After we came over
the Alps we found ourselves exhausted, culture shocked and in the lea of
the Black Forest. This was actually a happy accident, in my ignorance I thought
the Black forest was more Bavaria ... Southeast.
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| Alps way back on the Horizon |
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| View Across the Rhine Valley |
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| View North |
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| An Alp |
The Black Forest like Pisa is one of those places that’s
been with me since very early on in life, whether through a story told by my
nan or some early school event I don’t recall ... it could have even been from
comic or an Astrix the Gaul story. What I do recall though is this mental image
of this mountainous forest, with bears and wolves and snow in winter and being
vast.
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| Campsite |
The bears and wolves are gone (wolves for interests sake are
still found in isolated packs in northern Spain and Portugal). The hills and mountains
will require a little geological time to erode ... ahem.
As the mountains of the forest slowly become lower ... more
like very steep rocky forested hills, down towards the levels of Rhine flood
plain (the Rhine at this point is both a river and a canal or navigation and
there are two broad silvery ribbons winding through the lands come sunset). The
trees thin, there are area of vines, the main stems taller than we’ve seen in
Spain, Portugal and Italy, but still with only one level of lateral branching
and on some only branching in one direction ... like lots of hockey sticks
upside down in the ground.
You look behind you and the see the limits of the heat hazed
horizon, marked by blue hummocks and humps of mountains, lower down these
slopes in the properly visible realm these are many hued shades of green. You
look in front of you and you see the wide flat expanse of land the is the
Rhineland a vast flat plain extending for maybe ten miles west, before it rises
on the French side also to mountains. Lower than the Alps and less jagged
looking, but still high enough for the highest plateau’d peaks to hold snow.
When you look north the flood plain seems to be without limit, it just fades to
and indistinct muzzy blue white haze. I was reminded of some areas along the
river Nile, the difference being that when the mountains either side of the
Rhine plain ascend, they are green and lush, where the Nile is variously buff,
dun or beige.
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| Jewish Cemetery in the Forest |
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| Darth Vaders House |
So that’s the banks and lea described. What about the forest
itself? It’s vast; thirty by ninety miles approximate in `plan’, but I suspect
that if you flattened it out it would quadruple in overall area. In places you
can’t see twenty feet in front of you and in other places you can see mountains
receding to the blue limit noted above, but inwards east into the forest
deeper. There is a mix of deciduous and coniferous wood, as noted in an earlier
post. We caught it at the right time because the deciduous trees were still in
very early leaf, meaning that they still allowed through a lot of light. In the
conifer areas, there are bits that are deathly silent and dark, so much so that
that you are momentarily blinded as you exit into a glade or the sheer vertical
V of a valley that marks the place where two enormous geological teeth meet.
The Black Forest was so named because in the past it was impenetrable and dark,
we know why.
There are springs and waterfalls, like those we saw in Pont
das Tres Entradas in Portugal a few weeks ago. So similar but so different,
however to try and describe the ways they differ would be the job of a poet
maybe. It’s something and nothing. The air, the moisture it carries, the song
birds, the and tinkling and gurgling of streams and rills hidden in clefts
echoing and being amplified by the apparent stillness in the most sheltered
hollows, the rustle of leaf litter as you walk, and the sssshhhhhh of the
breeze tickling the emerging leaves higher up the canopy, maybe even the distant
background hum of motorways and industry. Maybe the reason is because it’s
mythical and your deep animal brain recognises that it’s a place where you
could get lost ... maybe even forever.
Where trees fall they are left as long as they don’t present
a danger, this can mean an overturned pine (as pictured) can become a microcosm
of the surrounding wood, with its own tiny forest of seedling pines no taller
than my thumb is long, interspersed with tufts and hummocks of moss, both black
and green, seedling herbaceous weeds sprout and bracket fungi forms fairy towns
and castles in the now lateral crevices of the trees bark. And amongst all this
flora wander the tiny six legged actual inhabitants of this world tree, beetles
and ants, spiders, bugs butterflies in all shapes colours and sizes.
In the bar at the first campsite we stayed, they said they
came to breathe the air that comes down off the mountain, in the woods itself
cyclists, walkers and even a wedding party were doing the same, we even got
passed by a jolly German jogger who must have been mid fifties or more ... and
at quite some altitude. It’s a magical place, wilderness enough with pockets of
absolutely picturesque habitation, and people who a genuinely pleased you’ve
come to see their bit of our world.
The Black Forest goes on the list of places to tour just
because.
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