Broken

by Lori Mairs:

Uphill from the chilled dark of the cedars and into the warm light of the desert scape above, it is here on this parapet that the formations of hoodoos begin and end and where the prickly pear cactus grows. In some parts of Woodhaven there's a visual and temperate signature where distinctive bi-zones intersect, where the crossing from one to the other sometimes happens within eight or ten feet. This is one of them. 

The air is still cool from a surprising mid-March storm that thrashed down from an angry black sky. Window-rattling booms of thunder, sheets and strips of lightning ripped beyond the width of the horizon with a wall of hail pelting anything unsheltered below it. 

I like to walk after big weather. Mostly the walk is driven by curiosity and a pull to witness the affects of a wild that can't be tamed. This part of the dry interior is a desert knoll and the highest point of the trail system inside the fence line. It's a sheer drop, sixty feet or so in some places, to the forest floor. Steep-sloped honeyed-grey grasslands are still flattened from a winter dump of snow. On the forest floor, dirt changes from mottled grey-rust to a thick reddish brown where the bio-zone switches from fir-cottonwood to cedar-cottonwood. The first has sparse and evenly-spaced trees while the latter hangs with a thick canopy darkened above and sheltered underneath. I'm eye-level with the tip-tops of new growth fir and pine and I can see a third the way up gnarly old cottonwood right into the habitat holes. If I stand here long enough the squirrels will show up and put on a Cirque de Soleil show, but today is for seeing what the storm brought in or brought down or brought over and what it left behind.

Where the trail sign marks the junction, I go up along to the old flume where fir branches are broken and scattered on the ground from the wind. I reach down, grab and throw, grab and throw, at least a dozen times, winging the fallen ones into the underbrush. I cross over the big fir root that makes a step on the path then dips under the old flume on the far side. This mess of gnarled tin and wood is all that's left of what was once a water carrier for the apple orchards in the Lower Mission. It's corroded in some parts and the wooden frame that held it up at chest height is mostly on the ground and rotting. In a few places the half-hoops of galvanized steel that braced the whole thing from underneath are lying about and poking through dirt especially where the wooden frame and the metal half-pipe are mostly disintegrated. 

Next to this mangled mess of a flume sits the whole story of Father Pandosy, the mission priest who sailed to the “new” world to settle 'untamed' land. Father Pandosy planted food in rows and people in pews. He carved a path for Indian agents and land surveyors who would divide the place into parcels for grazing cattle and growing apples. The good Father and his flock missed the part where the land had no need of taming, the part where the effortless and obvious way in would have been to ask the people already here and thriving. The Syilx people have been in the Okanagan Valley for over ten thousand years, they could have been, and in the earliest times were, in easy partnership with European settlers. Father Pandosy did what new world priests do.  

Sometimes this crippled flume is a memento mori to the courage of the settlers and their child-like trust of the vision that inspired long and treacherous walks across barren lands. It was a certain ingenuity required to survive as they were accustomed to surviving. But on days like today, days after a storm and strange unheralded weather, I only have a desire to want to reverse what was done and untangle it from the mess. I want to clean it all up and supplant this settler mentality with a little grace in a world that once was new and make room for the efficacy to ask about how to be in this place from the ones that already knew. A simple task: ask.

My dad picks me up and sits me on the metal edge of the ship's railing. My mother has the baby and my other brothers and sisters are standing below on the wooden deck and waving. We're all waving. My mother, without turning toward him, asks my father if he can see the Hendersons. He finds them in the crowd and points out their position so my mother can wave in their direction. There are coloured streamers going from the boat to the wharf where a crowd has gathered and when the streamers run out the people on the pier throw toilet paper rolls all the way up onto the boat decks. It's a celebration and wall of grief all tucked into the leaving.

