Pushing a big boat through a little bridge
With warmer weather arriving, pleasure boats have appeared among the working barges on the Maas. Jet skis and motorboats are popular so far, with the occasional sailboat and fishing barge.
A few days back, I was surprised by an *enormous* barge that suddenly appeared one morning.
No way this was fitting under the bridge, especially with a tall pilot house. Yet…the alarm didn’t sound, and the bridge didn’t open.
Certain disaster, and I was there with my camera ready to record it for CNN / BBC.
But, watch closely, the pilot house retracted as it approached the bridge, lowering into the boat to pass beneath the bridge, then popping up on the far side.
I love the ingenuity of mariners. Especially when things go completely wrong…
Partitioning life into compartments
During a recent visit to the US, a friend asked what it felt like to come back after having lived abroad for so long. It’s a difficult question: my closest answer is that it feels most like the feeling that I used to have when I went back to visit my parents.
I always have a sense of deep familiarity for people and settings when I go back: this is where I worked on projects, raised a family, sailed boats. At the same time, my memories are now frozen in the past, so I notice all of the little things that have changed; a tree that fell over the winter, a new store in town, the way that the kids next door have grown. It’s odd to wave to neighbors once a quarter, catching up with their gradual changes in single, occasional jumps.
Similarly, people ask how I cope with the travel, do I get disoriented by the time changes, do I miss having a big house, how do I stay on the correct side of the road in England.
I think that I adapt by doing a lot of partitioning.
When I am in the Netherlands, my life here is the most real to me. I have work, an apartment, Dutch shopping habits that are unique to this location. Dropping into the US, I have a different house, car, and friends. In the UK, things change again: I drive on the left and drink Guinness in the college bar and make familiar plans to attend Evensong.
For me, at these times, each of these settings is a simple, immediate reality. Just as I change my wallet to have local currency and credit cards, or pack clothes appropriate for local weather and customs, I also connect directly to the local place and people, disconnecting from distant alternatives.
It’s hard to describe; I tried to sort it through last night. I was sitting by the river last night watching the familiar flow of traffic and boats against the accustomed shops and restaurants of Maastricht. Six months ago it was sp foreign; now it’s just ‘everyday’. I’ve made a holistic mental transition that makes this city familiar and comfortable to me, assimilating places and peoples, rituals and routines. Maybe frequent travel speeds up that process; I don’t hold onto familiar places as tightly, or assimilate new environments more quickly.
On the down side, there’s certainly a disconnection from calling any single place “home”. I don’t ‘nest’ after selecting housing, and I’ve grown used scattering my 14 boxes of possessions across furniture that isn’t mine. There are pictures on my walls of people that I don’t know, smiling together in places I’ve never been.
I just compartmentalize them out.