by Helen Moat
I gazed back up at the storks, the adult concentrated on feeding her five young. Long ago, my father would have appreciated this family of storks in their twiggy castle, lording it over us from their sawn-off treetop in the sky. Now, I wasn’t so sure.
We cycled on, aware that the geography of the Rhine had changed in a fundamental way. Ever since Emmerich, on the border with the Netherlands, Germany enclosed the river on either side. We’d swapped from side to side, sometimes cycling on the left bank, sometimes on the right. We’d criss-crossed bridges, back and forth, but always in Germany. Now France lay on the far bank. We could have crossed to experience another country, another culture – but I didn’t speak the language. Here in Germany it was easier. Jamie and I made a concession: we cycled onto an artificial island, a strip of land that lay in the middle of the dammed Rhine. The German–French border sliced through the man-made river island, where a casse-croûte on the French side served up coffee and snacks. The Alsace owner responded to my order with a fat, slurred accent. “Voilà,” he said, pushing the cups of coffee at me in a quick impatient movement.
Back on the German side, the Rhine path hugged the river, mile upon mile of gravel that snaked with the broad sweep of the waterway. As the sun slid down the sky, Kehl, our destination, seemed beyond our reach, and the day disappeared into the ribbon of path. We dreamed of food as afternoon slipped into evening, Jamie yearning for deep-fried chicken. At last, we cycled into the corridor of warehouses and cranes that eked out from all Rhine cities. We veered off into a jumble of high-rise buildings, car parks and warehouses where we found our accommodation for the night – a tower block that sprang up from the urban mess. And there, planted in front of the hotel, in the gravel of a wasteland car park – as if flung down by God in answer to Jamie’s prayer – was a mobile snack bar selling deep-fried chicken.
That night we bedded down in our own lofty concrete nest, lording it over the city of Kehl and the river like the Rhineland storks.
*
10. Ingrid’s Redstart
On the Upper Rhine the character of the river changed again: the romance of the Middle Rhine, with its castles and monasteries, disappeared; and the rocky cuts that forced the river through narrow chasms and steep-sided valleys ribbed with vines, gave way to dirt tracks edging a flatter, tamer landscape. Here, the path followed the wide brushstroke of river, except when it was pushed back from the banks where the Rhine’s veins branched off into a watery world of marsh and woodland, interrupted only by sleepy villages. While it didn’t have the drama of the Middle Rhine, this stretch of the water had its own gentle charm.
After Kehl, I sensed the transition from north to south. A chorus of softly throbbing crickets joined in with the coo of wood pigeon. Accents grew thicker, seamlessly shifting to southern dialects. We were greeted with Grüss Gott, rather than the lofty Guten Tag of High German; a true sign that we were in the south. For the first time, we saw the mountains, distant and faint to begin with, then sharpening in definition and magnifying in size as we pedalled southward.
There was something else too: we were cycling from spring into summer. My feeling of well-being deepened as I felt the heat of the sun on my hands and face. The wind that had hounded us in northern Germany had limped away and the air was warm, and the wheels of our bikes seemed to spin of their own accord. We skirted peaceful villages and dropped into ash woodlands where cool air eked from the undergrowth like a fridge door left open.
The cuckoo was still following us, its soft soporific double note floating through the air from some faraway location. It was such a gentle sound, heralding kinder days: the soothing balm of warmer air; the stretching out of light-filled hours and the sudden burst of spring-flower colour. As a child, I had thought the cuckoo a benevolent bird with its innocent, hide-away ‘peek-a-boo’ call. But my father revealed a story of cunning ruthlessness: the parasitic cuckoos laying their camouflaged eggs in the nests of other breeding birds; the young, when still bald and blind, kicking out the eggs of their unwitting host while mimicking the cries of the ejected chicks, ensuring their foster parents continued to feed them. The truth of the cuckoo was a far cry from the gentle two-note carried through the air – echoing the innocence of my childhood that protected me from the harsh realities of the world in my edge-of-town fields. Knowledge and self-awareness would come later.
