Chapel Orahamm

We went for a late March wander around Straat and the docks area in Amsterdam. The fast way to get there is to hop out of Central Station and catch a ferry to get across, but you can ride the metro through to Noordpark and catch a bus over. It’s not a bad trip.

The thing with riding the bus was watching the housing turn into the industrial side and it gave me mid/north Tulsa vibes. The buildings were older and tagged, with more graffiti the closer we got to the Straat Museum – also called the graffiti museum.

Here’s the thing being from the US and having spent surplus time in Tulsa, OK – graffiti is highly associated with gang and drug activity. A lot of tagging is territory claims. You don’t walk much of Tulsa without knowing you are doing something unsafe. There are zones you just don’t go unless you have a real reason to be there or if you’re part of the neighborhood and people in that area know it. It’s not something you just willy-nilly wander around in. Same for OKC and Enid.

And that’s what I had to work through with Wren today. A lot of processing. Amsterdam has a lot of graffiti. But here’s the thing – you become blind to it because you aren’t scared of it. It’s not associated to gang violence and territory grabs. It’s not designating areas of homeless encampments. The graffiti is just part of the human experience in Amsterdam.

As I’ve commented more than once in the last couple of months, The American PTSD as I call it to Wren, is real. There’s a level of nervous system reset we are both experiencing being able to freely walk around and not worry about police brutality, gang violence, venomous Karens, religious nutjobs, the bigotry and homophobia people who will just get in your face.

I am decompressing. I dearly miss the high desert, the smell of dry sage, a good pinyon fire, the mesquite barbeque from when I grew up in New Mexico and Colorado as a kid. I miss certain Southwest foods and some landscape. But I don’t miss US culture. I don’t miss the propaganda and the bullshit. I can’t really see moving back. Not if we can help it.

So, we went to Straat. And I got to face another factor of how I was raised in a country that prioritizes gun freedom over safe walkable cities. This area has a cafe we went to sit at and I people watched for an hour as families with little kids wandered all over this industrial neighborhood with graffiti everywhere and they didn’t fear doing it. They weren’t ducking out of their trucks to rush into a store and rush back before they figured their car’s rims would be stolen. No. They just showed up, got coffee, and watched their kids play in a dirt pile or run around a little patio, or play with scooters, or just freaking exist. This wasn’t an area with bars on the outside of the windows.

I’m struggling to explain what it’s like to see something so culturally ingrained as dangerous-to-be-around instead be seen as the art it is and accepted like that. I’ve loved watching train graffiti for ages. It’s part of why I like trains. It was a free moving art gallery. Being able to go and wander this district, and not worry about running into huddled over drug addicts and loose needles, or get propositioned (drugs or otherwise), or threatened (mugged/guns flashed/etc), or told by police to move along or given the 5 point rundown as to if you deserved to be walking there, was eye opening to the world I came from – and how much better it could be, if there was better infrastructure, funding, and a full blown cultural shift.

Anyways, you’re probably here for pictures of the graffiti art. Mind you, these canvases are MASSIVE – like two story house sized canvas in a couple of cases.

• Copyright Chapel Orahamm LLC. Do not reproduce this writing or art in any form.
• Cover art for book reviews belongs to the author and their commissioned artist.
• No AI was used in the making of this post, book, or art.
• I do not consent to the use of my writing in training any form of AI.