This reprise article appeared in 2001 in Het Fiancieel Dagblad English Edition in Amsterdam

I’ll fight you for my pair.  Nothing is easier to slip on to take out the trash, bring in the mail or wander around in the garden.  They provide a surprisingly comfortable fit yet are a bulky enough reminder to remove when entering the house.

Wooden shoes or klompen as the locals call them, or clogs as we know them – when you think of Holland you think windmills and funky shoes.  Near our Dutch farmhouse sits the world’s largest wooden shoe factory.  Nijhuis sell 70% of the world’s wooden shoes. While tradition-bound villagers of touristy Volendam want you to believe they are all still handmade, don’t let them fool you, klompen are hi-tech business.

Never though, wear them to a cattle round-up, no matter how logical (protection of toes) the idea may seem at the time. The most immediate problem with klompen is that wood does not give, at all, ever.  After 100 meters, your foot sweats, swells and no longer moves. You quickly look like an escaped Mafia hit victim, staggering in cement-like overshoes that only come off with the aid of a jackhammer…

God created heaven and earth. The Dutch created Holland, literally. After reclaiming land from the sea, they needed to walk around and through all of that mud, so they invented wooden shoes. Archeologists found clogs dating from the year 1271. They are perfect for farm work so local farmers originally hand-carved shoes for themselves and their families.  By 1911, Holland’s 3,900 factories produced 9 million pair of wooden shoes a year. Now 20-computerized factories produce 3 million pair of shoes, souvenirs and gifts for the 1 million Dutch farmers, artisans, children, people working in their garden (and one columnist) who wear them every day.

…as cattle round-ups go, this was a typical lame-brained good Samaritan effort. My farmer neighbor, who may never again go on vacation, was away.  My wife was breast-feeding our daughter when we heard the very familiar sound of a young cow in heat. For those of you unfamiliar, it is a guttural wail beginning in her tail and slowly and painfully traversing the entire body, exiting much later as a long sonic moo. The event lasts a good 15 seconds and has broken dishes a mile away.  Loose translation, “I want a bull noooooowwwwwwww !…

There was a particularly loud moo and my wife looked at me and said, “that sounded very close.”  She, being a milk farmer’s daughter, measures cow distance in the same we wait for the clap of thunder after seeing lightning. Sure enough, outside our window five cows frolicked in the remains of our tomato patch.  2,000 frolicking kilos was a ground shaking and frightening site.

Momentarily frozen at this sight, my wife yelled, “I’ll call the other neighbor, you grab a broom and head out there to shoo them back towards the meadow.”  Yeah right, I’m not a real farmer, I just play one on TV, was my original thought…

Paul Nijhuis though is a fanatic.  The son of the founder, he is very passionate about wooden shoes.  In 1997 when the Dutch government privatized their version of the OSHA, they ruled that wooden shoes were unsafe and banned them from commercial and industrial use.  Not to be deterred, Paul demonstrated the safety of Nijhuis shoes by dropping a 110 lb parking curb stone on the shoes… with his feet still inside of them. He walked away from the experiment unharmed thus proving the 700 year safety record of these shoes. (Yeah, but can this tough guy shoo cows with a broom and walk a mile in them?)

…as the cows were guided from their trip down our 700 meter long street (stopping to socialize with cows in other meadows who wanted to join them, the trick was to wave forcefully but never raise your voice or shout. Having seen one too many cowboy movies, my effort to distract saw them instead bolt for the gate of an open field, the wrong one, where the roundup took on the added dimension of surrounding them in a 3 hectare “L” shaped meadow…

Nijhuis uses 12,000 Poplar trees annually to produce one million pairs for actual use and two million souvenirs, gifts and toys. Poplar is light and easy to work with. It is fast-growing and each tree yields about 60 pairs of adult-size shoes. He does this all with a staff of 150 employees.

A tour of the facility shows the entire automated process – from the saw that cuts each tree into lengths according to shoe size, a band saw which cuts the logs into cake wedges (each wedge contains a single wooden shoe), to a duplicating machine which rotates two pieces of wood in opposite directions to simultaneously create a left and a right shoe.

…once the glares from my fellow cowhands died down, a rope lane to the correct meadow was constructed as the permanent shade of deep red slowly began to dissipate from my cheeks. We now had them moving in the right direction with everybody reminding me every 20 meters to not shout at them…

Paul has a unique way of demonstrating how wood’s natural ventilation prevents perspiration of your feet. He spits on one end of a shoe and blows bubbles in his spit from the other end (not an exercise for the full-stomached witness). Air travels through wood and keeps the temperature constant so they are cool in summer and warm in winter. Still, I am not sure we’ll see many of them during prom season.

…as was later explained to me, my loud cowboy YEEAAAH, spooked them. We prefer that you herd rather than scare them. So there I was with five other guys on an early summer’s evening standing in my klompen and directing bovine traffic while keeping vehicular traffic safely behind us…

As for Nijhuis, he says soccer club fans and corporate clients have their own unique and specially designed clogs.  My personal favourite is the smuggler’s pair used to confuse border guards.  The heel and toe are reversed so it looks like you are going when you are really coming.

…as the cows all attempted to mount each other in the safety of the paddock (still searching for that bull and just being helpful?), I was now flush with the success of our effort and almost embarrassed myself like the saber tooth tiger character in the movie “Ice Age” by saying, “Yeah ! Who’s up for round two.” I remembered where I was, who I was with and decided it was time for a beer and joining for a laugh at the American city boy in his klompen…

Even in this 700-year old industry, Nijhuis has their disclaimer – “In accordance with the prescribed use of safety shoes we warn you to take care when wearing wooden shoes on wet surfaces. Be aware of the risk of slipping. Replace the wooden shoe if the wood is cracked and when the notch in the bottom of the wooden shoe measures less than ¼ inch. Otherwise when treading on a nail it could go through the wood.”

I guess any guy who drops curbstones on his own foot to prove a point needs a good lawyer.