Walk by the Water: Berlin: Havel 13

"Man marks the earth with ruin"--
Or, Bring on the Water Buffalo

Resumé of the autumn: Hot dry September, like summer. The leaves wouldn't turn or fall. Berlin Streets and San scrambled to redo their work schedules (no, we can't start to sweep up fallen leaves in the first half of October, the way we usually do, because there aren't any fallen leaves).

Then October was all rain and fog and damp and chill--how many days without the sun? Weeks. Sometimes a glimpse, a promise, if you looked out the right window at the right time:

West view from living room. My photo, October 2016.

But then if you looked out a different window at the same time you got promised something else entirely. Here comes the rain down from the Barnim Plateau, which stands out there just at the edge of sight, guarding the northern rim of the city and sending us its storms.

North view from the study. My photo, October 2016.

Then with early November the cold came swooping in. Snow in outlying areas and heavy frosts that looked like snow, even here in Mitte where the city breathes warm on itself.

And now all the sycamore leaves are down on the street behind our place, and we shuffle loudly through leaf-drifts that are almost up to our knees as we walk home from the S-Bahn station. Past the cafe that offers Turkish breakfasts, past the newspaper shop with its--how many? thirty-some?-- papers in German and Turkish and French and Russian and Arabic and Polish and English. Past the ice-cream place, shut up now for the winter: they've put away all their wicker beach-chairs, which sit out so invitingly under the sycamores in the fine weather.

I haven't been out on long walks all that much this fall. Had one round of eye surgery early in September--and this went well, but there's a lot of fluctuation around the improvement curve. You can be seeing really well for a while, and then a couple of hours later things blur (and dear me, here I am in a totally unfamiliar part of town, unable to read either maps or street signs), and then in another couple of hours it's fine again. (Happily the transit system uses large clear print, so I could always figure out where I was by getting to a bus-stop sign. Bless you, Berlin Transit Services.) Then another, trickier round of surgery early in November. This was expected to be much slower to heal, and so it will be, but I can get around (with caution), read or write for limited periods, and so on, so it's not too bad. In any case, I did get out a couple of times in the fall.

Some time in the summer of last year, when I was working my way down the River Havel from north to south, I regretted not turning aside halfway to have a look at the Tiefwerder Wiesen (the "low island meadows"), a stretch of flood-meadow south of the confluence of the Rivers Havel and the Spree in Spandau. (All that's left, I suppose, of the marshy muddy mess that the confluence would originally have been, before all the draining and developing of modern times.) Time to make up this omission.

So, one day in October, out we go, westbound on the Spandau train, to the next-to-last stop, and under the tracks and south a bit ... Ah, this is inviting, this is good autumn walking. (This is mist and fog blurring a lot of the pictures here, folks; my hand is not that unsteady yet.)

On Tiefwerderweg, Spandau. October 2016, my photo.

The geography gets complicated out here, once we get to the end of this street. It's one of those stretches of Spandau where the water and the land mingle almost inextricably, and where life without a boat seems hardly practicable.

Is it just me--who come from high dry country--or is there really something spooky about these amphibious worlds? The way Venice is spooky, the way the vast Brandenburg marshes around the Spree and the Oder that were drained in the eighteenth century were thought to be spooky, full of pagan relics and evil spirits. (Trackless places, inaccessible to outsiders, though the villagers who lived on high ground in the marsh knew the footways and the boatways to get out to the outside world.)

The eighteenth-century world, with its classical rationality, saw land as safe and orderly, water as dangerous and anarchic. The Romantics who came afterward saw water as freedom--a world without form or limit--and land as the home of all the enslaving structures that human beings build.

Byron says, in his great address to the ocean,

Man marks the earth with ruin; his control
Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy [Ocean's] deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage ...

.... the vile strength he wields
For earth's destruction, thou dost all despise ...

You wish. (Thou wishest. What would Byron have thought of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?)

