Indian Summer
Created | Updated Mar 13, 2012
I have been asking – nay, begging – h2g2ers to share their experiences with us. What to you is a pleasant day, or an ordinary encounter, to someone else, half a world away, is more magic than a journey to the moon.
Here, Bel is h2g2's answer to Marcel Proust. She leads us through an Indian summer day, and shows us wonders that we see, and feel, and smell. Thank you, Bel. I will never look at a swan the same way again. – DG
Indian Summer
We're having a lovely Altweibersommer1 (that's Indian summer to you), so after we'd been to the beautiful Rheingau (a wine-growing area in the southwest of Germany) on Saturday, we decided to take our bikes and do a cycling tour early on Sunday morning.
We left at 8.30 am, and although the sun had been up for more than an hour it was still quite chilly, especially in the forest, which we crossed on our way down to the river. We weren't the only early birds – there were quite a few joggers and 'dog walkers' about.
Normally, I leave home for cycling two hours earlier, and it isn't a forest I cross, but an area with lots of fruit trees, mainly apple trees, so the smells I enjoy at present are those of wet grass and rotten fruit. When I cycle, all my senses are alert: not only do I smell my surroundings, I can usually taste them, too. Go and try it if you live somewhere with lovely smells. You'll see what I mean.
We were nearing the end of the forest, where there is a large and popular playground and some wooden huts where people can have a BBQ when we were met with a black smoke cloud and a terribly burnt smell. We were alarmed and thought we'd need to call the fire brigade, thinking somebody hadn't put out the BBQ the night before. When we were close enough to actually see the huts, we could hardly believe our eyes: there was a group of Turkish people burning I don't know what at one of the huts – at 8.40 on a Sunday morning! At least we didn't need to call the fire brigade.
We made our way to the river after a slight detour (because we had taken a wrong turn) to find the path blocked by a barrier. Some people were doing construction work on the tracks of the tram! That's quite unusual for a Sunday morning, so it must have been urgent. Frankfurt was well awake.
We crossed the river, taking a pedestrian/cyclists' bridge, and even there we weren't the only people crossing. I started getting hungry, so when we arrived at Mühlheim, I suggested we enter through the flood gate and look for a bakery. There weren't many people about, but there was a boy, probably on his way to some local sporting event, so we asked him for the way to the next bakery. He was so baffled that he actually stuttered, but then gave us precise instructions. We found the bakery, but it was closed. Mühlheim was well and truly still asleep.
We returned to the path by the river, which was lively. Lots of people taking an early morning walk. We were surprised to see an old lady sticking her nose into some bushes – there wasn't any house near for kilometres. We wondered how she had got there this early.
The path was covered with dry leaves. Have you ever smelled dry leaves? They have a very specific smell, somehow bitter, and distinctive. It reminded me of my childhood, when we used to pick up the poplar leaves and search them for earwigs. We'd shake the earwigs out and smear the white stuff (we never knew it was the eggs) into our friends' hair. I really love this bitter smell of dead, dry leaves.
In Dörnigheim we took the ferry to get back to the other side of the river – and hopefully a baker's shop. We were lucky, the ferry was on our side of the river and left once we had entered it. We only paid 80 cent for the two of us. It only took a few minutes, then we were on the side of the village where the shops are. There was a baker's shop just around the corner – and it was busy. Two people were waiting by the door on the pavement. We joined them. I had a look through the shop window to see whether they had cheese buns. Eventually, a few people left the shop, so there was room for us to enter. A man with his son who'd come after us suddenly accused me of having jumped the queue. I couldn't quite believe how rude he was, so I stood my ground. Had he been polite, I'd have waited a while longer, but it's never a good idea to argue with me when my stomach is empty.
We bought some buns and coffee to go, then left and found a nice playground near the river, where we sat down on a large stone (the benches were still wet from dew) and had our breakfast in the lovely morning sun.
We were refreshed now, so we decided to go on cycling to Schloss Philippsruhe in Hanau. It was only another four km, so not really far. By the river there were lots of small green tents, and lots of anglers in them. My husband made some remark about catching fish by throwing stones into the water. He must have annoyed some of the anglers as we'd find out on our way back. Unlike the Rhine, which had been busy with traffic, there weren't a lot of ships going down the Main, so you couldn't hear the water leaping on the shore, but there were stretches where you could clearly smell the water. It smelled like a lake. Lakes have another distinctive smell and taste to them, and I have to admit it's not a smell I'm particularly fond of. Having grown up by the sea (well, by a river going to the North Sea) I don't like fresh water for swimming. The experiences I had with bathing in lakes have never convinced me that it is nice to do that. The worst experience was in Geneva, in its Lac Léman (Lake Geneva), which I had to share with fully grown cygnes (swans). Now, I've been scared of swans ever since a swan once attacked my sister when we were little, so swimming among them didn't do anything to get over my fears. I mean, imagine: your head (because that's all that is above the surface) next to a fully grown swan whose element is water, while you are struggling not to drown! And all that brought back by a smell. I prefer to smell the leaves.
We arrived at Schloss Philippsruhe at about 10am. We didn't feel like walking around, so we just took a few photos and went back home.
When we passed the anglers again a while later, I suddenly noticed that two of them had caught a very big fish. One was holding the fish, the other was taking photos. I've never seen such a big fish in my life. It was roughly a metre long and half as broad and must have weighed several kilograms.2 I politely asked if I could take a photo, too, but got an impolite 'No' as a reply. When I enquired why not, the man said because he didn't want to. It was quite an aggressive tone he used. He then spread some sort of open bag on the ground and his friend put the fish on it. They gently let it back into the river. When my husband asked why they had done that, the man said the fish was older than we, and then he turned his back on us. Lesson learned: don't talk to strangers on a Sunday morning. They will be rude.
From Bischofsheim on we took a different tour back than the one we'd come on to avoid the very steep hills. There was still a stretch where we had to get off our bikes and push them uphill, but it was easy in comparison to the hills on the other tour. We arrived back home at 11am, just before it got hot. Next time we'll take a picnic and go to Hanau Wilhelmsbad which is only a few km farther away than Philippsruhe and which has a huge and wonderful park.
It really was a most astonishing trout. The more we looked at it, the more we marvelled at it.
It excited George so much that he climbed up on the back of a chair to get a better view of it.
And then the chair slipped, and George clutched wildly at the trout-case to save himself, and down it came with a crash, George and the chair on top of it.
"You haven't injured the fish, have you?" I cried in alarm, rushing up.
"I hope not," said George, rising cautiously and looking about.
But he had. That trout lay shattered into a thousand fragments—I say a thousand, but they may have only been nine hundred. I did not count them.
We thought it strange and unaccountable that a stuffed trout should break up into little pieces like that.
And so it would have been strange and unaccountable, if it had been a stuffed trout, but it was not.
That trout was plaster-of-Paris. – Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat.
