Some things just make me wonder . . .
One of them is my name. It has a very Dutch sound in it, the
'ui'. Once I sat next to a lingist in a plane on my way to New
Mexico, and she told me that Dutch has several sounds that are unique
to it. I think the 'ui' sound is one of them. It suggests that my
family has been in the Netherlands a long, long time. It remained a mystery till some years ago I came across a story of a small village that once was on the border of the IJsselmeer (Zuiderzee), but had been poldered in. It bordered a stream called Tjonger or Kuinder. That the stream has two such different names is curious.
A few years later I spent a year and half working and living the the Netherlands again, and I came across a history. From somewhere in 1200 to 1405, a castle had stood nearby, or, to be more precise, a castle which had occupied two places. The castle had been moved because of accroaching waters. Under the protection of the Bishops of Utrecht the lord of Kuinre resided in those castles. It appears that the Bisdom of Utrecht, who laid claims on those lands to the north and the lands of Frisia, wanted to put some force behind their claims.
Those were not the best of medieval times. Sea level rise, which had been continuing, started to cause large floods of the Frisian and Hollands areas from about the year 1000 AD onward. Around the year 1000 AD there was not a good technology for defending against the waters. The first good dykes were built in that century using a mix of clay and seaweed. But further inland seaweed was not available, and their dykes must have been more vulnerable than those build along the sea by Holland and Frisia. So I imagine that the Lord of Kuinre had a hard time, since basically the land that was lost in that time was the area he was responsible for. One other castle was left on high ground in Urk. Not many records seem to exists, but there is a mention of three villages in the area that were lost when it flooded and changed into the Zuiderzee. The way the Lords of Kuinre raised funds (I guess for building dykes and such) was to tax shipping which got them into trouble with the Hanze cities and sealed their fate. Along with the steady loss of land to the sea of course.
Then after 1405, nothing can be found. I have no idea if there is any relation of my name to the village or the Lords there, but at least it can be firmly said that the name Kuin is Dutch of origen.
Paul Kuin #1
My father was born in 1905 in Bovenkarspel, North Holland. When he was a teenager he lost both his parents to the influenza pandemic of 1918 and was taken in by family. He left school and started working as a laborer planting popatoes for Mr. Smit (who later introduced potato chips to the Netherlands). In the evenings he studied. His family were builders and in the insurance industry. Eventually, he started out on his own, first planting potatoes, but branching out eventually to growing flowers. He developed a passion for tulips. He developed several new varieties. His goal was a beautifil ly colored tall tulip with a strong stem. He also developed several new varieties of other flowers, all from bulbs.
In the war years he refused to enrich himself on the misery of others - a practice that was not unheard of during the hunger winter of 1944-45. He was engaged to marry Dora Brouwers, but she succumbed to TB. My mother nurtured her sister in those days and got to know him. Eventually, they got together and married in 1952. I was born on my father's birthday, so I was called after him.
Around 1957 my father got increasing arthritis pains, so much that he no longer could work the land himself. After a year where the business was mostly run by his assistant, he sold his business to him and we moved to Maastricht. Eventually, he started a new business selling organic fertilizer. However, working for years with spraying poisons like Parathion on plants and getting sometimes doused in it left a mark. He died of multiple cancers in 1964.
Paul Kuin #2
In Maastricht I found that I was an outsider. I did not speak the local dialect, Mestreechs. I had a good friend from a few doors down, Agnes, and she would talk to me in mestreechs and I would reply in hollands. We never noticed till some years later a new kid arrived on the block. I remember his face looking from me to her, his mouth open in amasement. "You talk different languages to each other", he said.
In those days the schools were still for boys or girls only. Although we were catholic my mom did only send me to the school run by some catholic brothers since it was better than the city school which was non-denominational. My friend Agnes was sent to that school though. So I grew up with my brother and sisters until I was nearly 18. A few months before my 18th Birthday I started studying Physics with minors in math and astronomy at Utrecht University. I joined the student club Collegium Studiosorum Veritas, and made some good friends there. In my second year I started to spend more time there and helped with things like organizing entertainment and the publication the Vox. Most importantly, I met there my first real love, Judith. In 1982 I got a postdoc position in Oxford, after defending my thesis "Solar and Stellar Coronae" under the guidance of Tony Hearn.
In Oxford, Carole Jordan wanted me to model the winds and chromospheric emission of T Tauri stars. We worked on that for a sample of them, while I continued studying think coronae and writing a computer code to compute the X-ray emission of thin coronal shells anywhere in a wind. At some point I realized that the thickness of the coronae needed was much less then the mean free path, and I abandoned that line of research. In 1985 I took up an offer made by Jim Ionson to join him at the Solar Physics Branch at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. As things went, he left to take up a position with Reagans Strategic Defense Initiative research arm before I arrived, but he arranged funding to continue research into the heating of solar and stellar coronae. Later, I worked with Art Poland to determine a simple way to describe radiation loss in the upper chromosphere for loop modeling, and on XMM data.
I had set out to the USA with the idea to stay a few years and then move on to Australia, but I ended up marrying Abby in 1987 and staying a lot longer. Until 2003 in fact, when I moved back to the Netherlands with my family. However, that stay was not to last. Laws and attitudes had changed, and there was a requirement a Dutchman must have a permanent job contract to be allowed to bring his family home. We fought that in court, but lost. The highest dutch court would not even receive our arguments. In 2005 we moved to England, where I had found a temporary position as research fellow at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory of University College Londen.