Inland waters are, perhaps, more fragile than the ocean; and wetland, this spooky hybrid that slops together the categories of order and freedom, structure and anarchy, is more fragile still.

There have been problems out here, oil spills and habitat damage and such, but the city is working on it. Not always fast, not always to everyone's satisfaction, but they do work on it, as we will see.

If you look down at the bottom of the map below, there's an almost-island in the Havel called Pichelswerder, which stands up pretty high above the water: it's a last outcropping of the Teltow Plateau, that guards the south side of the broad Ice Age valley in which Berlin lies, as the Barnim Plateau guards the north. Back in the days when the water was higher than it is now, Tiefwerder was also an island--the name means "Low Island," because it doesn't stand up as high as Pichelswerder does. The long flops of water that you see on the east side of the main river are mostly old arms of the river that were semi-cut off from it when the river was straightened and improved in prior centuries. When you get way over on the east side of the map, where there isn't any more water, it's high ground again: there are end moraines from the Ice Age here, which wall off the water into the flood plain that we see in the map.

Map by Maximilian Dörrbecker. Wiki Commons.

The long tongue of water that splits off to the northeast from the river, just to the left of the "Tiefwerder" name on the map, is an old arm of the Havel that was turned into a harbor--Südhafen, South Harbor--in a round of river improvements around the turn of the last century. There are a couple of little Graben (ditches, dikes, drains) that link this with another old arm of the Havel, the Lazy Lake or Rotten Lake (Fauler See).

And here we go over the first Graben, just where it joins to the harbor. (Here we go into the world where everyone has a boat in the yard.)

Großer Jürgengraben at Südhafen. October 2016, my photo.

There were oil storage tanks in the harbor that leaked. Some of the leaks came from World War II bombing, some from accidents, some from what the Berlin Senate report calls (in a drumroll of long German bureaucratic words) "technically inappropriate handling of water-endangering substances." There are deep wells for the Berlin water supply down here, like the ones north of Hennigsdorf (previous post), and this contamination has been too close to them for comfort.

It also has been a threat to the Tiefwerder flood-meadow itself here, and this is a concern because Tiefwerder is the last remaining breeding ground in these parts for the Havel pike--those barracudas of the northern river world.

Pike (Pilsen, CZ). Photo, Wiki Commons.

The pike have some economic importance: they attract sport fishermen, as they can grow to over forty pounds (the females, that is; the males aren't that big), and they're canny fighters. Small-scale commercial fishermen pick them up too, for restaurants and fish-markets.

The pike are part of traditional river-country life. It's not so uncommon for a cozy waterside inn in Germany to be called The Pike or The Golden Pike or The Lake Pike. Of course the inn's menu may have no fish or seafood on it except farmed shrimp from Vietnam ... But then again there may be pike filets with cucumber sauce, or grilled pike with creamed cabbage. (How German do you have to be to take a serious interest in creamed cabbage? I ask Archangel, who says that he isn't sure, but that he had creamed Schwarzwurzel the other day at the university cafeteria and it was good. Schwarzwurzel is a somewhat sinister-looking vegetable that I have never seen in the US. Although the literal translation of the name is blackroot, my dictionary says that the English name is viper's grass. I must try this ... come over for lunch and we'll have some creamed viper's grass. Sounds like food for the evil spirits in the undrained marshes.)

When the Havel pike are ready to lay eggs, they come into shallows like Tiefwerder, because the eggs need to stick to plants or debris of some kind and not get washed downstream in the stronger currents of the river itself. The males loiter aggressively as the breeding season comes close: they fight, biting and ramming each other, each trying to drive the others away for the magic moment. When a female actually comes into the shallows and starts laying, the winning male fertilizes the eggs and, if possible, makes a fast getaway. During the actual egg-laying, the female has a brief feeding inhibition; but it switches off as soon as the last egg is out, and the winning (smaller) male can become the next item of prey if he doesn't hightail it. (Winning isn't all it's cracked up to be.)