Where the metal and wood lie abandoned along the trail, broken and forgotten, are remnants of ice balls scattered about and melted puddle-dregs of a brutal sky-fall that was the storm. Ice balls and puddles, it goes from one to the other and I imagine it will eventually go all the way back up again, after it's saturated the earth. The plants will cast it off into the wind and the wind will deposit it into particles that will carry it to the sky and become cloud again where it will rain or hail next season. These are the cycles that live in the flume. 

I find a spot where the moisture has stayed well beyond the drift upward and it's here that moss grows luminescent green and glowing. The moss isn't a sign of the broken; it's a sign of the staying and reaping. There are teensy brown umbrella tops lurching out of cushioned pads, miniature capsules and splash cups all gathered into a Lilliputian garden to be savoured for those who venture to squat for the inspection. We don't get close enough sometimes. I want to see beyond the broken today, find the rich and nutritious in the cycles. Today I want hope and somewhere to pull back the tides and erase what keeps tugging at my midsection. 

There's a Maori troupe on deck and they begin to sing “Now Is The Hour” and my mother starts to cry. She is broken. She doesn't want to go on the boat like I do. I can see them both, my mother and my father, because I'm up on the metal railing. I look away and look down. The water below is a long way away and it's black and swirling like a whirlpool. I get scared all of a sudden that my dad is going to forget that he's holding me and if he does I'll drop into the water and be gone forever. I grab at his arm to remind him I'm there and see that he's crying too. A roll of toilet paper whizzes by our heads. The Hendersons have spotted us and they're waving and jumping about to make sure we've seen them in the crowd. The streamers and toilet paper rips and floats away into the whirlpool. The captain comes over the loudspeaker and tells us to cover our ears then the big horn sounds loud and long and low, a final bellow as our ship pulls away into the harbour.

There's always a time after a storm when the little things flourish. The battering of hail has fallen to silence and if my ears were like the deer or bear I'm sure I could hear water being sucked up through the dirt. I move along up the flume until I get to where I can cross over it safely and make my way to a fallen log that's been placed on the hillside for watchers. I come to this spot when I need to have a think. It's mid-March and these are days and nights when I spend time with my mother. Her birthday is March fifteenth, she died March thirteenth. 

As of today I've been a motherless daughter for 24 years. Seems like a long time when I think the words but it doesn't mean I can't still smell her. She would have loved this part of my life. She would have loved these days in Woodhaven at the in-between times of the season and she would have been here talking to the trees along with me. It doesn't matter how long ago something was, what matters is how much it mattered. Sometimes what mattered is the thing that purrs softly and cozies into a place in your heart that gets most remembered. Sometimes the most remembered is the unspoken agreements and all the un-saids that find a harbour in my midsection waiting it out for after a hail storm. March bites like that for me. It reminds me of the broken parts. 

***

Lori Mairs (1961- 2021) was born in New Zealand and lived most of her life in British Columbia, Canada. From 2002- 2017, she lived in the forest as the caretaker of the Woodhaven Nature Conservancy in Kelowna, British Columbia.  She completed her BFA and then an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She was a sculptor and installation artist, using natural materials as well as fabric, metal and beeswax in her work.  She also participated as a lead artist in several eco art projects in Kelowna.  In the last few years of her life, she began writing essays and poetry.  In all her work, her primary concerns were the relationships we have with each other as humans and the deep and often reaching relationships humans have with the more-than-human world.  For many years she wrote a blog, “The Land of 7:30.”  She also practiced as a personal growth consultant until her untimely death.  She is greatly missed by her friends, family, clients and fellow artists, as well as the neighbors and other-than-human beings of Woodhaven where she wrote and made art for many years.

A time of hopeful anticipation

By Ruth Bradshaw:

The park is deserted at this hour, the café closed and the playground empty. The dog walkers and joggers are still sleeping. It is that time after the coldest, darkest part of the night has passed but before the sun has risen. A faint glimmer appears on the horizon and my nervousness at being out alone in the unpeopled early morning is gradually replaced by a sense of anticipation. The darkness will soon be gone. Dawn is here and the sunrise I’ve come to see will not be far behind it.

