Turning

by Jessica J. Lee

  spring

  It’s the third weekend in March, the vernal equinox, and Brandenburg hangs with the middling air of early spring, warm but not hot, clouds breaking the brightness of the day. I’ve reached Königs Wusterhausen, my bike laden with gear: pannier bags filled with food, clothes, my tent and stove. My sleeping bag is strapped to the rack, all of it tied together with a web of straps and buckles. It’s surprisingly light despite the load, barely slowing my pace as I push southward along Bahnhofstraße.

  I cobbled together this route at the last minute: I’d thought to go east with Coco, cycling towards the Polish border, but she couldn’t make it, so I’m heading southward instead. I reach Zeesen and cycle past it, turning down the lane towards Großer Tonteich.

  In autumn, the trees here had been thinning, and now they remain stark, bloom not yet arriving. The branches hang tightly, awaiting the moment to unfold themselves, so there’s a stillness awaiting warmth, like a breath held. In a week or so, the air will be thick with pollen.

  I pass Großer Tonteich, speeding along the southern edge of the asphalt road past the campsite and into the woods, where the trail turns to packed sand. The forest arrives thickly, a stark wall of pine with rough tracks running in every direction. I follow the way to the right and cycle a kilometre past a plantation of spruce, which doesn’t grow so well in Brandenburg’s sand. It is a small copse, though, all Christmas-tree-sized trunks, a forest in miniature. It ends, and then the forest is just plantation pine: stark and managed industrial forest as far as I can see. I feel suddenly as though I’ve wandered into a much larger world than the one before, the miniature spruces and sand tracks having turned to towering Scots pine and industrial-scale roads.

  The recreational trail disappears and I find myself on a logging road, haphazardly lined with loose cobbles, roughly dumped into the tracks of the lane. The sand to either side is moulded into the wide ridges of tractor tyres, making it impossible to cycle through. I stop for a moment and press my hand into the tyre tracks. Each row of treads is bigger than my hand.

  The trees here are bare, lopped so that just their green tops remain. It’s a brutal stretch of wood, clearly in the midst of being cut. It’s early on a Saturday morning, so no one is at work. I pass an intersection in the logging roads and see a small firepit – a rare sight in the middle of a forest, as fires are strictly regulated in German forests – and a few empty beer bottles and drink cartons wasting into the ground, as if there had been a celebration a few days before I arrived. The trees near the intersection are spray-painted with neon green. It’s usually just a stripe, a quick marker denoting trees for cutting or boundaries, but here I see names sprayed on to the trunks. One reads Tony, and I wonder where he is now, what he intends to do with the tree he’s marked as his.

  I’m struggling along the trail, unable to cycle. I’m no better on foot, wheeling my packed bike beside me. The trail is scaled for someone far larger than me. I imagine the logging machine in the animated film Fern Gully, which I’d had on VHS when I was six, the diesel-fuelled enormity of the clear-cutting machine. This road is sized for that. I check my map and see that I’ve another two kilometres before I reach the road. I keep to the edges, where the ground is packed with pine needles.

  Fontane travelled through this region by road and water, but for the most part, he travelled in the opposite direction than me, from Spreewald in the south-east of Brandenburg. His journey took him through villages from Wendisch and on towards Blossin, not far from where I eventually reach the main road. Here, the road curves and cuts south-east, on towards the village Groß Eichholz, where it rises steeply and then levels out on to a flat plain.

  In Fontane’s fourth volume of the Rambles, he described the villages of the region as solitary, with ancient pear trees on every lawn, a place of quiet rural living. ‘Villages of solitude,’ he wrote. My trip through it is much the same, a long and quiet ride, broken only by cobbled village roads where I see no one, but I know much has changed in the intervening years.

  I spend the stretches between houses singing medleys of whatever rises from the depths of my mind – Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and Spice Girls songs woven together – finding a smooth cadence with my pedals.

  Then, at the village of Kehrigk, I turn on to a forest track again. The lane takes me past a football field, dusky and overgrown, where three young boys are kicking a dusty ball. One of them kicks it over the fence, and it lands near me on the path. I throw it back over, and though they’re speaking to one another in Arabic, the oldest boy turns to me and shouts ‘Danke!’ in cheerful German. I smile and watch them play for a while, grabbing a handful of cashews from my bag before cycling off down the track.

