Dancing with the departed

That evening we are treated to a walking tour of the city by author Wim Willemse. He explains that Vollenhove was once a port on the Zuider Zee, a prosperous Hanseatic League city with an important fish industry, and later a peat industry. 600 years later, fleeting fortune, the sea is turned to polder, these industries have died and Vollenhove is a pleasant but very small town on a canal. They build very expensive yachts here. What used to be shore looks out over farmland.

The Bishop of Utrecht once kept a summer residence here, attracting other noblemen who built elaborate houses. We walk through the formal grounds of one noble residence, the gardens in some disrepair and half of it dead. A small monument honors WWII dead. We walk quietly and whisper in deference not to the departed but to a theater company rehearsing an upcoming production. Nearby, in the forest, a castle lies in ruins on a small island and a large wooden stage stands in the water in front. This was the home of a nobleman who died suddenly, his home left to ruin. The theater company will perform here, past and present dramas juxtaposed, a dance with the departed.

Later, in the boat, the conversation drifts to an acquaintance who lost a foot to parrot disease, to the surprising challenges of navigating the Ijsselmeer, and to a German who sank and drowned by underestimating the conditions on the lake. A cousin I greatly admire and appreciate has disappeared with some inheritance money, and we discuss the abyss he seems to have entered and our inability to coax him back into the family. I tried to enlist him as a cameraman for my Sahara trip, but he didn't respond to my emails, and now we discover, except for flowers his mother received on her birthday, that his immediate family hasn't heard from him in a very long time. How can this end well? I fear for him, I miss his humor, I wish he would call. It seems slightly morbid, the present tide of our thoughts, and I can’t help thinking it is the town that has affected us so. The sun sets.

My sister and I sit down and play chess until late into the night.

Dancing with the departed

Vollenhove, Netherlands