Notes from Deutchland

The Poulets, Anna's family on her mother's side, have been wonderful. Like good Germans they've organized every hour of our days here, making certain that we maximize our enjoyment of the place and our time together. Uncle Stefan and Aunt Jutta have planned a tour of the Rhinegau and a visit to the menagerie; cousin Anja and her husband Ali have arranged a visit to Hessen Park and a dinner at her house in the country; Uncle Gogo and Aunt Anne have reserved a room for us in the Bear Hotel in Wiesbadden and made plans for a lunch and dinner at their home in the hills overlooking town; Cousin Tina will drive from Bavaria to visit us for a day wandering Neroberg Park; Cousins Christina and Dietlef are planning a dinner out on the town and a Sunday brunch for the entire family at their home in Budenheim.

The arrangements go on and on. We feel well-cared for, pampered even, like honored guests from a distant land. Indeed, I do feel honored to be kin to the Poulets. They're a sweet and kind family, and of course everyone dotes on Ada, forgives her tired moments, insists she needs only another slice of kuchen to improve her spirits.

Our first afternoon, dreamy from jet lag, we took a walk with Uncle Stefan through the woods along his property. Stefan is a trim, intelligent, assiduous man who, having retired from his position as a judge, has turned his robust energies to managing his property, hunting boar, and splitting firewood which he sells to his neighbors.

Stefan lead the way, eager to show us about, down through apple and plum trees heavy with fruit to the narrow switch-back road leading to the meadow below. We passed his hochsitz, his "high-seat", the tiny hunting shed on stilts from which he watches and shoots wildschweine; his work shed smelling of oiled tools and greased machinery; and finally the neatly stacked rows of oak and elm wedges that amounted to a steady summer's work.

The sky brooded with low clouds over trees still green and heavy from the evening rain. We followed the sandy road, amazed at the lush serenity. A dozen goats were grazing above the meadow, their bells tonking softly from the hillside. Ada wanted to pet them, of course, but we kept her to the leaves and muddy banks of the road. The sun broke through and everything glimmered surreally.

"I love Germany," sighed Ada.

Weakened by travel, by all our scheming and worries and packing and pre-bill-paying to make this trip materialize, by months of working fifty-hour weeks in California away from Ada and Anna so that we could save for this otherwise hare-brained fantasy of a tour to see our families in Europe, by years of dreaming almost desperately for this trip to the Old World, weakened and tired but suddenly filled by the realization that we were here, in the cozy nest of Germany surrounded by caring family and the beauty of the countryside, the shimmering trees, I swept Ada off her feet and squeezed her with everything I had.


Biergartens beside the playgrounds: This might be my favorite example of how Germany does things right. There, somewhere between the timbered playsets and the cafe tables, lies the summation of civilization.

The kinder go a romping over the fort-like swings and slides while their parents, just a stone's throw away, enjoy some adult time over crisp Pilsners and appetizers. The kinder get some creative and adventurous exercise, sluicing water into troughs from iron pumps, scaling climbing walls, while the parents relax in the sun and recover their ability to hold adult conversation. The kinder get to be kinder and the parents, for a spell at the big wooden tables, get a recharging dose of spirits and sophistication.


Germans are civilized without being prissy. Their civility isn't snobbish or effete, but smart, practical, and always hearty. They're like the country boy who's read all the books in his uncle's library: Goethe, Mann, Steinbeck, Pound. He can quote Proust while turning a spit over a fire that's slow-roasting the wildschweine he shot before dawn. His little rustic haus is in tidy shape. The thick doors seal tightly against the cold, the slate-tiled roof hasn't leaked since his great grandfather built it before the Great War. The table is set with smooth wood-handled silverware, fresh bottles of Pilsner, and the porcelain plates his mother bought in Mainz one fine day on holiday. He opens the door for air. Standing in his underwear he looks out at the blue morning. It's autumn, cold and crisp, the trees smokey with color against the sky.

The boar will take awhile longer. He pops the cap off one of the beers, pours a glass for his guest and himself. "Man's duties increase with his knowledge," he repeats, and winks before taking a long drink.


Hessen Park. If there's a specific name for this type of park, my cousin-in-law Anja didn't know it, nor did her husband Ali.

"It's just Hessen Park," he said, lifting and dropping his arms contently.

How about Nature-Kulture-Heartiness-Training Park?

I think that would about some it up.