  A few minutes later, I’m rounding the eastern tip of Neuendorfer See, an enormous, sandy lake in the Unterspreewald region. The road here is freshly laid and black, warm in the afternoon sunlight. It curves with the edge of the lake, dropping me at campground on the lake’s shore. Mobile homes stand sentry, awaiting the season. A stark waterfront restaurant overlooks a dock of angling boats, and just one customer sits out front, beer in hand.

  I hop off my bike and loosen the kick-stand. Having stopped, my legs are suddenly soft, unstable, forty kilometres into the day. Bending down to the ground, I stretch until I can see the campground behind me, upside down. The man at the restaurant is watching.

  I want a quick swim here in this windy stretch of water before I continue onwards towards my campsite. The lake is fairly shallow – not unlike Müggelsee – lined with sticky brown sand, and littered with mussel and clam shells. A few ducks and coots paddle in the shallows by the small beach, but the shore is otherwise quiet. I undress, conscious that I’m being watched from a distance, and then step down into the water. My feet sink into the sandy muck and my muscles tense in the cold, my legs exhausted. I swim out a few feet, not too deep, and dip my head into the water.

  On a summer day, I imagine this lake would be beautiful, but far too busy. Now, though, the sun has hidden behind a patch of white clouds – they’re dotting the entire sky now – so it feels cold, dim, and I don’t stay in long. I dress back on the shore again and then wheel my bike back towards the road, on towards Springsee.

  —

  The road towards the campsite is grown-over, a narrow strip running between the pines. Every five hundred metres, a sign informs me that I’m almost there. To my left, fifty metres into the woods, a tall fence runs parallel to the road, signposted with warnings. It’s a military training ground. The forest to my right, however, is perfectly planted in parallel rows and seems to run on forever. Ahead of me, the road dips down a steep hill and I find myself at the campground, which sits silently at the shore of Springsee.

  The office of the campground is closed, its metal shutters drawn, but I’d called earlier in the day and the owner had kindly suggested I pick any of the tent pitches on the map and set myself up. She would come in on Sunday morning – despite normally being closed – so I could register. At the end of the call, she had complimented my German – she had been very patient with my explaining that I was coming by bike with a tent and that, yes, I knew it would be very cold – and wished me well, so I already felt quite certain I would enjoy my stay.

  The gravel lane into the campground slopes towards the lake and then forks into two, with small cabins in one direction and mobile homes in another. Beyond them all, the wooded slopes open up to reveal tent pitches, secluded at the shore of the lake. I pick one near to the path, ten feet from the water, and begin to unpack.

  I have my tent up within minutes – I did the complicated work of clipping the fly-sheet and the tent together the last time I had it up – and then look at the time. It’s not even half past four, and I’ve to fill the entire night ahead of me, alone. I’ve never camped alone. I think of how I would have felt ten years ago, on my own like this. I think of the camping trips I’d planned with Jacob. I momentarily wish for a friend to be with me, but then decide to make the most of th
e time alone and take a short walk. I lock my bike to a tree near my tent and set off down the lake-side path, collecting twigs for my fire.

  Mobile homes and makeshift cabins line the hillside, covered over with deep-green tarps for the winter. For the most part, they remain shut. Just a few people seem to have opened their homes for the spring: there is the distant sound of radio fuzz and a string of fairy lights glowing at the top of the hill. Otherwise, it is quiet. The lake is growing more still and glassy as the minutes slip towards sundown.

  Carrying a handful of pine cones and twigs, I walk to the lake’s eastern tip, then back again, noticing that three men are now standing on the hillside, watching the path. I should say ‘hello’, I think, but I don’t quite feel comfortable, so I keep walking, their eyes on the back of me. The path curves around the western tip of the lake, past a rusting condom dispenser – five kinds of condoms and five kinds of lube available at the turn of a metal knob – and up another hill towards a cluster of cabins. Behind me, a couple in a red Volkswagen trundle up the path. I wave at them and continue walking. When I pass by again on my way back, they have unloaded. The man stands on the porch of their cabin trying to light a disposable tray of charcoal.

