Tuesday morning, four days left. Yesterday Berlin hit 37 Centigrade, 99 for the free and the brave, and we were still over 90 when the rain began at midnight. Woke up to mid-70s that felt refreshingly cool, then ran through the second round of rain this morning. Bodywise, things are looking up: I’ve almost regained full range of motion in my once-stiff neck, and my badly-stubbed toe diagnosis has been downgraded from “probably broken” to “completely fine, in fact I think it is tougher now.” Brainwise I’m long on melancholy and short on inspiration, but hey, ain’t nobody promised me warm cream and sunbeams.
That’s enough moping to sad country music; time for Beastie Boys and a bit of blogging.
Last Thursday morning I got up early, practiced some isometrics in the absence of weights, ate my breakfast and did all of the packing I’d skived off the day before. (For some reason I am always pleasantly surprised with how fast I can pack—it can seem so daunting from a distance but in practice it generally takes about 20 minutes.) Sandwiches made and boots laced tight, I tromped out the door towards destiny, i.e. the first of three trains to Österreich, this one from Gesundbrunnen (“Health Fountain,” a major train hub near my home) to the Hauptbahnhof. While bored at Gesundbrunnen I spotted the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, so I took a snapshot.
And my next photo is: also of a train station. My amazingly fast ICE (Inter-City Express, fastest commuter rail in Deutschland, which I have witnessed get up to 250 kph) out of Berlin got a bit hung up—probably by some puny humans and their emotions—so I missed my connection in beautiful, historical Nuremburg and had to wait to umsteig (change trains) in beautiful, historical München (Munich). Departing the climate-controlled luxury of the ICE for the sunlit concrete and hot dirt of the München Hauptbahnhof, I noticed these pretty pink flowers growing right next to a novel (for me at least) sort of spring-based train-catcher.
Such a device always strikes me as mildly pointless, seeing as for train at top speed it represents little more than an excuse to derail and start crashing spectacularly. However, I suppose your typical loose train will not be at top speed by the time it gets here, and in any case it has to hit something first—might as well be a giant spring, and not like a huge boulder or a cardboard box with a bunny in it.
My new train, a regional express down to Lindau and the extreme southern edge of Germany, was slower, older and rattlier than that high-tech ICE, but I had a comfy seat with a good view of the ever-more beautiful countryside. Say, those certainly are some strangely solid and stationary clouds there along the horizon, hmm? Such an unbroken and ageless ridge, already enormous and looming ever larger—why, it’s very nearly MOUNTAINOUS, wouldn’t you say?
It’s always tough to take pictures out of a moving vehichle but in an effort to capture the mountain approach I tried my hand anyways. It reminded me—like many aspects of this trip—of driving to and through the American West. Going out west is one of my favorite things to do; I’ve done it 4 out of the past 5 summers, and despite the unending stream of fun to be had in Berlin I’m still missing it—those straight-ahead 8-hour drives through dust and sagebrush, the rocks and tree roots beneath my sleeping bag, the undying, sinister, ever-evolving threat of the BEARS. Nothing can quite replace that wide-open, big-sky, nobody’s-home feeling of space, but this Austrian jaunt came close.
Although the Germans don’t have to be as crazy with the warning labels as service-providers in sue-happy American, they will still tell you not to pitch bottles out the window or jump out of the train.
“Sure, it looks like ‘fun,’ and they say it’s ‘cool,’ and ‘everybody’s doing it.’ But the consequences of jumping out of a moving train can be life-changing, and even deadly! Be your own person! Get high on LIFE! DARE to not jump out of moving trains!”
