Milestones

I was told in Heidelberg to keep a journal for posterity, a commitment that fell to the wayside after my very first week.

My only foothold on time comes from a conversation I once had with a fellow student. Her name, too, I’ve long since forgotten. We’d walked down this cobbled street in Rothenberg one day and I remember spotting a movie theatre on a busy thoroughfare, its stucco walls blotted out by a thick film of movie posters. One was Lord of the Rings, known locally as “Der Herr der Ringe.”

“I wonder what it would be like to see ‘The Fellowship’ in German,” she mused.

I had nothing pithy saved up for an occasion like this, so I simply said, “Looking forward to The Two Towers?”

She deadpanned in the affirmative; we moved on.

Awkward moments like these make round-trip flights short by comparison. A shuttle ride from Frankfurt to Heidelberg takes about an hour, but it was the jetlag of crossing nine time zones that sapped everyone’s strength. I still don’t know how they were able to sleep. I was too sweaty and restless, not so much from the August heat as from the offensive way commuters negotiated their way across the Autobahn.

“Scheissekopf!” one shouts as he shakes his fist. His accent was Bavarian, sharp and without a hint of compromise. He meant business.

But another raises his voice gamely and yells “Schwanznase!” Before I can place the second man’s accent, he rounds a bend and drops from sight.

For the longest while after I’d convinced myself the mystique of Germany came from the scenery. Between cities the landscape is like a giant quilt, quadrants of fallow beige and crop-dusted green, accented on occasion by sheepherders and wind turbines. You enjoy getting lost.

Then one day, it happened. I was sightseeing on the Hauptstrasse when an elderly woman in a wheelchair sidles up alongside me. Her German was either as broken as my own or she was too hoarse to be understood. All I could piece together was “sechzehn Uhr”, or four o’clock in the afternoon. It was the hour of day when shops in Heidelberg closed for business. I realized, then, that she was as lost as I was, simply in need of someone to help make her rounds.

To this day I still don’t know who she was, what she’d said or even what I’d said to refuse the Euro forced into my hand later that same day. Still, it was the one people experience that made the entire trip worthwhile. It just goes to show that the more a person loses themselves, the more they wind up wanting to be found.