What is a polder?

Polder –  an area of low-lying land reclaimed from a sea, lake or river, as by the building of dikes. 

Amazingly, about 63 percent of the land that makes up the Netherlands lies below sea level. As a result, the Dutch have been creating polders – reclaiming land from the sea, the marshes and the fenland – throughout their history. Today there are some 3,000 polders in the Netherlands. An English saying goes, “God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland.”

Today we rode a bike-way through a beautiful green area called the Kinderdijk, a UNESCO World Heritage site where nearly two-dozen windmills line a broad canal through the verdant countryside. The windmills, built in the early 1700s, were used to pump water into a nearby network of canals and rivers, making it possible to develop towns and farms in the polder area. Paved paths for biking and walking run along the tops of the dikes that surround the polderland.

Later we visited the Polder Museum in the small town of Haastrecht. According to the local historian who staffs the museum, the first windmill was built in the area in 1420 and hundreds more eventually followed. Although windmills were made more efficient in various ways over the centuries, the basic technology remained the same for more than 500 years. Today electric pumps do the work of the old mills in this area of the Netherlands – but, as we know in Iowa, wind power is making a resurgence here and around the world.

Back on our ship, our Dutch cook, Wilma, exclaimed with some surprise, "There is actually a polder museum?!" –  which made us all laugh. It hadn’t occurred to her that the polders would be of interest to tourists. Like most of us, she takes her regional heritage for granted.

Long ago, when I rode my first RAGBRAI, my mother gave me a copy of a Dutch children’s poem that had been translated into English by my favorite college English professor – a woman named Henrietta Ten Harmsel who was a Dutch scholar. I carried it in my bike bag for many years until it was torn and faded, then I made a fresh copy and had it laminated. I have it with me today. The poem is called “Polderland,” and this is the first verse:

“The distance comes to meet me endlessly,
goes through me, drops behind me, then gets lost.
Childlike I pedal down each unknown lane,
straight and contented, never knowing why
God ever chose to give me so much sky.”

Here’s to the venerable windmill and the beautiful green land that it wrested from the sea!