The Kaiser’s Canal
The Bear went over the Mountain,
The Bear went over the Mountain,
The Bear went over the Mountain,
To see what he could see.
—NURSERY RHYME
The rose garden terrace of the New Bishop’s residence in Bamberg is the loveliest place to sit and write letters between Calais and the Black Sea. A thousand blooms cense the air with perfume; petals of every shade, scarlet, crimson, white and yellow, pink and apricot, carmine, garnet, soft as velvet, cool as wine, fill the wide terrace with colour and fragrance. Fountains tinkle into round basins where fat goldfish nibble and dip, and here and there from the sea of flow-ers rises a marble cherub or a draped Venus. The terrace overlooks the red roofs and copper-green spires of old Bamberg, where the River Regnitz plaits its way in a number of channels, mill-races and long, still reaches through the heart of the finest town in Germany. It is also a nice place to have a cup of really excellent tea and pat oneself firmly on the back for having reached another milestone.
Bamberg marks the end of the interminable River Main and the beginning of the Main-Rhine-Donau Canal, a long-sought-after goal. I had heaved a sigh of relief when the previous day I had rowed up the last thirty kilometres of the Main in stifling, thundery weather and come at last to the 384-kilometre mark – 384 kilometres! I had stopped for lunch and a swim on the green spit between the two watercourses and discovered that my tuck-box still had an egg in it from the night before. Being raw, it was no use to me unless … ah, the very thing. A nearby children’s playground had a slippery-dip in it, the shiny silver metal burning hot in the sun. An experimental dob of butter on the flattened end of the slide sizzled, and a few minutes later I was scraping off a fried egg onto the bottom half of a buttered roll. True, it was a little runnier than I liked, but I enjoyed the intrepid nature of such bush cuisine. I also enjoyed turning my back on the meandering Main after fourteen days of upstream rowing and looked forward to the still waters of the canal ahead.
After fourteen days of sleeping on my boat or under the stars, I decided to treat myself to a hotel room in Bamberg. My timing was perfect. That night saw a thunderstorm of Wagnerian proportions, the lightning striking the spires of the town all about me. Brilliant white flashes crackled in the window frame, and at one stage illumined a terrified cat pawing at the glass like Gallico’s Thomasina back from the dead. The poor ginger puss spent the rest of the night curled up damply on my chest and clutched ever more tightly with each new crack of thunder overhead.
How accustomed I had grown to the outdoors life! I found the walls of the hotel room that night unbearably claustrophobic, the windows and doors and taps unnecessarily fiddly. The water running from the taps seemed to me a thin and etiolated trickle compared with emptying a bailerful of cold water over the neck and shoulders each morning under a clearing sky. The hot bath for which I had so longed was a tepid, steamy, hip-pinching affair after skinny-dipping at noon in a wide, lonely bend of the river with cool mud squishing between the toes and the smell of green river-weed in one’s nose and mouth. How clinging and marshmallow-like seemed my quilt that night; how yellow and feeble glowed the light-bulb for shaving with the next morning. And the big plate of puten-schnitzel mit butterknudeln unt grunesalat I ordered for dinner was four times the amount I could comfortably eat and took ten times longer in the preparation than my beloved daily tomato-and-mayonnaise roll. I rolled groaning from the table feeling as if I had just consumed a vat of porpoise blubber. I longed to be out of the city and on my way again.
The Rhine-Main-Donau Canal links the top of the Main River with the Danube and so serves as the passageway between the two great river systems of Europe. Its existence allows ships to travel all the way from the North Sea to the Black Sea without ever touching the Mediterranean. I had first learnt about its existence from my mother, who had informed me with a great deal of enthusiasm and a total disregard for accuracy that there is a wonderful canal that crosses the Alps, just think of it, built by none other than King Ludwig, Mad Ludwig they called him, and anyway, this canal is one of The Author Dreams of Gingerbread the great feats of engineering, terribly old, you realise, and it follows the Crusaders’ route to the Holy Land, or perhaps that’s something else, but yes, there is, a canal that is, I read all about it in a book.
