Dahme 2

Forest, River, Streetcar

It's a gray morning in a slow spring, a few days after Easter. Some cold weeks in March stalled the season, and then there was the big storm Niklas and its sodden, occasionally snowy, aftershocks. 

The shrubbery in center city is greening up, but here--on the way from the Grünau S-Bahn station to the river--the woods still look wintry, and often the only green thing visible is the moss on fallen logs.

Near Grünau S-Bahn. My photo, April 2015.

It isn't far to the river, which looks a little bleak here, heading up deeper into these not-yet-woken woods. 

Dahme, looking upriver in Grünau.  My photo, April 2015

The Dahme is big here, and it has a big voice, unlike the near-silent canals where I have been walking in the winter. The river is wide enough to be choppy on a morning like this, and the water makes heavy lop ... lop ... sounds against the bank. And hisss and slorpp and other surprisingly warm and mammalian noises.

I am not the only walker bound upriver. A couple of tottery old dears with tiny backpacks got off just ahead of me at the Grünau station, took the shortcut ahead of me through the trees to the water, and now they're turning south, up the Dahme. They are so ancient and wobbly-looking, I keep thinking I'm going to catch up and pass them. And I do, after about an hour; they're faster than they look.

As the tottery old dears and I march south, the river fills with rowers. The principle on which this stretch of Grünau is established is the one laid down by Water Rat early in The Wind in the Willows:  "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing--absolutely nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."

The house where we meet the river, which has an immense vine-tracery on it, is a Bootsattlerei, a boat-saddlery, that makes canopies and tarps and awnings and seat covers for the boats here in boat-land. 

Bootsattlerei on the Dahme, Grünau. My photo, April 2015.

Many of the houses that follow, along Regattastrasse, are clubhouses for sailing clubs and rowing clubs, kayaking and canoeing clubs, clubs that promote Wasserwandern--"water hiking," boating along the endless back-country waterways of this flat wet northern world. 

The houses have a spacious, 1900-ish feel to them. (The Wind in the Willows came out in 1908, the year Kenneth Grahame left his job as Secretary of the Bank of England. He had started the book some years before, not long after an unsettling incident at the bank. A person referred to in the newspapers as a "socialist lunatic" had come into the bank and offered him a rolled-up manuscript, tied with a white ribbon at one end and a black ribbon at the other. The lunatic asked Grahame to pick one end; Grahame picked the black, and the other pulled a gun out of the manuscript roll and shot at Grahame three times, at close range, without managing to hit him. --This not the great age of specialist competence in Britain: amateur central bankers, amateur assassins.) 

Here's the house of the Academic Rowing Association, the first of the clubs to establish itself out here in Grünau, in 1902. (In English if you're an academic it usually means you're a professor, but in Germany it means you have a university degree; you're a person certified as having some clearly defined semi-abstract expertise, you're not an amateur. Not like England in 1900 or so, where having been to a university meant you were a cultivated gentleman, with better manners than to display semi-abstract expertise in public.)

Akademischer Ruderverein, Regattastrasse, Grünau. My photo, April 2015. 

The Academic Rowing Association (which perhaps would not have liked to describe its activities as "messing about in boats") split in two, like so many things, during the Cold War, with the eastern half here and the western half somewhere out along the Havel, on the other side of Berlin. And like so many things, it has been glued back together again in some fashion since the 1990s.

Along the street are posters for a water-sport-fest that will happen here early next month. The poster, like the houses, evokes the 1900-ish world (ah, people want to erase the twentieth century, put it out of mind like a bad dream ... but if we go back to 1902, do we have to do it all over again?).

Poster for Wassersportfest along Regattastrasse. My photo, April 2015.

Regattastrasse shrinks into Sportpromenade, which shrinks into a sort of bicycle path. (It appears on the map as a regular street for a long way, but beyond a certain point it's blessedly closed to cars.) The boathouses have come to an end, we're on the river--or perhaps on the Long Lake by now--the shoreline is beautifully open, and the day is getting finer:

Dahme, Grünau. My photo, April 2015.

The water is on my left. On my right, where the grayness of the early day still lingers, is the streetcar line and a hefty stretch of the Berlin City Forest.

Along tramline 68, Grünau. My photo, April 2015.

