Turning

by Jessica J. Lee

  I slide my bag on to the rack of my green bicycle and slip out, locking the door behind me. It’s a thirty-kilometre journey, leading first through the northern stretch of Prenzlauer Berg and then on through Weißensee. I follow the bike lane past the turn-off for Weißer See, a smile growing into the corners of my mouth. Anne and I have taken to swimming there on weekdays, like I used to do with Jacob. A convivial intimacy has grown into the place that had held sadness. Joy too. Last week, as we swam from the shore towards the raft that houses the fountain, the enormous jut of white water came to life, springing fifty feet into the air in front of us. It scared the wits out of Anne and me, and we floated laughing wholeheartedly at the surface of the lake.

  I pass the turn-off and slip further north, ducking between the skinny tram tracks that lead out towards Karow. Here, the bike lane joins the pavement, and I cycle along dodging weekend walkers and the overgrowing hedges that lean out over it. May is brimming over. The houses of the city give way to fields of golden rape. The chestnuts are dappled with spikes of pink flower. The air is a musk of lilac. The cherries have already finished, their pale remains carpeting the ground. I count the young leaves of linden as I pass them, my favourite tree spreading itself across the city. As I pass each plant, I name it: Raps. Kastanien. Flieder. Kirsche. Linde.

  At Karow, I stop to check my map. In the year of swimming, I have not rectified the problem of travelling without a paper one: I pull out my phone, reluctantly sliding my fingers over the webbing of roads that covers the city. I feel no shame about it any more. I have a small book of lakes and trails in my bag that I rarely look at. The frail enormity of a paper map wouldn’t serve me well on my bike, and I can never fold them properly anyway. Instead, I’m a small blue dot, pulsing and bright like the lakes.

  The route through Buch leads me down a road so poorly cobbled I have to walk. The stones slip in and out of their places. Pools of pitch have been laid over the gaps. It is a road that feels as though it has been at a standstill, like the sand tracks of Brandenburg, the places untransformed. At the end of the road, there is a forest track, and beyond that, a country road lined with fields.

  I’m singing: repeating the first verse of ‘Land Of The Silver Birch’ to myself as I pedal. My foot hits the bottom of its rotation with every Boomdiddy-ah-da. As it is my last new lake – for now, at least – I wonder if I ought to sing a song about Berlin and Brandenburg, so I rewrite the song as I cycle, singing the verses in alternation, lingering with pleasure over my silly lines:

  Land of the pine and birch,

  Home of the bear

  Where now the mighty wolf wanders again

  Blue lake and sandy shore

  I will return once more

  Boomdiddy-ah-da, Boomdiddy-ah-da,

  Boomdiddy-ah-da, eh.

  Within an hour, my voice exhausted, I reach Bernau. Its Plattenbau houses rise in the periphery of my vision. I pass the curving arc of the old town fortress and turn northwards, following Ladeburger Chaussee out of the town, towards a field of wind turbines. I’ve never been here without rain.

  It is hot today, and a dry wind is cutting across the fields, dredging up the dust. It rolls sidelong across the flats on either side of the road, near the Lobetal bunker. I hold my breath as I cycle through it, the thick cloud of red dust swirling over me. On the other side of the fields, the air is clear.

  At Lobetal, near Mechesee, I cut into the woods. I can hear the bells from the forest church ringing, rhythmic and distant as a bird call. It echoes through the pines. The road turns to track, lined with dried pine needles and caked with mounds of soft white sand. I ride my bike for a few hundred yards and then slow, hopping off to a walk. The trail towards Hellsee is thick and pillowed. I’ll take my time with it.

  The pines thicken towards Mechesee, and as the trail dips towards the top of the lake – near where I swam some weeks ago, when it was still cold – I follow the trail markers for the 66-Seen-Wanderung. Three other trail markers are painted on to the trees – red stripes, green stripes, the blue circle of the 66-Seen and one in yellow – so I keep an eye out, careful to take the trail that runs northward. The track is joined by a smaller trail, where a man on a bicycle with battered panniers wheels past me, speeding ahead. A few moments later, he appears again, back-tracking and lost.

  ‘Wohin fährst du?’ I ask him. Where are you riding to? He looks at me in confusion.

  ‘Wo ist der Weg?’ he asks me. Where is the trail? I ask him which trail he wants, as there are a few, and point in the direction of each of them. Hearing my accent, he looks at me in confusion, as if he doesn’t quite believe me. I see his brow furrow, and then he shakes his head and wanders off. I wonder if perhaps he doesn’t trust me, a foreigner in his home landscape. I think of Fontane, lamenting the idea that someone from abroad might write his home landscape first. But I know the trail here.