With this introduction in mind I pictured an extraordinary engineering marvel, a waterway that wound its dizzy way through the heart of the Alps, edging along precipices, scaling in flights of locks, a hundred at a time, the knife-edge ridges of glacial peaks, spanning the vast abyss of blue valleys via aqueducts of spidery slenderness a thousand feet above the swollen rivers below. I also imagined that being built by the infamous Mad Ludwig, each lock-house would be constructed in a cluster of turrets and needle-spires, dove-grey and icing-sugar-white, each possibly equipped with its own troop of red-jacketed soldiers in cock hats. The style would certainly be gingerbread, but – a cold thought struck me – if Ludwig was as mad as they said, would the construction materials be gingerbread also? The main danger, I surmised, would be getting entangled in the belay-line of a mountaineering party climbing up over the ice on their way to the Jungfrau; or avalanches possibly, set off by the high bleat of a passing chamois or the distant thunder of an alpenhorn quartet.
As it turned out, my impressions were wholly fanciful: the Rhine-Main-Donau Canal has as much eccentric charm and baroque splendour as a major motorway. It does not, for one, pass remotely near the Alps, though it does of course cross a major watershed. This watershed consists of a vast flat plateau of farmland interspersed by pine plantations, small patches of heathland and medium-sized towns of little character. Secondly, it was not built by Mad Ludwig but by quite a different Ludwig who was by all accounts a man of great industry, practicality and efficiency and had no time for gingerbread at all, tending more to the sauerkraut school of architecture. It was he, presumably, who chose to drive the canal across the practicable emptiness of the Bavarian Plateau rather than swing southwards through the ski-resorts of Switzerland. In fact, there wasn’t a gingerbread aqueduct or a yodeller in sight.
The locks on this canal were to prove increasingly troublesome as I progressed. These were not the mossy beamed devices of the English waterways with geraniums spilling gaily along the lock sides. These resembled your average-sized Soviet hydroelectric plant, with vast walls of white concrete and towers six storeys high topped with control rooms paned in green-tinted glass. Each of these offices held in its high and remote fastness a schleusemeister of a severity and efficiency to match the mighty complex under his care. It was his job as a modern-day Moses to send the waters hither and thither through his titanic pondage at the push of a button and the flick of a switch. It was not his job, as was soon made clear to me, to swill thousands of tons of water about for the sake of every passing boatman who happened to be out for a Sunday jaunt on the waterways. Such frivolous creatures were pointed in the direction of a distant noticeboard and expected to get on with following instructions. I soon worked out that near each board was a device like a bicycle rack, and locked to this by a coin-release system was an aluminium trolley or bootwagen. The idea was that skippers of unpowered pleasurecraft could release such a trolley, roll it down a ramp into the canal and haul their little craft out of the water. Then it could be wheeled with relative ease along the lock and lowered again into the next section of the canal; on returning the trolley to its frame and clicking the lock shut, the coin would be recovered and the merry mariner could continue on his way – all without disturbing the Patriarch in his Sinaian height.
Such was the theory. In practice I found that a little feigned ignorance and whimsical pleading with the schleusemeister would usually get me through at the tail-end of an industrial barge that happened to be passing through.
The canal is travelling along its own high causeway above the landscape, rather as a railway travels along the top of an embankment. It feels unnatural but exhilar
ating to be travelling thus so high across the fields and woods. One evening I come to a lonely stretch of heathland and scattered pine forests. Here there is a strange monument on the right-hand bank, a thin upright wedge of white cement oddly curved and pointed. It marks the highest point of the canal – that is, the watershed of the whole of Europe. Behind me the land falls invisibly away into the Black Forest, the valleys of the Main, the Rhine, the Rhone, the Moselle all the way down to the grey shores of the North Sea and the old Atlantic. Ahead of me a mass of land falls away to the Danube, which tumbles endlessly down through Austria, through Hungary, across the vast Magyar Plain, cuts beyond the Carpathian mountains and peters out into the wide wetlands of the Danube Delta. That night I check my maps and fig-ures. I am not only at the highest point of my travels but I am almost exactly halfway between North Wales and the Black Sea. It is all downhill from here.