The only sign of human life is the faint sound of distant traffic and even that recedes when I reach the top of the hill where there is more tree cover. Here it is tranquil but still far from silent. The birds make this space their own with a rush of notes that feels more of a competition than a chorus and, as the light slowly increases, they grow louder still. It is impossible for my inexpert ear to distinguish most of the individual voices, but I recognise blackbirds and robins and hear the occasional cawing of crows accompanied by the shaken cloth sound of their wings flapping. I can only guess at the rest, but I decide that today it matters not what all these birds are, only that there are so many of them singing. 

As it grows bright enough for me to make out traces of the hilly fields and meadows which the park replaced, it is not difficult to imagine that a line of taller trees could mark an ancient boundary. I walk over and lean back against the nearest of these with my eyes closed. It is a mature lime tree, its bark ridged and furrowed with age and experience. The sound of the wind in its leaves is so like gentle rainfall on dry ground that when I open my eyes, I expect to see a soft rain falling.

At this time of half-light, half-night, nothing is quite as it first appears, and the past feels closer. It is the time before this landscape was farmland that I can sense most strongly. In the twilight it is possible to replace the parkland limes and chestnuts with the woods of coppiced oak and hornbeam that covered this part of London for centuries. I think of the sights, sounds and smells of that woodland - the calls of turtle doves and cuckoos, the rich scent of wild garlic, the orchids and helleborines growing among a multitude of other plants - all long since lost to this place.

If I were a visitor in one of those earlier centuries, it would have to be necessity rather than curiosity that brought me here at this hour, something that made me desperate enough to risk the dangers of the woods at night. For even after the wolves, bears and lynx were gone, there was still the threat of robbery or worse. Perhaps I am here to search frantically for firewood to heat food for an ailing relative? Or maybe it’s to find the herbs I need to cure that relative using a knowledge of plants taught me by my mother just as she learnt it from hers. I’m sure I would know that when I find the right plants, I should take only as much as is needed so plenty are left to grow for future use. But would I stop for a moment to appreciate the wildflowers and birdsong on this fine Spring morning? Or would this experience be so commonplace and my fear so great that I would hurry home without paying them any attention? 

The high-pitched screech of a ring-necked parakeet returns me to the 21st century. I am thankful that my survival is no longer dependent on what I can gather from the woods. But I am sad too that I do not have the knowledge needed to do this anyway and sadder still that I will probably never experience a springtime woodland with quite such a variety of sound and beauty as that earlier visitor. My greatest sadness is that I live in a time and a society whose untamed desires have so changed the world, that the future of many species, including my own, is now uncertain. Even now we understand the damage we are doing to the world we don’t seem to be capable of taking only what we need. We must always have more. 

As the light grows, I think of what the future holds for this area. This is not as easy as picturing its past. Not because I cannot guess the impacts of the storms and droughts that already arrive with increasing frequency but because it is too painful to contemplate the uprooted trees and withered plants they will leave in their wake. I know I cannot ignore those threats but, as a new day starts, I focus instead on how green and vibrant the horse chestnut leaves look when backlit by the rising sun. 

***

Ruth Bradshaw works in environmental policy and has been a regular conservation volunteer for over a decade. She is currently writing a book about the value of urban wildlife which draws on both her professional expertise and her volunteering experiences. Her essay ‘Stories of Co-existence’ was recently shortlisted for the Future Places Prize and her creative non-fiction has also been published in a variety of websites and journals including Canary LitMag, The Clearing and The Selkie. When not writing or working, she can often be found in the woods near her home in South London and occasionally on twitter @ruthc_b

The pursuit of peaceful coexistence

Illustration by Kami M. Koyamatsu – Website

By Mackenzie Kelly:

The first cloud-free day of spring acts as a beacon of hope in Seattle. Reminiscent of a Hallmark movie, people across the city of all ages emerge in unison from their homes, lifting their hands to shield sensitive eyes, eager to soak up the sun. After enduring my first Seattle winter, I was grateful for the additional daylight hours so I could enjoy the last moments of sunshine walking my two dogs near the lake after work. I grew to love this walk for the dichotomy between the beauty of nature and the urban landscape.

