I received a text from another educator.
“Your daughter is hanging at the Weespertrekvaart.”
“On which bridge?” I wrote back.
“The rusty one.”
We cycled there around dinner time.
The whole body of water was full of students.
Not everything was better in the past. In my youth you stayed away from open water. Anyone who jumped into the Rhine, I am from Arnhem, had to immediately go to the doctor for an injection. The fish that was there was dead, almost you.
We sometimes went swimming at Lathum, which was a combination of mud and algae at best. We took mud baths in an excavation, one of us disappeared under the quicksand, they were able to pull him out with ropes just in time. The rest developed ulcers from the metal particles.
My father, professionally involved in water management, foresaw a bleak future. It only got worse, we would never be able to recreate in open water again, the river water would no longer freeze in the future because of all the pollution. He saw the fact that the last Elfstedentocht was held on his birthday as an ugly trick of mother nature. He had just retired and his successor did not hesitate to tease between the toasts. “I should have just punched him then,” he told me just before his death. “A missed opportunity.”
In my youth you stayed away from open water
We then fantasized together what it would have been like if he had done so. It was a pity that he did not want to be cremated, otherwise he would have had his ashes scattered in the IJssel, his favorite river, the banks of which he wanted to pave asphalt. “That was not allowed, but when we sold it as a cycle path it was allowed again.”
And now my daughter swam through the Weespertrekvaart with half her class, more than living proof that my father was wrong. With each scream of pleasure, the long nose she pulled at him grew longer and longer. Too bad they never knew each other. There was another grandfather there who shouted at his granddaughter that she had to shower immediately at home because otherwise she would get sick.
Nobody took him seriously.
