Here's Fog in Your IJ

Totally unexpected. Cold, but promised to be dry (a word we'd forgotten here), and the sun is streaming into my apartment, so---ER-OP-UIT!!! met m'n fiets. Last year's rides left two small gaps, promising as short rides close to train stations if the bike (or, more likely, a winterized leg muscle) gives out. Check out the updated BIKE MAP (112 kB), with this weekend's rides in red, as always. (Today's ride around IJmuiden is the red path more to the west.)

So OK, it didn't turn out to be as dry as all that. I arrived in Beverwijk near the coast, near the mouth of the IJ, that strange and strangely named kind-of-sort-of river that connects Amsterdam with the North Sea. A big industrial area. I get off the train in Beverwijk and it is pouring rain. Now, with all due respect to its residents, Beverwijk is just a commuter village with nothing imaginable to distinguish it from its neighbor villages. I wait under the station's overhang for maybe an hour. Gobbling some lunch, my eye wanders off to a plaque simply attached to the station wall:

Do you even see it? I wasn't sure I did. Look just behind the white lamppost, over a few tiles removed to make room for some knee-high shrubs. I walked over with rozijnenbrood (raisin bread) in hand, to investigate. And the plaque read:
 

Those of you with a little Dutch or even a little German under your hats are already dreading this message:
 

On April 16 1944, from here, were 486 young men taken away by the occupation, of whom many never came back.

In two months it will be 60 years. In this town there are old women who still remember the springtime day when they were beautiful and their young men were taken behind this everyday wall to a rail car and down the tracks to God knows what.

The rain stopped and I rolled along wet tiles to the Beverwijk Bazaar, which looked like an enormous American-style covered flea market. One of the buildings is the Zwarte Markt, the Black Market. I looked for the ANWB to buy some maps (we don't have on in my home town of Bussum, grrr), but it was just a travel agency, no maps. I get out of Beverwijk toward the IJ.

The Dutch do many things well, and one of them is: MOVE DIRT. I mean, move dirt on a scale that threatens to alter the rotation of the Earth. Calculate the amount of dirt in the Afsluitdijk: 30 km long, 30 meters wide at the narrowest, and able to witstand at least 4-meter tidal waves. We're talking serious dirt volume--and the Afsluitdijk was closed in the 1930s. Sometimes you need a place to store a spare kilometer or so of dirt. This apparently is one of them.
 

Dirt can only do so much, of course, so another thing the Dutch have gotten very good at is making cement and bricks. Lots and lots of cement and bricks. Think about it--all those tiles along the bike paths and sidewalks, and all those apartments and shops have to be built out of something. And where there is lots of water, there are lots and lots of bridges. Mostly concrete bridges. The sloping pipe that transfers the output from this kiln to the ship waiting on the IJ (and over the road--eek) is large enough to drive my car down.
 

And at the end of the IJ is the North Sea, and the world. Welcome to IJmuiden.
 

If they honor you with a harbor statue, birds will pay homage, too.
 

One of IJmuiden's harbors. This is by far the most crowded working harbor I've seen in the Netherlands--or anywhere else. The competition for moorings is unreal.
 

Complete with triple-parked fishing boats.
 

Make no mistake about it, this is a working harbor, in the crusty, Hooi, haar haar haar Old Dutch manner, like going back 200 years.
 

Perhaps you've noticed from the previous photos that the day wasn't getting any clearer. In fact, fog settled in to a visibility of perhaps 50 meters just after this picture. This is a drilling rig in the middle of a sand flat. Exactly like in the ocean or North Sea, complete with loud machines and loud speakers and long cranes and a cantilevered helicopter pad--except from this one you drive your pickup home, out the bottom of it. I guess if there's natural gas under the shore, it makes more sense than putting it out in the water. Still--extremely weird, even weirder with the fog rolling in.
 

I was already suspicious about the bike path marked on the map--with writing right over the top of the thin gray line. Sure enough, under the writing--well, OK, over the harbor entrance--there is a gap of perhaps 30 meters. This cost me 2 kilometers of riding, not much, but it seemed like much farther in the fog. I had to ride with the lights on.
 

I peddle around the nondescript little resort harbor, past the Toegang Verboden sign with all the people on the other side ignoring it as I did, and along the Zuiddijk to the polite little bicycle circle around the lighthouse at the end. The lighthouse is not particularly impressive, except for the foghorn. THAT was impressive. As I peddled around it to just the wrong place, the horn let loose, and I thought the welds of my bicycle frame might come undone or my spine fuse. Damnation that was loud. My lungs actually hurt for a minute or so, and my teeth felt funny for perhaps a half hour. There were three guys fishing at the end, just a little out of the horn's way. I don't know how they do it.
 

These guys must know what they're doing, or you'd have read about it by now. The channels seemed pretty narrow to me.
 

And it was time to peddle back. I had no intention of making a long day of it--the weather isn't yet up to it, nor the length of days, nor my legs. The red path on the bike map doesn't look like much, but between the long harbors and getting lost in the fog, there was a lot of backtracking.

I rode in from the peaceful North Sea dunes. Of course, it hasn't always been so peaceful here. The coast is lined with these.