  I carry on, past a plantation of larches that appear beaded and decorated in the sunlight, and on past a marshy stretch of brook scattered with alder. It isn’t as dramatic as the alder carr along the Briese, but it has the same winding, otherworldly quality. The trees create dark and dappled shadows on the water’s surface. Everything else is green.

  The trail veers westward and turns into a narrow paved lane. Fishing huts appear on one side – some cared for, some neglected – and then, at the end of the narrow track I can see it: Hellsee, Bright Lake, aglow in sunlight. It needs a brighter word than bright.

  —

  In Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, the young protagonist – she never gets a name – goes back to her home island on a remote Canadian lake, searching for her father. She doesn’t find what she came for. I’ve been reading and re-reading this book all year, as if it might hold a key. I’ve carried a paperback of it, battered and dog-eared, in my bag. I’ve carried it in lieu of a map.

  She grows ever wilder, retreating from her friends, retreating from her lover, rushing into the wilderness. She strips off her clothes, throws away her shoes and runs into the forest. She swims in the lake and sees its horrors and joys: it emboldens her to cast off the trappings of the good life she is pretending she can live. Home is gone, but so too is the possibility of pretending that pain hasn’t changed her.

  I’ve been troubled by these narratives of women walking out on their lives, exiling themselves in order to take up space. I’m worried by the idea that in order to find a place for themselves, women walk away, as if the only choice is between the room of one’s own or the inexorable, unequivocal wild. Between Penelope and the sirens. But likewise I’ve lingered over Atwood’s lines, wondering whether my decision to swim was a way of surfacing from a suffocating pain, a way of marking territory. The ghosts can’t be exorcised, though, and there isn’t any wilderness left to claim. Though pain alleviates with time, fear remains, rolling as if on the tide.

  I never left my life. At the end of each journey, I went back to work, back to my friends, back to my home in Berlin. That the lakes could exist alongside all of this made them more valuable to me. They became points of light in the landscape, generous, steady and incalculably beautiful.

  At the edge of Hellsee, the shallows are clear. A school of young perch are darting between the reeds, the flash of their red tails catching the light. I want to be like them, swift in the water.

  I wander the edge of the lake until I find a fallen pine, enormous and stripped of its bark. It reaches out into the lake, bleached white in the sun, smoothed by the winter. This small curve in the shore is lined by beeches. On one side, a single alder tree reaches out over the water. This is the spot.

  I lay my clothes by the roots of the pine, piled as usual atop my bag. Glancing along the trail in either direction, I see that I am alone. It is still early in the season. I slip towards the lake’s edge, stepping knee-deep into the water. Warmth surrounds me, and then the slightest wisp of cold.

  I swim out, pressing my hands through the turquoise clarity of the lake, moving towards its centre. From h
ere, I can see the line of Hellsee as it curves and narrows on either end. The water rounds a corner and disappears behind the forest.

  I linger here, afloat and watching the trees. Feeling the depth of the lake beneath me, I slip on to my back. I watch the sky, sensing the cool of the water as I move through it. Suspended, I drift home.

  bibliography

  The following texts proved invaluable in the process of writing this book:

  Atwood, Margaret, Surfacing, Virago Press, London (2009 edition. First published 1979). Extract reproduced by kind permission of Margaret Atwood.

  Berdahl, Daphne, Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland, University of California Press, Berkeley (1999)

  Bernhardt, Juliane; Engelhardt, Christof; Kirillin, Georgiy; Matschullat, Jörg, ‘Lake Ice Phenology in Berlin-Brandenburg from 1947–2007: Observations and Model Hindcasts’, pp791–817, Climactic Change 112 (2012)

  Blackbourn, David, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany, Jonathan Cape, London (2006)

  Blankennagel, Jens, ‘66-Seen-Wanderweg in Brandenburg: Einmal rund um Berlin’, Berliner Zeitung (17 October 2014)

  Boehrer, Bertram, and Schultze, Martin, ‘Stratification of Lakes’, pp1–27, Reviews of Geophysics 46, no. 2 (2008)

  Brockmann, Jan, ‘Sand. Water. Wind’, pp5–22, Raw: Architectural Engagements with Nature, edited by Solveig Bøe, Hege Charlotte Faber and Brit Strandhagen, Routledge, London (2016)

