The Low Countries. Jaargang 12

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The Netherlands Gets on its Bike
[Anton Korteweg]

If you had to take one photo that summed up the Netherlands as the average foreigner sees it, what would it show? Queen Beatrix in clogs, cycling past a row of windmills, with the glassy eyes of dozens of cows staring at her in astonishment - this would probably qualify.

It is not very likely that Her Majesty would offer her services for this Dutch promotional spot, but the fact is that she does cycle. In 2001 she was even immortalised in bronze on her bike. Whereas her male predecessors had been frozen into statues as proud generals on horseback, she will forever be trying to keep her rather shaky balance on two narrow tyres at the Posbank nature reserve near Arnhem. And so far with great success.

Her mother and grandmother cycled too, as do most of her subjects. There are as many bikes as people in the Netherlands: sixteen million. If the Flemish are born with a brick in their hands, with which to build their own home as soon as they get the chance, the Dutchman finds a tricycle in his cradle so that he will master the art of cycling as soon as possible. The Netherlands has 20,000 kilometres of cycle paths (which means 1.2 metres per inhabitant) and the Dutch language area is the only one to have a word for the bicycle whose etymology remains unknown: fiets. Virtually every Dutch linguist of any reputation has agonised in vain over the origins of this word. The one certain thing is that it was initially spelt with a v (viets), and that it dates from the late nineteenth century. How a small country can achieve greatness!

The fact that people cycle so much in the Netherlands is not so much a result of the displays of modesty (‘look how ordinary we are’) of which one might suspect successive monarchs. No, apart from the informal nature of Dutch culture, it is of course also a matter of our fairly unique geographical condition. To quote the Rotterdam writer and keen cyclist Bob den Uyl in his ironically toned study What Cycles There? (Wat fietst daar?, 1980), the Netherlands are ‘a large park, filled from top to bottom with winding paths and roads, small streams and broad rivers. The land might have been made for top-notch cycle trips. The distances are not too long, there are no mountains to block the view or be climbed, the landscape is peaceful, still and, to the connoisseur, varied’. And as if this evocation of such a paradise were not enough to make the most obdurate driver leap straight onto their bike, he goes on, ‘It is also larded with old towns whose streets

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Daphne du Barry's The Queen on a Bike (2001) at the Posbank nature reserve near Arnhem. Photo by M. Pluim.

you can wander contentedly’. Den Uyl does portray the marshy Dutch delta a little too idyllically, as if the Netherlands were one vast Arcadia, but it cannot be denied that the country's highest ‘mountain’, 321 metres high, lies in the deep south, at a great distance from most Dutch people. Nor do the Dutch have to endure a scorching sun in a barren landscape, and every couple of kilometres the pasture is interrupted by ‘a patch of wood the size of a newspaper’. And one gets used to wind. An additional advantage is that, unlike Belgium, all these cycle paths mean you will not so soon be knocked down and end up in hospital.

No, in the Netherlands you can cycle to your heart's content with greater ease than in almost any other country. Our former Prime Minister Wim Kok must have thought the same when, at the European summit in Amsterdam in 1997, he succeeded in persuading his colleagues to - cautiously - try out a bicycle. One cannot blame him for failing, as far as I am aware, to convert them into avid cyclists in their own countries. Those are after all less suited to this form of transport than the ‘endless low country’ of the Netherlands, where, to encourage cycling, one has since 2002 been able to rent a bike for only 2.5 euros a day from an increasing number of railway stations and where the Best Cycling Town is chosen from five nominees every two years. In 2000, this honour went to Veenendaal in Gelderland: it was one of the first places in the country to have free secure cycle-racks at the station and in the centre of town. This is an initiative worth repeating: nothing is stolen so easily and with so few qualms as a bicycle, locked or not, and especially where there are students. In a medium-sized university town like Tilburg more than 7,000 bikes change hands unlawfully every year. Twenty a day.

Jan Fockema. cycling champion in 1891. and his timekeeper C.A.A. Dudok de Wit.

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The ‘election campaign’ of Dutch provo Bernard de Vries (1966). Photo by Cor Jaring.

Bicycle manufacturer Fongers and the Dutch army: close allies. Nationaal Fietsmuseum Velorama, Nijmegen.

