John Wise

After 31 straight days of intense activity, I’ve ground to a halt today and need to do nothing. Obviously, writing is not nothing, but doing the minimum is de rigueur. Mentally, this is harder than it sounds because here I am in Germany; I could have gone to Mainz today to gaze through the church windows created by Marc Chagall and visit the Gutenberg Museum in the same city. Instead, I sit here in the living room of a house in Heddernheim while the sun is shining outside. I feel guilty for this laziness as there’s an implication that I’m bored or simply not motivated enough to take advantage of the geographical location I find myself in. Writing this pains me as I’m afraid that the truth is that I’m wasting a valuable day.

On the other hand, I could say that I carved space out of the clutter of activity to allow other things to fill the gap. In that now vacant area, I can allow a different seed of inspiration to blow in. Whatever lands might one day sprout to become a mighty apple tree or merely a weed. The point is that I need these moments to be nowhere and be no one wanting anything so I can find the surprise of what is being cultivated in the place where something else might have otherwise been. This one day where I shut down everything except the essentials for sustaining life is not a lost day; it is a gift I’m giving to saturated senses.

I do not want to (Ich will nicht) see what I’ve not seen today; I will leave that for another day that will or will not arrive.

Stephanie and Klaus Engelhardt are my inlaws who had asked back in May if I could come over to Germany. After Jutta’s apartment was turned over to the owner, I took up residence at their place, as Caroline and I have done on other visits. Breakfast, lunch, and finally dinner were all had with these two today.

After tonight, things get busy again.

It’s a lazy Wednesday by the Wadden Sea, and a short vacation will come to a finish. Not in a rush of activity but the quiet gray of doing nothing much at all. It’s okay to not be in a hurry, to take refuge in a warm room with the conveniences required for sequestering ourselves, even if for only some hours. Languorous activities such as we are engaged in ask for a bit of mindlessness, and maybe the act of writing violates those principles of inactivity, but staring at the ceiling or the inside of my eyelids doesn’t feel like an option either. So I write of the past from the future of when said things I write actually occurred.

This theme of photographing the space where I commit my thinking to bits represented on a screen should have been given more thought many years ago because, more than selfies, I would have quite the collection of locations and settings where I’ve sat down to this exercise of trying to explore wit, cynicism, spleen, awe, love, and delight.

This is the door to the house where Theodor Storm’s parents lived. I’d guess that he lived here as a child. With Storm arguably the most important person in history to hail from Husum, no wonder the small town recognizes him. Maybe I’d also consider Nicolaus Bruhns, who was said to have been an influence on Bach for celebration, too, if he actually had that influence. What’s not in doubt is that Bruhns studied under Dieterich Buxtehude, which lends some gravity to this person who only lived a short life of 31 years back at the end of the 17th century.

I certainly didn’t try this masterpiece as that might have ruined my admiration that something so beautiful was on display, tempting my sense of culinary wonder. It will forever hold a place in my imagination that this may have been the greatest-tasting cake ever created. I didn’t even bother to note the location where I saw it as I hope to forget just where it was. Should I ever return to Husum and have the burning desire to finally try one, maybe I’ll learn they no longer make this work of art, but it can live on here forever.

Friendliest looking moat I’ve ever seen. Klaus and I hiked up the mountain to Schloss vor Husum (or Husum Castle). That’s a lie because there are no mountains anywhere near here, but the quite small castle actually does exist. Also, this is not a moat; it’s just a lush pond.

This is a corner of the castle that must represent the rest of the structure. I would have liked to photograph the place in greater detail, but some groundskeepers had red tape up to cordon off the area directly in front of the main part of the buildings so they could get some maintenance work done.

Bird photographer, I’m not (cue a chorus of “Photographer of many things you are not, John”), but that’s not going to stop me from trying. Heck, I don’t really care about this bird, for that matter, but it will do as my stand-in for the many birds that were out of sight but not out of hearing range. This makes me wonder where Rammstein was when they penned the words for Ohne Dich and the lyric Und die Vögel singen nicht mehr (Translation: And the birds no longer sing). Obviously, they weren’t in Husum.

Time has eaten the lion’s face and will ultimately eat mine, too, except mine will likely be a horrific sight as it’s happening.

I’d guess this street looks much like it always has and that Theodor Storm and Herr Bruhn would recognize most things aside from the electricity box and the cars.

The house Storm lived in for a short period doesn’t open until 2:00 or 40 minutes before we depart. Like the castle, Caroline and I now have a few things to return to Husum for.

