COMPARING ESTATES
In trying to learn more about Elswout Park in Haarlem with its grand central house and beautifully laid out park I discovering that there were parks all over Europe that were laid out with similar features of ponds, Chinese pagodas, Swiss wooden bridges, a small zoo with animals, gardens, winding paths and long vistas. They were sometimes 20 acres, but Elswout is middle sized at 80 acres.
And then it suddenly occurred to me to wonder how much land Todd and Susie had with the help of Todd‘s sister Mary. They have about 60 acres, almost as much as Elswout, although they plan on selling about 15 at some point to pay for the 45 acres they just acquired.
But it suddenly occurred to me that this reveals a huge difference in cultures between the Netherlands and the United States. Todd is a carpenter, Susie has been a health care worker and they have an estate almost the size of the very rich Dutch bankers who built the huge central summer house and laid out the gardens. And it is all theirs. It isn‘t laid out in the same formal way as Elswout but it has beautiful raised beds that Susie has tended over the years, it has a picturesque, now falling, tobacco barn which could serve as a romantic feature, it has a pond with a little island in the middle, there are streams and waterfalls and large meadows with beautiful mountains all around. There is even a small cemetary. There are walkways where you can take long walks. It is as beautiful, but in a wilder way than Elswout Park. Todd and Susie love the quiet and sitting at the edge of a large meadow watching the sunset in the spot where they are going to build a small house.
But the contrast between their estate and Elswout, between the United States where it is possible for two common people to have a 60 acre estate and Holland where it you have to be a super rich banker to have an 80 acre estate, is enormous. Every inch of land around Haarlem is carefully monitored. The large estate has now become a public park. Tom and Susie have their estate to themselves.
Of course Susie and Todd’s 10 foot by 20 foot one room cabin is a little smaller than the grand house at Elswout. Their running water flows down a pipe from a spring up the hill, their shower is under a tree outside and their outhouse is up the hill. They’ve lived here for twenty years. Their new house will have an indoor shower and toilet. There is nothing grand about any of this. Yet Todd and Susie are living the American dream of of people who lived on the Western frontier, building a home and a garden with their own hands and living isolated with no neighbors in sight and with nature all around.
But this is only possible in a country with the possibility of endless land including in the sparsely populate American western desert and the freedom for two young people to do whatever they want on it. In Germany the forest land would be protected with everyone‘s houses squeezed into small towns. And in Haarlem only the very rich and powerful can have an estate this size. All the land was divided up centuries ago and the weight of tradition is everywhere.
So in the end our two cultures are very different and that is probably what makes the Netherlands so attractive to us, but it is also what makes the United States so attractive to people like Henny and Bertrand, who really enjoyed the many years they lived in Portland, Oregon doing graphic design.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 