Sunday December 23, 2007

Germany---winter wunderland. 8pm. Two days ago the prevailing color was silber (silver). Now it is weiss (white). There is a very unusual weather system in the area, and the result is what the locals are variously calling raureif, or frozen fog. Not just dew or frost; the fog settles on the trees and bushes and fields and then freezes before it has a chance to melt. Anja and I, her day Gunter and some friends of his took a long stroll in the countryside (10 klics outside of Marburg, about an hour north of Frankfurt (also learned where the word Frank-furt comes from today----a furt is basically an English 'ford', and the city is named after a ford that was revealed to the Franks who were fleeing from some other goths/vandals/huns and searching for a place to cross the Main and were shown the way by a deer). That was Friday.....close to zero grad centigrade, sunny and hazy. Where the sun couldn't reach was everywhere silver, hanging off everything and most everywhere. Not ice at all, but more a crystalline powder in the hand, light and dry and feathery in appearance. Anja said some of it on the ground looked like orzo. Where the sun did hit for long was just barren; so the dichotomy was very stark indeed....some trees were silvered halfway up and then appeared dry, and fields on one side of the country roads were dry while the other side had a complete covering. To wander in it was extraordinary.

Saturday-12/22/2007. Could it be any more picturesque? Hard to imagine. 5 degrees below zero and everything in socked in....today is even more unusual. The fog has stayed overnight and everything is either gray or white. Visibility in the air is very reduced. I walked up the 13th ruin at the top of the hill, from where I can see on most days 10+ kilometers into Marburg and the castle (Schloss) landmark that dominates the skyline. But on this day I couldn't even see the hotel/restaurant a few hundred meters down the hill. I had the day to myself, walking in the forest (Wald) alone with the cold, padding and crunching along, alternately putting my hands in my pockets to thaw and then taking them out when they had warmed up enough. It is cold enough that I can feel it down my throat when a take a big breath with my mouth open. The forest is in a very bad state, a massive hurricane having decimated the area near and far about a year ago. Whole stands came down, and while the foresters are cutting down the broken trees, the job is immense. Trails I used to know simply no longer exist, or are so clogged with branches and trunks that it is just an obstacle course. Very sad. In the summer time from just up the hill I would only be able to see trees; now, I can see right through the forest, just a field of debris and massive tread tracks, all the way into Marburg. Very sad, though today peaceful and beautiful in its own way. There is no 'up' today, the horizons just merge into a gray vastness and I couldn't tell how near or far anything might be. And until I hit towns there was virtually no one to be seen on any of the paths. Almost eerily deserted. I walked down to the Lahn, the river that runs through Marburg, and then along that into town. Eventually, Anja picked me up and we bought some wine and came home.

Today. More of the same, but now it is all white and the crystals are longer and even more stunning. There is no sun or any sense of a light source. Just a ceiling of a few hundred feet, and the 'sky' is just various shades of gray merging into.....nothing. Smoke. The smaller branches are drooping with the weight, but again this is nothing like ice but ineffably light and delicate. Fences in the countryside with connectors of string or twine are swelled to many times their width by the spiky covering. Some places deep in the forest (where there is deep forest left) are weirdly left untouched by this, but mostly it is magical. The palette of colors is so muted there is really only gray, white, a bit of green, and some brown. That's pretty much it. I was by myself again, trying to do a little local foot research for a walk Anja and I are supposed to lead next Friday in the area.

Someone in the distant past liked to bury there people in raised earthen circles. The surrounds are 2 or 3 stones laid on each other to an above ground level of 2-3 feet high and a diameter of 12-15 feet or so. Not much to distinguish one from another. The middle is all earth and whatever nature has bestowed in the intervening years. In summer these graves can be devilishly hard to find, but the forest partly destroyed and it being in the middle of winter where one can see better, it is much easier. Were they Celts? That seems to be the prevailing theory. They are not much to look at, just a local curiosity.

The news is full of global warming and the spreading sub prime/mortgage crisis. The latter will work itself out, but the planet needs help. I feel pretty smug about my environmental impact (no motorized vehicles, mostly travel on public transport or my feet), but that smugness isn't going to mean anything if we keep polluting and overpopulating. Nature doesn't measure, but if it/she did, what happens weather wise is normally accomplished over millenia and eons. The possible disaster we are responsible for ourselves could be occurring in just one lifetime. Is there a politician lucid and strong enough to say to us, and to the world at large, that we need to slow down and redirect a huge amount of scientific research and money to a renewal source of energy that doesn't pollute and that can make secular western society self sufficient? Because if there is not we are screwed. If some of the most dire climate forecasts are accurate, we have very time to offset what is already in motion.

I read today that for the first time, in a small village in Italy just recently, there was an outbreak of Dengue fever, brought by tiger mosquito's from somewhere in Africa because the climate is now mild enough to support their migration. Very.....scary. As we wander in the next few years I need to see how I can help. If we don't solve this issue, all the other issues may become......moot.