The usual routine: a swim in the green waters of the canal, applying a bar of soap to hair and skin with great vigour, then clambering out onto the sweet grass to dry off. The towel is hung to dry on the boom; it will still be wet first thing tomorrow from the dew, but an hour later it will be stiff and dry with sunlight. Then as the light fades I pull out my tupperware box and make a sandwich.
Behind me, as I sit facing out over the canal, a steep bank drops away to a pine forest. The bank is covered in mullein, their tall spires of sulphur flowers luminescing faintly in the dusk against the British Racing Green of the forest. There is a high shriek from somewhere in the trees and a quick rustle: some small animal meeting its death at the claws of an owl, perhaps? The stars are coming out, wavering in white S’s and ?’s in the deep blue of the canal. I am suddenly desperately, hungrily, cravingly in need of company. It is as fierce and persistent a desire as my thirst for milk a few weeks ago. I remember that I have a bottle of white wine in the hold, a present from one of my benefactors in Eltmann. I open it with the new corkscrew and fill a glass. Then I very solemnly raise the glass to the night and say out loud a toast of thanks to all the people of Wales and England, of France and Germany, that have sped Jack and myself on our slow ascent to this height. I make a small, foolish speech and drink the wine. It is excellent. Whatever it is in the wood kills again, and I think for a fraction of a second about such things as the Surrey Puma and the Dartmoor Panther. Is there a … check map … a Hilpoltstein Tiger, perhaps?
After a third glass of wine I am about to climb into my sleeping bag which I have spread on the soft grass of the bank when in the gloom of the opposite bank I see the shadow of someone moving. He is directly across the canal from me. After a little while there is the flare of a match and a fire is lit. The shadow is a man, about my age I guess, and he settles down to make himself some supper. He too has a bottle … beer, I think … and I make out a rucksack by his side. He is setting up camp for the night. I doubt if he can see me in the darkness across the width of the canal, though perhaps he has seen the pale yellow lines and mast of Jack. I am tempted to call out to him, but what would be the use? The canal is too wide for easy conversing and there is nowhere to cross for miles. Besides, he is almost certainly German and what if he doesn’t speak English or understand why someone is calling out of the darkness to him? I am snug in my sleeping bag now, and the craving for company has been drowned in the wine. I let it go and sleep, and when I wake the next morning he is gone. I like to think that he was a fellow traveller, someone walking from the Black Sea to North Wales, that we passed unawares in the darkness and shall never know the truth of it.
Now that I was going downhill, the lock-keepers refused to succumb to foreign eccentricity and utterly forbade me to enter the locks as I had been doing. They pointed sternly to the bootwagens and insisted I use them. In vain did I plead that Jack was a seasoned traveller, well accustomed to the perils of every variety of lock between here and the North Sea. Not zis vun, they would crackle through their intercoms. Use ze bootwagen. Iss fur ze kleine booten. Click.
This was all very well, but Jack was no kayak. At one lock the keeper was particularly abrupt down the intercom and I had to return three times to explain that the coin-release mechanism on the trolley was jammed. He did not believe me and on my third attempt hung up and refused to answer. Hot and bothered, I managed to clear the dust and grit out of the slot with my knife and hauled the trolley all the way up to the top pound where Jack was waiting. There I lowered the trolley on the end of a rope down the ramp into the water. Then, waist deep in the canal, I manoeuvred Jack over the top of the trolley frame and tied her bow rope onto the upright ‘prow’ that made the handle. Gripping the rope tightly, I started to walk slowly up the ramp, hauling Jack behind me. The effort needed was tremendous. The boat, heavy with rigging and luggage, was nearly impossible to pull up the slope, and I strained and strained with all my might to inch Jack up out of the water. Then my feet slipped from beneath me on the green slime of the concrete ramp. This was not just a stumble or a skid – it was a perfectly executed Buster Keaton stunt: both feet shot from under me in synchronisation, ending up perfectly level with my head. My horizontal body hung there for a good three seconds, three artistic seconds that allowed my head to turn to face the camera, and a brief glance over my shoulder to see where the ground had got to. Then my eyes closed in resignation and there followed the swift plummet onto the concrete slab below, accompanied by a comic whistling noise and a loud splat as I landed in the green slime. And the routine was not yet over. Somehow in the course of my aerial acrobatics the towrope had become tangled around my neck, and as the laden trolley rolled gracefully back into the canal I went with it, drawn headfirst down the ramp on the end of the rope like a trussed walrus. So stunned was I that I disappeared completely under the water, my position marked only by a line of bubbles breaking the surface.
