A Time of Birds

by Helen Moat

  That day back in 1990, we’d walked the river to the Rhine Falls as the light faded out. There was no one there but us, as we kicked through wizened leaves in the chill of dusk. Now, here with Jamie, the place was heaving with tourists. Japanese, French and Spanish mingled with tens of other languages. I squirmed at the crude tourism of the place – a far cry from that muted winter’s evening when I’d come with Tom. Jamie and I didn’t linger, climbing out of Neuhausen am Rheinfall and on through the tangle of suburban streets that led to the old centre of Schaffhausen.

  When I’d visited with Tom, we’d wandered through the same streets and squares of Renaissance buildings decorated with frescos and surrounded by statues. We’d enjoyed the autumn-winter taste of charred chestnuts – our senses heightened with fresh love. Here in the present, the place was bright with spring sunshine. Jamie and I found a place for the night with a couple of artists, where I made pasta on a hot-ring among the tubes of oils and paintbrushes and great canvasses of abstract paintings.

  After our makeshift meal, Jamie and I looked at the map to work out our route over to the Danube. This would be my first major challenge, and the thought of the hills that lay between the two rivers made me nervous.

  ‘We could put the bikes on a bus,’ I suggested.

  ‘No, we can’t do that.’ Jamie’s voice was firm. ‘We’re cycling. You can do it.’

  I nodded contritely. Jamie was increasingly taking over the role of his father and I was pleased that he was growing in confidence daily.

  *

  Just after 8am, we cycled out of Schaffhausen. The road eased us up its incline and on through a narrow valley, squeezing between thick woodland, before opening out into meadows dotted with sloping farmhouses and solid wooden barns. The way took us past bales of hay and ruler-straight woodpiles. Glossy Swiss tractors lay in farmyards, looking like they’d never seen a muddy field. These were the rural scenes of Switzerland I knew so well from the past.

  I struggled on, the incline now sharper. My legs felt like lead and the pedals fought against me as I pushed down on them. My head, still sluggish in the early morning, held onto a stubborn resentment against the rise.

  Around Bargen, we cycled into Germany, then promptly back into Switzerland, the two border signs just yards from each other. On the edge of the village we turned right onto Steigstrasse. The name told me everything I needed to know: ‘Climb Street’ was like a wall in front of us. We dismounted and wheeled the bikes up the narrow country lane, joking we needed to rest our numb bottoms. It was a bike-hike, as Jamie christened our new mode of travel. But it didn’t matter; I was pleased to slow down to a walking pace and take in the views around us. We headed on through forest and onto the plateau, weaving through wildflower meadows. Overhead, a bird dipped and rose with the hills that unfolded in waves of yellows and greens before us.

  The skylark!

  One early summer, just before my father left Wood Lane forever to enter the sterile world of the care home, I had taken him and my mother to Eire. I wanted to show him the parts of Ireland he couldn’t reach on his day trips. Tom and I had rented a cottage overlooking Dingle Bay. I’d planned to take a boat out into the bay to show my father Fungie, the resident dolphin, but he’d looked at the boat and shaken his head before shuffling back to the car. We’d climbed the pass over to Brandon and drove the Ring of Kerry, his head drooping into his lap. We’d taken him to the Burren in County Clare, where Tom and I had scrambled over the table-flat slabs of limestone to find early orchids, mountain avens, even spring gentians, but my father had hung back, disinterested. Then in County Mayo, on the dunes above a littering of islands, he’d lifted his head and craned his neck skyward.

  ‘The skylark!’

  We’d stood there together, my father and I, watching the dizzy skylarks bombing and flittering and shooting vertically up into the sky before dropping down again like a plumb line. We tilted our heads backwards to spot the birds so high above us – small dots in the heavens, a darting of energy. And from these tiny birds, ping-ponging high above the Earth, came their song sharp on the air, yet also gentle, sweet, bubbling, intricate. I looked at my father and saw the old light in his eyes, an excitement that I thought had gone forever. But it was to be short-lived, as fleeting as the skylark’s movements across the clouds.

  ‘The skylark!’ I said to Jamie.