Through Germany, we continued to follow the birdsong, the aroma of coffee and pastries and the fresh sharpness of ozone along the riverbanks. I loved the simplicity of our lives here on the Rhine: sleep, eat, pedal and repeat. But it was much more than that – for we glided effortlessly through a world alive with sound and sight, smell and taste – and around each new corner, there was a new onslaught on the senses. I felt a rediscovered equilibrium that gave me a fuzzy happiness as I cycled along.
*
I slammed on the brakes and looked on in dismay. The Rhine had burst its banks and the path in front of me was submerged somewhere beneath a lake of water that held a pair of mute swans. A family stood staring at the flood, too, the sullen teenage boy in a bad temper – furious that his parents had marched him along the Rhine only to be halted in their tracks. The parents shrugged and turned around, dragging their unhappy son with them.
I was not pleased either. We’d travelled a good number of miles along a dirt track from the last village, and now we’d have to add an additional dozen to our day by retracing our route back to the road in a long detour. Still I stood there, frowning at the water, as if my disapproval would make it recede. On the other side of the flood, I could see a cyclist approaching us. He stopped and dismounted from his bike and gave us a cheerful wave.
‘Just wade through,’ the man cried out.
I looked at him doubtfully then back at the flood. This was no puddle – more of a pond. I stepped closer to the water. While the edges looked shallow enough, I thought the dip in the middle looked unmanageably deep.
The man stood hesitantly on the other side, too, despite his confident call. Then he sprang into action. He pulled off his trousers, socks and shoes, lifted the bike above his shoulder and waded through the flood in his underpants. I watched the water come to his ankles, his knees and then his lower thighs at the deepest point, but soon he was through, triumphant and pleased.
‘Go for it,’ he laughed as he slapped out of the water.
Jamie looked doubtful.
‘Let’s do it,’ I said, not caring for the extra miles.
Before Jamie could say anything, I’d pulled off my socks and shoes. I wasn’t going to strip down to my underpants, however: I was British. Please! I rolled up my trousers as far as I could, pulled the panniers off my bike and hoisted them onto my shoulder. Jamie watched, still unsure, as I pushed through the water, then he followed before returning across the flood to fetch the bicycles. A group of other German cyclists had now caught up with us and there was much laughing as the cyclists stripped off and negotiated the flood. The ice broken – or the water parted – we all lingered to share cycling tales.
At the youth hostel in Breisach, I emailed Karlheinz and Ingrid to reassure them that everything was going swimmingly – and that we’d nearly had to swim through the Rhine floods in southern Germany. Karlheinz sent me an excited email back:
You’ve brought luck at Richard’s house. Just after you left, we discovered a redstart had nested in the roof of the front door porch – and the nest is now full of its young! In Germany, if a redstart builds her nest in a house, it brings good fortune – and we are sure it’s a good omen for your trip.
11. Manuela
Somewhere back on the Rhine, my Swiss friend, Manuela, had messaged me: You need to cycle more quickly and get to us for the weekend. We’re waiting patiently. I smiled as I read the text: it was typical of Manuela’s humour.
Years ago, Manuela and I had met in a rural youth hostel somewhere between Bern and Luzern. Manuela, sixteen or seventeen, was on a cycling trip with school friends, and I, a couple of years older,
was inter-railing on my own around Europe. Manuela was round-faced with a layer of puppy fat, living off cake as her mother didn’t cook much. Later, she told me she’d thought I was sophisticated and worldly-wise, whereas I, with my sheltered Brethren upbringing in provincial Northern Ireland, thought Manuela sophisticated with her chic continental clothes and her cultivated European outlook.
I remember Manuela lowering herself onto the floor of the hostel to look up at me with focused intensity from ice-grey eyes. She had a way of positioning herself lower to whoever was with her, so that they had the feeling no one else existed. Men found her irresistible, and Manuela went from one intense love affair to the next over the years.