Ah, Hessen Park. Where historic houses and buildings from the region, dating to the 17th century, have been brought together and restored into a rambling countryside village set among apple orchards and newly-cut wheat fields, bordered by oak and elm forests, and the cozy heritage of a German past.

Hessen Park, slender two- and three-story houses built of stout timber post and beam, with mud-straw infill. (Fachwerk: post and beam construction that can be quite ornate in its moulding, scrollwork and inscriptions. Fachwerk: as in, Fuck, this is a lot of work!) The houses are slender structures of stacked, well-lit, intimate rooms, the kitchens set on the ground floor so the oven fire heats the house. Simple, tiny living indoors; crafty, earthy living outdoors. The original micro-houses.

Joining the meandering crowd, we follow a dirt road through the village, past the coopers shop, a bakery, the rope-maker's shed where children are learning to twist jute into rope, the weaver's house with its mesmerizing looms, the blacksmith's shop with its sooty mechanical lung of a bellows, and a towering windmill full of massive wooden cogs and immense grinding stones. Children are running about, or sweetly concentrating in the craft courses, making little rafts from willow branches, pumping the levers of the looms, connecting themselves to the past all around them.

Hessen Park. It's all a very cheerful, rustic, playful, thoughtful history lesson for kinder and adults alike. And of course, there's a biergarten, right beside the playground. We set Ada loose among the carousing kinder and sit down at a picnic table to order riesling and potato soup, beer and bratwurst for lunch.

When the food arrives I go for Ada. I had taught her to ask "Sprecken Sie englisch?" when spoken to, and here she was at the swing with three older girls, asking just that.

"I don't have any friends here," she added rather pathetically. The bigger of the three blinks at Ada through round spectacles, saying nothing. She blinks and blinks and I worry some older girl nastiness might lash out from her. But she turns to her friends, says something in German, and the three of them set to putting Ada in the big basket and climbing in with her. All four of them in the basket together, cute as kittens. The older girls, standing, begin to rock and soon they're swinging high and laughing. I leave them to play. Ada's lunch can wait. Our table is a few strides away and like a good German I must be practical and not let my soup go cold or my beer go warm.


Riding the train from Frankfurt to Berlin: rolling green countryside, cows grazing on the hills, orderly forests of elm and oak opening to ruddy wheat and corn fields, compact villages of white stucco houses topped with red porcelain tile roofs and gleaming solar panels, a church steeple, a narrow road leaving town for a sky of swollen white clouds.

You would never guess, having an hour ago been deep in the industrial innards of Frankfurt, knowing Berlin and the big coastal cities to the north, that these verdant expanses exist. There is almost no sprawl here in Germany. You leave a city, you leave a town, and beyond a stone wall the country begins, thrilling you to wander.


Berlin. Prinzen Garden! In the Kreuzberg district there's a public vegetable garden and cafe installed on a block beside Moritz Pl. Station. Super cool, a rustic creative agricultural venture of personal and shared garden plots, interspersed with birch trees and garden sheds and big bins of compost, a bicycle workshop, (clean) restrooms housed in a shipping container. The scene partly anarchic, very hip (Zeph girls in high-waisted  jeans, hair in top-knots, reading under the trees), well-organized and obviously well-loved by the participants. We shared a bowl of delicious creamy vegetable soup from the cafe, made from vegetables grown in the garden.


Berlin. Mitte: galleries, cafes, boutiques, leafy playgrounds among the intimate streets of Auguststrasse and Linenstrasse. Ada has come to anticipate a playground every few blocks in this city, and so we use those ingenious slots in the apartment rows -- park spaces where a building was bombed or destroyed in the war -- as rewards and encouragement for her when she tires of yet another slog before white walls. In the cafes she gets more hot chocolate than she's had in her entire life.

Travel is a condensed version of life. Each day a new season, every hour a new day, dramatized by blood-sugar highs and lows as meals are missed or supplemented by chocolate and beer. One moment Ada is singing in love with Germany, telling children she's just met in the park that she wants to move here. The next she's frustrated by another gallery, pining for her friends, slumped in my arms, depressed as Sartre, unable to lift her feet over the cobbled streets.

On our lakes tour outside of Berlin, sitting in the prow of the ferry, Ada exclaimed, "It's so beautiful it makes me cry." Then she thought it funny to feign crying over the mansions and estates set along the lush banks of the river. She hammed it up: so much beauty, so many tears.