As the sun set and we made our way back home, sniffing every bush as we went, I saw little creatures erratically diving near the streetlights. I had only ever seen bats in videos on the Internet, flying out of a cave en masse like a dark cloud spilling into the sky. As the bats dove into the light, I watched with reserved excitement and a little undercurrent of fear buzzing through my body. Am I too close? Is this safe? Are the bats lost? Are they supposed to be in the city?

 After doing a deep dive on our local Washington bat species, I was happy to share my warm dusk walk with these misunderstood mammals of flight. All of our local bats are insectivorous and a world with fewer mosquitoes has its appeal. Just as the people in Seattle are emerging from their winter seclusion, the local neighborhood bats are roused from hibernation and hungry. Bats can eat roughly half of their body weight in a single evening. How could natural pest controllers this efficient ever be considered insidious? As the ancient proverb goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. 

Last year I accepted and cemented my new title as City Slicker when my husband and I became homeowners in Seattle. This came as a shock to my husband who had bet this move would amount to nothing more than a brief sampling of city living before I begged to retreat back to a more humble life in the countryside. We moved in search of better opportunities, though chasing after our lofty career-oriented dreams left us feeling like underdogs adrift amongst the crowds. Although I had made my decision to settle into my new urban existence, I still longed for backwoods amenities.

I grew up thinking city living was somehow devoid of nature which contributed to my apprehension about making this move to the big city. I worried that I had to make the choice between civilization and wilderness, but catching my first glimpse of urban bats on that spring walk calmed my fears and dispelled my reservations. Nature and civilization do not have to be incongruous presences; instead, I commenced my pursuit for peaceful coexistence.

As a new homeowner, I began my journey as an amateur gardener, focusing on making my little neck of the city a natural safe haven with the ultimate goal of creating a backyard “bed and breakfast” (B&B) for bats. I dove into researching and collecting native plants in the Pacific Northwest. Though there were a few casualties along my journey, through trial and error a few plants have now survived their first winter under my care. One of my personal favorite survivors is our mock orange flowering shrub, emitting a beautiful smell reminiscent of orange blossom mingling with jasmine. It’s also a favorite for butterflies, beetles, and moths. This motley crew of arthropods were my first residents in our backyard bed and breakfast of biodiversity! These “pests” are welcomed with open arms and hopefully open wings eventually. While I appreciate their residency, my hope is that they will ultimately play the role of “breakfast” in my aspirational Bat B&B. In order to preserve bat food, our yard is a pesticide-free zone. Using pesticides would reduce insect abundance, leading to a food shortage for my prospective tenants.

A key milestone in my campaign for peaceful coexistence is the installation of a bat house. What kind of an innkeeper would I be without a proper place for bats to rest their weary eyes? I bought a premade bat house from the National Audubon Society because I was worried my shoddy carpentry skills would soil my reputation, shifting my status into slumlord territory. With my husband’s help, we mounted our bat box under the eaves of our home. Bats need a clear, unobstructed flight path in and out of their roosting site so orienting it south only a few feet from our neighbor’s towering home wasn’t exactly ideal. Just like the rest of us emerging from our “caves” in the spring and turning our faces towards the sun, bats long for direct sunlight so we placed their home facing east for ample sunshine.

As spring returns, I continue to anxiously await our first tenant. It can take months, often years for bats to take up residence in a newly erected bat house. Although our bat house remains empty, it has turned into a symbol of hope in our new home. I can’t help but root for these misunderstood mammals. In some ways, bats are conservation underdogs with undeserved and maligned reputations who lose the spotlight to other more charismatic megafauna. As nocturnal animals, they are often only seen elusively fluttering at twilight, easily forgotten amongst the crowd. Bats are vital pest controllers and are also the primary pollinators for agave plants. Imagine a world full of mosquitoes, yet void of tequila! Instead of living in fearful ignorance, I choose to pursue coexistence with these beneficial beauties. When I can sit on my porch and see bats flitting around my mock orange bush at twilight, I will know that I have made a home for them and a wilderness for me. Everyone loves an underdog story. I’m happy to play a small part in it.

