It's the top of the summer--not pre-summer (Vorsommer), not after-summer (Nachsommer), but high summer (Hochsommer). The afternoon sky burns blue as fire, and the plums and peaches at the Turkish fruit stands are so ripe, the skins slip off them, loose as old gloves. People head for the water.
Me too. I'm headed for the F23 ferry, which stops at an unobtrusive little landing stage at the foot of Müggel Island Way, between people's back gardens, among the water lilies.
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| From F23 ferry at Müggelwerderweg pier, July 2014. My photo. |
It's hot walking along the street between the rail transit and the ferry. But--ah, this is better!--how fresh the day is when we've pushed off from the shore, moving briskly ahead among the kayaks and canoes and paddle boats in this shallow end of the lake.
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| From ferry, crossing die Bänke, Müggelsee, July 2014. My photo. |
The F23 is a solar-powered ferry that hauls pedestrians and bicycles through the bridgeless untidiness of water at the east end of the Müggelsee (islands, stray river branches, small lakes stuck onto the end of the big one).
The ferry goes through the Spree-channel linking the Big Müggelsee to the Small Müggelsee, and then across the Small Müggelsee, stopping at landing stages at a couple of beer gardens along the way.
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| Neues Helgoland, F23 ferry stop, July 2014. My photo. |
The ferry continues up the Spree, which is small and domestic in this stretch. No coal barges, no big excursion ships. We pass a rowboat propelled through the bright water by a stark naked old man with a wild shock of white hair. (Swimsuits are not considered socially essential in the back reaches of the river on hot days.) A small motorboat with a large family in it wanders from side to side in the channel, more or less in the ferry's way, but the ferry pilot slows and shifts, giving them space to figure out what they're doing.
The back gardens of riverside houses run down to the water's edge, and people are putting out their lunches on tables under the trees. An older man makes a floppy dive from his garden into the river and swims out close to the ferry, treading water to wave amiably as we pass.
Then here's the last stop, a pier at the foot of Tankard Alley (Kruggasse) in Rahnsdorf.
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| Ferry at Kruggasse stop, July 2014. My photo. |
Rahnsdorf is an old fishing village that was conglomerated into Berlin when the (approximate) current version of the city was put together in 1920.
Village Berlin is wonderful, I love coming out to these places in the summer. In the outer reaches of the city the medieval layouts of the villages are often still somewhat intact--the little fieldstone church from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, the churchyard and village green, the low, broad-fronted farmers' or fishers' houses, sometimes with barns and fields still behind them. (No barns and fields here, Rahnsdorf lived by fish and not fields in its early days.)
Actually, there's no old church here either, because the whole village burned to the ground in the late nineteenth century, and the church was new-built in the years after, in an undistinguished neo-medieval style. But there's a fine tall linden tree by the church, and a few old graves, green and sleepy in the summer afternoon.
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| Rahnsdorf churchyard, July 2014. My photo. |
There's a cross by the church inscribed with a rather gruesome verse memorializing the drowning of a young fisherman in October of 1863. (When the west winds blow the waves pile up at this end of the lake, and the Müggelsee can become surprisingly murderous.)
The water was my dying bed,
The evening was my last day.
In vain I cried, Help me! Help me!
Because no one saw me drowning,
I died little by little in the water,
In anguish and torment.
The cross has a rather odd history: In 1967 the Märkisches Museum--the local history museum in central Berlin--took it away for restoration, promising to provide a copy for the churchyard. But nothing happened, and when inquiries were made, the museum said that they were sure they had put the cross in storage but now they couldn't find it. The Rahnsdorf people and also the Köpenick local museum inquired and inquired, without luck, repeatedly, for (wait for it, folks) ... thirty-three years. In 2000 the cross was located at last, in the Märkisches Museum's remote storage, but it was badly damaged; somebody had cut out the more decorative part with an acetylene torch and made off with it. The Rahnsdorf people raised enough money from donations to have the cross recast for the churchyard, and there it still is. The village doesn't let go. [Details from the June-July 2012 Rahnsdorfer Echo.]
