Tangled Bank: Writings from Orion

Nightlife in Amsterdam

67 Nightlife in Amsterdam It was the month of March. Logan, Utah, where I was teaching, still lay in the chill grip of snow and ice.A trip to Holland for a butterfly conference in the ancient university city of Leiden seemed the perfect leap forward into spring. Before departing, I asked my environmental writing students to read an essay of Brian Doyle’s entitled “Van,” to study its near-perfect form,and to ponder the wayVan Morrison’s music ties together the human heart and the natural world.Graced with images from the rivers Lagan and Beechie and the woods around Belfast, bristling with crickets and bogs and boyhood haunts, his songs show how waters and rocks and love and desire all spring from the same source.Singing“Take me back,take me way back ... when you walked in a green field ... through the buttercups, in the summertime ...When I understood the light,”Van testifies that nature and culture are two sides of the same coin. But I wondered if this would still seem true in the densely populated Dutch landscape. After the butterfly meeting,I bicycled along canals through the heart of the famous flower-bulb fields around Leiden.The early spring banks were alive with golden celandine, and the still water exploded in the courtship displays of great crested grebes.Picture long-necked,spike-billed dragonets in chorus-girl headdresses with fancy ruffs of amber and black, foxtrotting a deux across the water.As the great tulip-red sun settled behind a village church at the end of a long yellow band of daffodils, my sense of being in a mature countryside—a landscape concocted of equal parts nature and culture—was profound. I was well aware that centuries of filling wetlands to make these Dutch polders had eradicated many lifeforms.Yet the present condition supports plants and animals in broad array amid an attractive and prosperous human community. This perception of ancient settlement, of an intimately shared (if not always peaceful) history between human and other inhabitants, only increased when I visited the Belgian city of Bruges. Following the barging TheTangled Bank:Writings from Orion 68 moat on foot, past half the medieval city gates and all four windmills, then out beyond the old row houses with their fancy gables,I came to a woodside field where town and country merged.Rabbits boxed and lapwings soared and dive-bombed,all out of sheer sex.The lapwings,wispy-crested,roundwinged plovers, shone with all the colors of violet-green swallows.They shrilled their signature “Peee-Wit!” as they rose and swooped, over and over. The first butterflies—lemon-wedge brimstones, a puffball cloud of speckled woods—were also seeking mates between nectaring bouts on sprays of coltsfoot. Walking back into town at dusk, I paused often to watch swarm flies swirling like atomic particles, the males presenting prey wrapped in bright bubbles as nuptial enticements for the popular females. The next day, as the train carried me east through Ghent and Brussels, then north past Antwerp, Delft, Den Haag, and finally into inevitable Amsterdam, the gathering urban/industrial clot strained my sense of harmony.The Dutch capital would be nobody’s first choice for a natural history destination, though it does enjoy an abundance of trees, parks, and waterways.But I’d purposefully spent my spare days in the country,arriving in the city just before dusk with plans to fly out the next morning. The Concertgebouw Orchestra was sold out, but imagine my surprise when I discovered the other main event in town that night was Van Morrison! I made my way by metro to the Carré, where he was playing, only to find the house full.Explaining my situation to the usher in the small circus hall, I asked if I could just listen for a moment from the lobby so I could tell my students that I had heardVan. She did me one better and let me stand in the back of the hall,“for just five minutes.”After a couple of numbers, another usher came to show me out. Just then a striking blonde saxophonist took a solo, and the usher became transfixed.“She is Holland’s most famous musician right now,” he said, clearly her most devoted fan. “Would you like to use my binoculars?”I asked,handing him my trusty pair. I always keep my binos at hand. I’ve found them equally useful for whatever comes my way,be it...