Alone in Kyoto

Kinderdijk, Zuid-Holland, Nederland. Yet another UNESCO World Heritage Site. In retrospect, we may have to chronicle all the World Heritage Sites we visited on this trip, because it's a lot. 

Michael Patrick Rooney is famous for his obsession with two genres of structure -- lighthouses and windmills. Of the latter, Kinderdijk, Holland is famous for its windmills. 19 in total, lined up on eitherside of a reservoir meant to keep Holland habitable. Some still functioning, others just for show; the windmills have stood there since 1790 and are both an early success of land reclamation and the benefit of a familiar, Dutch tale. 

"God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland."

                                                                -Old English saying

Holland is created. A natural marshland that was frequently flooded throughout the year, the Dutch created a series of dikes and polders to control water levels and maintain useful land. A polder is the low-lying land between embankments, natural or not, that creates a hydrological entity. Essentially, the early Dutch were master engineers and learned how to control both seawater and river water levels to shore up land. The Kinderdijk windmills were built to manipulate water levels within the polder.

Kinderdijk is instrumental in this process; it means "Children's Dike". The legend foretells that a great flood sank the Grote Hollandse Waard and that nothing there survived, except for a cradle that was found by a young boy named Dirck. Inside the cradle lay a baby girl and its guardian -- a cat. It is said that the cat loved the girl and when the flood came, abandoned its own kittens, who had grown, to protect the baby in the cradle. Dirck eventually married the baby girl and they birthed a child who then lay in the same cradle -- Ludiger. Ludiger, a missionary, taught the people how to build dikes and therefore, Holland was spared any further flooding. This cleared the way for Santa Klaas to arrive, and each year on his day, December 6th, Dutch children place a new collar on the statue of the cat built over the tomb of the baby in the cradle, who became the mother of the missionary who built dikes, who cleared the way for the arrival of Santa Klaas. All hail the cat and the cradle!

All legend aside, Kinderdijk is truly a magical place. The day was gray and cool when we were there, but I don't think we would have enjoyed it the same had it been any other way. We spent an hour or more walking down the reservoir, sitting on bridges, benches and approaching the windmills that were built where "the cat saved a baby's life." People still live in them, too, and it really makes you wonder how much more one needs than a boat, a reservoir, a garden and a windmill to call "home".