A furnace of hot yellow in the beech forest

Why is it that every autumn seems to be more brilliant than the last?  Or is the intensity I’m seeing in colours this year thanks to an effort to look at the world at a slower pace?

Taking off for a weekend just the two of us to a spot in the middle of a beech forest might have something to do with it.  We boarded an ICE train in Hamburg late Friday afternoon bound for a weekend in Kaiserslautern, arriving at our hotel close to midnight after a short taxi ride.  If the journey was merely a black tunnel slashed with fleeting smudges of white and grey as the train fled south through the German countryside, the sight which greeted us from our first-floor window the next morning made up for it:  A woman walking four draught horses across a field, their breath puffing in the morning mist, splashes of yellow in the wet grass.

Out the door and down a path after breakfast, within minutes we were surrounded in the intense yellow of the beech forest.

The forest near Kaiserslautern is part of the Naturpark Pfälzer Wald, and forms the largest area of continuous forest in Germany.  Though we were only minutes from the border of a small city and from the lookout tower could see a German Premier League and 2006 World Cup soccer stadium, we walked as if the still of the path had been reserved in advance for us alone.

Though every corner brought a new combination of colour as the beech gave way to larch, European and American oak and evergreen pine, what struck me the most was its clear floor and general uniformity.  On the west coast of Canada the underbrush is so thick you can’t see  to either side of the path, while in Eastern Canada the greens, yellows, browns and reds of the dying maple leaves turns the forest into a jumble of hue.  Here the forest floor is a flat carpet of brown beech leaves, the sky above yellow.

We had to go into the city only once, and were glad we did, because its surprisingly unattractive, charmless streets  made us want to return to the beauty of the forest that much sooner.   We’d never have gone to Kaiserlautern had we not been invited to a friend’s birthday party, and it’s lucky for us she chose to hold it at Bremerhof,  where we stayed.  I can’t stay right now whether we’ll go there next fall to enjoy the forest all over over again, but it would sure be worth it.

To the holocaust deniers: come to Buchenwald

It was perhaps fitting that we should come upon Buchenwald through damp drizzle and fog, the autumn cold another burden on the stark emptiness of the place.

We’d been in nearby Weimar a week already, but until then had somehow found excuses not to go.  Now we were there, hesitating still, the half-open entrance gate with its cynical message, “to each his own” staring at us, if not inviting us in.

Nothing here invites you in.

An empty sweep of concrete foundations, each with a lone, low marker, some draped in flowers, are most of what is left.  That and the main museum, where the stories of who lived and died there, the perpetrators and the victims, are told in words and silent remnants, some in minute detail.

Thousands of buttons unearthed from a dump are displayed in a long, low case along with combs, dental retainers, shaving brushes – the wood rotting, the remnant brush a mere stubble.

Cold, hard metal cases enclose photos of men and women in prisoners’ garb, frontal and profile: mute, dead.

An empty cart used to carry bodies to the crematorium lies open and gaping.

Though Buchenwald was more a forced labour camp for the production of munitions and not designated a death camp, death lingers here like foul mist.

Sifting through the displays and wandering among the desolation, I kept recalling the words of Barack Obama as he stood in Buchenwald this past spring:

“To this day there are those who insist the Holocaust never happened.  This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts, a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history.”

I’m glad we went to Buchenwald, because I also learned something you don’t usually associate with the place.

The Soviets used the camp for five years after the war as a kind of ready-made prison of their own, warehousing former Nazis but also those who opposed the new repressive regime that was slowly overtaking the old.  Buchenwald was one of 10 camps the Soviets operated in that way.  I didn’t know any of that story before coming here.

It was only upon realisation that the existence of the camps would have seriously imperiled the new East German government’s image that they were dismantled.  The East Germans prefered to hush up talk of those years, but since German reunification that story, like thousands of others, is now being told in a relatively new museum opened in 1997.

A memorial to the un-named Soviet victims unearthed many years later is just beside the new museum.  As you enter the forest, you’re confronted with an array of randomly spaced stainless steel poles.  Each stands as a silent reminder that a body was found on that spot.  There are so many,  I couldn’t count them all.

Pittsburgh in a state of incline

Pittsburgh surprised me.

Not that I expected the city to live down to its insulting name tags – Ditchburgh, Pits-burgh – but I discovered during my five days there last week that the city doesn’t deserve them at all.

Maybe it did during the bad old days when soot-belching steel plants blackening the daytime skies, but those days haven’t been around for more than three decades.

But if the city has indeed transformed itself into a self-billed magnet for green, high-tech industry, there remain a few places where you can get a sense of what the place must have been like when its citizens lived and breathed among a smouldering mass of steel mills.

One of them is the Duquesne Incline (say doo-KANE.)  It’s a short, sweet ride up the riverbank to a spot overlooking three major rivers, a football stadium, countless bridges and the downtown skyline.

