Fateh and I had agreed to meet at the train station in Heerlen, a small city about which I knew nothing except that it was landlocked and had an extensive history of Roman occupation. I’d hoped to visit the thermae, a complex of ancient baths that had been reconstructed by Hadrian’s army, but Fateh was clear we wouldn’t have time for sightseeing; when I proposed the idea, he responded with a simple and emphatic “No.” The plan, he explained in the series of short messages that followed, was to shop for groceries at an affordable market before catching a bus bound for the village to which he’d recently moved.
My visit to the Netherlands was ostensibly professional. I’d been invited to participate in a media summit focused on water systems and coastal land loss. I was attending the conference as the delegate of a New Orleans–based newspaper, though I’d written only one article on the subject, about the opening of a deltaic research center in Baton Rouge. This center was devoted to the study of water in Louisiana and the threat it posed to people and industry alike. Not coincidentally, the institute had been molded in the image of a Dutch organization, the Netherlands being at the vanguard of flood prevention. Amsterdam, then, was the proper place for a convention like this, which included journalists from dozens of cities around the world, many of whom had spent their careers chronicling the effects of global warming and climate change.
While I was clearly unqualified to participate in the conference, I’d leaped at the opportunity to attend, hoping to break the dreary monotony of my routine in New Orleans. Travel, unpredictability — no two forces could better dispel my malaise. But I also had an ulterior motive: to travel to the south of the country to see my friend Fateh, whom I’d met on the island of Samos, and his wife, Fatimah, whom I hadn’t yet met. Several years had passed since Fateh and I had last seen each other, and despite my protestations, he insisted on hosting me during my one-night stay, as he’d done for months in Greece. We would, I imagined, talk late into the night, perhaps with the aid of a local spirit rather than our typical ouzo, and that conversation, I thought, would be invigorating, even restorative. We had much to discuss.
I took the train from Amsterdam Centraal on the second day of the summit, still groggy from the sleeping pill I’d taken to counter my jet lag. It was January, and the maritime sky was heavy with moisture. We soon left Amsterdam behind and entered a countryside whose history was unknown to me. Without history or myth, the scenery was indistinct, nameless but for two strange words: polder and dyke. I’d learned these words on the first day of the conference and, seated now on the upper level of the intercity train, I tried to apply them to the passing marshland, though I could hardly remember which was a polder and which was a dyke.
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