What nobody can bring themselves to say is that the Elfstedentocht is gone.
Over.
“Foarby.”
Living in a country protected from the sea by huge manufactured barriers, we are starting to understand that even these heroic constructions will not be strong enough for climate change. I’ve often imagined the collapse of dune and dike, and the cultural losses such a cataclysm would bring. If the western Netherlands — all those cities, at or even below sea level, with all those museums and libraries — were swept in the sea, which treasures would we miss most? (I’d stuff the Frans Hals group portraits, in his museum in Haarlem, into my little lifeboat.)
And when we imagine the losses to cultural heritage that global warming entails, we often think of things we’d try to rescue, or buildings we can’t move or a few striking images: snowless Alps, drowned Venice. We don’t always think about the immaterial losses that warming will bring — or, in the case of the Elfstedentocht, that it already has. When the freak hurricane, the unexpected drought or the unbearable heat wave passes, we get on with our lives, unable to admit that some things are not coming back.
That’s why it’s always so poignant for me to hear about the Elfstedentocht. Nobody can stand to say that it’s over. You’d hate to be the prime minister who told everyone to forget about such a beloved national tradition. Instead, barring some freak storm, it just somehow will never happen again. Years will pass. (Twenty-six already have.) Younger people, for whom the tradition means nothing, will eventually forget about it. The race will fade from the communal memory, and with it, a whole way of life — a whole way of structuring and giving continuity to human experience — will disappear.
How can such nonmaterial losses be commemorated? As long as we are unable to see them as losses, we can keep refusing to see what has caused them and keep hoping that they still, someday, might be reversed. The Elfstedentocht is like a relative whose small plane went missing a few years ago and whose loved ones still hope that he could, one day, stumble into town. They all know he’s dead, of course. But it feels too cruel to be the first to say it — too painful to erect a gravestone without so much as a corpse.
This denial has consequences. For the past few years, we have heard about the passing of another way of life in this country — the life of the country’s farmers. The word “farmers” sounds idyllic. But Dutch animal agriculture, which is stunningly productive and even more stunningly polluting, is mainly the province of heavily industrialized and heavily subsidized agribusiness. These corporations are a source of great cruelty to animals and also a source of precisely the same gases that have poisoned our entire world. There’s nothing traditional about mass factory farms. But their lobbyists have been able to convince a large percentage of the population that attempts to reduce pollution are an attack on a traditional way of life. Caroline van der Plas, the leader of the pro-farming party, told the Guardian in late 2022: “In the outlying areas, you often hear that in The Hague there is no eye for the human dimension and the small things that are so important in the countryside.”