  Coates, Peter, ‘Borderland: No-Man’s Land, Nature’s Wonderland: Troubled Humanity and Untroubled Earth’, pp499–516, Environment and History 20, no. 4 (2014)

  Conrad, Andreas, ‘Heiligabend wurde die Grenze geöffnet’, Der Taggespiegel (23 December 2014)

  Cruikshank, Julie, Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver (2005)

  Darby, David, ‘Theodor Fontane und die Vernetzung der Welt die Mark Brandenburg zwischen Vormoderne und Moderne’, pp145–164, Metropole, Provinz und Welt: Raum und Mobilität in der Literatur des Realismus, edited by Roland Berbig and Dirk Göttsche, Walter der Gruyter, Berlin (2013)

  Deakin, Roger, Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain, Vintage, London (2000)

  Detrich, H. William, ed., ‘Antarctica: Life on Ice’, Special Issue, Scientific American Classics 26 (2014)

  Dortmann, Andrea, Winter Facets: Traces and Tropes of the Cold, Peter Lang AG, Bern (2007)

  Driescher, Eva; Behrendt, Horst; Schellenberger, Günter, and Stellmacher, Rita, ‘Lake Müggelsee and its Environment: Natural Conditions and Anthropogenic Impacts’, pp327–343, Internationale Revue der gesamten Hydrobiologie und Hydrographie 78, no. 3 (1993)

  Fontane, Theodor, Effi Briest, translated by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers, Penguin, London (1995)

  Fontane, Theodor, The Stechlin, translated by William L. Zwiebel, Camden House, Rochester (1995)

  Fontane, Theodor, Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, 4 Volumes, Wilhelm Hertz, Berlin (1862–1882)

  ‘Forum: The Nature of German Environmental History’, pp113–130, German History 27, no. 1 (2009)

  Gopnik, Adam, Winter: Five Windows on the Season, House of Anansi Press, Toronto (2011)

  Hutchinson, G. Evelyn, A Treatise on Limnology, 3 Volumes, John Wiley and Sons, New York (1957)

  Kirbach, Roland, ‘Die Seeschlacht’, Die Zeit (1 June 2011)

  Kögel, Annette, ‘Der erste Sommer der Freiheit’, Der Taggespiegel (23 August 2015)

  Krümmelbein, Julia; Bens, Oliver; Raab, Thomas, and Naeth, M. Anne, ‘A History of Lignite Mining and Reclamation Practices in Lusatia, Eastern Germany’, pp53-66, Canadian Journal of Soil Science 92 (2012)

  Landesamt für Bergbau, Geologie und Rohstoffe Brandenburg, Brandenburgische Geowissenschaftliche Beiträge 2: Ein Streifzug durch die Historie des Braunkohlentiefbaus in Ostbrandenburg, LBGR Brandenburg, Cottbus (2012)

  Lekan, Thomas M., ‘Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1890-1945’, PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison (1999)

  Lekan, Thomas, and Zeller, Thomas, ‘Region, Scenery, and Power: Cultural Landscapes in Environmental History’, pp332–365, The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, edited by Andrew C. Isenberg, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2014)

  Mietz, Olaf, Allgemeiner hydrogeographisch-limnologischer Überblick über die Seen Brandenburgs und die Entwicklung eines Klassifikationsmodells für die glazialen Seen des Norddeutschen Tieflandes, Institüt für angewandte Gewässerökologie in Brandenburg, Potsdam (1996)

  Nelson, Arvid, Cold War Ecology: Forests, Farms, and People in the East German Landscape, 1945–1989, Yale University Press, New Haven (2005)

  Nixdorf, Brigitte; Hemm, Mike; Hoffmann, Anja, and Richter, Peggy, Dokumentation von Zustand und Entwicklung der wichtigsten Seen Deutschlands, Umweltbundesamt, Dessau-Roßlau (2004)

  Nixdorf, Brigitte; Hemm, Mike; Schlundt, Anja; Kapfer, Maria, and Krumbeck, Hartwig, Braunkohlentagebauseen in Deutschland, Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus, Cottbus (2000)

  O’Sullivan, P. E., and Reynolds, C. S. eds, The Lakes Handbook: Limnology and Limnetic Ecology, Blackwell, Oxford (2004)

  Pfannkuche, Jens; Meisel, Jen, and Mietz, Olaf, ‘Factors Affecting Clarity of Freshwater Lakes in Brandenburg, Germany’, pp311–321, Limnologica 30 (2000)

  Reschke, Manfred, 66-Seen-Wanderung, Trescher Verlag, Berlin (2014)

  Rilke, Rainer Maria, ‘The Gazelle’ translation copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell; from Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.