These three ugly gnomes were in a sideyard with no explanation of their purpose. Maybe they keep the spirit of Storm alive?

Time for more food, more fish, more Bratkartoffeln, more mineral water, and a very nice server at Gaststätte Tante Jenny.

North-Friesische Futjes from Waffelgut sure looks like orange-sized balls of fried dough, er um, donuts, but who am I to turn up my nose to the strange delicacies of ethnic peoples when I’m visiting their lands? Buying five was .50 euros cheaper, so I played it safe and only got two with sugar and the other three plain.

Don’t go thinking I’m eating lunch, futjes, and then ice cream; the donuts are for the train. The Waldmeister and hazelnut ice cream were to go with my coffee. Now I’m ready to get on a train that’ll take about 8 hours to bring us back to Frankfurt. By the way, I didn’t really want the Waldmeister ice cream, but I knew that once Caroline saw this photo, she’d be asking how it was, so I had to oblige her. To be honest, I can’t say I really enjoyed it, though I did finish it.

Only two trains will be required to get us home; this one goes to Hamburg and the next one to Frankfurt. I met a man from Yorkshire here on the platform in Husum who’s been living in Erfurt for the past 20 years; he was waiting for the train so he could photograph the two engines pulling our transportation to Hamburg. Something about the diesel engines intrigued him, but I didn’t have time to learn more as the train was on approach, I stepped away so he could focus on the matter at hand and not me.

I don’t know where I’m at, and if I think deeply about that, I may never really know where I’m at other than with myself in a bunch of situations that defy believability. I mean, how is it that I’m on a train cruising at 100 mph across Germany, and in less than a week, I’ll be having coffee with Ed Tankersley again at King Coffee on Union Hills Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona? Ah, did you pick up on that? I can’t confuse who I am with where I’m at, but how many times do I make such wrong-headed comparisons where I count on my wife finding and correcting my blunders? Is that part of the basis of surrealism or absurdity? But John, you stated you didn’t know where you were. Oh really? My inference was about where I am inside and where I am when I’m somewhere else other than the John, who is talking to Ed, Klaus, Caroline, or anyone else really. The John that is writing this is using his fingers to express a voice that is never heard by anyone but myself. My writing sounds like me to me, but does this version of John sound like the one you know? I know where my body was when I wrote this, but the person who has been changed in subtle ways over the past few days hasn’t been realized fully yet. Or maybe I have been, and I’m mostly just the person I am and always have been as I write this.

I didn’t travel 1,300 kilometers to be the same person I was before this journey that has taken me to the tidal mudflats of northern Europe. I’m looking for something. Did I find it? I never know for certain as it doesn’t present itself as a bookmark, an artifact, or even a carbuncle of oozing knowledge. That would be a thing, wouldn’t it? Every time you gain something when learning, you move one step closer to appearing as Baron Harkonnen in Dune. Better would be sprouting a new branch; maybe trees used to be humans who learned that it was better to gain knowledge while reaching into the sky and enjoying a life of standing in place, taking it all in.

Maybe I’m always looking back at myself, and the person or realization I don’t find is lost in my inability to know myself in those places. I visit cathedrals, forests, oceans, rivers, cities, and coffee shops, always searching for the essence of self and place, trying to find a clear image of the person who was slightly different yesterday but in many ways the same as I’ll be tomorrow. I believe I know that I’m not outside nature, but my integration with it is a blur of deciphering as an ever-changing world goes by that doesn’t allow for fixing on points that might ground me in certainty. And so I keep on this path of discovery, hopeful to find whatever that something is.

Maybe the clouds are gods floating overhead, free to travel the earth and come and go as they please. Condensed water drops hold the power to deliver the most valuable resource to humans in the form of clean water that nourishes our green plants, so they produce our oxygen. A symbiotic system that is not reliant on the idiots in between. What about those of us who are between places such as here on this train, being neither here nor there? I’m busy using resources, not producing anything, ah but is producing information that may at some point be construed as knowledge have value? That’s not up to me to decide; only history and those with an interest in the past make those decisions. Then, in an age where information is akin to countless fields of wheat, we speed past and find it impossible to inventory and assign value to this commodity that will rot in the field if not tended to. I have to accept that every word and every letter written here just might be one kernel of wheat out of 22 on one of the five heads of a single plant 62 meters away from the train in a row I cannot identify. An ant could come by taking that kernel I’ve left to its nest, and in a week, all that I contributed would be gone. The grains I leave behind will ultimately disappear, having been transformed into something else.