Okay, so this is not exactly the wilderness here. Ding, ding, ding goes the trolley, the 68 tram, covered with ads for a discount grocery and going too fast for a clear shot:

Tram 68, along Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

I do love the 68 tram, everyone loves the 68 tram--though there is some public debate about whether this or the 61, along the north shore of the Müggelsee, is the "most beautiful tramline in Berlin."  (Do I remember any public discussions about which is the most beautiful public transit line in Denver or Chicago? Nah, and this is not just memory failure on my part. Though there were things to be said for the 147, in Chicago, or even for the Jeffery Express when it was not packed with bodies in such a third-world way that you couldn't see out the windows to the lake.) 

In one place a little further up, before we get too deep among the trees, some praiseworthy citizen has planted pansies along the tracks. (It's pansy-planting season just now; all the florists have pansy-flats piled by their doors.)

Little thought-flowers. And there is pansies, says Ophelia, that's for thoughts. Pansy/ pensée. Very small blobs of thought along the streetcar line. Usually I bring something philosophical to read on the public transit, Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, but today it's just Die Zeit, with an article about the difficulties of creating an efficient mechanical asparagus harvester.

Along the 68 line, Grünau.  My photo, April 2015.

The German name for pansy is Stiefmütterchen, little step-mother. The flashy lower petals, the stepmother and her daughters, shoulder in front of the more simply dressed upper petals, the stepdaughters. (My mother explained this to me when I was small. We were on the side of the slighted stepdaughters.) 

The bike path--the old street--keeps fairly close to the tramline here, but if you're not in a rush you can veer off on little footpaths through the trees, even closer to the water. The last time I was out here, summers and summers ago, it was a hot weekend day, and every little cove was full of picnickers and swimmers, with their bicycles stacked against the trees. There are a couple of official swimming beaches along here, and a few reed patches that are fenced off to encourage them to regenerate themselves. But mostly it's open woods and innumerable little sandy coves where you can dangle your feet in the water and pick up Spree-mussel shells. (I kept one of the shells on the kitchen counter in Michigan for years, as sort of a talisman, a reminder or a hope that it would be possible to come back to this stretch of the river. The shell still sits on the kitchen counter here, by the espresso machine, and it still makes me happy to see it, evening after evening, as we do our after-dinner cleanup.)

It's not fast progress through the woods: the track is full of rocks and roots and sinkholes, and occasionally it veers out so directly onto the river's edge that the water has eaten away the edge of the path (ah, but here is a convenient tree limb to hang onto, for those of us who do not balance so well on narrow footways as we did years ago). The tottery old dears are mostly sticking to the bike path.


It's getting on for lunchtime, and I did pick up a sandwich at the Grünau station. Actually not a sandwich, as the rather dour woman behind the counter corrected me: not a belegtes Brot but a Laugeneck, a lye corner.... Where was it--in which German airport?--where I saw a sign on the pretzel stand advertising "lye pretzels"? This frank translation of Laugenbrezel might have put off the English-speaking customers. But in fact that distinctive smooth brown finish on German pretzels does come from dipping the formed pretzel into a lye solution before baking. (Anything with a very high pH will do the job; home bakers tend to use soda water, but it's less effective.) You can do the lye dip with regular rolls as well as with pretzels, and this particular bake-shop had a fine array of triangular, very dark-brown, pretzel-finish rolls stuffed with things like cucumber and salami, or tomato and gouda. 

So I keep an eye out for a cove with a good stone or fallen log in it, where I could sit and have my lunch. And here is one with a couple of nice logs ... a little awkward because there is no footing on the other side of the logs, just a steep pitch down to the water; but the main log is wedged well in place and isn't going to roll me suddenly into the river.

I open my little paper sandwich bag, and ... ach du meine, the rustling of paper is like ringing a dinner bell in the woods. Suddenly I have friends, looking for their share of the crumbs. A coot hurries across the water to my cove, bobbling its head at double speed; a pair of mallards circle behind him, and a crow hops up aggressively to my log. 

One of the few things that have made me feel alien in Berlin is that I don't know the native flora and fauna very well. My parents taught me animal and plant and mineral names at about the time they taught me not to walk in front of cars or fall in deep water, and here it simply feels bizarre to be a responsible adult in other respects and yet not to be able to recognize a common bird or streetside weed. It's like losing part of your speech, your ability to connect things and words.