But then, her emotions jump-started, she was actually crying. She became so overwrought with sorrow that she began to bawl. We couldn't calm her. Like a good drunk, she grew spiteful: "I hate boats. Why did you bring me here? I never want to ride a boat again in all my life!"

All of this in a period -- or should I say an odyssey -- of three minutes.


Common sense and cordiality. What I love about traveling in Italy is the feeling I've gone into the past. But then I visit Germany and it feels I've shot into the future, a nearly utopian future. The cities well-planned with parks and solid infrastructure. The streets clean, the trams and trains running efficiently and dependably. The homes solidly built, topped with porcelain tile roofs and solar panels, the windows and doors sealing tightly. The people, if sometimes a little cool blooded, always polite and helpful.

Germans are often accused of being rule-bound, which may be true when it comes to matters of safety and civic function. But the rules of propriety are regularly bent, just a little, towards practicality and common-sense. Want to drink a beer on the street? You're a grown adult, have a beer. Don't go smashing bottles and we'll all be just fine. A mother needs to breast feed her baby on the train?  A kid, or an old geezer, needs to piss discreetly behind the trees in the Cool Park? We're all human here, and we're all human together. Common sense seems to be the over-riding ethos of the land, perhaps because most everybody has a good deal of it.

A common sense that the system is working, that it's been thought through, that society tacks toward the good -- and government strives toward that common good -- when the playgrounds are clean, the bridges stout, the schools well-funded, the health care universal, the food system safe, and a day's work begets a respectable day's pay.

Common sense and cordiality. Even in Germany's biggest city, Berliners are generally polite. Turkish and East German families, artists and professionals, expats from all over, everybody gets well-enough along because again, the rules can be trusted. The game isn't rigged for those on top. And for that, people act, not as though in competition with each other, but with decency.

We were passing through a gritty neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon. Men were drinking and playing cards outside of the bars and doner restaurants before the metro station. The only person I saw passed out in all of Berlin was slumped against a wall. A broken beer bottle had been swept into a corner. So here was where Germany fell apart. Here was her underbelly, a poor neighborhood on the industrial outskirts of the city, where her dark side showed through. A gang of workers, wobbling with drink, were standing before our turn into the metro. I grabbed Ada's hand and felt my senses go on alert. One or two of the men saw us coming. They stepped back, and as they did, reached to pull their drunk comrades aside so that we could pass through. I nodded appreciatively at one and he nodded back. Even in the roughest of neighborhoods, a family was to be respected.


Pickup Fussball in Kreuzburg Park. Organized by the Heine Hotspurs, a crew of sporting artists, English teachers, musicians, Frenchies, Irish, and some Germans too, the games were 7 minute battles of six versus six, three teams rotating, played by on a fenced rubber court beneath leafy plane and chestnut trees downwind of the camel yard. A skilled, intense, clean game, the winning team staying on until their third straight. The waiting team keeps time, stretches, rolls a spliff of "park weed", talks about the spreading legalization of marijuana throughout Europe and the U.S.
Finally the game comes to a hollering halt when two blokes, both English, clash heads going for a high ball. Bloody crescents in temple and brow have us all caring for the unfortunates with water and handkerchiefs. The Irishman, who seems to be the head of the Hotspurs, says to me apologetically: "Wow, this has never happened before. I swear."


A Lovely Sunday in Berlin. Our last day in Germany, spent with friends Till and Mori and their two energetic young boys (who gave Ada a lessen, despite being a year or two younger than her, in being resilient and capable of self-defense!)

Strolling about Auguststrasse, we revisited the art show in KW, then brunched on the walk outside a cute restaurant beside the fussbal pitch. Afterwards we walked along the river Spree to the restored museums. (The architect who did the renovation famously kept many elements from the past: shrapnel divots from WWII, blocks left unstuccoed.)

On a dance floor set on the river bank people were dancing tango as couples and families ambled by under the still-green trees enjoying the warm September afternoon. We found a bench and rested and watched the clouds. The kinder tossed pebbles at the water. A tour boat chugged past, stout tourists sitting docily and lifting bottles of beer to their mouths. We watched the city scroll by like a little cloud in the sky, changing subtly in the blue.

A Wayward Winter's Eve

This always happens to me: the first days apart from Anna and Ada I drift about in purposelessness. It's embarrassing to admit, but when I'm finally left to myself, loosed from the mooring of daily family life, it's as if gravity and discipline has been lifted away and I can't put one foot in front of the other. For a spell I become languid, indulgent, wistful in a vacuum of solitude, books, beer, and of course some English Premier League on the old telly.

