow them.
But infrastructure had to be created. The dragline excavators and the bulldozers that came—at first half-sinking axle deep into the rippling expanses of mud, but soon finding their track-laying feet, as it were—would be followed by ploughs, seed-drilling machines, harvesters, heavy-duty tamping engines, road-rolling machines, asphalt layers, cement plants, curbstone makers, foundation diggers, architects, carpenters, town planners. Telegraph and utility poles would be erected, schools would be planned, as would libraries, hospitals, office blocks, endless rows of modest modern houses, and with farms built and widely separated on hundred-acre and two-hundred-acre plots. And there would be roads and bus routes and a long railway line, linking the new province with Amsterdam and the rest of Europe and the world.
And once all that was done, so the people were invited in, to the half-made landscape and the half-built towns. On January 1, 1986, Flevoland was finally formally open for business. Advertisements were placed in the newspapers in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague, making it known that a new area of potential farmland was now available, and inviting applicants who wished to farm it.
And not just to farm it. But, and crucially, to own it. The state may have paid for all of this new land to be created, but it was not the state that ever intended to possess it. Such might well happen in the Soviet Union, or in China. It might well also happen in more nakedly capitalist societies, where choice parcels of state-made land would be handed out as party favors to the politically connected or to the ostentatiously generous. The Netherlands was signally different in its approach.
The Netherlands has for centuries been animated by its so-called poldermodel. This is a uniquely Dutch philosophy, born out of the country’s ceaseless need to do battle with the sea. It is a philosophy underpinned by a spirit of cooperation and compromise and a determined lack of evident privilege and separateness, and a concomitant belief that all of the population could and should share in such rewards as state-directed projects might ultimately generate. Popular communalism might well be the guiding ethos of the kingdom—but it would always be a communalism firmly yoked to individualism. New land would be owned not by the monarch or by the faceless official body that engineered its precipitation from the sea. Rather it would be owned by the best and the brightest and the hardest-working of the people who expressed their keen desire to own it. There was a distinctly Jeffersonian flavor to the poldermodel, so far as the distribution of territory was concerned—a belief within the Dutch psyche that it was important, as Thomas Jefferson had once written, “to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small land holders are the most precious part of a state.”
Pancake-flat and perpetually windy, the twelfth province of the Netherlands, Flevoland, was raised from the sea and dried out in 1986, now supporting towns and cities, farms, railways and highways, and a population of 400,000.
Those who first came initially to live and farm as smallholding tenants on the new Flevoland plots would agree—and not at all reluctantly, it seems, for the Dutch are an obedient people by and large—to follow the guidelines of the government agency, the Ijsselmeer Polders Development Authority. For the first five years they had to plant and harvest scientifically decreed rotations of rapeseed, flax, peas, and grass—after which, if all worked out and the farmers made sufficient of a living and the polder soils proved to be as fertile as anticipated, the tenant farmers would be invited to bid for mortgages, for ownership, for the establishment of a vast omnium-gatherum of private property. After which, assuming the banks looked kindly on those who sought loans, the farmers would embark on the kind of intensive agriculture peculiar to the Netherlands, with nitrogen-fixing clover on the fallow fields, turnips for animal feed in winter, and then during the warm springs and summers, potatoes, beets, wheat, onions, and barley in abundance.
Some degree of social engineering was also attempted in the settlement of the polders. As recently as the 1980s, the Netherlands was divided religiously and politically by a venerable phenomenon known as “pillarization”—the Dutch word is verzuiling—by which the kingdom’s three dominant groups, the Catholics, the Protestants, and the liberal social-democrats, were encouraged to develop along lines tinctured with a degree of what one might call cooperative segregation, of a mutually respectful separateness. This unenforced and somewhat vague sense of apartheid—one can see Dutch-influenced systems elsewhere in the world, South Africa and Northern Ireland more notably; and in the Netherlands it was until recently unthinkable for a Catholic and a Protestant to marry—was quite deliberately suggested to form a basis for the settlement of the Flevoland polder.
And so, the advertisements placed in the newspapers of the mid-1980s suggested, subtly rather than overtly, that it might be desirable and socially healthy for the ultimate demographic makeup of the region—and Flevoland would become the country’s twelfth and final province—to reflect by its admixture the pillars of the nation as a whole. Those government officials who were charged with considering the thousands of applications for land took the religious and social affiliation of each family into account—with the result that the 400,000 who live in Flevoland today are a near perfect alloy of the nation’s belief systems—one cannot say that Flevoland is Protestant, or Catholic, or liberal. Rather it is, quite simply, Dutch. It is, by its metrics, a near perfect distilled reflection of the kingdom as a whole.
And its capital—now a fully established city, thirty-seven minutes away by train from Amsterdam Central, and like so many new-made cities around the world dull, bland, flat, respectable, bustling, prosperous and inhabited by an evidently quite contented people—is the city of Lelystad. The city was named in honor of the man who, a full century before the water’s floodgates were closed and the human floodgates opened, had this vision of making new land, in florid abundance, for the good of his people and for the security and stability of his country. Si monument requiris, one might say of Cornelis Lely as others had said of Christopher Wren in London, circumspice. If you wish to see his monuments—just look around you.