We’ve reached Hamburg, and again, we are playing musical trains as we jump from track to track as flexibility is required to move so many trains through a busy system. We’ve still not seen the new Elbphilharmonie, nor is it in this photo, but someday Caroline and I will visit the hall, which is one of the largest concert venues on earth.

We passed through Uelzen and Celle, both of which I’d never heard of. They went by in a blur like so much fence, graffiti, and wheat the train passes at terrific speeds.

Note: after I returned to Frankfurt, I looked up Celle and have now put it on the list of places for Caroline and me to visit. As for Uelzen, while they have an interesting main train station, that seems like that’s about it.

We have stopped and taken off again as we move down the track at nearly 250 kilometers per hour or 150 mph away from Hannover. With less than three hours remaining before reaching Frankfurt, it feels like this journey will quickly come to an end.

You don’t know how much you love the sun and mountains until you’ve left the flat gray area of somewhere that sees little to nothing of these two aforementioned attributes.

I’m reluctant to move on to the next image as I have nothing else in the camera yet, and my traveling south is being occupied by putting these words up. If I were to pause, might I get sleepy? So I must find something in the silhouette of the land and dramatic clouds that inspires me to babble on. Note that it’s now taken me five hours to write the 1,693 words I’ve written so far (pre-Caroline edits, of course), which, writing this statistic, makes me open the calculator to see that I’m writing about six words a minute minus eating, drinking, and photography breaks. That probably means I’m getting closer to seven words a minute when I am writing. If I am to occupy myself for the next couple of hours, I better slow this blistering pace down.

Shadows are creeping over the landscape, especially as I set in to write for this photo, for it is a good 30 minutes after I snapped this shot. We just passed Neu-Eichenberg with a nice old train station about 40 kilometers from Kassel and our last stop before Frankfurt. I just finished reading about the history of the Eichenberg Station. Should you be interested in what it looks like and its history, follow this link to Wikipedia. And with this, I can only share that we are riding into the sunset. Should I find another photo, worthy of inclusion, I might discover more to blather on about. Until then, maybe you too, should just stare out a window at nature or, better yet, take yourself into it.

Didn’t have to wait long, and fortunately, I was able to snatch up the camera just in time to grab a photo of the sun setting over the Fulda River that I didn’t think was salvageable as I had a lot of reflection from the window I was shooting out of. But the important parts of the image that tell the story look nice to my eye. It’s 8:30 in the evening as we pull into Kassel. This city was supposed to be one of my side journeys that is surely out of contention for a visit, as are so many others. Paris, too, will have to wait. Maybe when Caroline and I return in the fall, we can find our way down some of these other romantic roads and rail lines.

We are quickly running out of daylight during our final hour on the InterCity Express train (ICE) we’ve been on since Hamburg. I should point out that these 8 hours of travel are all the easier as we are sitting in 1st class with fast wifi, no seat neighbors, a table, and a quick ride that doesn’t suffer from turbulence.

I thought two photos ago that I was done and could just relax into the last minutes on the train, but here we are passing through Fulda, and I spotted some buildings on a distant hill, but as I started snapping photos, this factory sprung into view. That was a win.

Maybe this is redundant, as I posted an image of my workspace on our way to Husum this past Sunday, but right now, I can’t remember, and I’m too lazy to check. Okay, so I just went and checked, and I took that weird reflection photo in the tunnel a few days ago, but that photo was then; this is now. So, do I sign off figuring I can’t do any better than this, and at 26 photos, this is certainly a long enough blog post, or do I hold out for one more? Just kidding, I’m done. Vacation to the Wattenmeer and all that it included is done.

To bed late, early to rise. Neither Klaus nor I were woken by the alarm, but he woke long before I did. Taking an earlier train to the Hauptbahnhof than planned, we were able to grab a bite to eat and coffee casually instead of sprinting through the main train station.

Onboard the RE50 train to Fulda in the quiet 1^st class section; we left Frankfurt at precisely 6:26; this is Germany, after all. Travel time is about 90 minutes, but without wifi, things feel a bit primitive. For the next 8 hours, we’ll be on one train or another as we have three connections over the course of the day.