I got in to Lindau about an hour late. Good ol’ Ted France, lifelong family friend, Duluth-born Montessori kindergarten teacher and generally speaking the nicest guy you’ll ever meet, met me at the modest train station and took me out for pizza. (I’d exhausted my supply of apples, bread, and cheese a couple hours before.) We caught up a bit during a little stroll through the narrow cobblestone streets of touristy but charming Lindau, then hopped in Ted’s efficient lil’ red hatchback and made tracks around the end of the Bodensee (a huge lovely lake along the German-Austrian border), out of Deutschland, and into beautiful Vorarlberg, the mountainous western province that the France clan calls home. On the way to Altach (literally “Old Creek,” Familie France’s particular villiage) we picked up Brigitta, also a schoolteacher, Ted’s wife of many years and a Vorarlberg native, and at home we were greeted by their eldest daughter (and my long-term friend) Johanna, home on summer break and, unfortunately, a bit laid up with a nasty cough. We said hellos, discussed plans for the weekend, and turned in early. The youngest, Melissa, is off studying something somewhere (seems like I must have been given that info at some point but I guess I did not pay very good attention), so I got her bed and room. Thank you, Melissa! Wherever you are.
The next day I got up early and went for a run before the heat of the day set in. I did a couple loops through Altach, then took a footbridge over the highway (#1 of 2 oddly industrialized features in this largely rural area) and tromped through some fragrant fields, beneath some menacing but inactive high-tension power lines (#2 of 2, fine by me as long as their not crackling with electricity). I saw horses, said “Morgen” to extremely tan old men, and waded across a stream beneath a highway bridge on my way back. It was all very agrarian and good for my soul.
I hung out with Johanna and blogged through the rest of the morning in the cool apartment (see last post). Around 11 Brigitta picked us up and took us to lunch in nearby Feldkirch, which is a pretty little mountain valley town with good restaurants and a castle. I ate the kind of genuine German food (Schnitzel und Dampfkartoffeln [breaded pork cutlet and steamed potatoes]) that is actually rather hard to find in Berlin, and it was taaaaaasty. Friday afternoon Feldkirch was so pretty:
That I just had to stand in front of it and try to get some prettiness to rub off on me:
No dice.
Here is the only vineyard in Feldkirch. According to Brigitta everyone raves about it and makes a point of buying and drinking it, but it is actually sour and crappy.
Real Talk with Brigitta France.
The castle was fantastically old and pretty neat. Unfortunately it was also rather dimly lit, and as I’d foolishly neglected to switch my camera off of “quick-shutter action mode” after last week’s trampoline photo shoot all of my shots of the castle turned out murky and indecipherable. (I guess in sports mode the aperture is open for a shorter period, which leads to less blur and lower brightness.) However, one interesting courtyard shot did come out alright:
Translated: “Here lies Hasso, the lifesaver and savior of the castle from a fire on the seventh of June, 1965. True in life, heroic in death.” I was seriously sorry there was not more information on this dude. (And yes, I do know it was a dude and not a lady because “sein” is a masculine possessive pronoun.) I suppose I could have asked in the museum, but that probably would have led to me learning all kinds of boring non-castle-fire type history. ANOTHER LESSON WELL-AVOIDED.
When I mentioned earlier how this trip south reminded me of previous trips in the American West (mountains, farms, breathtaking vistas, etc), I left out one important difference: unlike the lovely desolate desert out west, there’s water ‘round these parts. In addition to receiving ample rainfall (apparently May was a wall-to-wall rainout) the whole landscape is criss-crossed with streams and rivers fed by snowmelt. And being frou-frou Europeans these Austrians can’t just be happy with a little bit of water trickling down the mountainside; no, they are compelled to harness it and put it to work reducing fossil fuel consumption through things like this here hoity-toity hydroelectric powerplant:
It was actually pretty neat, and the open water helped to cut the oppressive mid-day heat. The water in this pool is a very strange tint of blue-green, but judging by the identically teal water in the nearby river.
I guess this water picks up the color naturally, and not through some nefarious industrial process. Still, I kind of felt like I was posing in front of an especially elaborate water hazard on a mini-golf course:
Johanna looks much more natural:
Brigitta had to get back to work so she left Johanna and I to our own devices in Feldkirch. I naturally gravitated towards a Spielplatz (playground), and after waiting out a couple of snot-nosed brats we got a turn on the highly hazardous zip-line.
WHEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEE.
Oh, and that fortified structure visible behind Action Johanna? It is a high school.
But this fortified structure, on the other side of the field? It is a jail.
Just wanted to clear that up.
Our train home was so severely delayed that we ended up taking a bus home, and I didn’t have time for the afternoon hike Ted had planned. Instead we did the next best thing: took a refreshing swim in the Rhine! In an effort to reduce seasonal flooding, the Rhine through Vorarlberg was split and thoroughly channeled a few years back, resulting in a fast, straight Rhine and the gentler, more meandering counterpart that Ted and I doggy-paddled across. It was deep and clear and full of Germans and little fish. This dip was quite refreshing, and (as we learned later from Brigitta) international: on the other side of the river we had actually set foot in Swiss soil. This represents the first time I have swum to a new country. Updated number of countries I have been to: 6. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
Once back safe on the Austrian bank Ted and I came to the simultaneous realization that we had both forgotten to bring any towels at all. We stood around and talked about the weather until our torsos were dry enough to pull shirts over, then squelched back to the car and got the seats all wet.
Back at Casa la France Brigitta whipped up a tasty vegetarian wild rice salad, which we ate with local bread, cheese, and beer, all outstanding. The cheese was particularly stupendous, and I was not at all surprised when Johanna informed me that it had won a gold medal in a cheese competition in the epicenter of all cheese wisdom, Wisconsin. It had herbs on the rind and a fine nutty flavor. We closed out the night in frustrating fashion, trying and failing to watch a faulty Marx Brothers DVD. The Frances turned in one after the other, mindful of the next day’s early start, and I eventually tired myself out by reading a New Yorker article by Oliver Sacks, about a novelist who had a very specific sort of stroke and forgot how to read. Not the best thing to read late at night by yourself—I kept expecting the words to suddenly scramble, or morph into cuneiform or Sanskrit or something.
Saturday morning dawned sunny and warm, of course. I drank coffee with Ted and took a couple photos of the backyard. These conifers turned out okay:
But this massive willow was just plain too big to fit in the frame:
I needed a second shot to get the trunk, and the swingset.
Ted and Johanna wanted some supplies from Riedmann, their favorite local grocer, and insisted I come along to witness its majesty. Gaze upon it, and despair!
But seriously folks, despite the deeply creepy smiley face logo and all its Wal-Fart connotations, Riedmann was a high quality establishment. I mean, any store that offers both heart-shaped salami AND teddy bear-shaped bologna has got to be doing something right:
Also, the parking lot featured both these mysterious orbs,
And this completely bizarre wooden family:
Austria is kind of strange.
Brigitta, Ted and I filled our water bottles, polished our apples, piled in the car and headed towards the foot of a nearby mountain. In the field where we parked and started our hike I took this photo just by casual accident without even trying:
I think the thing in this middle is the powertrain for a rope-tow.
Boots tied tight we tromped uphill. Just past a sign that said “1100 Meters” we found a well-lit spot where I made my hosts pose for a portrait:
Isn’t that just precious?
Thankfully we were able to climb in the shade, so the most strenuous leg of our hike was nice and cool. The trail was rugged, and quite steep at times, but well maintained and clearly marked. We gradually fell into the slow, steady rhythm that tends to work best when one is walking up a mountain. We talked about flower or rocks, or just concentrated on the next step, stopping every once in a while to drink water and check the view. I took very few photos because there wasn’t much light and I was sort of “in the zone.” I did manage to catch Brigitta unwittingly posing beside an elaborate cairn:
When the trail got especially dicey we were sometimes provided with a very useful cable handhold, as demonstrated in this poorly lit shot:
Brigitta had no real need for it, of course, as she was equipped with a pair of those “Nordic walking” poles that still—despite their prevalence in Europe, and their obvious usefulness—strike me as a little goofy. I suppose I tend to associate them with kooky old shirtless dudes in bicycle pants—a type we passed more than once on our ascent, walking downhill and looking comically hale and hearty. We started up at maybe 9 in the morning, obviously much later than some of the more serious Austrian mountaineering-types.