Except of course, what Cornelis Lely made was the very land on which everything else was to be constructed. Until his ambitious and revolutionary dreams of damming and draining and settling and farming took root and were publicly endorsed by a reigning queen, the making of land was an endeavor assumed to be exclusively in the purview of the Gods, or of Nature. Given the ephemeral nature of the Netherlands, coupled today with the ephemeral nature of all the world’s land that happens to lie close to the ever rising sea, it may yet turn out that lasting is not necessarily going to be the singular feature of land that most appositely describes it. Land may turn out to be quite as temporary as the planet on which it lies. An irony that will not escape any Netherlander today, most especially if he chooses to walk across the Barrier Dam when a storm is brewing, and the North Sea starts to lick hungrily at his country.
3
Red Territory
To have and to houlde, possesse and enjoy and singuler the aforesaid continent, lands, territories, islands, hereditaments, and precincts, seas, waters, fishings, with all and manner their commodities, royalties, liberties, prehemynences, and profits that should from henceforth arise from thence, with all and singular their appurtenances, and every part and parcel thereof, unto the said Councell and their successors and assigns for ever.
—ROYAL CHARTER, THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY (1628)
If a white man had land and someone should swindle him, that man would try to get it back and you would not blame him.
—STANDING BEAR, PONCA INDIAN LEADER, ADDRESS TO THE 1879 TRIAL IN NEBRASKA, IN WHICH INDIANS WERE FINALLY DECLARED TO BE HUMAN BEINGS
Such concerns as might trouble a modern Dutchman were not, however, on the minds of the hundreds of American men and women who in the early spring of 1889 sat impatiently on their horses, and on the driving seats of their wagons, and in squadrons of waiting steam railway trains drawn up by freshly built wooden platforms in the heart of the midwestern prairies. It was the April 22, a chilly Monday, a fateful day in the history of the distribution of American land.
The crowds, some formed into ragged and ill-disciplined lines, were all waiting for the coordinated declaration—by mounted riflemen and buglers of the U.S. Cavalry—of the hour of noon. At this precise and presidentially ordered moment, when cannon were detonated and signal shots were fired and flags were dropped and brass instruments blown, the hundreds would all be released, like racehorses at a steeplechase gate. And once let slip they would gallop, careen, speed, or chuff-chuff-chuff in a mad dash. There they would spring into action, each to lay claim later that day to the ownership of a piece of land, supposedly in their knowledge unpeopled, undeveloped, and unowned, and that each supposed would pass into their exclusive possession and remain so now and for always.
So, the horses would be champing, their riders would be checking the girths and the bridles, the train engineers would be readying themselves to swing open the regulator valves and turn the wafts of steam into billowing gouts of the stuff. Ahead of them all was an expanse of territory that would soon be a state named Oklahoma, a conflation of the Choctaw words meaning “Red People.” The crowds—single men and whole families, drawn from all over the country and beyond—were engaging this April day in the first of many land runs, so called by the United States government, that had been designed to settle this territory’s acres and, with hard labor and commercial guile and over hopefully brief periods of time, make them productive and pleasant, civilized and rich.
The great majority of these would-be settlers had chosen to believe what the government agents had told them: that the land ahead, and to which they would soon be laying claim, had previously been owned by no one. It was theirs for the asking, theirs for the taking. It was about to belong to anyone with the spirit of adventure, the pluck of the pioneer, who was equipped with a swift horse, a good eye, a sharp stick, and a large and unmistakable white claim flag. It would be virgin grassland, already officially surveyed and mapped and primed and just now quite ready for the plough and the sickle and the construction of a homestead. It was untouched and unclaimed, as government agents promised. It would be as unspoiled and unused as would be the willow forests of Flevoland a century later. What the hopeful were about to claim was brand-new land, entirely claim-free, with these waves of new settlers the first humans ever to inhabit it.
Nothing could be further from the truth. What transpired that April day in Oklahoma—arguably by numbers the most populous Native American state in the present-day United States—needs to be seen, as it seldom is, in a greater context. For in common with all the habitable quarters of America, the prairies in these parts had in fact long been well and truly settled, and to the extent that ownership—a concept eventually to be codified and regulated by the new nation’s new government—was sympathetically understood by its native inhabitants, it was well and truly owned as well.
The North American continent to which white Europeans came in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had long been abundantly populated by a vast array of aboriginal native peoples. Today’s estimates range from two to twenty million living in what is now the United States. They were by all current accounts well-organized into bands and tribes of considerable sophistication, agriculturalists in the main, farmers who lived in or beside small towns, and who had a profoundly deep attachment to the land from which they derived their various livings. When those who lived on the coasts first glimpsed with astonishment the white sails of the tiny inbound flotillas, they can have had no apprehension whatsoever of the savage interruption—of the apocalypse, indeed, the holocaust—that was about to despoil their serene and settled lives.