***

Mackenzie Kelly is a veteran veterinary assistant and budding field biologist with a passion for conservation. She loves all critters but is especially fond of non-charismatic species like bats and insects. She studied Political Science at Northern Arizona University, but couldn't help but felt compelled by the beautiful Southwest scenery to stick around Flagstaff, AZ after graduation. While completing two AmeriCorps terms, she facilitated service-learning youth clubs that explored the rivers and canyons of the Southwest. These educational outdoor experiences sparked a passion for sharing the wonder of wilderness with others. She is currently finishing her Master of Biology through Miami University’s Advanced Inquiry Program where she hopes to inspire social and ecological change by being nature’s biggest cheerleader.

A Return to Den Wood

A companion piece to Winter in Den Wood, published here on Elsewhere in January 2021.

By Ian Grosz: 

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers – Herman Hesse

In late May I returned to Den Wood. I had last been here in the winter when the trees had been bare and seemingly lifeless. The small tunnel of twisted, comingling branches at the entrance to the wood was now almost a full leafy canopy, but it had been a cold and wet May, and the wood was late in its blooming; the ferns not yet unfurled and many buds yet unbudded; the growth of the wood almost a month behind its usual blossoming. The gorse was in full flower though, and there was a greater variety of birdlife amongst the trees: bluetits and yellow hammers; finches and robins as well as the ground birds I’d seen before: the blackbirds and thrushes. The lower sections of the wood were full with song and I felt my mind begin to slow with each step, the earthiness of the air in my lungs as I walked in the marbled light of the first warm days we’d seen since the onset of spring. 

I had felt tense when I arrived. Both my wife and I had been bad tempered that morning, and I was still carrying the frustration and mild anger of our irritability. We’d been locked down together in our small home since I had lost my job the year before. We all need our own space from time-to-time, especially when under the added strain of uncertainty. Arriving at the woods, that space for me immediately opened up, but it can still be difficult to let go of our often, self-imposed time constraints; let life flow a little more freely. I walked too quickly along the path, headed for the grove of wych elms I’d last seen bare and ghoulish in the winter; headed single-mindedly to my intended destination with my camera as though I had some urgent appointment. I crossed the low bridge above the stream and forced myself to pause there, letting the trickling sounds of its meditative flow settle me a moment.

I’d been diagnosed with anxiety disorder the previous summer, and I had become more aware of its insidious nature; the way it can overtake me without my realising it; make me feel as though everything is urgent; everything time-critical and to be done quickly. As a pilot, a sense of time pressure and sometimes urgency had been an occupational hazard that had crept into the rest of my life, invading everything I did with its insistency. It had become so great I couldn’t go shopping or load the dishwasher without my chest tightening and my pulse quickening. Everything I did, I did furiously. Finally, I had developed vertigo, and my flying life was over. Now I needed to force myself to slow down; to let life flow a little just like this stream, and I stood on the bridge and allowed the sounds of the water to fill my consciousness.  It did the trick, because I now ambled up to the elms, taking my time and taking photographs along the way, noticing details; letting the green light of the wood bathe me in its soothing balm. 

It is now a well-known scientific fact that being amongst trees is good for us. Studies have shown that a walk in the woods reduces levels of cortisol and other harmful hormones in the body; lowers blood pressure and even boosts the body’s immune system through the release of phytoncides in aromatic compounds. A study carried out in Japan in 2016 on elderly patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, found that ‘forest bathing’ significantly reduced the production of chemicals that add to inflammation and stress. The exact mechanisms at play seem unclear, but perhaps it’s the way we simply slow down when in natural environments; allow our bodies and minds the space they crave.