Here I am a little shy of the peak, wreathed in glorious golden summer mountain morning sunlight.
It's hard to tell but I am completely yodeling in this one.
So long story short we kept going up until we ran out of mountain, then stopped to eat apples and take a few pictures on the Höhe Kugel (literally “High Ball.” No, we were not served congratulatory highballs). I liked this lonely spruce in mountain meadow:
I would have needed some kind of 3-D IMAX hi-def camera with Smell-O-Vision to properly photograph this place. As Brigitta and I discussed, there is generally nothing more boring than a photo of a mountain. Incorrigible shutterbug that I am, I took a couple of snapshots against my better judgment. This photograph contains three countries and a man in a blue shirt:
The light streak just below the horizon is the Bodensee, and the dark streak above that is Germany. The deep green line on the lower left, with a bit of a bend to it but largely horizaontal, is the forested banks of the Rhine canal that Ted and I swam, and everything above and to the left of it is Switzerland. The rest of the valley, and the, uh, mountain in the foreground is Austria. The man in the blue shirt is of indeterminate nationality.
The Höhe Kugel is less of a peak and more of a high point along a ridge. Here is a view along that ridge, with a hint at the endless rows of Alps marching out towards Italy and the rest of Austria:
Here is the wooden cross set on the peak by ancient druids, or Christians in the 1960s, whatever:
the CTPCRHU (committee to put crosses real high up) totally saved on cathedral construction costs on this oneI guess it is there so when God is flying around Superman-style he won’t have to descend into the valley to know that everyone in it is Christian. At first I thought it was wired up for illumination/electrocution, Church of the Electric Cross-style, but a lack of lightbulbs/leather straps led me to conclude that it is merely grounded to protect against lightning strikes. An exploded, burning cross atop a mountain would probably not make for very good press.
This is Austria, so everyone was already a little goofy, and our Earth-time coordinate on top of a mountain on a Saturday morning filterd some more reasonable people from the equation, so there were a few charming eccentrics on display. For example, one group walked their Chihuahuas to the top. One of the little dogs was sort of weirdly fit and didn’t seem THAT out of place, but this spindly black and tan guy was in rough shape:
He was very old (his head was mostly white), incredibly skinny and shakey, and I think he was missing an eye. And he climbed a trail that whipped me pretty thoroughly. Someone needs to organize a Mountain Chihuahua Rescue Service. They can deliver very tiny amounts of warming rum to slightly distressed hikers. I do not know about you but I personally would really like to step into a control room and bellow SCRAMBLE THE MOUNTAIN CHIHUAHUAS.
Here’s a special breed of maniac: mountain bikers. No, no, not just punks with knobby tires pedaling around the park—we’re talking about riding bicycles up and down mountains. Climbing up—presumably along more bike-friendly paths than the one we took—strikes me as unnecessarily difficult, if not straight crazy. The real insanity is in the downhill portion, where you strap on your armor, stand up high on your pedals and sort of rumble/hop/skid/fall down rough and rocky 45-degree slopes. The woman on the left in this shot took a nasty tumble about 5 seconds later:
It was hard to watch and hard not to.
