Flat heat here, dead breeze. A frenchman asks me where Im going “Germany” I say in french. He grunts a bit and smiles, just points east. I follow his finger to Neuf Brisach. A conceptual military fortification built by Louis XIV built for mathematicians and battles, a web of triangles and deep tranches, 3 metre thick walls. Google Earth it.
I move on and at a roundabout a man in a car pulls over and, I assume, asks me where I’m going. Allemagne I declare. Germany’s quite close now so walking there is almost a normal thing to be doing. He grunts and points east. I follow his finger. Neuf Brisach is the border town with Germany. It is a 17th century creation of Louis XIV’s, an eccentric exapmple of a fortified town, a many pronged star constructed out of 30foot deep trenches and 3 metre thick walls. Walking into it felt like entering another world, I felt like a pilgrim nearing Rome, amazed that men could build such things.
Geometry that is beyond my capacity to name
I slept in the campsite here, arriving after office hours and leaving before them. Exiting town via the bakery at about 8am. By 10am I was sat in Germany outside a McDonalds opposite a Vineyard, long lines of traffic crawling either way. No border guards though, barely a border at all really, just a bridge from one side of the river to the other, one side in France, the other in Germany. I just walked in. Disappointing really, I was expecting a grilling from strict suspicious German border guards. And now the language change. I had been speaking half remembered, broken French for a month of so and now, in the space of a hundred yards I had to switch to German. I struggled with this, I really really struggled. And today was a long way. Into another city on the edge of the Black Forest.
In this heat the Rhine flows the wrong way. I burn precious clothes in a tumble dryer and run out at noon, crossing little streams and out through the suburbs. I watch a Crane sweep the sky from the deep heat grass of a field, my fingers ripe red with Cherry juice.
In the morning I sit in the campsite in Turkheim for a little while, today is one of my shortest days, its only 5km or so to Colmar, I sit and watch an elderly dutch campervan camper feed crisps by hand to one of the local Cranes. These birds are huge. Somewhat larger than swans with square wings like a herons. Atop the local church there is a nest built for them, a shallow dish like a giant tea light holder that they then fill with twigs and baby Cranes which are also massive and have an awful lot of trouble trying to stand up. Tourists gawk at them. So do I I guess. All the tourist shops sell little cuddly Cranes, or tea towels with Cranes on. I set off down the river that runs through the town, the bakeries compete to sell me my breakfast and I eat bananas all along the footpath. Kids skate past on their way to school and I have to go for a piss beneath a very windy willow tree that nearly causes me some problems. The path arches round the local college and some vineyards that are sliced in half by the single train line. Kids playing truant, or perhaps high school drop outs hang about by the platform. I enjoy looking at all the tiny grapes just starting to take their forms. Pretty much at the end of these fields is the edge of Colmar. A huge dog untied lounges in a driveway and I hope to heaven its not the aggresive type due to its apparent freedom. Its placid and I scamper past onto roads looking for a route into Colmar. If I head directly East I shouldn’t miss the town centre. This sort of works. I buy thin socks and a clean t-shirt in a hypermarche on the skirt of town, one of massive places where the ceiling is miles away and you can’t really see the edges of the shop floor. Outside I eventually figure out that I can follow a small stream into the heart of town and find the tourist information after little effort. Then I find out where the hostel is and walk back the way I came only to find it doesnt open for another hour. I sit down and eat the rest of my Comte and bread, drink all my water.
German graves, French soil.
Above a precipice, staring at germany through the haze, a border collie befirends me wildly while her owner does an impression of a cow, illustrating her question. Descend through Orbey and alpine flowers, kill the heart of darkness and my staff – stabs me in the chin and splinters beneath my fall. In the night Pine Martins rush silently above me from branch to branch to branch, their frog like barks tracing their movements. In the morning they scamper in the light.
Interlude. (I killed a grasshopper by mistake*)
you realise you are as inconsequential as the last human, as important as the first. You realise there are so many people doing so many things, that everything comes to matter as much as everything else. Or as little.
Before I left I had a conversation with a man who said I had to be prepared for this journey to be completely inconsequential. For it not to matter at all, for it not to change anything, for it not to be noticed. And I think, and I have thought on this for all these days of farmland and villages, night and day, forest and gendarmarie, all the mornings I have woken having no idea where it is that I will sleep next. And it is a thing that makes me so sad I become happy again, when you have plumbed the depths of this thought, this possibility, when you have discovered that everything you thought mattered so much matters not at all you obtain a kind of peace usually only offered by the grave, or the open sky, the blue of distance and disappearance. The joy of presence, that the moment you are in is everything. A two bit bar with flies and the noise of French pop music. Everything. As consequential as inconsequence, as nameless as defined. As Rebecca says, so easy to recall, so impossiible to describe.
*The grasshopper to which this passage is dedicated died in the gap between the fly sheet of my tent and the inner bit as I rolled it up one morning,, the next night I lay there and stared at its buckled dried out corpse and wrote.