The church is on a bit of high ground, a sand dune at the end of the lake, and the village street (called, brilliantly, Village Street, Dorfstrasse) winds gently downward as you walk away from the churchyard.
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| Dorfstrasse, Rahnsdorf, July 2014. My photo. |
What a lovely little walk this is, past the flowers in the scraps of garden along the street--
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| Along Dorfstrasse, Rahnsdorf, July 2014. My photo. |
--past views of the river at the ends of side-streets:
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| Spree, Rahnsdorf, July 2014. My photo. |
As you can see, it's terrifically boaty out here, and the rhetorical-sounding question, How could you live here without having a boat? becomes more practically urgent in a district that we come to presently, called Little Venice. It's in a sort of delta of the Spree between the Müggelsee and the Dämeritzsee, and the canals that take the place of streets are all little Spree-arms.
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| Klein-Venedig, July 2014. My photo. |
Venice itself is so purely, quintessentially urban, that it seems shocking to see how very suburban this Little Venice is. It looks like a 1970s American Midwestern suburb with boat-sheds instead of garages sticking out in front of the houses.
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| Little Venice, July 2014. My photo. |
Then on we go, southeast along the river--or rather, a street away from it, as this area is terribly afflicted with private property along the water. Not that the street is uninteresting. Here is someone's camping trailer parked in front of their house, painted all around (there's a sailboat scene on the other side.)
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| Along Biberpelzstrasse, July 2014. My photo. |
There are all sorts of little arms and inlets of the Spree along here, and I need to do some map-checking (instead of my usual mindless and misdirectional ambling) to locate the necessary bridges.
How secret some of these little waters look ...
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| From Hohe Brücke, Biberpelzstrasse, July 2014. My photo. |
Just before the Berlin city limit the river splits into an old and a new arm with an island between. The old Spree-arm runs down to a canal that links this end of the Spree to the Dahme, the river that comes in at Köpenick and used to be called the Wendische Spree (see Spree 8 post). The new arm runs straight into the lake here, the Dämeritzsee, and my goodness, look at the traffic on a summer weekday afternoon:
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| Spree near Dämeritzsee, from the Triglawbrücke, July 2014. My photo. |
The bridge over the new Spree-arm is called the Triglaw bridge, after the three-headed Slavic god of war. (When the area was quasi-forcibly Christianized in the twelfth century, the crusaders knocked one of the heads off the big Triglaw-statue in Stettin and sent it to Rome as a gift to the pope, allegedly ...)
The Dämeritzsee is the border between Berlin and Brandenburg, so--as I'm only doing the Berlin stretch of the Spree--we're about at the end of the line here. (Okay, the Spree south of Dämeritzsee is still the Berlin-Brandenburg border for a ways, but it seems to be beyond the reach of public transit down there--so the lake is where we stop, at least for the time being.)
We just need to go around the north side of the lake and back to the S-Bahn; the water is almost wholly inaccessible here. There's one nice little public cove where I stop for a bit to listen to the water sploshing loudly at the shore ...
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| Dämeritzsee, July 2014. My photo. |
... and watch the reeds blowing in the strong afternoon wind.
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| Along Dämeritzsee, July 2014. My photo. |
A woman about my age comes along, and we say polite German things to each other about how fine the day is, how agreeable the sound of the water on the shore is, what an excellent place the little cove is altogether.
But there isn't anything else like it. There are long hot streets with private houses clutching their own ten yards of fenced-off shoreline to their chests. There's a big police station, a swimming beach (good), and finally a scruffy little stretch of woods--blessed shade!--with an abandoned shopping cart beside the path.
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| North of Dämeritzsee, July 2014. My photo. |
It really is a very little stretch of woods, and it comes to no good end, in Erkner (Brandenburg).
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| Coming into Erkner, July 2014. My photo. |
Time to get to the S-Bahn station and home to (green!) center city.
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