Wind the Clock.
“This is my first time in Germany!” I excitedly told the driver of my carpool, a hitched ride from Amsterdam to Köln. We met in the cold air outside Hotel Ibis, the car an eclectic mix of persons all looking for cheap transport into Germany.
“And you’re going to.. Aachen?” he asked, in slow disbelief, making the soft guttural scratch of the German ‘ch’-sound. “Yup! Going to Aachen.” I smiled, without granting clarification, my own pronunciation so much more flat and lifeless. English: the neutral divide between lilting, dancing French and softly guttural German. Words pronounced by clicking the tongue definitively against the teeth, in the forefront of the mouth, largely ignoring the back of the throat, keeping our vowels chained beneath the tight restraint of our consonants.
It’s been a unique tour de Deutschland thus far, as I have planned my route via towns where my scattered collection of German friends reside. Aachen, Köln, Marburg, Darmstadt. Still to come: Mannheim, Stuttgart, Freiburg. I make a sharp cut across the western side of Germany, from the northern Netherlands border to the southern Swiss border. From Freiburg, I will take a bus into southern France and move just north of the Pyrénées, across the southern French landscape into Bordeaux.
It’s an incredible relief to be out of hostels and to stop paying exorbitant prices for B&B’s, which, due to weather and circumstance, were the only available options in Iceland and Scotland. In Amsterdam, the hostel was full of stone-cold potheads, dragging out their days in clouds of smoke in the dank basement entrance of the hostel. Three days of walking through the frozen city, watching snowflakes shimmer in the air, the sun a cold reminder of how far away summer actually is: It was enough. Make a beeline into Germany. Warm up the days with friends and couches and free cups of tea, forming a new resolution with self. Fill out job applications and purchase watercolor pencils. Begin to sketch again. Move south, until the short, dying bursts of cold and snow have disappeared into the folds of the warm bosom of a later spring. May, not March. Leave March behind in its own cold dregs and move south, for god’s sake. Leave this awful, bone-chilling cold behind–the long evenings twisting restlessly beneath too-thin sheets, the frozen toes, the heavy bulk of blankets and sweaters and socks, the unrelenting frustration at the sting, the bite, the chill–and move south.
To beaches, to sunshine, to shorts. From beer to wine, from heavy to light, from this collection of snapshots with friends to form the deliberate montage of self. Moving toward a purpose. Searching.
And all the while, with one clear direction in the back of my mind:
Move. South.