Pike skull. Photo, David Stang, Wiki Commons.

The water has been low in Tiefwerder in recent years, and the pike have sometimes had difficulties getting in to breed. The water will be lower still if the waterway portion of the German Unity Traffic Project ever gets finished. This offers (if I may mount my soapbox for the moment) an interesting example of the difference between German and American concepts of politics.

In the US, there's a fairly strong (though not universal) feeling that political action at its best consists of forwarding the good guys' agenda and whapping the bad guys. (That's what Mr. Smith does when he goes to Washington.) In Germany there's a fairly strong (though not universal) feeling that political action at its best consists of working out compromises between conflicting legitimate interests. This doesn't mean that the compromises are always wise ones, or that big economic interests don't have undue weight (the auto industry gets away with too much here), and so on. But the basic concept is different. In an election campaign here, a candidate might reasonably claim skill in making compromises as one of his strengths. I think that trait could be a tougher sell in a lot of US districts.

The German Unity Traffic Project is a big list of rail and highway and river/canal projects started up in the early 90s to re-link the old East and the old West. This was a legitimate interest: the two parts of the country needed to be re-connected, and going back to the transportation arrangements of the 1940s wasn't going to do it. But then on the other hand, any big construction project puts noise and dirt in people's backyards that they legitimately don't want, so a lot of negotiation was in order. Most of the dry-land projects are done by now, I think (twenty-five years later--negotiation takes time, and careful building takes time), but the waterways part has been slower.

One waterway project involved some deepening and broadening of the Havel, and different interests pulled different ways here. On the one hand, water transportation is efficient for big heavy stuff: a single barge carries as much as dozens of trucks, and there's much to be said for getting lots of trucks off the highway. On the other hand, messing with the river creates problems--in this case, reducing the already meager overflows into Tiefwerder and making more of a barrier between river and flood-plain, limiting the pikes' access to their breeding grounds. There are some other issues as well. (Yikes! What's going to happen to the old bridges when the river is deepened and widened, and who's going to pay for whatever needs to be done to the bridges? What becomes of parks and beaches that are going to be partly taken over by new, bigger river?). After much pulling and hauling there is (last I heard) an agreement not to make the river quite so much deeper and wider in this stretch, and not to cut down as many waterside trees as originally planned. This will solve some of the problems with bridges and historic landscapes. There will still be problems with sufficient flow from the Havel into Tiefwerder, however, so the city has agreed to pump water from the river to the wetland as needed, and to put in fish ladders for the pike. Fish ladders don't always work, but the distance from river to floodplain is very small in this relentlessly flat land (this is not the Bonneville Dam, folks). So the pike should be able to make the trip.

As for the old oil spills: Cleanup at the harbor has been under way since the 90s. (Germans have relatively long attention spans.) They've carted away over sixty thousand tons of contaminated soil for treatment at "biological earth-treatment facilities or earth-washing facilities;" they've pulled out and treated contaminated water, and filled in again with clean stuff. There still seems to be some harbor activity here, as we can see later if we look back, but it's more cautious, with the soil and water more securely sealed off from the storage tanks that are still in use.

Here is where the harbor meets the main river:

Havel, Südhafen. October 2017, my photo.

We can't really see much of the harbor from here, but we get a better view as we move away from it. First we cross another of the Graben that link the main river with an old arm on the other side of Tiefwerder. (Lots of boat sheds and boat clubs along here--boats already under wraps for the winter.)

Kleiner Jürgengraben. October 2016, my photo.

And then we look back, and there are the big cranes at Südhafen, gray in the mist. They're loading or unloading something from that barely visible barge, making a lot of clanking and banging in the gray morning.

Südhafen. October 2016, my photo.

We're heading away from the more industrial part of the river now, working down from heavy-industry Spandau toward the forest (Grunewald) and then to royal-palace Potsdam. There's a nice little path along the water here, bright with autumn.

