Waterworld

Here's what I love about Seattle: Water.

There's the water of the sprawling, placid blue lakes. There's the water of the wild grey expanse of the Puget Sound. There are dock yards with giant red cranes and rows of multi-colored shipping containers; steep city streets that dead-end into ferry terminals; real beaches looking out to distant rough-hewn mountains. There are boats on water and houses on water and planes on water and - best of all - sparkling lights reflected on water. Seattle is all about the water.

Sunset in Seattle

There is one particular form of water that is universally and instinctively recognized as high entertainment: boat locks. I have a happy Parisian memory of the mini-locks along the St. Martin canal, of a sunny Saturday morning in May when little children and bicyclists and middle-aged French men out for a stroll all stopped to watch the heavy gates swing shut and swirling white currents of water lift a little boat as though by magic.

Locks in Paris

Seattle has its own set of locks, a scaled-down version of the model used for the Panama Canal. On a recent sunny Saturday, the weather was decidedly crisper, but children, bicyclists and grown men alike still paused to watch as the gates swung shut and the water started to rise. 

Yet despite the inherent appeal of water works and boats, here's what really tickled my inner child on our recent excursion to the Ballard Locks: Seamoor Safety, the Water Safety Sea Serpent.

Coloring courtesy of yours truly.

Seamoor's red bear friend is called "Corker," and his blue bear friend is named "Sinker." Guess which one is used to illustrate what not to do around open water.

I'm not sure which impresses me more: that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers publishes coloring books, or that they devised a triple pun to name an imaginary sea creature of ambiguous sexuality who demonstrates how to wear a jet ski engine stop lanyard with flair. You might consider visiting www.Bobber.info to print out copies of Corker and Sinker's adventures for your own coloring pleasure.

To the North, Part II

Other than seeing the Wadden Sea, the primary mission of my self-directed northern adventure was to visit the rest of the Netherlands' World Heritage sites.  All five (including the Wadden Sea) are variations on the same theme: how the Dutch fought the Sea.  The five sites were, collectively, rather anti-climatic.  (Spoiler alert: the Dutch won.)

But in the right order, they do tell the arch of the defining Dutch story.  It goes something like this:

In the beginning, there was land, and there was Sea.  And then the Sea breached the land, and the land was flooded.  This was understandably frustrating to the people who thought they lived there.  (The Wadden Sea will remain permanently stuck in this stage of the story, now that it is protected as a World Heritage site.  But no one really wants to live that far north anyway.)

At first the people tried to fight the Sea by building their houses and churches on terps (mounds of earth) and constructing sea walls and sand bars.   This was not very successful. Eventually the ingenuous Dutch realized they could use windmills to pump water up and out of low-lying land.

Thus the polders were born: land drained and kept dry by orderly systems of dikes and windmills.  The very first, Beemster Polder, was drained in 1612 (!!!), and was designated a World Heritage site a mere 387 years later.  But it is a particularly difficult site to visit because - other than the pretty lines of trees and tidy grid of roads and canals - there's not really any there there.  It's like the Greenwich, CT of Amsterdam.  (This stage in the battle between the Dutch and the Sea is much better represented by Kinderdijk.)

Although great for postcards and Dutch branding, the windmills alone were not enough. Terrible floods racked the lower Delta region of the country, while the large bay of the Zuiderzee (the "Southern Sea" that in fact lay north of Amsterdam) stubbornly ate away at the interior of the country.  In the mid-1800s, the government forced the evacuation of one large island in the Zuiderzee, Schokland, having grown tired of funding the fight for such a lost cause.