Long Distance Walk and the Ironies of Nationality

When I was 19 years old, I decided to walk from Frankfurt to Siena or at least that is where I finally got too tired to walk any further and ended up staying there three years.

I had just read an inspirational book about long distance walking which was all the rage back in 1972 by some British record holding long distance walker. I got a lot of tips from him and had all the latest and lightest equipment. A 1 1/2 pound single man tent about the size of a rolled up Sunday addition of the newspaper, a sleeping bag about the same weight,good for -20 F. Felt in-soles to keep my feet warm in my walking boots. I walked for 40 days and tried to average 50 miles a day when it wasn't all up hill.

It was a wonderful experience. For one thing my progression was slow enough to notice the subtle and gradual changes in the flora and fauna as I climbed slowly ever upward towards the Alps and also the gradual changes in dialect. I could sing as loud as I wanted when there was no one around for hours. As the summer heat increased I found that it was easier to walk at night especially in the moonlight. I more or less followed the route of the German poet Schiller. Of course when I got up onto the Brenner Pass I was thinking of Hannibal and wondering how his poor old elephants made it in the snow.

The interesting thing for me was walking in Germany. I was an American and half Jewish, who had been born in 1950, still close enough to the WWII and the holocaust to feel negative about the Germans. My parents had taken me to see Dachau when I was a small child and it was vivid in my memory. What was totally unexpected for me was the kindness and generosity and even awe the Germans demonstrated for me. You see hiking in Germany is somewhat of a national past time and it has almost mythological proportions there, so to find an American young man walking alone through their country made a big impression on them. Before I had walked my way from Frankfurt to their Southern border in Swabia and crossed over into Switzerland, I had actually been hosted by 9 different families some of whom even had teenage daughters whom they entrusted me with. They fed me, took me to meet their friends, took me to swim at their health clubs and even to church with them. And they were all peaceniks with Viet Nam war protest posters in their houses.

One town and its inhabitants sticks out prominently in my recollections and that was the town of Marbach am Neckar on the Neckar River. I had grown so accustomed to sleeping in the fields and the woods in my little tent far from roads and towns that I hated to arrive in a town at night because then I would have to pay for a room.It seemed silly to have to pay for a bed now and I was never afraid for my safety sleeping outside in the fields or the forests. The only thing that ever happened to me sleeping in the woods one dawn was a German bird watcher had tripped over me while walking and looking through his binoculars at the same time.

Anyway I had arrived in Marbach am Neckar at dusk and looked for a grocery store with the idea in mind that I could buy some food and then hike out of town before it was totally dark. The shop keeper was just ringing up his last customer when I brought my things to his register. He said to me:” Are you a hiker?” And I said I was. He said so was he and his family and he wanted me to come to stay at his house so his son could practice English with me. I told him only on the condition that they let me put up my tent in their backyard and let me sleep out there rather than impose of them.

When I got to their house the first think I saw was a row of hiking boots outside the front door ranging from little to big like steps. It turned out he used to be a shoe cobbler before he was a grocer and had made his families hiking boots himself and even his 5 year old daughter had walked further than I had at that point. I felt humbled...but they were so nice I got over it quickly as they made me feel so welcome...

Anyway they let me pitch my tent in the vegetable garden next door between the cabbage rows which belonged to their uncle and I still remember he leaned out his second story window and said: “Are you a Yankee!?” I said I was and he was delighted. It was just so hard to imagine that the Americans and Germans had been engaged in mortal combat only a few decades before...