  Röhring, Andreas, ‘Cultural landscape as action arena – an identity-based concept of region-building’, a paper presented at the Regional Studies Association Annual Conference, Newcastle, United Kingdom (April 2011)

  Schaer, Cathrin, ‘Landscaping the Death Strip: A Vision of the Berlin Wall as a Giant Garden’, Spiegel Online (2 July 2009)

  Scheer, Regina, Der Umgang mit den Denkmälern: Eine Recherche in Brandenburg, Brandenburgische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung und Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kultur, Potsdam (2003)

  Schiemeier, Quirin, ‘Life Discovered Under Ice in Antarctic Lake’, Nature (12 February 2013) http://www.scientificamerican.com/​article/​life-discovered-under-ice-inantarctic-lake/

  Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment, Geological Outline, Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment, Berlin (2013)

  Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, ‘Encyclopedia Arctica’, 15-volume unpublished reference work, Dartmouth: Dartmouth College Library, http://collections.dartmouth.edu/​arctica-beta/​index.xhtml

  Sussmann, Hans, Teupitz und das Schenkenländchen, Stadt Teupitz, Teupitz (1973)

  Stiftung Berliner Mauer, ‘Denkmallandschaft Berliner Mauer’, Berlin (2013) denkmallandschaft-berliner-mauer.de

  Talling, J. F., ‘The Developmental History of Inland-Water Science’, pp119–141, Freshwater Reviews 1 (2008)

  Terry, Andrew; Ullrich, Karin, and Riecken, Uwe, The Green Belt of Europe: From Vision to Reality, IUCN, Cambridge (2006)

  Tsing, Anna, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On The Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, Princeton (2015)

  Tyb’l, Lothar, Teupitz am See: ein Schatz in der Mark Brandenburg, Weissensee Verlag, Berlin (2006)

  Tyler, John E., ‘The Secchi Disc’, pp1–6, Limnology and Oceanography 13, no. 1 (1968)

  Wallis, Emma, ‘Digging Up The Past in Halbe’, Deutsche Welle (24 April 2013)

  Wall Kimmerer, Robin, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, Oregon State University Press, Corvallis (2003)
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  Walther, Peter, ed., Märkische Dichterlandschaft: Ein illustrierter Literaturführer durch die Mark Brandenburg, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart (1998)

  Wiechers, Katharina, ‘Der unendliche Uferstreit vom Groß Glienicker See’, Der Taggespiegel (3 July 2014)

  Wordsworth, William, A Guide to the Lakes, 5th Edition, Henry Frowde, London (1906)

  acknowledgements

  A great number of people made this book possible. To my editor, Lennie Goodings: thank you for your guidance, insight and passion for this book. Thanks also to Nicole Winstanley and Kathrin Liedtke for your enthusiasm and encouragement. To my agent, David Godwin, thank you for taking a chance on me.

  I’m grateful to those who helped make this process a pleasure and advised me along the way. Lisette Verhagen and Philippa Sitters at DGA, Tamsyn Berryman at Virago, everyone at Godshot in Immanuelkirchstraße, Michael Monaghan, David Darby, Belinda Bowring, Kelsey Padjen, Simon Connolly, Amy Raphael, Joanna Sidhu, Ruby Stocklin-Weinberg, Darren Patrick, Justin Kinnear, Stefan Fergus, Luca Bendandi, Sennah Yee, Joy Xiang, Steffi Ackermann, Katrin Hahner, Ricardo Rivas, Joan Steigerwald, Cate Sandilands, Beth Moore – thank you. Thanks especially to friends who read and commented on drafts of the manuscript: Alyssa Mackenzie, Rachel Hopwood, Cassandra Hogan, David Balzer and Anne Haeming. You made this a better book. You all helped me stay afloat.

  This book began as an experiment, for me, in non-academic writing. Thanks to Paul Sullivan for wholeheartedly embracing my proposal to blog about the lakes for Slow Travel Berlin. Thanks to everyone who followed the 52 Lakes Project on social media – your kind words propelled me. Sehr vielen Dank to all the Berliners and Brandenburgers who recommended lakes and offered guidance on local history. I’m so grateful to live here and for all the kindness I’ve received along the way. Any errors in my account of this place and its past are entirely my own.