In the Netherlands, polders the tracts of land the Dutch have reclaimed from the sea are protected by a succession of three dikes. The first, the one closest the sea, is called the watcher. The next, farther inland, is the sleeper. And the final barrier is the dreamer.
Those names are good representations of the Dutch people's striking combination of passive tolerance and faithfulness to tradition. The waves might get past the watcher, but if they do, no big deal; the sleeper is there. And if the sleeper is caught, well, sleeping, the dreamer can still protect the homeland.
Similarly, Amsterdam might have become an open bazaar for sex, drugs and political radicalism, but just beyond the city limits the tulips still bloom in the spring and the people who tend them still wear wooden shoes.
I think of our friends in Holland when I hear my own neighbors bemoan this country's declining moral values. By that, they almost never mean the increased thievery on Wall Street or the swelling population of homeless and uncared for Americans on the streets. They refer to the number of young people who are hopping into bed with each other or the city leaders who are opening the parks to drinking.
In the Netherlands, they've been drinking in the parks, and on the streets and anywhere else you care to pop a cork, for centuries. And it has lately become the custom for young lovers to live together as a trial before they make the commitment to marry each other.
It isn't rebellion against their parents that makes them do that. Their parents don't even mind.
My wife had a hard time believing that. So when we visited Wim and Marjan, who had followed the custom before they tied the knot, she put it to the test.
We had been invited to lunch at the home of Wim's parents. They had farmed on a polder before they retired and turned the farm over to Wim's older brother (one tradition Wim isn't too crazy about), and now live in a peaceful house in the flat northern countryside.
Over soup, bread and cheese, my wife asked Wim's mother what she thought about the fact that her son and Marjan had shared quarters out of wedlock. The old woman said she saw nothing to object to in the least.
I got the feeling she was more surprised by the question than by Wim's premarital experimentation. Similarly, I suspected the few complaints we did hear from the rural Dutch about sin in Amsterdam stemmed more from the city's international notoriety than from what actually goes on there.
This permissiveness may come easier to the Dutch than it does to us because of the country's traditional moorings. Indeed, tolerance is one of the anchors to which the people are bound. Anne Frank was far from the only Jew to be secreted away from Nazi barbarism in Holland, and the people proudly point to the number of synagogues in their Christian country.
But it seems somehow easier for people who have shared the same fundamental values equality, civility, family for a good chunk of human history to understand and accept the excesses of youth and the foibles of themselves.
The morning we left Holland, the train was overrun with kids who had been partying all night after a big motorcycle race that takes place every year just up the line. It took a couple of stops before the conductors got all the unticketed passengers off the train, the smokers out of the non-smoking cars and the loudest drunks on a car by themselves.
Meanwhile, we sat wide-eyed across from a well-dressed old Dutch gent who kept pointing to the rowdy youngsters showing off or vomiting on the tracks outside, all the while laughing uproariously as if he couldn't imagine better entertainment.
He made me feel narrow-minded, provincial, American.
The other day, we got a card from Wim and Marjan. They have produced a son since we visited them, with the same name as the older brother of whom Wim was so envious. And another child is on the way.
It's an unbridled environment in which those kids will be raised, but I won't worry. If they get by the watcher, the sleeper and the dreamer will still be on the job.