  We stood amid the beauty of Switzerland’s uplands and observed the bird’s acrobatic twittering and flight, just as I had done with my father in Country Mayo. A moment captured, a moment repeated: father and daughter; mother and son. And I silently promised myself that I would never allow my depression to cause me to lose sight of Jamie, or the skylark.

  From Blumberg, Jamie and I freewheeled to Donaueschingen, zig-zagging through German country lanes and on past farms reeking of cow manure and fields of pungent rapeseed that tickled the nose. The air was a cold compress slapped on my face and the iciness of wind caught my throat.

  We followed the ditch canal into Donaueschingen with satisfaction: we’d completed the Rhine from Rotterdam as far as Schaffhausen and had reached the source of the Danube. I’d conquered my fear of those first hills and made it across. It didn’t matter that I’d wheeled the bike up the steepest sections. I’d done it, and, more importantly, I was emotionally alive.

  GERMANY AND AUSTRIA

  1. Starting Out on the Danube

  From its source at Donaueschingen, to its mouth at the Black Sea, the Danube is 1,768 long miles – it is Europe’s second longest river (after the Volga). The Rhine we’d left behind was less than half the length of the Danube, and the journey ahead, following the twists and turns of the river, would take us through eight countries: Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania.

  The scale of our journey was now sinking in. Apart from a short section before Schaffhausen, the Rhine route had been largely flat, and while large sections of the Danube offered easy cycling through floodplains, there were challenges to be met in the vineyards of Croatia, and in Romania where the Carpathians drop down to the river.

  Finding the karst spring at Donaueschingen’s castle, I was disappointed to see it surrounded by rubble, planks and scaffolding: the Danube’s source was under restoration and a mess. It was an anti-climax after the pictures I had seen of the spring surrounded by a grand ornamental wall and wrought-iron railing, with an imposing marble statue of a woman and child representing the hills and the Danube – Mother Baar pointing the way east to the child, the Danube.

  While Donaueschingen has grandly claimed the river’s source, the Danube actually has two sources on higher ground: the Brig river that begins deep in the Black Forest just northwest of Furtwangen, and the Brigach that flows from the north. The two rivers conjoin at Donaueschingen and it’s at this point on the outskirts of the town (not in the castle park) that the river becomes the Danube, keeping its name in all its different forms to the Black Sea.

  As Jamie and I needed to find overnight accommodation, we headed for tourist information. The helpful assistant pointed us in the direction of the Jägerhaus, the Hunter’s House, lying deep in woodland north of the town. When we arrived at the guesthouse, there was no one there but the owners. We parked our bikes in a dim hall with a bowling alley and blinked through the darkness to the reception area. The woman took us upstairs to a roomy suite with a kitchenette.

  ‘Great. We can we cook for ourselves.’

  ‘Not for one night,’ the woman said sourly. ‘It’s too much work.’

  ‘Ah, we’ll eat in the restaurant then.’

  ‘No, it’s not possible. We closed the restaurant last year.’

  Arriving for breakfast in the morning, I found, to my surprise, the dining room filled with guests. The husband courteously served breakfast in breeches, checked shirt, a western bow-tie and cowboy boots, but without making eye contact. The guests whispered among themselves, and we ate our breakfast in muted discomfort, the room having all the atmosphere of a
school examination hall. I looked at the hunting paraphernalia strung around the room and then to the woodland outside, almost expecting Little Red Riding Hood to burst through the door followed by the wolf and the hunter. I suppressed a desire to giggle. It really wouldn’t do.

  *

  There was a sense of anticipation as we cycled out of the town to a new river and a new stage of the journey. The valley lay wide and flat in front of us, the path parting wildflower meadows edged with blood-red poppies. A series of sharp lefts and rights led us through open countryside, and we lost the Danube for a while until we crossed the bridge at Pfohren. With a short, sharp rise out of the village, we were on our way again, loving the speed of the wheels on the tarmac.

