Winter

Winter is the season that turns Holland’s waterways into roads and makes the great skating race possible, but it is never simply a picturesque backdrop. Frozen canals, bright still weather, and holiday crowds coexist with a landscape that depends on dikes, sluices, and windmills to keep water in check. The season’s pleasures rest on the same practical vigilance that makes life in the lowlands possible.

Ice and Everyday Travel

On the canal used by the boys, straight waterway and straight lines of bare willow trees draw the eye toward the raised carriage road atop the dike that holds back Haarlem Lake. The long view gathers different kinds of winter movement: skaters on the glassy canal, brown-winged iceboats, push-chairs, and small sleds propelled by iron-pronged sticks. The frozen water is a public route, not merely a surface for recreation, and guards patrol it in winter to clear obstructions and garbage. After snow, they sweep the canal before the covering hardens into ice that is beautiful to look at but unwelcome to skaters.

The winter landscape also makes water-control works unusually visible. Near Halfweg, Lambert explains that the IJ and Haarlem Lake meet where the river lies five feet above the land. Dikes and sluice gates must therefore be strong, or flooding would follow. The lake’s spring water is used by Haarlem’s bleacheries, while its eels provide Lambert with a more personal measure of its abundance. Winter travel across this engineered landscape brings infrastructure, work, and local knowledge into the same field of view.

Work Behind the Winter Landscape

The country’s windmills serve many kinds of labor, including sawing timber, beating hemp, and grinding, but their principal task is pumping water from lowlands into canals and guarding against inland freshets. The account estimates at least 9,900 large windmills in Holland, with sails from eighty to 120 feet long, and an annual cost approaching ten million dollars. Even when the frozen waterways invite leisure, water management remains an underlying condition of the landscape.

Some newer mills can adjust their sails to changing wind: they spread them to catch a faint current and shrink them when a strong gust threatens. This responsive machinery is part of a larger dependence on maintenance. Millions of dollars are spent each year repairing dikes and regulating water levels; without that work, the country would be uninhabitable. Winter’s stillness, then, does not mean that the land has escaped its elemental danger. It briefly recasts a working water system as a skating ground.

The Race on December 20

The twentieth of December arrives with exceptionally favorable winter weather. Sunlight lies across the level landscape, but the ice on lake, canal, and river resists the warmth and shows no sign of melting. The weathercocks stand still, and the windmills, after a week of brisk work, rock lazily in the clear air. With grinding, crushing, and sawing suspended for the day, millers near Broek take in their sails and go to watch the race.

The chosen course is a level sheet of ice near Amsterdam, on an arm of the Zuider Zee. Spectators gather along the north side of the frozen IJ; townspeople, visitors, and northern peasants who have chosen that day for their city trading converge on the event. Coaches and holiday clothing mingle with the distinctive dress of city children, orphan-house girls, boys from the Burgher Orphan Asylum, and people from the countryside. Winter briefly brings different parts of society to one shared public space, drawn there by the skating match.

Evening at the Brinker Cottage

The same December twentieth that brings crowds to the race ends in a domestic scene at the Brinker cottage, standing alone on the frozen marsh. Inside, the room is exceptionally clean, a peat fire burns on the hearth, and the table holds silver skates and flowers. Dame Brinker, Gretel, and Hans are together by the fireplace, laughing; Raff, whose family had also been at the race, suddenly rises, snaps his fingers, makes several lively flourishes, and lifts his wife in his delight.

The contrast between the cottage’s outward isolation and the warmth within gives winter a second scale. Across the landscape, frozen water supports travel and celebration; in the cottage, the race’s objects and memories enter a family’s private joy. The day’s cold season does not dissolve hardship or the need to control water, but it makes possible a moment of shared festivity and, at home, a striking sign of renewed happiness.