I had seen the potential for life in the bare elms of the winter; the promise of the spring to come and the message it held for both my own situation and the world in the midst of a pandemic. Now they had made a healing canopy of patchwork green high overhead, the thin trace of blue sky and clouds appearing as though threaded through their branches; earth and sky connected by their reaching presence.  I stood beneath them for a long time, just breathing them in, and the stresses in my body, out.

Finally leaving the grove, I sat on a low knoll amongst beech and hazel trees.  Self-consciously at first, I closed my eyes to listen to the birdsong; the susurration of the leaves; and to better feel the earth under me. I stopped looking at myself from the outside in, and allowed myself to be. Dare I say it, for a moment perhaps, I felt almost part of things; connected by the trees around me. My heart rate slowed considerably; I know that. For once, I had let go of time; and time it seems, for a moment at least, had let go of me. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity.

Wiesenburg: A spring diary

By Paul Scraton:

Field notes from Brandenburg:

We walk across the fields to the old village just before tea, and we see that the stork has returned. The nest is on top of the brick chimney above a workshop that is now an art and community hall between the supermarket and the Schloss. But the stork is in the fields, taking languid strides across the rutted ground, while a hooded crow watches on from a safe distance.

Another returnee to the village: the artwork that stands in the middle of the pond, part of a 42-km walking route that links Wiesenburg with Bad Belzig. The artwork represents all the lost and abandoned villages of High Fläming. Those destroyed in the Thirty Years War or left as ghost villages as industry shifted, swallowed by the forest. Each winter the artwork is taken away to protect it in case the pond waters freeze, and each spring it is brought back. The lost villages found once more. 

In the Schloss gardens, the anglers sit along the banks of the ponds, easily maintaining social distance with their umbrellas and low stools, trailers pulled by bicycles and plastic bottles of water and beer. 

At dusk I watch the bats dance between the houses above the gentle orange glow of the street light. I stand on our driveway and look up and down the street. A number of houses are empty. Shuttered and waiting for someone new. A generation change, our neighbour said. 

The new house that we pass on our walks is beginning to take shape. Walls and and a roof. Windows and doors to come. The old tumbledown shack that was the only structure on the once-tangled and overgrown property now has a shiny new big brother. 

The path through the forest follows the old dry valleys formed by the last Ice Age and leads us to the next village. It is there we spot the first swallows of spring, pinging this way and that as we walk down past the houses with their neat gardens to the sandy track out the other side. We’ve never been this far before, and the path leads up to a lookout point that offers as close to a view as you’ll get in Brandenburg without climbing a castle tower or a wooden walkway high above the trees. 

Our neighbouring house has been gutted, the remnants of the old lives lived between those walls piled up in the garden. The things that were left behind when they sold it. Old travel cases and trunks. Hunting trophies. Garden gnomes. The new neighbours are working on it around their jobs, on evenings and weekends, working hard and making good progress. The kids play on piles of sand as the adults pause for a beer and we say cheers across the top of an overgrown hedge. 

In the window of the village library, closed since March, there is a line-up of books: Albert Camus’ The Plague. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. David Wallace Wells’ The UnInhabitable Earth. The librarian has a sense of humour.

In the garden the cherry blossom comes and then the cherry blossom is gone. 

On a walk along the art trail we come to an open door on the edge of a field. In the middle of the 19th century the village of Groß Glien had 42 residents. Now all that remains of the village are the ruins of the church foundations a few steps from the work of art, enclosed in a tangle of brambles and young trees.

At the top of the Hagelberg, a five kilometre run from our house, I’m at the highest point in Brandenburg and the smallest Mittelgebirge in Germany. Or perhaps it is the second highest. It seems that there is a debate, involving places on the borders with other states and rumours of earth movers in the middle of the night in order to take the crown. No matter. It’s so peaceful on the hill it is hard to imagine this is the site of a bloody battle that, in 1813, took 3,000 lives. 

