The map at the gated entry to the forest hike through the Dutch countryside promised some sort of crossing, be it bridge or land, at the waist of an hourglass shaped lake. However, after reaching the bank through the woods, I found only a wide stretch of water, the rest of my hike unreachable ahead of me. Unwilling to turn around, I walked toward the shore to explore, and as I reached the half-submerged weeds and shrubs I saw movement, and two women climbing onto a metal raft, attached to land by a pulley system that reached across the water from one shore to the other.
“Hallo!”
One of the women waved me over, calling out in a shrill voice. She had short blonde hair, and wore sweat stained workout gear, spandex pink and blue. I splashed through the muddy bank to reach the raft at the shore, and the two women greeted me in Dutch, to which I responded with my limited vocabulary of good morning, even though it was afternoon. They smiled, and shook their heads when I asked if they spoke English. Then they ushered me onto the raft. Their dog, a black mutt in a green canine-raincoat, had already boarded, and sat there wagging his heavy, wet tail.
The second woman, also blonde but much younger, mentioned something in Dutch. Faced with my blank stare, she mimed pulling the metal line of the pulley, drawing hand over hand, like invisible tug-of-war.
“Oh!” I said, understanding the mechanics of the raft, “I will help you!”
We positioned ourselves facing the opposite shore, the dog facing us and assuming the role of coxswain, his metal tags jingling as we pulled forward. The raft moved slowly against our pull, and the women chatted in Dutch, with occasional attempts to engage with me in their limited English.
“English?”
“American. From Boston.”
“Holiday?”
“Yes.”
“Student?”
“Not anymore.”
And so we exchanged smiles, at the limits of our conversation, and continued pulling across the murky lake, under the wet, gray clouds of Dutch spring, silent and listening to the rhythmic lap of water against the metal raft.
**
I learned English seventeen years before my hike in the Netherlands, 3,000 miles away in Rhode Island, 5,000 miles from my home of Buenos Aires. At six years old I walked into a classroom, much like the muddy bank of a Dutch lake, and smiled at the encouraging faces that spoke words I didn’t recognize. I mimed in an attempt to understand and be understood. Sometimes it worked, like when I pointed to the lunch I wanted in the noisy cafeteria, but mostly I failed, unable to form the unfinished sentence in my mind. And at the end of the day, exhausted, I would return home in tears, running off the bus and into my house, into the comfort of family and Spanish.
Slowly, my family’s first year in the States went by, and I began to learn more words, placing them together in a sentence like a puzzle, and sometimes a conversation would develop in class where both sides mostly understood. And then I would hit another roadblock halfway through a sentence, encountering another word I only knew in Spanish.
“Can you pass the…grapadora?” I would say, offering up the only word I knew, and miming the crocodile-mouth of the stapler with my hand. A simple request stopped being so simple. A precipice tested my confidence and spirit, and I faced a moment of bravery at the vertigo-inducing midway point of a sentence.
This pattern continued each day, a slow drift forward, until I finally learned the language. But that same feeling of anxiety and bravery returns each time I travel, when the comfort of language is stripped away to that all too familiar kindergarten moment.
**
Our raft made it across the lake in ten minutes, and when we reached the other shore we hugged, smiled, and said our goodbyes in our own languages, not even having learned each other’s names because the question was too complex for us all.
We were mostly without language, but we recognized in each other a similar goal, and so we improvised and crossed the lake. As a six year old, I needed a raft to get me across kindergarten, away from the side of the sandbox where someone told a joke and everyone else laughed, away from the corner of the classroom where the teacher asked a question and nineteen out of twenty hands shot up to answer. And I found that raft in listening, watching, and holding my breath at the edge of a sentence and finding a way to finish it, with or without words.
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