I fell asleep almost immediately after our flight took off from Portland, Oregon bound for Amsterdam. It must have been my head rattling against the cold window that woke me. Below, terra firma and flat frozen bodies of water appeared to be locked in an ancient struggle to dominate the landscape. The organic shapes bent around each other like writhing tadpoles or spermatozoa, the negative white lake-like surfaces and the gradual, somewhat tree populated topography where land had protruded above water-level. I'd never seen a region so, apparently endlessly, sparse or evidently impossible to inhabit. For as far as my eye could see there were only endless shapes frozen together in an argument over whether the region were land or sea. And then the landscape faded to all white as we approached Baffin Bay and was one expanding white field with only infrequently detectable elevations, which seemed to indicate that in the direction we traveled the earth had dominated but it wasn't clear to me. Was snow drifted up in detectable mounds on top of frozen bodies of water or were there hilly landmasses under a blanket of snow?
Before seeing the Netherlands from the sky I saw the light of day stretch out into the gray of morning like a wing, its furthest reach into the impending day or the fading night, depending on how you looked at it, was like the tip of a long wing feather on a high flying bird and striated with pale pink and yellow. In the water below us an empty container ship kicked up sea glass green and two frilly white ruffles as it traveled away from a trine of offshore oil rigs. Like selvages of fabric the dark black-green water lay next to dark green-brown stretches and I couldn't tell if the change in color was because of a change in depth or current until I noticed an army of skeletal white windmills that seemed to be looking for the shore and then more gradations in water color that indicated that the ocean floor must have been becoming shallower and then the beach appeared.
When I got into the airport I heard an American say, "I think we landed in Rotterdam and taxied to Amsterdam." It's true--our taxi in seemed to take forever. But in time I found myself at this very nice cottage on Rietwijkerstraat.