Here are a couple more lets-ride-bikes-down-mountains kooks tightening their pads and braces and talking through the route along which they will be least likely to brain themselves:
After breathing in a few final lungfuls of the freshest of alpine air—this whole mountain really did smell terrific, like sunshine on flower petals, or like a million pine-tree car air fresheners torn up and boiled in a swimming pool—we strapped on our packs and bumbled on down the trail. After a virtually bovine-free ascent we finally got some COW TIME:
As we learned from local girl Brigitta, cows are a very important part of the culture in this neck of the woods. These slopes are too steep to cultivate crops, but the rich pasture supports a huge population of free-roaming cows. They meander around all day, eating grass and mooing at each other, then trundle back home when they need to be milked. These hills are dotted with little cowyard/creameries where wizend master cheesemakers say spells over their cows and produce very specialized varieties of Käse (cheese). Sometimes cows lose their way among the trees and woody valleys, so each is outfitted with a collar and bell—known as a “cow bell”—to make it easier for farmers to locate their wayward heifers. The bells have a strange, wavering, almost liquid tone and combine with birdsong to give this place an omnipresent, peaceful and melodic background soundtrack. Apparently each herd contains an experienced cow who wears a larger bell and leads her fellow cows out to grass and back home again. Can you spot the lead cow in this picture?
Neither can I.
As the photo above oughta tell you, we got to walk right past these noble and goofy beasts. They handled the same slopes we did, with surprising agility for, you know, meat refrigerators on legs. Some areas were designated no-cow zones—for the protection of the plant life or for the protection of the cows, I really wasn’t sure—and hemmed off with electric fencing and barbed wire, with cow-proof gates like this one to let hikers in and out:
It made me feel like a clever monkey to waltz right through this impassable cow forcefield. I wish there would have been a cow standing right there so I could have rubbed its dumb nose in it.
Brigitta, our fount of cow wisdom, told us about a disturbing recent development in the long-undisturbed Austrian cow bloodlines. Apparently some farmers have begun breeding their stock with larger American cows in an effort to increase milk production. The new hybrids do give more milk, but their long American hind legs make it difficult for them to traverse some of the steeper slopes. Some farmers are fond of this new development, as it means cows don’t wander as far and are easier to round up, but others are concerned that it will lead to injuries and disturb grazing patterns. Yes, this is a bizarre thing to debate, but like I said: cows are huge around here. Like when the seasons change and the cows need to be moved up or down the mountain to greener pastures, the farmers deck out their cattle with ribbons, flowers, and especially large bells and march them along in a huge procession while the townspeople stand around in their Sunday finest and cheer and play their alpenhorns. Schools are closed so the children can come watch the cow parade. Brigitta identified this cow as Swiss (I think), and I am inclined to believe her:
This Swiss cow did not trust me one bit.
Upon passing the cow-proof gate we came to a very pretty mountain prairie with a bit more vegetation to it:
This field was rich in wildflowers. Brigitta’s father is in the hospital after a minor heart attack, so on the walk down she busied herself making him a little bouquet out of the flowers she was least likely to get in trouble for picking. This purple item in the middle was completely off-limits:
I don’t recall its name but it is beautiful and very rare. It reminded me a bit of Minnesota’s own endangered state flower, the pink lady slipper, although Brigitta informed me that the lady slipper is a type of orchid and this purple fellow is not. I’m not sure why I like the idea of rare flowers so much—I suppose they’re so delicate and fleeting to begin with that the threat of annihilation feels that much closer and more terrible.
I took a few steps off the trail to find a place to relieve myself and accidentally came upon this fine view into the west, with a rather isolated little villiage visible near the center:
I tried to imagine living there and couldn’t.
This rocky prominence reminded me of formations in Yosemite, so I held up a minute and captured Ted walking towards it.
Preeeeeetty.
My fellow cow farmers let’s drop the niceties and get down to brass tacks: climbing mountains all day looking for fresh clover is hard work. Sometimes cows get thirsty. A thirsty cow is a sad cow, and a sad cow is nothing any of us want to see. Gentlemen and ladies I present to you the ultimate solution to all your sad, thirsty cow problems: the hollow log water trough:
I liked how this hollow log took water from an existing snowmelt trickle and made it into a legitimate self-refreshing bovine rehydrator. Ted told me an amusing anecdote about a friend of his who got so hot on a hike that he stripped and hopped buck-naked into a log trough like this one. I hope it was ice cold.