As a railway fan, I loved it.  Arriving at the lower station from across the street you climb a rickety, rusted-out stairway, cross an overpass, turn to enter the station, pay your four bucks to a man behind a cage sitting across from a pot-bellied stove, click through the turnstiles, turn the corner while taking in that familiar, comforting smell of musty wood and creosote, and enter the beautifully preserved wood-paneled car.

Except for a brief period in the early 1960s when the operators ran out of money, they’ve been hauling passengers and freight up and down this hill first under steam – and now under electric power – since 1877.  

As we slowly climbed the 30-degree slope above layers of Pennsylvania coal, a woman riding with us mentioned that some days you can spot deer and wild turkey roaming the underbrush near the rail  platform.

At the top you step into an unpretentious museum filled with icons and photos of Pittsburgh’s past.    I especially liked reading the long and detailed first-hand accounts of what it was like to live in the neighbourhood and take the tram every day to work – 250 people still do today – and was astounded how the gritty photos taken from the same spot 70 years ago contrasted so starkly with the clean, post-industrial city just below the windows.

As I slowly walked around the displays, I was thankful that local residents cared enough to save this moving landmark, still holding out after 132 years on generous applications of time, money, and teak oil varnish.

But the highlight for me was the beast’s roiling underbelly, where for five dimes extra I spent an hour taking in the rumble, gong and clatter of the engine room’s bullwheels, cable drum and wooden-toothed drive gear.

Ever been in a museum and found yourself reading without taking anything in?  I’m no engineer, but standing on the platform overlooking the incline’s working innards as clanging bells signaled the start of another trip, I couldn’t get enough of the displays.

From how they used carved blocks of Rock Maple as teeth for the main wheel to where they got the idea to place the original steam engine at a 90-degree angle to the tracks – a trick to save space on land, actually – I was fascinating by the technical ingenuity that went into its design and construction.

Back upstairs, I was in for another treat.  Spread out over half a wall are two showcases crammed with old and fading visitors’ postcards of inclined railways and lifts from around the world.

Going over the display was like stumbling through my life history.

Not only were there depictions of Vancouver’s  Grouse Mountain Skyride – both the old and the new – as well as Hong Kong’s Peak Tram, the Table Mountain cable car in Cape Town, and others in Lisbon, Paris, and Chamonix, but I was astounded to see a copy of a postcard I actually own from my three life-changing months of ski patrolling at Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights, Israel in 1980-81.

>heavy sigh<

I wish every road trip for work were like this.  Time to walk around and focus, get some kind of feel for the place I’m in, instead of the usual fly-taxi-work-taxi-fly routine.

An open letter to British Airways

Dear Mr. Airways,

Thank you very much for supplying an airplane with enough fuel to get us from Hamburg to Vancouver and back via your splendid new launchpads at Terminal 5, Heathrow.

I know you have financial difficulties at the moment, but we really hope you will put the small fortune we paid to good use in fixing up your shabby planes, or perhaps leasing a few new ones?

I ask this because before we board, some of us really enjoy the sight of a bird that looks like it can actually fly, instead of some ancient 747 whose tail section looks like a marauding band of vandals attacked it with chains before setting it on fire.

I would also at this time like to thank you for the excellent care British Airways gave our five pieces of luggage as they sat at Heathrow for one full day on our return journey.   Instead of having to lug home from the airport 115 kg worth of new clothes, cycling gear, off-the-shelf pharmaceuticals, six litres of maple syrup, chocolate chips and other stuff either laughably expensive or impossible to find in Germany, your delivery service saw fit to deliver our bags not only to our front door, but through the walk-in closet to the centre of our bedroom carpet.   Will you please offer this service on a regular basis?  It made journey’s end a most pleasant experience indeed.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, would you please better publicise the many improvements in our flying experience offered at your award-winning website, ba.com?

I ask this only because when we arrived at Hamburg airport to check in, we were informed that, contrary to our wishes to sit together, the entire 747 from London to Vancouver had a grand total of six seats available, all in the middle section, and spaced a good 10 rows apart.

Your employee in charge with getting us all through the automated check-in machines informed us in a somewhat snide tone that BA now offers passengers the opportunity to check in online 24 hours before departure.  Ostrich that I am, this had never occured to me.  Only through the assistance of an actual human being behind the counter were we able to at least sit two of us together.  I was left to squeeze in the middle row between a flatulent Amazon and an obvious candidate for  stomach stapling surgery.

For the return journey ex Vancouver I acquired the assistance of my IT-expert brother, whose GPS gadget is synced with Coordinated Universal Time down to the last millisecond.  At precisely .01 seconds past 2035 the day before departure I hit send to check in.  We received three seats together at the very back of the plane.   Too bad for those who logged in .02 seconds late.   What do you say to your customers who have no net access?  They do exist, you know.     Now I know why people wish for the good-old days when all it took to get a decent seat was arrive at the airport a reasonable time before departure, smile a lot, and if necessary, budge the queue.

Yours most sincerely,

Ian in Hamburg