Hudson, sir,’ Gieles exclaimed. The words rolled off his tongue in such an orderly fashion that it made him sound like a news presenter. ‘On January 15th, 2009, Captain Chesley Burnett Sullenberger of US Airways landed on the Hudson after a flock of Canada geese flew into his engines. He felt as if he had been hit by a gigantic bolt of lightning.’
Gieles mimicked being struck by the lightning, his body jolting, and then continued. ‘Captain Sully—everybody calls him Sully, and that’s what’s printed on the T-shirts and mugs and underpants—Captain Sully saved all hundred fifty-five passengers of flight 1549.’
‘He checked the plane twice for stragglers,’ the man added excitedly—this was a boy he could talk to—‘before evacuating, the last man to leave the sinking ship. Which actually happened, because the landing had torn open the whole bottom of the aircraft.’
‘And then these little boats came sailing out from everywhere to pick up the passengers,’ continued Gieles happily. ‘But I’m sure you know that, sir.’
‘Hey,’ the man roared over the noise of a descending plane. ‘Cut it out with that “sir” stuff! Makes me nervous!’
He waited for the sound to die down. ‘Johan and Judith.’ He pointed to his wife, who stood there staring at Gieles in silent amazement with her restored eyes. ‘Goodness, you sure do know a lot! This boy sure does know a lot, doesn’t he?’
She placed a hand on her husband’s liver-spotted arm. ‘Johan knows everything about airplanes and crashes. He’s been collecting plane crashes in scrapbooks since 1972. With all the details. And if he can find photos he pastes them in, too. Other spotters call him a crash freak. Isn’t that right, Johan?’
‘Hmm.’ A Boeing was hanging heavily in the air a few kilometres away.
‘They’re very lovely scrapbooks,’ she declared. ‘It’s not the death and sensationalism that Johan is interested in, but the chain of events.’
‘I was sure I could do it,’ said Gieles in English.
‘Excuse me?’ said the woman.
‘That’s what Captain Sully said. After his act of heroism.’ Gieles tried to imitate his voice by relaxing his vocal cords. ‘I was sure I could do it.’
The man followed the plane until the tail disappeared behind a row of birches. Then he said, rather severely, ‘So you know damn well how dangerous geese are for aviation.’
‘My geese can’t fly,’ Gieles lied. ‘They’ve lost the knack.’
‘Look,’ said the woman, delighted. ‘Kenya Airways. What cheerful colours. It looks just like the tail of a tropical parrot. I adore parrots. They make me think of fireworks.’
‘Next time we come here,’ said Johan, ‘I’ll bring my scrapbooks along. Then I’ll show you that even a couple of geese in the engine can do a lot of damage. A whole lot of damage.’
‘What a wonderful place to live,’ his wife interrupted, inhaling deeply. ‘Right near the airplanes, yet out in the country.’
‘Tremendously beautiful spot,’ nodded Johan in approval. ‘That’s all I can say.’
She turned halfway around in her chair and pointed to a little wooded area further up on the other side of the road.
‘I wonder who planted those trees there. Such young trees right out in the polder … It’s like a fairy tale.’
‘Environmentalists,’ said Gieles.
‘What a terribly nice gesture.’
‘Why?’ asked Johan suspiciously, putting his aviator glasses back on.
‘They didn’t want a runway to be built here. So they bought a piece of land from our neighbour and planted trees on it. But the court said the trees had to go, so they moved the trees over there.’ He pointed to the woods. ‘My mother calls it “the woods in exile.”’
For Gieles, the summer with the environmentalists was the best he’d ever had. Suddenly there they were. They came chugging along in a smelly diesel bus, and Gieles couldn’t see how the bus could hold so many people and so much stuff. He watched as they unloaded their tents, generators, duffle bags, sleeping bags, kerosene lamps and pans. In one afternoon, Gieles’s boring view of the polder turned into a non-stop circus performance. Dozens of dome tents were pitched around a trailer that was painted in rainbow colours. The environmentalists tied hammocks to wooden poles and their children hung paper streamers in the branches. It looked gorgeous, thought Gieles, who didn’t dare go out to size up the situation until the end of the afternoon. His friend Tony went first.
The activists were very nice. They gave them lemonade and cookies and asked them all kinds of questions: how often Tony and Gieles played in the woods, what they thought of the airport, whether they were often sick or found themselves coughing a lot. Gieles chuckled when the environmentalists talked about the importance of ‘their woods,’ when what they meant was the scrawny little clump of trees in the middle of a wasteland. Everywhere there were piles of grey sand with bulldozers and dump trucks driving through them. It was one big sandbox, where men in orange overalls walked around with notebooks. The construction of the new runway was in full swing. Now it was a matter of waiting for the court ruling.
Every day, new people came to visit the encampment. According to Uncle Fred they were celebrities, which must have been true because there were photographers and journalists there as well. The celebrities shouted that they were opposed to the runway. But once the runway was built, you never heard them say another word about it. They never came back. Now the celebrities were flying over the roofs of the houses of Gieles and his neighbours.
Gieles’s house was on television countless times that summer. Reporters kept asking Uncle Fred what he thought of the idea of airplanes landing in his backyard.
‘You can’t stop it,’ he declared. And actually it wasn’t even his backyard. Uncle Fred had been bought out. His own house was located right on the future runway; it had to go. That’s why he moved in with the family of his twin brother. It had been a practical decision, too. When Ellen was flying, Fred could take care of Gieles and do the housework.
Gieles knew that Uncle Fred never answered the journalists’ questions. Uncle Fred was never for or against anything. He never identified with any particular side, as if the matter didn’t concern him. He took everything in stride. Be a river, not a mountain: that was his motto. The river was friendly to the activists. He brought them homemade fennel soup and sausage rolls, and let them take showers at the farm. When the guy ropes of the sprawling encampment got all tangled up, he offered them the pasture as an additional place to pitch their tents. That’s what inspired him to start a spotters’ campground.
The river was friendly to the activists’ enemies, too. When the military police appeared in the farmyard to go over some questions of public safety, he gave them a bag of cherries. And when the airport people came over to talk about sound insulation, he served them coffee and apple pie.
Gieles fervently hoped that the environmentalists would never go away. And he wasn’t the only one. All the neighbourhood children spent more time in the woods that summer than they did at home. They played hide-and-seek and danced wildly to the music from Rinky Dink, an environmentally-friendly sound installation driven by bicycle power. A man with a braided red beard taught Gieles how to make a tent with bamboo sticks. He painted wooden