  At Tuttlingen, the riverside park tempted us with its sculptures and hammocks, but we pedalled on. Less able to resist Mühlheim, perched on a skyline ridge with an imposing reconstructed medieval castle at one end, Jamie and I pushed our bikes up the steep-sided hill and under a gateway of cobbled stones. We paused to quench our thirst at the fountain under a statue of a mother carrying a basket on her head, her children clutching her apron. The main street of pastel timber-frames stretched the length of the ridge, the ancient houses bulging and sagging with age.

  The landscape changed again from wide meadow to narrow wooded gorge. After Fridingen, pinnacles and walls of white chalk protruded from thick deciduous woodland. The fast tarmac paths soon deteriorated to a rough gravel track that rose and fell on the hillside. This quiet backwater of the Upper Danube was possibly even more enchanting than the Middle Rhine. Palaces, castles, churches, monasteries, ruins and grottos called to us on the skyline. I yearned to stop and explore, but we still had sixty miles to go before reaching our destination with its hilltop youth hostel at Sigmaringen.

  *

  We were both speaking German, but weren’t communicating.

  ‘Where? Is-tan-bul? Unbelievable.’

  The cyclist sitting at the next table next to ours on the terrace café was on a ten-day cycling trip along the Danube. He’d complained about the ‘freshness’ of the weather and the winds. For me the weather was perfect, with its partial sunshine and light cooling breezes.

  ‘Yes, Istanbul. But we’ve almost three months and we can take it slowly.’

  ‘I just can’t imagine that,’ he said, frowning. ‘To have to unpack and repack every day – and live like Gypsies for months. That can’t be easy.’

  ‘It’s okay, actually. We don’t have much with us, so it doesn’t take long to gather our stuff. And I love the adventure. Around every bend, there’s a new view and a new experience.’

  The cyclist shook his head in puzzlement. I turned around again to talk to Jamie. From behind me I heard him muttering, ‘Istanbul. Madness.’

  As we cycled away from the terrace garden in Bertoldsheim, I thought about the German cyclist’s words. Everything I’d said to him was true. When we’d set out at the beginning of May, I hadn’t known how I would feel after weeks on the road. Would it get to the stage where I wouldn’t want to sit on a saddle again? Would I yearn for home? But the further south and east I travelled, the more joyful I felt. There was something wonderfully liberating about turning the pedals and waiting for the world to unfold. On the German Danube, we spun through buttercup and wildflower meadows of ox-eye, viper’s bugloss and yellow rattle and on through poppy-splashed barley fields. We bumped along cobbled streets of rainbow-painted towns and villages. Just outside Donauwörth, we slipped into a beer tent to listen to the locals singing Bavarian folk songs in Lederhosen and Tracht (traditional costume for women) with a belly full of Weissbier. It was only mid-afternoon.

  Once a grass snake slithered across our path – and a fawn ran out in front of our bikes. We saw an enormous carp rise from the water as we ate our Butterbrot on the edge of the river, sending rings across the broad width of its surface. On the Danube’s backwaters, we passed ponds of screeching frogs, sounding something between a chorus of demented Donald Ducks and a battery of gunfire. Storks adorned riverside meadows and herons stood frozen on the Danube’s banks. I dismounted from my bike to watch one of the slender herons on the Danube’s edge, I, too, frozen on the river’s edge, as I waited to see if the bird would move from its spot.

  If I were asked to choose a bird that best matched my father, it would have to be the heron: solitary, still, watching, sharp-eyed. My father was drawn to this elegant creature, too, recording multiple sightings in his diary in his usual shorthand: Saw a heron in country … Saw a heron in flight … Saw a heron at the Lagan Bridge. Praise the Lord … Watched a heron for a long time. I saw from his diary entries that the birds and his God were an outlet for the emotions he was unable to express. When he abandoned his expressions of faith, the birds and his countryside, he had abandoned himself. It was a truly dark place.

  *

  As Jamie and I continued on our journey, the smell of wild garlic in the Danube woodlands filled our nostrils. The gentle two-note of the cuckoo still accompanied us, dipping in and out of our soundscape each day. Continuing through Bavaria, the accents grew even thicker, the landscape more rural.

  Bavaria, along with Baden Württemberg, is Germany’s most affluent state. Everything was solid here, from the sturdy houses to the bulky farmers in their dungarees and brace-held trousers and the housewives in their nylon housecoats plucking fruit in their gardens or preparing vegetables under shady trees.