Earlier in the day I had misread a sign in German over a spiget that had running water filling up a trough for cattle and had drunk from it. I thought it said you can drink the water but I guess: “Keine Trinkwasser” means you can’t. That night I got sick and this family thought it was their fault even though I told them what had happened. They took care of me for a week in their house. When I got well they took me to the source of the Danube which was a little stream filled with little white flowers and swallows streaming over it with towering cliffs above and a castle clinging to the side of the cliff which I believe was called Klingenzell. It was so beautiful up there and it was hard to believe that this tiny stream became a mighty river traveling a thousand miles and ending in the Black Sea. They introduced me to their best friends and they just couldn’t do enough for me. They bandaged my blistered foot. Finally I was well enough to start my hike again and after many thanks and a tearful farewell, we exchanged addresses and for many years we sent each other cards at Christmas. As if that wasn’t enough, as I was leaving the village and had hardly walked a mile, on the outskirts of town, I spied an old lady sitting on her front steps. She beckoned me into her yard and showed me large fossils they had placed in the lawn of their front yard and then she invited me into her house and insisted on making me breakfast of fried eggs and toast and coffee and then proceeded to show me a whole lot of miniature drawings of flower fairies that her grandmother had drawn and they were really quite good and better than ones I had seen in fairy tale books as a child.

By the time this sort of thing had happened 9 times and I was hosted by families I met for the first time in Radolfzel and Lake Constanz and other towns along the way, I left Germany with a completely different impression than the one I had arrived with. In fact in the town of Constanz I was invited to give a little talk about my long distance walk to an English class of German high school students who gave me a warm reception.

In marked contrast after spending a miserable night in a meadow high in the Swiss Alps in which tiny gnats small enough to get through my mosquito netting devoured me all night, I arrived on foot about lunch time in a beautiful valley and spied a country restaurant with wondrous wooden tables and chairs and gorgeous table settings and since it appeared open to the public and not a private party, I went to take off my back pack and began to sit down at one of the empty tables when suddenly the management arrived and asked me to leave. They didn’t like the fact that I was dirty and sweaty from hiking all day. Unlike the Germans they had no reverence for hikers.

I remember heaving a sigh of relief when I finally walked across the border into Italy near Lugano and laughed at the bumper to bumper traffic jam at the border of cars that were not moving at all as I briskly walked past them all, cutting to the front of the line and flashing my passport at the guard as I stepped across the line.

I had bought a bright yellow woman's straw hat somewhere along the way because the sun had become quite strong and it was all I could find and afford at the time to protect my head with. As I walked along, the Italians kept shouting at me: “Shoene Kappe, shoene kappe!” I guess they liked my hat. It was useless to try to explain that I wasn’t German. I remember when I went into the shop to buy it, I had explained to the proprietor that I had walked all the way from Frankfurt. As I went to leave, he took me aside and he said: “I will go along with your story for the public but tell me the truth; you really hitch hiked here didn’t you?” He refused to believe I had walked and that was pretty much the same story I got all along my march through Italy. Many country restaurant proprietors gave me free meals and a free cognac or glass or wine for the road but they always winked at me knowingly when I told them I had walked all the way from Franfurt.

I had come to hate dogs by then because as I walked through mountain villages in the cool moon light with no sound but my foot steps, the dogs of the village would take to barking at me and I felt terrible about the rucus which would be waking everyone up and making me feel like an intruder or a vagrant. I remember one day in the Piedmont walking past an old lady with an enormous German Shepard whom she was calling off to spare me from his wrath and his name was “Brando!” I thought that was a great name for a dog.

Finally when I walked into Milan, my friends there whom I had known from school days came down to get me with their car and they kept saying: “Che Ganzo! Che Forte!” when I explained to them what I had done. They took me to their in-laws apartment and did all my laundry and let me use their bath and I stayed with them a few days to rest. They told me that once I got to Bologna that I should walk on the Futa, which was the old Chiantigana wine route between Bologna and Florence where I would meet up with them again as they actually lived there and only visited Milan from time to time to see their relatives.

When I got to the Futa, I remember that almost every street that crossed the it was named after a young partisan who had died in the resistance movement during WWII, many in their late teens and early twenties. It was very sobering. It was odd that Emilia Romagna had produced both Mussolini and all these partisans.

Could you still hike that today?

I have been doing martial arts/karate since I was 16 and still ski every winter so for my age I'm in good shape. Probably could still do it but it might take me twice as long....LOL.

cheers,

BrianA