That Day in Rotterdam

 

One of the few photographs I took that actually captured the rain that soaked me that day, getting me wet even through the REI rain shell I had purchased in Portland before we left. It is common knowledge in movie production, for example, that if you want to make a scene with rain in it, you have to make it pour buckets, far more intense than any real rainstorm.

October 24, 2014

By then on our trip it was standard practice for me to leave on a walk and come back at the end of the day having taken a thousand photographs with my iPhone, almost all of them containing some word or sentence in the local language.

Of all the non-English-speaking countries in Europe, Holland was the richest with public exhibition of its language. It is almost as publicly verbose as the United States. As rule, the further south you go in Europe, the less you see of the language. By the time you cross into Africa, you become frustrated at how little you see the local language written on signs. Words in public are the hallmark of an advanced, prosperous culture. It works this way in Mexico too. Spanish-speaking neighborhoods in the United States have far more written Spanish displayed in them than do corresponding streets south of the border.

In Rotterdam, I was sure my new phone was ruined. I could not bear to miss out on photographing anything I saw written in Dutch. At one point the screen stopped working. As it happened, it just needed to dry out. But I couldn't just put my phone away. I kept bringing it out, sheltering it with my cold rain-soaked hands to eke out a few more photographs as I obsessively walked the city.

My Dropbox has a thousand photographs from that day, at least. I took photos until my phone battery died on most days. I tried to time the battery so it would give out just as I got back to the hotel room. You never knew what interesting thing you would see in the last hundred yards.

It is interesting how memory works. Of all those images I took that day, they are nothing compared to the single imprint of standing on the side of the river, having just arrived there. The sky was foggy and a mist hung over the buildings on the island across the water. It looked like a miniature version of New York. Just then a large beautiful ferry came down the river and disappeared into the fog. The name of the ferry was the Abel Tasman, the name of a famous Dutch explorer who ventured into the southern Pacific and explored Australia. I felt overwhelmed by the appearance of the ferry out of the fog. But it went by too quickly for me to get a good photograph of it. This is the way it is. It is in my memory.