Along the Havel, Tiefwerder. October 2016, my photo.

But then .... Hmm. The path splits, further on. Now where? We could stay along the river, or we could turn inland through the meadows. My ten-year-old paper map is quasi-useless: there have been substantial changes here in the last ten years, in attempts both to protect the flood-meadows and make parts of them more accessible. Google Maps, which is very irregularly reliable about footpaths, suggests that going along the river is going to dead-end us in the swamp.

Well, let's turn off and explore ... Aha, boardwalk over the marshes. This is fun.

In the Tiefwerder Wiesen. October 2016, my photo.

The trees are aggressive here. If the meadows aren't mowed in some fashion they will turn into forest and thus eliminate the habitat of a number of rare species. The city wants to preserve the meadows, but how best to do the mowing has been a problem. Long ago, when the water was higher and life was simpler, the locals came in with scythes or sickles and took the hay out in rowboats. But gradually this ceased to be a profitable activity, and the locals stopped. In the 60s, the district of Spandau had to come in and do the mowing, but this was expensive. (Hand-work? you certainly couldn't bring in heavy machinery here; it would sink.) The Berlin districts have never been rolling in money, so it was a big problem.

What to do? Cut something else in the budget? Give up the wetland and the endangered species? Nah.

Bring in water buffalo. They're low-maintenance, they're happy to eat small trees, and they're generally non-disturbing to the ecosystem otherwise. Amphibian and dragonfly larvae grow in the water-filled buffalo wallows and apparently survive being wallowed at.

I didn't see any water buffalo, but I did see some of their helpers: white goats with floppy brown ears.

In the Tiefwerder Wiesen. October 2016, my photo.

Not everyone's happy about the water buffalo and goats and the fence that keeps them in. There's some settlement here in the edge of the flood-meadows, Kleingärten and some regular houses. There are grievances because a handful of the Kleingärten were eliminated to round out the space for wetland preservation (was this really necessary? was this a good compromise?). And then the electric fence that keeps in the water buffalo also keeps out the locals who used to wander about anywhere they liked in the area (in rowboats? in big boots?).

In the Tiefwerder Wiesen. October 2016, my photo.

So there's still some annoyance about wetland preservation out here in Klein-Venedig (Little Venice), where all the streets are water, and the only conveyances in or out are boats. (Your post comes in by boat, your garbage is taken away by boat; emergency services, if needed, come by boat. You paddle to the nearest transit stop by boat.)

This isn't the only Venice in Berlin. New Venice, over on the far east side of the city, is an all-water-street area along the Spree, somewhat like this in principle, but it looks very different: big newish suburban houses with motorboats in big garages (see Spree 11 post, July 2014). Here, in Little Venice on the Havel, there are garden-houses (something between a work-shed and a rain-shelter, not a place you live year-round), and quirky older (non-big) year-round houses, and a mad mix of boats.

Here's a modest canoe by a very small house dripping with geraniums (perhaps just a garden-house?).

Klein-Venedig. October 2016, my photo.

Here's a fair-sized sailboat taking up half the street. (The corresponding house is virtually invisible behind hedges.)

Klein-Venedig. October 2016, my photo.

Here's a motorboat apparently lost in the woods--but no, you can see the house it belongs to and (just barely) see the water it's riding on.

Klein-Venedig. October 2016, my photo.

And then we're past the little settlement, back to an unpeopled, dreamy water-world. The world of dissolution, the world of doubling, of images. (So which is the real world--the structured, built-up land, where we live and do our business, or the incorrigibly unstructured water, which after all makes up most of the planet and most of us?)

In the Tiefwerder Wiesen. October 2016, my photo.

Hmmm. Here goes the path, up out of the wetland and back to the self-designated real world. It's a human equivalent of the fish-ladder for the pike, getting us between our normal habitats and the Tiefwerder Wiesen. Though unlike the pike, we don't come down here to breed (or ... what do the teenagers come down here for in the summer evenings?).