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DOUBLE DEUTSCH1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Itinerary | Home
The bicycle wheels were spinning more rhythmically after a few days. The hills seemed to have flattened out. Erik and I kept closer together, not side by side, but at least exchanging the lead now and then, more like teammates than competitors. And we were taking in more of the countryside. In Buchen, a fairly large town, I bought a German bird book. The next day, we stopped at Brauhaus Faust zu Miltenberg, which pumps out 21,600 litres of beer a day, all of which is consumed within a 100-kilometre radius. (One branch of the Faust family left in the 19th century and started the Schlitz brewery in the United States.) The path toward Wertheim took us along the Main River, a wide ribbon of milk chocolate with barges on it, then through a deciduous forest, where the still-wet asphalt was pasted with maple leaves. I stopped frequently to look at birds – at the Schloss Neuenstein near Öhringen, there were mallards in the moat and Canada geese pecking at the lawn – and Erik would take out his sketchbook or his camera. I told him about my belief that all the really enjoyable things in life started with the letter “B”: bicycles, birds, binoculars, books. He nodded. “Bier,” he said. “Bratwurst, Beethoven, Brahms.” Neither of us said “bonding,” but we were both thinking it. With help from Erik and the bird book, I was learning some German, and the surrounding country was becoming more real to me. On our last day, as we cycled the final 28 kilometres to Rothenburg ob der Tauber, the rain had completely stopped and the sun warmed the rows of vines in the vineyards (Weinberge) that lined the hillsides along the Tauber River. There were more birds, mostly thrushes (Drosseln). We stopped to speak to Albert Thürauf, a local winemaker, who told us that blackbirds (Amseln) let him know when his grapes were ready for harvesting. One day, they’d descend, he said, and eat 20 percent of his grapes, and that was the day he began picking “because the next day, they’ll eat 40 percent.” He laughed. There were birdhouses all through the vineyard. We passed a farm, and a woman gathering plums from a tree beside the road waved to us. In Battenfeld, the day’s midpoint, we stopped at a Gasthaus for a beer. By then, we were cycling side by side, and we made the final climb to Rothenburg together, arriving at the town gate, jumping off our bikes and hugging as though we had both just scored the winning goal in the final game of the World Cup. Meike was waiting for us at the gate with congratulations in the form of a bottle of schnapps and three plastic glasses. That night, in Rothenburg’s oldest building – a 10th-century Weinstube called Zur Höll (to hell in German, surely a misnomer) – we drank beer and laughed about the rain and the hills and how we had enjoyed the competitiveness, had mea-sured ourselves against each other and ended up on an equal footing. The trip had been a lot like our lives: We’d come together, there had been some initial jostling for position and we’d ended up travelling in tandem and enjoying the scenery. I was neither the man with the iron fist nor the wise counsellor; I was simply a fellow traveller. If having had me thrust upon him all those years ago had rankled then, he’d long since gotten over it. And now, I discovered, so had I. Or, as Goethe put it, “All theory, dear friend, is grey, but the golden tree of actual life springs ever green.” — Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net |
