Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal 3

West of the locks near Westhafen (see previous post), the canal gets bigger and deeper and the landscape more uniform, relieved only occasionally by graffiti-splash on blank walls.

Construction site along the Hohenzollernkanal.  My photo, winter 2014

This western stretch of the Schiffahrtskanal is called the Hohenzollernkanal, and you've seen the boring part of it if you've flown into Tegel airport and then sat in the loud bus-clotted traffic on Saatwinkler Damm, on the way into center city. On your right is the usual airport-area logistics clutter. The canal flows by on the left, with a kind of moral remoteness, dark and still below a scrim of trees; an occasional bicyclist's head bobbles past on the path on the far bank. On the other side of the bike path are endless Kleingartenkolonien. 

There's no one-word American-English translation for this, we mostly don't do Kleingärten in the US. We have urban gardens: vacant lots where a handful of people put in rows of tomatoes and salad greens and zucchini, with nothing but a piece of string tied to sticks to separate one person's vegetable rows from another's. 

A Kleingartenkolonie, in contrast, looks like a sort of hobbit suburb, a whole settlement of half-size houses on half-size lots, each neatly hedged or fenced off from the rest. A lot is big enough for a few fruit trees and a lawn and maybe a specimen evergreen or a lily pool, as well as flower and vegetable beds. The little house--anything from a glorified shed to a micro-villa--is a place where you can take your afternoon coffee if the weather turns too bad to have coffee under the apple tree. The image of US urban gardens tends to be socially radical; the image of German Kleingärten tends to be spießig (suburban, stuffy, whitebread). They go on for miles, especially in areas that are not prime residential (around the airport, along big rail lines). They make for a monotonous landscape, especially where owners put high hedges along the path. 

So I break off the walk one day and pick it up at the same spot another day, wondering if I am about to have another 6 K or so of nothing but Kleingarten fences hung with beware-of-dog signs. 

I take a bus up to Jungfernheide, the park just south of the airport. Through chromatic ranks of apartment houses: salmon-red houses with sage-green trim, daffodil-yellow houses with violet-blue trim. I cut through the park, where the bare pre-spring woods are bright in the sun, up to the canal. (German makes finer distinctions of seasons than English does: there is pre-spring (sunshine in February), after-winter (winter that comes after winter should be over: snow in April), pre-summer (naked sunbathing in April) and so on.) In the edge of the woods is a day-care center, where the children are just coming back from a walk. Very small children in very bright coats, all colors, like little lollipops bounding along the uneven path under the trees.

Here we are on Saatwinkler Damm again (sigh, let's eat auto exhaust), but the landscape slowly mellows as we go. Saatwinkler Damm gets smaller and quieter past the airport. Here and there the canal bank is lavishly be-crocused. (This is getting better!)

Crocus along Hohenzollernkanal, February 2014.  My photo.

The canal divides here in the west, wrapping its arms around an island called Gartenfeld (campground on one end, semi-comatose manufacturing facilities on the other). I try the paths along both canal arms, first the main branch of the Hohenzollernkanal and then the older, narrower piece, the Alter Berlin-Spandauer Schiffahrtskanal. 

 

On the old branch of the canal the street is some distance above the water, and the question is how feasible it is to get away from the cars and down to the waterside, where there is a track among the trees. There are a few locked-off stairways down to landing stages, but at first there is no other way down for someone of advanced years and unstable knees. Besides, there is a “Keep off” sign from the Waterways and Shipping Office. However, after a bit, there is a public stairway down to the water, and we presume that “Keep off” no longer applies (I have only been thrown off property once while walking around Berlin. So far.)  

It's quiet on the track down by the water. 

Along Alter Berlin-Spandauer Schiffahrtskanal. February 2014, my photo.

Ducks are flirting on the water, pursuing each other and pairing off. The males display aggressively: mallards with bright green heads as silky as Christmas ribbon, and mandarin ducks like painted wooden toys.

Mandarin duck pair, Berlin-Spandauer Schiffahrtskanal, March 2014. Photo, M. Seadle

There is an old fisherman baiting his hook with shaky hands in the late-morning sun.

Inviting though they are, these semi-official water’s-edge tracks always make me a little twitchy. The problem is that they can run you suddenly up against a fence or a concrete abutment with no way around, just when the last way back up to the street that was suitable for old ladies was long long ago. I see a street bridge up ahead, with the track sloping up easily to it, and think, Okay, maybe I’ll go back up to the street again. But when I get further, I see that there’s a very clear, broad, hand-railed walkway along the water underneath the street, so … why not stay down below? It sounds like there’s still a lot of traffic up at street level.

Aiee, this is a low bridge. It’s really dark under here, a tunnel of damp crumbling concrete, with trucks shaking the roadway that’s only this far above my head.  Me, I’m a little claustrophobic. I’m glad to see the light at the end of the tunnel as the path curves round. 

Out from under the bridge, smack up against a closed fence. Dead end, no way up.  Nice view of the canal, sort of.

Under the Gartenfelderbrücke. March 2014, my photo.

Back through claustrophobia-ville and up to the street, therefore—and ah, how wonderful, this is where the traffic ends. Nominally, Saatwinkler Damm goes on, but it’s just a one-lane cobblestone, closed off to cars and scattered with strollers and bicyclists.

The old branch of the canal turns north after a bit, and the path becomes Boathouse Way, given over entirely to boat storage, rowing clubhouses, and the like. (One rowing club advertises itself on the waterside landing as "a comfortable small club that does not go in for competitive sport." My kind of athletics.) 

Somewhere over on the left is a little body of water with a wonderful name: Pipe-burst Pond (Rohrbruchteich).

The last stretch of the canal is beautiful. There are alders here with long, long catkins flying in the breeze. (Good stuff, alder wood. Fender Stratocaster guitars are made of alder wood. The piles hammered into the lagoon on which Venice is built are alder wood. It stands up to a lot.)

Alders along Berlin-Spandauer Schiffahrtskanal. February 2014, my photo.

Then the arms of the canal rejoin. The landscape softens and feels more countrified. There is more water. Water mirrors water and sky, and it begins to feel as though water and sky will be getting the upper hand of the land before long.

Along Berlin-Spandauer Schiffahrtskanal, February 2014.  My photo.

The gardens that back on the water have landing stages, and a little rowboat tipped up against the fence is as normal as a wheelbarrow.  

The land starts melting away into the chaotic waterscape of the Havel. 

Berlin-Spandauer Schiffahrtskanal. February 2014, my photo.

All that is solid melts into air (Marx undoubtedly meant something different), and air and water are hard to tell apart. The water gets wider and wider, and we are at the river.

Time to go home. Look for a big street, there should be buses on it.  Ah, there's a bridge--a big bridge must have a big street attached to it. Which bridge, where exactly are we?  What else--it's the Water-city Bridge (Wasserstadtbrücke).

Bus to the U-Bahn, through one of my favorite stations, Paulsternstrasse, and so home.

Paulsternstrasse U-Bahn Station March 2014. Photos (above & below), M. Seadle.