The bicycle is the perfect means of transport for the individualist. Tandems are for eccentrics. And everyone has memories of bikes, just as they do of a mother, even if it was no more than the resigned endurance of painfully jolting along on a children's saddle or the luggage carrier. Perhaps this is why the bicycle and cycling are so often praised in poetry. It started as early as the late nineteenth century, when Herman Gorter portrayed two competing racing cyclists in sight of the finishing line in his classic epic poem ‘May’ (‘Mei’, 1889):

...they peer at each other's wheels
And pedal resolutely, their souls
Full of spite and hatred, approaching the end one is ahead,
But the other overtakes and dashes past
Blinded by despair. Pedalling over the finish
He draws cheers and applause from the spectators.

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Since then, writing poetry on the nation's favourite form of transport has never ceased. In 1980 an anthology was published, entitled simply The Bike (De Fiets), in which Wim J. Simons collected fifty bicycle poems. He could have chosen three times as many. Strikingly enough, it was in the seventies that the praises of the bicycle were most abundantly sung. I shall not venture to explain this boom. Simons simply says that the bicycle gained enormously in popularity at that time. But since when have poets let their inspiration be guided by such banalities? Of course the true cyclists among them may well do so. Cycling is after all a fairly earthly occupation. In any case, of the following collection of ten bicycle poems, eight were published about thirty years ago. After an ode to the bicycle (C. Buddingh) you will encounter them all one after the other: the toddler on the children's seat at the front (Jan Kuijper), the seven-year-old boy on his first bike (Gerrit Komrij), the urban cyclist (Gerry van der Linden), the man who cycles to avoid the boredom of a Sunday (Kees Ouwens), the cyclist who actually wants to fly (Ad Zuiderent), the conqueror of the Mont Ventoux (Jan Kal), the noble cyclist (H. Van Teylingen), the man who is ashamed as he anticipates the elderly, struggling pensioner he will later become (T. Van Deel) and to close, the cyclist as a metaphor for contemporary humankind.

As for myself, I am entirely ‘self-propelling’, in the sense that I am addicted to moving myself about. Preferably by bike, but if that's not possible, on foot. This urge must have something to do with a powerful yearning for autarky, for only ever having myself to thank for everything. I distrust everything I cannot achieve under my own steam and therefore go through life carless. You have to earn your destination by making an effort. Even death. I have tried to express this conviction in the ‘Ode to the Bicycle’ (‘Ode aan de fiets’) below, which is from my latest collection, While Whistling (Al fluitend, 2001):

As motionless as possible in movement;
it's best with mist in the meadow
it's light, but there's nothing that
must already be something, no cow
nor gate nor city in the distance;
what there is, is just a bike
with circling legs each side.

Even if, however far from home
and however dark the night, you pedal
your own kindly light with ease.
And even if your front light is broken,
the dynamo still sings its song,
which itself brings peace to the mind.

But above all, on arrival, it is
entirely you that arrives -
empty, cheery, dead tired.

And so, later, it should be you
that comes to a halt and no other.

Leiden Central Station. Photo by Anton Korteweg.

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J.H. Moesman. The Rumour. 1935-1941. Canvas, 120 × 100.5 cm.

In my more melancholy moments I fear that I even subscribe to Pascal's declaration that all the world's misery is the consequence of the fact that man is not capable of sitting quietly at home - implicitly an argument against every form of mobility. But if one has to move, then as far as I am concerned it's by bike. Because, as one of the greatest post-war Dutch poets, Rutger Kopland, once wrote in a collection with the eloquent title of Everything by Bike (Alles op de fiets, 1981): ‘On the bike everything goes slowly / but still fairly fast.’ And that is precisely the speed I like. Every day for almost a quarter of a century I have covered the distance from my home in Leiden to my place of work in The Hague by bike - 35 kilometres there and back. The little bonus I like most is to come across the same cyclists at the same place every day. This ideal cannot be fully achieved but one comes close, at least when I leave home at the same time, take the same route and keep to the same speed, and when the others, always the same ones, do this too. As if we were not moving ourselves forward, but were being moved forward, fixed on two conveyor belts moving in opposite directions.

And as a telling Dutch saying points out, one which perfectly expresses the thrift in our national character, on the bicycle you will get where you want virtually free of charge (‘Op de fiets geniet je voor niets’ - ‘Enjoy the bike at a price you like’), which is of course an added bonus.

To conclude: to the poet, unlike the ordinary earthly mortal, cycling, or the movement the legs make while doing it, has one great advantage over every other means of movement, including running. The cycling movement is... cyclical: your legs turn, you pump something up. Cycling draws up water, brings things to the surface, like the dredger. Without cycling there are no thoughts, or at least far fewer thoughts, and without thoughts there are no poems.

Translated by Gregory Ball