First, a moment to apologize for my pun on the title shared in two languages by a German nationalist poem and an anti-fascist film, Watch on the Rhine. Some things cannot be avoided.
Last spring, while on a Viking River cruise from Amsterdam to Basel, I found myself occasionally on deck taking pictures in the early evening as well as during the day. It’s not that a river cruise doesn’t have plenty to keep one busy: lectures, demonstrations, food tastings, local entertainers and more. It’s just that there’s a lure to the passing scene and the changing light.
So here are some images made mostly along the middle stretch of the river as we passed by in evening light and on into night. Lights come on in buildings, the line at the ferry seems a little more hurried—is dinner waiting at home?—and shapes soften and change; somehow they seem both more and less in the present.
A town’s waterfront houses seem quieter without the traffic in front of them; as we pull back more shapes enter the picture and change the tone.
It’s a quiet time for industry along the river, although loaded barges and other ships keep on well into the night; it’s also the time that cruise ships make most of their distance, while the guests sleep and wait for the next day’s town.
On board, the sundeck empties, and chairs are clustered, as if for protection.
Along the shores, small inlets and harbors gather in boats for the night as we pass by, imagining what’s happening on board the houseboats and cruisers, what meals, what plans—and I find myself wondering what they are telling themselves about us as we pass by, a long white shape in the slow dark.
Some smaller boats are not yet ready to turn in; at night they seem both faster and louder as the shadows fall.
At points, with only older buildings and the river and its banks in sight, it’s even possible to imagine we have unmoored from time and are traveling not only along the river but into its history.