Klaus is my travel companion today. This is the first time he and I have ever gone somewhere together; not only that, it is his first vacation without his wife, Stephanie. It is also our victory lap for having finished everything that needed to be done with our mother-in-law’s apartment. The keys were turned over to the owner ten days early, and he’ll be able to let his next tenant move in early.

Regarding the 8 hours of travel, we are headed to Husum, Germany, in the far north. This is a fairly good starting point to explore the Wattenmeer (Wadden Sea), which is a shallow body of water of tidal flats and wetlands. When Caroline and I were last in the area, we never saw the sea as low tide makes it disappear, but Caroline did walk in the famous mud. With Klaus and I up in the Wattenmeer until Wednesday, we should have enough time to see many of the sights that we previously missed.

Over the coming few days, I’ll share (because I know how to overdo that so well) much, if not everything, about what we see and experience. With that in mind, here’s a barn on a farm with windmills in the background out the window of the train somewhere between Frankfurt and Fulda.

Ninety minutes later, we are transferring to the train that will bring us to Hamburg for the next leg of the trip.

The train that was supposed to be 20 minutes late turned out to only be 10 minutes late. We are now on the slowest moving ICE (Inter City Express) train ever as we crawl down the track at about 130km/h or 80 mph.

Maybe you were expecting my exceptional photography skills to be on display here. Taking photos from a train window leaves a few things to be desired, starting with clean windows, but we can do nothing about that.

Fortunately, there haven’t been 100 beautiful little villages we’ve passed as we are out in the middle of nowhere.

Just pulled into Gottingen 3 hours after we left Frankfurt. Hannover is our next stop, and then Hamburg. Strange enough, time seems to be flying. The stress that comes with driving your own car makes 3 hours of travel a bit tiresome, while being the passenger just gazing out the window is not only relaxing but also offers the chance for a random photo.

The train has finally picked up speed as we race over along at 221 km/h (137 mph)

The green blur of a bullet train moving along like a bullet.

We were in a tunnel when I took this hence the white streak across Klaus’s eyes; they are lights outside the train as my camera is focused into the darkness, but the reflection jumped back at me. Not the result I expected but not a bad one either. Like a gazelle, we are about to leap into Hannover.

As we inch closer to midday and further away from Frankfurt, we had to give up our unreserved seats on the left side of the train for the sunnier right side where the warmth of the sun is making for heavy eyes. That or the less than five hours of sleep either of us had is playing a role. I guess it goes without saying that my step count is looking ugly, but we should make up for that after we arrive at the sea.

We arrived in Hamburg with almost enough time to spare. Well, we had a minute or two before we had to board the train on the track right next to where we pulled in. The ambiguity of what part of the train was ours confused even Klaus, and we quickly learned we were on the segment of the train going to Kiel and not Flensburg. No problem, we jumped off and headed for “our section,” which was the next car, but the doors were already closed and were not going to reopen as I pushed the button and then the train started to move. This wasn’t me making it go; it was the train saying goodbye to idiots as it pulled away.

The next train leaves in an hour. Time for lunch, which turned out to be as bad as the cup of coffee we didn’t enjoy on the trip from Fulda to Hamburg. So, attention Deutsche Bahn, your coffee is meh, your user experience and user interface are both meh, and now on this regional train with 90 minutes of travel time, we don’t have wifi. Oh, and that part from Frankfurt to Fulda is also 90 minutes, with no wifi, what decade are you guys operating in? What is the incentive to travel by rail if the ability to connect and get fueled up on good coffee doesn’t exist? This begs the question, is this your idea of 1st class ICE service, really?

We arrived in Hamburg to gray skies, but once we were some kilometers north of the city, the clouds started to break up, offering great views of billowy clouds. The cumulous display might be part of the weather forecast that suggested Germany was in for some heavy rains everywhere except Husum. You are looking at rail tracks photographed with a slow shutter to smear them. Next stop, Schleswig, or maybe another photo if I see something spectacular.

I almost missed taking this photo, and I’m surprised I got any of these cows in the frame. These are the famed Holstein breed of cattle in their ancestral lands: Schleswig-Holstein. The Germans have built these cows for over 218 years using similar processes they’ve perfected in building the Mercedes-Benz. If you see these cows in other lands, be assured they were made in Brazil or Pakistan from inferior parts, as only the Germans hold the patent to these highly engineered robot cows. Final fact: in full gallop, a real Holstein can reach speeds of over 240 km/h or 148 mph.

Evidence of Germany’s move to alternative energy has been following us the entire day so far. Wind and solar are scattered over the landscape far and wide, and contrary to German worries about these turbines killing birds, I only witnessed a couple of dozen being shredded by those blades of terror.