Who could resist such slapstick? Not I. Although I was covered in green slime and had a ringing head, my bad mood was dispelled. That day ended with the canal descending into the valley of the Alt-muhl, and my grateful entry onto that beautiful and little-known river. The Rhine-Main-Donau Canal was behind me and I was launched on a current that would take me two and a half thousand miles to the Black Sea.
When I emerged onto the Danube, though, the water was sluggish and black and the banks were industrial and bare. I had expected a swift and sweeping current in a wooded gorge similar to the Altmuhl, and my first sight in the fading light was sorely disappointing. Pulling through the oily waters in the dusk, Jack’s bow went clunk on something and I saw that I had hit a floating bottle. A second glance showed that it had in it a piece of orange paper, and on an impulse I dragged it out of the water. It was as I had thought: that classic mariner’s find, a message in a bottle. I struggled to remove the cork and extract the piece of paper, and found that it was scrawled in a childish hand in coloured crayon. It was in German and read: Good luck on your adventure, dear Captain. I hope I will meet you one day when I too have a ship.
It could not have been more clearly intended for me. I was no scavenger picking through debris on the shore. I was no boatman out for the afternoon. Of all the people on the river, surely I was that dear Captain on an adventure that the child had seen in his or her mind’s eye? The childish writing, the aptness of the find, and above all the tremendous optimism implicit in the act of consigning such a message to the currents, conspired to send me singing on my way through the darkening dusk. I had been wished good fortune and fair sailing by an anonymous child yet to learn the sneering laws of chance, and I looked forward to the day when I should shake hands with the young author of that fortunate note. Meanwhile, here was a marina, here was light and company and food, and here was rest for the night. I had reached the Danube and it was surely easy going from here.
Pigeons and Palaces
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen …
—KEATS, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
I needed to make a phone call. The
marina didn’t have a phone, so I found myself wandering along a country road at night heading for the town of Kelheim two miles away. After half a mile I came across a building, cheerful and lamplit, standing by itself with bare fields on either side. Along with the warm light that poured from its windows into the night there came the homely buzz of voices and the clink of glasses that betokened a pub. In fact, as I peered at the building’s frontage, there did seem to be a sign of sorts, and a name in German. This was clearly the German equivalent of the Red Lion or the Fox and Hounds, though here it would be the Two-Headed Eagle or the King of Prussia. At any rate it would have a phone and I could follow up with a pint or two of good German beer to celebrate my arrival on the Danube.
I pushed my way through the doors into a congenial smoky atmosphere and there were the customers sitting around several long tables drinking and chatting animatedly. The look of surprise they gave me as I entered was soon explained; they were apparently in the middle of a pub quiz, with paper and pencils scattered among the beer mugs and coasters. I was a late arrival, perhaps, having misread the starting time. Did I want to join in? I assume that was the question, because at my first halting words of greeting one of the men said, ‘Ah, English, ja?’ and the question of my joining the quiz seemed to be dropped. I asked if there was a phone I could use, and after some head-shaking a large man pulled out his mobile phone and handed it to me. I protested, but he was insistent so after I had made my call – a brief but important one to a friend in Stuttgart – I handed the phone back and offered to pay. At this there was much discussion among the jovial group and an older man was dispatched to fetch an item from behind the bar.
This, to my mild surprise, was a large plastic pigeon.
The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow Page 29
