On the Road.. er, Ship

Water travel is always so broadening, especially in the hips. Especially if you’re spending nine days on a Viking Riverboat cruise where the food never stops, even at breakfast, what with the stout coffees and delicate teas; the fresh omelets and smoked fish and sausage; the veggies both raw and cooked; the breads and rolls and croissants; the cereals both hot and cold; the bowls of berries and the platters of sherbet-colored melon; not to mention the juices from every kind of fruit Eve ever thought to toss in her Garden-of-Eden blender.

This tour I set out on last month made its way through the Netherlands and into Belgium. Some of us also took the optional excursion as well, to visit World War I battlegrounds near the border of France. (After such indulgence on board, it felt only right to bear witness to the suffering the people of these lands endured during the bloody century just before this one, and I can say more of that in another post.

There in Amsterdam on that first full day, I learned about this old, old city that, staggeringly, saw over 17 million visitors last year. While threading through some of its 165 canals I learned too that it is home to people from 181 nations if you can picture it. I can’t, as my own list of the world’s nations stops at around 40.

It has a population of 850,000 people, 40% of whom are under 30 and there’s a frightening thought. I mean, what if these youth kick off a real virus of a border-crossing movement to take out all us oldsters, wallowing in our nifty AARP benefits and discount movie tix?  What then? Oh, admit you’ve considered the possibility. I mean can’t you sometimes just feel them behind you in the subway stations, waiting ‘til no one’s looking and shoving you in front of the train, Frank Underwood style?)

Still, they’re pretty adorable, the young, and here in Amsterdam especially where they’re all the time wheeling past on bicycles like so many American tykes in the great era of Hot Wheels. Sure, they drink and get high and amble over to the Red Light District to check out the patient ladies sitting bare as newborns in their cozily furnished display windows. And yes, in a typical year the city has to fish some 12,000 bicycles out of the canals, tossed there in moment of youthful high spirits. Nonetheless I am heartened by the sight of them. At the AnneFrank House there are at least as many young people as older folk waiting in line to get in. At the Rijksmuseum too where all the Rembrandts are kept. They are not innocent of history, the young people here. They know what has transpired here in this fallen world.

One crisp morning I stopped for coffee at a Starbucks with a whole plaza of outside tables. It was a place overflowing with both older people like me and with the younger too in their practical backpacks and their jaunty scarves, and as I sat among them all in a freshening breeze, I thought this is what peacetime looks like. For if this isn’t what people the world over don’t want I’ll eat my hat as the old fogies used to say: What we want is only to sit together, the young and the old and the in-between, the babies, the dogs and the toddlers too, and feel the blessing of each passing moment.

I thought all this. Then, it being almost time for another storied meal onboard, I trotted the quick mile-and-a-half quick back to the ship.