Outside the supermarket the asparagus stand is erected. Beelitz is not far away. They sell white and green asparagus, offcuts for soup and punnets of strawberries. A plastic screen stands between us and the friendly woman who weighs our purchases and takes our money through a small gap at the bottom of the barrier. 

On a run out from the village I see what I think might be wolf droppings, but there’s no internet connection on my phone to check so I take a photograph for later. The results of the research are inconclusive. 

We hear the sirens first. Then see the first engines passing by quickly on our road. Over the fence we hear our neighbour say that he should go down to the station and see what’s what. There’s barely been any rain for months, and the forests are dry as a bone. Twenty minutes later the engines return, slower now, as does our neighbour, ringing his bicycle bell as he turns into the drive.

The latest coronavirus information is posted outside the town hall. The number of new infections, of those who have died, useful telephone numbers and relaxations to contact restrictions. Other notices include planning permission for an extension to the supermarket, and on which days the military will be conducting live fire exercises in the restricted zone. 

In the remnants of the old GDR factory on the edge of the village, the police find two thousand cannabis plants in an old warehouse. Three men are arrested. 

Most mornings a red kite hovers over our garden and most mornings I wonder if it is possible that there is a more beautiful bird. 

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).  

Berlin: A spring diary

By Paul Scraton:

On a midweek morning, in these strange and anxious days, I go for a walk. Sometimes it feels like all I can do. I cannot concentrate on the words I would like to read and write. My eyes ache for something other than the gentle glow of a backlit screen. The sun is shining and our pavements are wide. In Berlin it is springtime, our balcony full of the sound of bees delivered to a neighbour by mail order. I head out into the city.

My walk takes me south from where I live in Gesundbrunnen, crossing the route of the Berlin Wall into Mitte before following a familiar route through Rosenthaler Platz to Hackescher Markt and Museum Island. The first stretch feels reasonably normal (whatever that means right now), with kids on scooters, joggers and dog-walkers, and apartment dwellers escaping the inside for sunshine on a bench. Apart from the playgrounds being locked up, it feels like it always does.

Closer to the city centre, it is all a little more eerie. The hotels around Rosenthaler Platz are darkened. The pavements are empty. It is a reminder not only of current events, but in a strange way of the changes that took place over the past two decades in these neighbourhoods, ones that perhaps we did not notice while they were happening. Without the tourists, the hotel and hostel guests and the AirBnBers, the population is diminished. As I walk, I wonder how it would have looked on these streets had these contact restrictions and ban on tourist stays in the city happened twenty years before. 

In a recent essay for Literary Hub, the walker-writer Lauren Elkin explored the idea of what we remember when we walk the city, reflecting on the idea that “[w]e city-dwellers are recording devices, forever observing the micro-adjustments time works on our neighborhoods, noting what used to be where, making predictions about what will last and what won’t.” 

This is always true, I think – although sometimes we don’t notice as much as we should as the city changes around us – but as I walk through a Berlin that was stalled about a month ago and only just starting to move again, the question of what will last has become more urgent than ever before. Will these hotels ever reopen? The restaurants and bars, where chairs were lifted onto tables all those weeks ago and have not been down since? The clubs, where only ghosts dance, behind their heavy, locked doors?

And we think of the stories from the hospitals and care homes, we read the testimonies of the key workers and we see the numbers going up and up and we think not only of what will last but what we’ll have lost.  

We walk the city to remember. 

On Rosenthaler Straße I pass the place where we used to go drinking in the basement of a junkyard and the bar on the corner that never seemed to close. One is an adventure playground now, a place where my daughter spent afternoons during primary school. The other belongs to a hotel that was built on what was still an empty space when I first moved to Berlin. I walk down this street all the time, but usually I am going to or coming from somewhere, to meet my daughter from school or my partner after work. I don’t remember much then. But today I do.  