  They reminded me of my mother, who also wore a nylon housecoat throughout the day, although she preferred to chop vegetables in the kitchen, venturing only into our small garden to pull stalks of rhubarb for pies, and scallions and lettuces for salad. She hated the sunlight.

  My father, in contrast, revelled in the outdoors: the songs of the sky, the slap of wet grass against his leg and the pungent smell of damp earth and vegetation. At this time of year, we tramped our fields edged with the white blossom of hawthorn, the air filled with its scent, just as it was here in Germany.

  What was it that had drawn my parents to each other? Perhaps the fact that my mother was a farmer’s daughter. She lived in County Down, the adjacent county from my father’s home county of Armagh. He’d met my mother at a Brethren conference, seduced by her eyes, dark as wells, across the pews. My father had cycled out to her family farmhouse near the small town of Dromore, intent on wooing my mother. He liked to tell us the story of that first visit: how he’d cycled along the drive to the large panelled door and rang the bell. When one of my mother’s sisters opened the door, it almost fell off its hinges. No one used the front drive or door, preferring to slip through the back door in the farmyard.

  My mother’s many brothers teased my father for years after about his grand entrance. My uncles were pranksters – and loved to play practical jokes on their three sisters’ wooers, whether it was letting down tyres or hiding their bicycles up trees. Sometimes I wondered if my father was drawn as much to the countryside where my mother lived as to her large brown eyes, while my mother was equally drawn to the boy from the town. During their courtship, my father thought nothing of the fourteen-mile round trip on his bicycle, along the twisting roads of the Down drumlins – in sunshine, wind and snow. Later, he abandoned his bicycle for the car that became something of a love affair despite his affiliation with the outdoors. But he would roll the window down, whatever the weather.

  In spite of the fragile relationship I now had with my father, I knew I was very like him. When we went outside, it was as if something reconnected in our brains. We both felt alive. The countryside was our natural home. As I cycled on along the Danube, I knew he too would have once revelled in its nature on two wheels: the rising carp, the racket of frogs, the bolting fawn and the light playing off blossom trees.

  I’d turned my back on him all those years ago – after that terrible night in in our kitchen – but still he was here at my side, occupying a stubborn place somewhere inside my skull that simply wouldn’t leave.

  *

  2. In the Wars
with Klaus

  We arrived in Ingolstadt under heavy skies that were befitting this medieval city of castles, towers, walls and gates and grand gothic buildings. It had sprung up around a fortress – its horseshoe ends meeting at the Danube to create a loosely circular enclosure – and the locals refer to themselves as Schanzer, the ‘people of the fortification’. It’s here that scientist Victor Frankenstein built his monster.

  Klaus, our CouchSurfing host for the night, lived outside the fortified old town, across the railway track and down a quiet suburban street. I’d written to him further up the Danube to ask if he could put us up for the night. He’d replied: You’re very welcome. Just one condition: my team 1860 is playing against Kiel in a relegation match and I have to watch the match the night you are here.

  No problem, I’d reassured Klaus, wondering how a football team had ended up as a number (it transpired 1860 was Munich’s lesser known team, and its number referred to its founding date). While I’d promised Klaus I wouldn’t hinder him from watching his match, I inadvertently managed to cause a distracting commotion in the middle of the game. Perhaps it was the wine our hospitable host had plied us with, or perhaps it was just a case of my scattiness, but on returning from the toilet, I’d forgotten the clear glass doors that separated the hall from the living room. As I looked at the TV screen ahead, I went slap – straight into the doors – nose first.

  There was blood everywhere: on the tiled floor and all down my clothes. Klaus was torn between my plight and the football match. 1860 won and I slunk off, embarrassed, to wipe up the mess and change my clothes. It was a pure slapstick comedy moment – and despite the hefty nosebleed, it was mainly my pride that had taken a dent, not my nose. The irony of me losing so much blood when ‘safely indoors’ was not lost on me, as Jamie and I hadn’t had any accidents on the bikes, bar a cut finger on that third day when I’d fallen into the ditch.