I am tired of living with the insect kingdom. They are too efficient at eating blood, too omnipresent. One very nice shortbread jam cake thing, and a dutchman called Jacob who span a good line in anecdotes and spent several years saving baby jackdaws who had fallen from the church tower. For years after he could visit the tower and call down his Jackdaws. I want my own friend, maybe I will make a Jackdaw army. The weather becomes clockwork. A rush of sun til 12, a rumble of thunder by 1 and a full storm by 3. Bright sun again by 6. At 2 one day, 5 cows get killed by lightening. At 3 I reach a strange fort, a ruin in the forest, at 4 German and Swiss people play golf beneath a giant thunderstorm. This seems foolhardy, and by 5 I can see Switzerland for the first time in 22 years, fork lightening striking its distant hills.
Near the Feldburg 1459m asl
The weather spent the day being fairly threatening, I spent the day wondering how far I would get and where I would sleep, trying not to notice the no camping signs that could be found at the entrance to the Black Forest. The clouds rolled up and down the hills occasionally enveloping everything in a dense fug, the air was thick with bells resonating off the hills. A fancy 4 star hotel on the footpaths side hosts a car park filled with german, swiss and french vehicle, the way the countries in Europe seem to overlap at the corners, freely blending together, mixing people culture, flavours, flora and fauna. I take the wrong path at some point and doubel back after a few kilometres, the first moments of uneasiness above the rapidly moving cloudline. Still sunday walkers though, enough people for safe keeping.
Technically the peak of the Feldburg is somewhat out of the way for my route, just a few kilometres or so, and as I near it I conclude it really doesn’t look that exciting. Its one of those large bare nipples of a mountain, a rolling nobble, hard to define the actual peak. The Germans have also decorated it with heavy weather monitoring equipment, buildings painted like lighthouses, red and white stripes, satilite TV junkies, deep brick. Its getting quite late in the day and I sit down on a little well used perch, just off the path at the edge of a deep and sudden precipice. Swathes of dead trees mingle with the living down the valley and the ghost of Caspar David Freidrich is everywhere.