I am learning, however. I know that the crow is a Nebelkrähe, a fog-crow (one of the gray-backed birds that swagger around the city like gangsters: hooded crow is the English name). I know that the little sparrow-size birds with yellow breasts and blue-black caps that whistle along the street behind our apartment house are Kohlmeisen ...  Let's see, what is this species called in English? We don't have them in America, but they're so ubiquitous on this side of the Atlantic, there must be an English name. Ah yes, the great tit. (Surely this wouldn't be a usable name in the US? Do even the British say, We have great tits in the back yard?)

Here is Herr Fog-crow (or possibly Frau Fog-Crow, as they look very much alike):

Hooded crow on the Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

Deeper in the city there are signs along the waterways saying not to feed bread to the birds, it isn't good for them, so I don't feel too guilty about scarfing almost all of my sandwich. Sorry, my lye-corner. But the general air of anticipation around me is so intense, I do toss the last bit out. A coot gets it, the crow stamps and flaps and curses--and there are immediately more coots, conjured up from nothing by a tossed bread-crumb.

Coots on the Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

I had never seen coots until we moved here, but I recognized them immediately. (At least with them I could still attach words to things.) I learned to read, when I was about three, from a book of very bad reproductions of Audubon's Birds of America, which my mother had won as a door-prize at some in-law's bridal shower. (I persecuted people to read me the names under the the pictures until I knew a lot of the names by heart, and at some point the print started turning into recognizable words on its own.) 

It's a great moment when you learn to read, it changes your life completely to have access to print. Even if the first printed words that make sense to you are Common Loon. 

The book started with water birds: common loon, American coot, pied-billed grebe, crested grebe--which I had about as much chance of seeing, in the high plains, as of seeing an emu. But the names and pictures did imprint themselves on my mind, and so I knew a coot in a moment when I finally saw one, sixty years later.

**

It's time to move on after lunch--the sun is really out now, the woods are bathed in light in this leafless season, and the pines start to give out a resiny fragrance in the infant heat of April. Shine out, fair sun, with all your heat./ Show all your thousand-colored light!  

Along the Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

This is a new season. I've hardly seen freight traffic on the waters all winter, but now here is a big barge flying a Polish flag, on its way up from the Oder-Spree canal through the Long Lake (which we are on by now) and westward to who knows where. 

Here would have been a more adventurous place to have lunch, out on the tree trunk ... But no, maybe I'm too old for this one.

Along the Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

On we go through the lovely woods. Here is a little projecting corner of land, where the lake turns ... and this took a hit in the Niklas storm, I see. Two tall young pines are recently down, snapped off raggedly a dozen feet off the ground; the top of one is broken off and lodged halfway up in another tree. 

We must be getting closer to residential areas again; there is a civilized custom of putting benches in places where people might reasonably want to sit down.

Along the Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

Ah yes, here we come back closer to the streetcar tracks again, and then out of the woods and into Karolinenhof. Some farmer established a household--a Hof--here in the eighteenth century and named it for his wife Karoline. A hundred years later it was turned into lots for biggish houses, and there's obviously been more building down here recently.

Village pond, Karolinenhof. My photo, April 2015.

It's sleepy and suburban here; people haven't taken in the eggs from their Easter egg trees yet.

Easter egg tree, Karolinenhof.  My photo, April 2015.

Our Hausmeister has taken in the Easter eggs from our trees already, though I saw yesterday that he had forgotten a red one out by the stone seat where teenage couples meet for very serious private discussions, in the depths of the shrubbery in front of the house. 

The earliest-blooming fruit trees (what are these? I've lost my language again) have been bursting out in our neighborhood up on the Spree in the last few days, and they are bursting out here too.

In Karolinenhof.  My photo, April 2015.

Shall I walk on into central Schmöckwitz? No, perhaps save that for next time. 

The streetcar stop in the middle of Karolinenhof is just on the other side of the fence from a playground, where the shed in back has been brightly painted with flora and fauna.  

At the streetcar stop, Karolinenhof.  My photo, April 2015.

The style isn't exactly J. J. Audubon, but the picture is recognizable. That's a crested grebe, that is. 

**

Material on Kenneth Grahame is from an article in The Telegraph: 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3671092/Kenneth-Grahame-Lost-in-the-wild-wood.html

Shine out, fair sun ... is from the Masque of the Twelve Months (1619), possibly by George Chapman; it provides the text of the opening to Britten's Spring Symphony.