  Back near the centre of the campground, an old man rounds the corner and startles me. I’ve not expected to see so many people, the place is so silent. He stops me, asking if I’ve seen his pug, it’s lost. He looks frantic, peering up every narrow trail between the cabins. I shake my head and tell him I will look, but as I walk on I hear him greeting his dog with relief, the crisis ended. The place is a series of vignettes.

  The sun is beginning to dip towards the horizon, warming the sky to pink. I return to my tent and unpack my stove, pulling out a sachet of dried soup and a bottle of water. Squatting on the ground, I load my stove with a handful of twigs and drop in a crumpled scrap of newspaper, the corner alight. It roars into flame quickly, then peters out, so I feed it some more paper and twigs until it burns steadily. The water boils in minutes, and I pour out half of it for a cup of coffee. The rest I save for lentil soup, which I leave to simmer on the stove. I’ve packed Brötchen too, so tear off the corner of a roll and dip it in my coffee.

  The sky over Springsee has grown more saturated, a thick rose hue glowing at the tops of the trees. Contrails from two planes cross overhead, reflecting in the lake, marking treasure in its depths. I leave my soup to cool off a bit and go sit down by the shore, stepping on to the edge of a crooked, ageing dock. I’ll swim here in the morning, when it’s officially spring. For now, cross-legged, I sip my coffee from a metal cup and watch the sun go down. Watching the lake from here, I think of the dock back at the cottage, where I slip my legs over the far end to see the sunset. It seems strange to me that I was once so afraid of that water, that I hadn’t seen the beauty in it.

  In past summers, when my best friend Rachel would come to the cottage, we would canoe and sing ‘Land Of The Silver Birch’. Rachel knows Canadian camp songs better than anyone, a legacy of months spent at Georgian Bay as a camp counsellor. I imagine that her time spent teaching children to canoe served her well with me, useless with a paddle. The second verse of the ‘Land Of The Silver Birch’ is about sleeping near the water’s edge, the lake ‘silent and still’, and as I watch the contrails over Springsee fade, I hum to myself quietly. I long for Rachel to be with me, but instead I’ve a book to keep me company when it is night. Time slows in the silence. Night is slow to come. It’s not yet seven.

  Back at my tent, the flap tied back, I sit with my legs outside, eating soup from the pot. I over-prepared, packed a tupperware full of marinated tofu as well, so I eat that too. By the end of my meal I’m so exhausted and so full that I zip the tent securely shut and slip into my sleeping bag. The last glint of light still hangs over the pines across the way, and the tent still lets in the faint glow of the sky.

  I pull out my spare bike light – using it as a book torch – and dip back into my novel. I’m nearing the end of The Tiger’s Wife – thick in its stories of the lone tiger in the woodland, post-war village fields trapped with landmines – when the sound starts. A low patter at first, like oil spluttering in a pan, but then louder, like fireworks breaking up into the sky. I lie still and listen. There’s only darkness outside, but then the sound comes again, echoing this time, a sound like gunfire ripping into the forest across from me. It takes me a moment to recognise that it is gunfire – or blanks, at least – coming from the military training ground nearby. It’s the site used by the Bundeswehr for combat training. I’d seen signs posted nearby, but I hadn’t realised it was this close.

  Since the taxi accident, I’ve been terrified by loud sounds – fireworks, the pop of a balloon, the blaring horn of a passing car – and have struggled to regain my calm in those startled moments, as terror returned with every unexpected sound. But now, the gunfire pattering in the distance, I’m okay. I lie for some minutes, listening to their ripple and crack over the silent lake, and then go back to reading. I’ve found some fragment of strength in the solitude.

  I fall asleep at some point, but am awoken by a dog calling from the lake. I think of the lost pug and then remember he’s been found. The sound comes again, but it isn’t a dog – it is coming from the water, a coot perhaps, barking in the night. Something rustles outside my tent, and I begin to worry about my bike being stolen.