Back home, we started writing letters to each other on tissue-thin airmail paper, Manuela’s writing long and sloping and exotically foreign in appearance. After a year or so of correspondence, I returned to Switzerland to stay with Manuela in her village. She introduced me to her friends in a trendy bar laid out with deckchairs and a sand floor – there was nothing like that in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. I had found another world. Manuela had a boyfriend whose father watered his balcony marijuana plants when they went on holidays. I didn’t know anyone with a balcony, much less a marijuana plant.
Manuela approached everything in life with the same intensity and passion – it was hard not to be seduced by her enthusiasm. She had a weakness for hyperbole, hamming up her drama-queen acts with a well-developed sense of the absurd and dark humour. It would stand her in good stead for medical school and her training as a neurologist. Not everyone ‘got’ her, but for those who befriended her, she was fiercely loyal – and despite the distances that divided us, our friendship had endured for thirty-five years. In truth, our backgrounds and lives were so different, we’d never have been friends ordinarily, and we valued our friendship all the more for it.
A couple of years after that first meeting in the hostel, Manuela came to Ireland to work with disabled people at a Camphill community, ahead of her medical degree. One day during that time, I confessed to her that I wanted out of Northern Ireland, away from the small-town conservatism of my birthplace and its entrenched sectarianism. I also wanted away from the shackles of my Brethren upbringing and the weight of my parents’ fragile peace agreement.
‘I’d love to have the courage to leave my job and go and live in Switzerland.’
‘Well, what’s stopping you?’
I started to make excuses, then stopped. She was right. There was nothing. A little while later I bought a copy of The Lady magazine with its pages of nanny advertisements, hoping to find a Swiss family who’d employ me as an au pair.
When I told my father I had found a job in Switzerland, his face dropped.
‘But there’s nothing for me here,’ I told him. ‘I need to experience something different, explore the world. I want to be happy and have fun’.
‘But we are not here to have fun. You shouldn’t be pursuing happiness. You should be content with what you have.’
I looked at him oddly; somehow this puritanical aspect of my Brethren upbringing had passed me by. Later, I realised this was a desperate argument from my father, who simply didn’t want to let go: his children, his raison d’être, were slipping away, one by one. It was when my youngest sister left a few years later that his depression set in.
*
Manuela had good reason to jokingly ask me to cycle quicker: she had a busy week ahead with practice consultancy hours and a medical conference. It was a shame. Nonetheless, as Jamie and I drew closer to Basel, too late for the desired weekend, I was looking forward to seeing Manuela. In one sense, I would miss Germany for the few days I would be in Switzerland. Its pure High German was much more accessible, for even after three years living in Switzerland on and off, I still barely understood the dialect.
For all of that, Switzerland felt more like home and despite its ‘too-perfect’ image I loved its mountains, the clean air and the easy organisation of it all. I felt embarrassed to admit my love affair with the country – no one ordinarily confessed to liking this law-abiding, conservative country. Even Manuela dismissed her own land ‘with its stupid cows and boring mountains’. Basel, at least, was industrial, even rough in places and more laid-back – and lay right on the German border. It was here Manuela set up home with a skeleton suspended from a hook in her book-filled study, deep within the immigrant quarter of the inner city. It was as far away from chocolate-box perfection as she could get.
There was another reason why I felt a rising sense of excitement as we neared Basel. We had almost reached our first major goalpost – the end of the southbound stretch of the Rhine. From here on in, we’d head east before turning north again for the Danube.
Just north of the city centre, Jamie and I cut away from the Rhine and unceremoniously crossed the border into Switzerland. If it hadn’t been for the painted white cross on the pedestrian footpath and a small sign half-hidden in bushes, we wouldn’t have realised we had entered another country: German suburbia merged with Switzerland’s seamlessly, and there was a sense we’d sneaked in through a back door.
Manuela kissed us Swiss-style, right, left, right, and marvelled at Jamie’s height. Long gone was her soft round face, the puppy fat and the waist-length hair, sometimes swept up in a loose roll. Her face was gaunter now, her body taut and skinny, her hair cut in fashionable shoulder-length layers.
