Cheeses and Bulbses
Alkmaar, July 28.
Of course Holland is the greatest cheese country on earth, and Alkmaar is the biggest cheese market in Holland. Every Friday the cheesemakers of the district bring their product to the public market, and buyers, local and foreign, bargain for and purchase the cheeses. That is why we came to Alkmaar on Friday. The cheese market is certainly an interesting and novel sight. All over the big public square are piled little mounds of cheeses, shaped like large grape-fruit and colored in various shades of red and yellow. Each wholesaler has his carriers in uniform of white, and a straw hat and ribbons colored as a livery. When a sale is made, two carriers take a barrow which they carry suspended from their shoulders and with a sort of two-step and many cries to get out of the way they bring their load to the public weigh-house, where it is officially weighed. Then off the cheeses go to the store-rooms or to the canal-boats which line one side of the square, waiting to take their freight to the cities or to the sea. The farmers look over each other’s cheeses as they do hogs at the Kansas State Fair, with comments of praise or criticism. There is much chaffing and chaffering between them and the buyers. In about two hours the cheeses are gone, the square is empty and the beer-houses are full. The women-folks do not take an active part in the market, but they are present and looking things over, and I suspect they had been permitted to milk the cows and make the cheese.
About $3,000,000 worth of cheese is sold annually in the Alkmaar market. The country round about, North Holland, is all small farms, with gardens and pastures and little herds of the black-and-white cattle. The cheese wholesales at about 60 cents a cheese, and in America we pay about twice that much for the same, or for the Edam, which is like it. The farmers look prosperous, drive good horses and very substantial gaily painted wagons.
Alkmaar has 18,000 population, and is therefore about the size of Hutchinson. But it is a good deal older. Back in 1573 it successfully defended itself against the Spaniards. The name means “all sea,” because the country was originally covered with water. The land is kept above the water now by pumping and pouring into canals which are higher than the farms through which they flow. This is done very systematically and by windmills. A district thus maintained is called a “polder,” something like our irrigation district, and on one of them near Alkmaar, about the size of a Kansas township, six miles square, there are 51 windmills working all the time, pumping the water. These are not little windmills like those in a Kansas pasture, but great fellows with big arms fifty feet long, and they stand out over the polder like so many giants. The picture of these mills in a most fertile garden-spot, with canal streaks here and there and boats on the canals looming up above the land, is certainly a striking one. And it shows clearly what energy can do when properly applied.
The soil is as sandy as in South Hutchinson. But dirt and fertilizer are brought from the back country and the soil is kept constantly renewed. It seems to me that with comparatively little work the sandy soil of the Arkansas valley can be made into a market garden, producing many times its present value, whenever our people take it into their heads to manufacture their own soil and apply water when needed and not just when it rains. That time will come, but probably not until a dense population forces a great increase in production.
I have another idea. Along the coast of Holland are the “sand dunes,” which are exactly like our sand hills. What we should do is to change the name from sand hills to “dunes,” brag about them and charge people for visiting them. The city of Amsterdam gets its supply of drinking-water from the dunes. This was important news to me, for it confirmed my theory as to the similarity of the dunes and the sand hills, and also suggested that somebody in Amsterdam used water for drinking purposes, a fact I had not noticed while there.