At Hackescher Markt I bump into a friend. We don’t hug and stand a distance apart as we talk about how everything is, at work and home. We ask about our respective partners, families and what our daughters make of it all. It feels like we are the only two people on this street, a place where normally crowds bottleneck at one of the few locations where Berlin actually feels like a proper city. We say goodbye without the normal gestures of farewell. We don’t say that we should try and meet up soon. That we should hang out sometime. It all feels awkward. Strange. 

Down by the river I watch as the sun catches tiny waves caused by the wind and realise that it is not only people who are mostly missing from the scene, but also the river boats. There are no cruises out on the water, no sightseeing to be done even though the weather is fine. The city by the river has a different sound now. Birds and distant traffic. The laughter of a little girl on her bicycle. What’s missing are the engines of the boats and the commentary in different languages that crackles through loudspeakers before drifting off on the breeze that blows in between the grand old museum buildings at the water’s edge.

My route home takes me close to where my partner and I first lived together and the playground by the tram tracks, as empty as on a freezing winter’s day. I walk along the route of the Berlin Wall, the no-man’s land emptier than I have ever seen it, apart from maybe the last time I was here during the anniversary celebrations, when it was blocked off to allow the safe arrival of politicians and other dignitaries, who did their own short stroll to remember, from the black car to the chapel.

There are not many here to remember today. Those people who are out and about are all moving. No-one lingers, to read the memorial boards or look at the photographs. At the corner of Bernauer Straße the bakery is open, and I pause on the pavement to let a young woman in a face mask, cup of coffee in each hand, cross in front of me. When we walk we make predictions of the future. Of what will last. No-one can say how long our city will be like this. What version of Berlin will emerge on the other side. We do not know how much loss and sadness we will have to deal with along the way. 

A few blocks from home, a small group of workmen are putting the finishing touches to a new bar that is currently not allowed to open. But still they paint the window frames and inside tables are being laid out and the first drinks have been added to the shelves behind the bar. The day that it opens will be some party, but we don’t know when that might possibly be. The only thing is certain, I think as I turn the last corner, is that the city that welcomes it will not be the same as it was before. 

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).  

Spring In This Place – a poem by Will Burns

I choose the bee-flies for company today.
Sunlight on beech leaves,
cool sweat in the warm wood,
the blue flowers of the season.
Not numerology or some old painting
I think you might like.
Not a poem I hope you read for signs of life.
I fall hard for this place every day
the way we do for people we shouldn’t.

***

As part of The People’s Forest project, the poet Will Burns is creating a series of new works inspired by Epping Forest. Over the year Burns is penning a collection of poems, one per season, in part reflecting on the unique nature of Epping intertwined with his own experience of the forest real and imagined – here we have had the pleasure and privilege to publish Will’s poem for spring.

April Clouds

Märkisches Land, 17 April 2017, East

By Rolf Schröter:

The landscape that can be viewed through the window of an intercity train flies by, and things one might wish to focus on vanish too quickly. The only real world thing outside the train that can be grasped, that stays long enough to let musing begin, is the sky. This is especially true in spring, when above the monotonous agricultural deserts of the German plain the clouds and sunlight perform their works of great theatre. I try to focus on small excerpts of that performance, to capture them in a small notebook that I carry in my pocket. It is hasty work, as the clouds and the train move, and by the time I am finished things have progressed so far that I cannot check my sketch with the original any more. It doesn't matter. Instead I note the time, the approximate place, and the direction of travel. I take home with me a report, even if it might be fiction.

Westhavelland, 28 April 2017, West

Wolfsburg, 28 April 2017, West

Isenbüttel, 17 April 2017, East

Uetze, 17 April 2017, East

Rolf Schröter is a draughtsman living in Berlin. While doing technical and design drawings for the living, he is spending a lot of free time sketching from observation in his town or on journeys. He publishes this work on his blog skizzenblog.rolfschroeter.com.