Manuela dipped in and out of the house over our three-day visit, still finding time to bake Zopf, (plaited bread) and cake, and to cycle with me into town to rummage in second-hand shops. We spent evenings chatting and eating raclette, made with strong Swiss cheese, and Spätzli with smooth red wine – as we’d done down the years, first alone, then with our men and finally our sons. Those years had gone by fast and furious: one minute, Manuela and I were young women on the cusp of life, the scores to our future still unwritten; the next, mature women with teenage sons. It was hard to believe Jamie was around the age Manuela and I had been when we’d first met.
I had told Manuela we would stay five days, but in the empty house I felt the black dog of my depression scratching at the door. Just as I felt it had gone forever, it came creeping back in. I had the urge to find the Rhine again. I missed the fresh air and the constant movement. And so we packed our bags, wheeled the bikes down the little garden path, pushed the gate closed behind us and free-wheeled down the hill. Back to the river.
12. Back and Forth
From Basel, we stayed on the German side of the Rhine, but I knew that the next stage of the ride would see us cycling backwards and forwards between Germany and Switzerland, and between past and present.
Soon we were out of the suburbs – the refineries, power stations and sluice gates replaced by open fields. By early afternoon we were cycling into Bad Säckingen, where our CouchSurfing host, Hans, had offered us a couple of sofas for the night. As the retired teacher wasn’t expecting us until late afternoon, we explored the town, peering into its Gothic church and wandering through cobbled streets around the main square. We found an ancient wood-covered pedestrian bridge, the longest in Europe, and crossed into Switzerland at Stein, lingering there until it was time to find our host.
*
‘I’d like to cycle part of the route with you, if that’s okay?’ Hans said in the morning.
‘You’re welcome to join us, but I have to warn you that I cycle very slowly,’ I laughed.
It didn’t seem to put Hans off, and after our host had cooked us a boiled egg to accompany the usual German breakfast of rolls, meats and cheeses, he wheeled his bike out to join us on our way east. As we cycled towards Laufenburg, the air nipped and a low fog hung over the Rhine, softening birch and willow to an Impressionist painting in the early morning mist. For the first time, I put on my cycling gloves – to keep my hands warm, rather than for protection. Had the summer weather north of Basel been a fleeting tease? It felt as if we’d returned to winter.
Hans was good company. His easy chatter wa
s a refreshing change from Jamie’s withdrawal into a world behind his earplugs. Jamie was happy, too, pleased to drop behind and listen to downloaded podcasts on his mobile. At Laufenburg, we paused to look at the handsome half-timbered terraced houses mushrooming from the river on the Swiss side, the town still sugared in misty light. I’d also come here with Manuela when our boys were small. We’d sharpened sticks to spear Bratwurst and barbecued them over a fire on the river beach.
As Hans, Jamie and I headed out of Laufenburg, the mist dissolved and the sun broke through: it was another fine May day. And at mid-morning, Hans waved his goodbyes before turning back for Bad Säckingen. At Rheinheim we lost the signs for the Rhine path and found ourselves on the bridge crossing to Bad Zurzach in Switzerland. We were cycling blind and beginning to feel frustrated, but an elderly couple stopped to help us, then accompanied us up a steep hill on their bikes to show us a shortcut – causing me to feel great shame at my incline phobia.
From here on in, the climbs became more persistent. Deep down, I knew the hills were as much a psychological problem as a physical hindrance for me. Ahead lay Hohentengen am Hochrhein: hohen and hoch indicating height – and twice over. Sometimes, linguistic ignorance is bliss, but the way ahead turned out to be a gradual schlepp, rather than an insurmountable climb. Jamie, for his part, was in a rare bad mood and I was struggling to cheer him up. In the end, I gave up and left him to guide us in and out of German and Swiss villages, back and forth over borders until at last we came to the long freewheel down to the Rhine Falls.
I’d come to the Rhine Falls with Tom long ago. Later that year, we returned to Bodensee, getting engaged at Konstanz. It seemed appropriate. A quarter of a century later I was still with this man who stood consistently by my side, giving me space to grow, encouraging me in that growth. He was indeed the constant in my life.