  I sit shivering – it’s just three degrees overnight – until I decide to get up, peer outside my tent and tie the flysheet to my bike bell. I slip out into the darkness and find it more silent than before, even the coots have gone. I laugh at myself momentarily, but then tie the thin cord to the bell anyway, knowing that I’ll sleep better if I’m tied to my bike and to a sound I’ll recognise.

  I grow restless in the night, cold creeping through my sleeping bag – I’m at its lower temperature limit – and into the air. In some moments I’m awake, pressing the button on my light so I can see my breath cloud in the cold air, and then I’m in a dream-like haze, my mind racing with thoughts of the tent zipper sliding upwards, what I might do. I manage some rest until five, when the sky should turn from black to slate blue, and then push my head out of the tent to find that the world is grey, prickled with cold rain.

  I’m worn out from the night, gazing at the lake, now rippling and dark. It had been so beautiful the night before, and I immediately regret not swimming then. But it is technically spring, and I want to celebrate it with a swim. Springsee – spring in German can mean a fluvial ‘spring’ or, simply, ‘to jump’ – seemed an apt choice.

  I slip into the lake naked – no one else is around – and swim out into the centre. It seems warmer here, the lake less rippled by rain, so I linger a while, letting the cold wake my limbs. I feel my skin tighten, my mind sharpen – it feels the same as caffeine but clearer, more visceral – and then swim back to shore, rushing back to the relative warmth of my tent. I dress inside, trailing bits of leaf and dirt in after me, and then light my stove to make breakfast.

  Once my porridge is cooked, I shelter halfway inside my tent, warming my hand over the fire while I spoon hot porridge into my mouth with the other. I’ve downed a cup of coffee and am racing through the porridge, burning my tongue. The wet spring morning is so cold, but I am warm.

  ember

  Late the next Friday evening, the sky occluded with grey, I take the train to Frankfurt an der Oder. It rains the whole way, the same cold, miserly drizzle that has lingered since spring arrived. The train is a slow-moving local, stopping frequently as it winds its way through the countryside south-east of the city. It traces the same routes I cycled last week on my way to Springsee, before cutting north-east again towards the Polish border.

  I try to gaze out the window, but there’s only blackness outside and the beading of rain on the glass. I watch the carriage instead, the teenagers riding from one stop to another, a young woman reading a paperback. It’s a one-carriage train, stark but intimate. I shouldn’t be taking the trip. My disse
rtation is due at the end of the month, and I should be spending every minute at work. For a while, I balance my laptop on my knees and work, but the sound of my keyboard clacking echoes through the carriage. I grow self-conscious and return to watching the darkness outside the window. The other passengers watch me like I watch them, furtively, out of the corners of their eyes.

  When I reach Frankfurt an der Oder – a town just on the Polish border at the banks of the Oder River, which lends its name to help distinguish the town from Frankfurt am Main – the rain has lifted. It is lamp-lit and silent in the town. I wheel my bike to a nearby hotel and check into a stark, simple room with starched sheets. There’s a television with a handful of German channels, all playing historical documentaries late at night. One of them is about a castle, I think, so I let it play for a while. I don’t have a TV at home, so I spend time on every channel, delighting at the glow in the darkened room before falling into sleep. Tonight is a brief stop-over, a small luxury I’m affording myself on my way to Helenesee. I’d wanted a night away from the city, a break in the monotony of proof-reading and editing. The anonymity of the budget hotel room feels grounding, oddly restorative.

  The morning is bright, the grey has gone at last. I wake up early, eat Brötchen and boiled eggs for breakfast, and set out, first winding my bike through the small centre of town, towards the river. I pass a handful of gothicstyle brick buildings and then find myself on a small side road leading to Ziegenwerder, a small island in the Oder, overlooking Poland. It is said that the island once served as pasture for goats – Ziegen means ‘goats’ – brought here by their herder, Gottlieb. The island’s soft grasses fed the goats of the city for some time, until, local legend says, the herder fell in love with a young beauty across the water and sought to make his way across. The effort ended badly. The river is wide. I gaze across it, towards the Polish town of Slubice, once a part of Frankfurt an der Oder, where flat stretches of grass south of the town glint in the sunlight. The Oder is wide and glassy, flowing steadily. I walk the length of the island. There used to be a bathing club here too, swimming off the banks of the island.