Shortly we came upon a mountainside waypoint lunch joint where we stopped for cold frosty ones and a couple of kalte Platten (cold platters)—plates piled high with cold cuts, cheese, and onions, sprinkled with herbs and doused in vinegar. I cannot believe I did not photograph these things, they were awesome. In a less ravenous state I might have questioned my ability to eat that much vinegary bologna but had worked up quite an appetite so I put it down no problem.
Further down the trail we hit this cool structure spanning a ravine.
It looked a little makeshift but was quite sturdy. I really dug on the repurposed mountain-bike tire steps:
I suppose rangers just pull these off of all the mangled bike/biker conglomerations they find lying around.
Eventually we came back to the trail we’d started on and followed it all the way back to the car, then popped on some Buddy Holly and headed for home.
On the way we stopped off at Ted’s kindergarten, and Ted gave me a tour of the place. A+, would send my Austrian child there. I particularly liked all of these fastener practice devices on the wall:
The Austrian school year is FINALLY coming to a close so Ted needed to pick up some bats and balls for the end-of-year picnic/run-around-in-a-field-on-a-blazing-July-afternoon party. I went home and took a nap instead. I think we know who came out ahead in THAT scenario! (Ted, because the children are the future.)
So I slept through the afternoon, woke up and blogged a bit, then took the train back to Feldkirch with Johanna, for to attend the fabulous Weinfest. (Wine-Fest, pronounced exactly the same auf Detusch, although in Vorarlberg dialect it’s pronounced “fescht.” Actually that’s almost definitely only true for a few of the dozens of dialects to be found in this region. I had a lot of interesting conversations with Johanna and Brigitta about the dialects—they vary valley to valley, with all kinds of kooky sub-dialects in between—and I’d love to write more about it here [It struck me as the sort of thing you could make an academic career out of] but I am trying to wrap up this blog post and get the hell out of Berlin, so:)
I met several of Johanna’s hip young Austrian friends, including two couples named Simon and Sylvia and Simon and Silvia. Here are Simon and Sylvia, I think, with some cold white wine and a giant pretzel:
This photograph sums up the spirit of the evening pretty well. Plenty of wine, lots of laughs and good conversation (in English and auf Deutsch), giant pretzels and a very amusing courtyard-clearing cloudburst, the region’s first rain in quite some time. GOOD CLEAN FUN.
Caught the last train home and woke up feeling fine, although I did manage to stub my toe badly enough that I had to keep it elevated on the ride home. (It’s better now.) I took one last picture before heading out the door, of a print on the family’s hard-to-photograph but heartwarming bulletin board of memories:
For those of you not in the know, this is Ted posing with my pa and my black pug Otto, back when he was a mere black puglet. Awwwwwwwww.
Then I took a couple trains back home. Can you tell I’m a little tired of writing this blog post. I had a very good time in Austria and I cannot thank Ted and Brigitta and Johanna enough for their hospitality. Thanks again!
Now: Thursday afternoon. Classes are done with now and forever, and as soon as this blog post is up I will go turn in my locker key and keycard and badge and gun and say goodbye to the IES center that has been so central to my time here in Berlin. The organization is far from perfect but the staff is flawless—on the off chance any of you are reading, thank you for all your help and support!
So: put up the chairs turn out the lights and lock the doors on this little task, then farewell dinner with Johanna (Clarke, not France), then I guess hoof it home and start packing up the laundry I did this morning. Berlin has been marvelous, all things considered, and I’m sorry to leave it, but I am started to get that freedom-sweet-freedom belly tingle. I’ve always been a fan of the clean break. I’ll get some sort of farewell post up here soonish—a small backlog of phunny photos remains, after all, and as an artist I cannot let them go unshown.
Back soonish. Hey mom and Maya, see you in TWO DAYS.