After seeing the girls off at the airport I sat in the car outside the Coop, unable to go in, reclined in melancholy as I watched pigeons whirl about the steeple of Saint Johns Cathedral in the metallic light. Finally inside the store, I struggled to buy a few desultory items: two Fuji apples, a gallon of milk, a six pack of beer, a head of broccoli, a half pound of chuck. The poor things looked woeful riding the conveyer into the checker's hands. I had plucked them out of their gleaming bins to orphan them in my wayward house.

At home things hardly got better. Ignoring the many chores and renovations needing to be done, I sat on the couch and read Sartre. The weight of responsibility loomed overhead like a Hokusai wave clenched before the moment of explosion. To relieve the pressure I opened a bottle of beer, watched out the windows at bright leaden clouds above the black trees and thought of the skies of France, Italy, Berlin. Italy's dreamy, humid, water-color skies above distant poplar trees. Berlin's monumental skies of towering cumulous, humming with the weight of history, the stormy moods of the North Sea.

Thinking of Europe, then of good urban design, I popped another beer and wrote an email to the Ada County Highway Department deploring the crap design of a certain 'boulevard' in town: a bike-lane-less thoroughfare of parking lots and business malls that was once pretty countryside along the Boise River. A livable city, when moving traffic to outlying neighborhoods, must not do so at the expense of existing neighborhoods. We all know that; all of us but the traffic engineers who seek volume over quality.

Now my blood was up. So there: I'd done something. The boulder was moved a hair. Just enough to break my inertia. Next I put on Radio Boise, got moving to the music, Youth Lagoon, Mason Jennings, and disconnected the gas logs and piping from the fireplace. Why pay for gas when I've got all the lumber I can collect from the job site? Why heat the house at all when it's only me here, me and Ada's little red soccer ball sagging on the hardwood? Me and my big ideas, the glinting sky, another beer and all the time in the world to do nothing with the life in front of me.

I paced the house, I tidied up the slovenly leftover things that I'd never have let gather had Anna been here. Coffee grounds and newspaper sheaves on the counter. As dusk settled my energy mounted: a whirling, unfocused energy, like a squall that pings your face with dust and ice. I put on coat, scarf and gloves, and bicycled downtown to Boise Bicycle Project. It was their annual members' meeting. Lots of good people, hip younguns, cute old folks, people of benevolence and beards, tight jeans and idealism. A keg of Ranger IPA in the workshop; pizza from Pie Hole. Everyone brought together by love of community and bicycling. Jimmy and Nate gave inspiring, quirky presentations of the organization's achievements in 2013 and goals for 2014. BBP has launched a project with Mayor Dave Bieter called Ride On Boise, which will include a citizens' advisory committee and advancements of all kinds.  (I don't recall the details due to the beery atmosphere, but they can be found at the BBP website.)

Afterwards everyone hung out, made certain the keg didn't feel neglected. Inspired, I couldn't go home. Or was I fearing the vacant house? I rode over to The Modern, had a whiskey at the bar, then felt restless to move again. Outside, it had begun to snow.  Light, icy flakes twisting out of the blackness, refreshing my spirit as I rode over to Penguille's for a night cap. A country-western band was playing on the little minstrel stage. The place was pleasantly crowded, the tiny wooden stalls full of revelers. The barkeep poured me a Bushmills and I walked about taking in the collection of Western Americana art on the walls: naive heroic oil landscapes of alpine lakes and poised bucks; freemason banners full of classical oddity. Calmed, centered by history and place, the avuncular old timey atmosphere of this outpost in the modern world, I sat at the bar and took in the band.

Stand up base, steel electric, drum set, slide guitar. They played the Bob Wills classic Rolly Polly, about the hungry growing boy who "eats everything from soup to hay . . . as long as he can chew it, it's okay." The song made me think of Ada and Anna, of our family life far away from this wagon ride through the snowy night. I had forgotten how homey a bar could feel, how important such places are to those who can't or won't go home.

Somebody brushed my shoulder: it was the singer in the band. They were making their way to the bar on their break.
You're good, I said to him.
Thanks, he said.
You play here much?
Now and then.  We play again next week.  You should come.
I will, I said, being polite, knowing that by then I wouldn't need to.