And then there was that moment I realized we’d become airborne, flying over small villages to which access to mass transportation is denied in order to ensure those people never escape. I think I’m happy I cannot look out my window as it appears it’s a straight drop down to the merciless earth below.

Hedeby and Danevirke are the areas I learned about on the website listed here. This strip of land has been settled as far back as the Viking Age and is the narrowest point between the Baltic and North Seas. This also acted as the border area between Scandinavia and Central Europe. I photographed this on our brief stop in Schleswig, which features as a starting point to explore the area, as far as I can tell.

Looking north, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from here, if you could see that far on this very flat part of the earth, you’d be looking into Denmark. We are on the fourth and final segment of our trip to the top of Europe.

We’ve reached Husum on the North Sea, but before anything else can happen, Klaus has to get a COVID test. Without that, he cannot check into the hotel with me, nor can he eat in restaurants if it proves too cold up here. Then again, he’ll have to get a test at least every 24 hours if he’s to eat in restaurants. While he waits for the swabbing of his sinus, I’m outside, happy I’ve been fully vaccinated. With his test complete, he’ll have to wait about 20 minutes for the results so we head to the hotel to get checked in. By the time our bags are dropped off in our room, his negative results arrive; we show them to the person at the front desk, and we are good for the remainder of our stay here on the edge of the Wattenmeer.

How about a nice 10-kilometer (6 miles) walk before dinner? We didn’t leave with that in mind, but that’s where the trail took us as we left the harbor area, walking towards the sea. Reaching one of the dikes, we went through the gate and saw this sign asking dog owners to keep their hounds on leashes so as not to ruffle the wool of the local sheep.

There are dikes that are pooped on by grazing sheep and then there are pristine levees such as this one that, with a little bit of blue sky, look as though they could be a Windows 95 background.

The weather here is a rapidly changing skyscape of racing clouds that change from billowy white to menacing gray, threatening imminent rain, but they, too, just stream overhead and are quickly gone.

There’s so much to see here, and the light is playing a significant role in what get’s photographed and subsequently shared as my photographs shift between dull and vibrant as quickly as a cloud moves from one side of the sky to the other.

I can’t help but feel I’m looking at the canopy of the world that is forming north of here. These are the clouds that floated out of America, across the Atlantic, passed over the United Kingdom, and are on their way to Scandinavia before retiring in the Arctic. Like whales, they are migrating; only these are leviathans of the skies. You can trust that I don’t really believe that weather and the cumulus that inhabits it work that way, but you also can’t know how my imagination works.

Earlier, I wrote that the Germans are building cows, they also build land using sticks. By limiting the wave action using these water breaks in shallow waters, they can limit erosion and start collecting sediments that extend the land, thus taking from the sea instead of the other way around.

Even at the end of the Earth, you will find art, in this case, wind trousers. The German word “Windhose” means “whirlwind” or “tornado,” so this is, in effect, a pun.

I suppose in some way I promised loads of poop when I showed the pristine dike above, but from this angle and distance, this land, too, appears perfect. Look closely at where your feet are when walking here, though, as evidence of the sheep is everywhere.

It is not 1:29 p.m. when the Lamb of God appears to John; it is late in the day and nearly evening, though the sun is traveling with us at such a late hour. Looking at this photo I’m struck that maybe this was the sign I was looking for in visiting all the churches and cathedrals on previous journeys. Here was Jesus himself looking into my soul and I gazed upon him as a dumb animal as I’m too blind to see the obvious right before me. So was he the dumb animal, or am I?

We’d almost sat down for dinner at a table right here next to the water when the sun peeked out for another performance, giving me what I thought would be my sunset photo. I was wrong. We were also wrong about sitting next to the water as the wind picked up, and it was feeling cold. This contrast of a temperature of 61 degrees (16c) to the 95 degrees (35c) we were having in Frankfurt was a bit unexpected in how jarring we recoiled from what should have been a pleasantly cool temperature.

It was nearly 10:00 p.m. when we left the Compass Restaurant where we dined on a couple of great fish dinners. What I forgot to share earlier is that we’d stopped for ice cream before our walk, which was part of what necessitated our lengthy stroll next to the sea. Now with 17 hours into a long day and tired feet that barely carry us back to our hotel, we are just minutes away from falling asleep with wishes to not arise with the first bird song we hear.