THE MANY SPIRITS OF FREIBURG, GERMANY

            The town of Freiburg is tucked into the southwest corner of Germany, nearly in France and close to Switzerland.  It has an amazing cathedral, the beautiful Munster, but other than that, there are not many of the “must see” elements of a European city that most tourists seek:  Roman ruins, for example, or world-class art collections or stunning architecture.  But what it lacks in virtuoso qualities, it makes up for with sheer charm.  Freiburg is the kind of place that Euro-trotting backpackers or package tour travelers “do” in a day or two.  Because of our house exchange, we were able to “do” Freiburg at the leisurely pace it deserves and as a result, we fell in love with the pretty little town.

            Only about 200,000 strong, Freiburg’s old city is a pedestrian-only zone centered around the Munster.  Only a clutch of the original medieval buildings still stand since the bulk of the old city was bombed to near obliteration in the waning days of WWII.  The cathedral survived, some say miraculously while others say it’s because the tall spire acted as a reference point for the Allied bombers to guide them in their operations amid a sea of rubble.  Whatever the reason – divine intervention or military expediency – the gorgeous red sandstone church dominates the old town.  Begun in 1200 and worked on over a three-century time span, the cathedral grew in size from a modest early thirteenth century church to a building whose tall lacy spire, and flying buttresses, and arched edges are recognizable throughout town.

            Along with its sheer size, the Munster cathedral is notable for its soft building material that requires near-constant repairs.  The sandstone is good for about 30-60 years before it begins to crumble.  Some townspeople claim that they’ve lived their whole lives in Freiburg and have never seen the Munster without some kind of scaffolding attached to its sides, dotted with masons and workmen repairing some eroding bit of the structure.

            Jutting out from the walls of the cathedral is an array of 90+ gargoyles whose ferocity is chilling, even to this modern-day sinner.  I can’t imagine what the imagination of a thirteenth century observer could do with the images of animals, both real and mythical, and humans, both anatomically correct or mixed with attributes that sprang from a dark creativity steeped in tales of damnation and gruesome eternal punishments for temporal crimes.  Among the leering, howling and gesturing gargoyles stand the towering statues of the prophets, looking down from on high.  Most earth-bound observers would be hard-pressed to make out the faces of the holy ones tucked into niches toward the top of the cathedral.  But thanks to the fabulous Augustiner Museum in Freiburg, some of the statues of the prophets and a handful of the scowling gargoyles have been ensconced in a specially-constructed gallery where you can walk among them and also, above them.  The gallery is ingenuously designed with small flights of stairs that take you adjacent to the wall-mounted gargoyles, and then another flight leads to vantage points above them so that you can look down on the elongated backs of the gargoyles and see the troughs carved into them.  Rainwater would flow down the backs of the gargoyles and out of the gaping mouth of the carved demons.

            The cathedral serves as a reference point for the old downtown, both figuratively and in the Middle Ages, literally.  Carved onto the wall next to the mammoth entry doors are measurements of interest to the common medieval person.  A circular shape from 1270 is next to another circular shape from 1317.  The shapes comported with the recommended size of a bread loaf.  Since a bustling market occupied the space outside of the cathedral (the market actually pre-dating the construction  of the church) medieval Maude or Mortimer could take her/his purchased loaf of bread over to the church’s wall and make sure that Hans the baker hadn’t skimped in the day’s baking.

            Along with the bread loaf shapes, several square and rectangular shapes are carved into the walls showing the standard size of a brick, bucket or beam.  The wall of the cathedral was the medieval man’s google search engine or handy Wikipedia. 

            All around the cathedral, the light-hearted spirit of Freiburg can be felt – and literally heard.  Small stone canals run parallel to the streets, a bit more than ankle-deep and about a foot wide, and filled with sparkling clear cold water.  Called “bachles,” these little street canals are Freiburg’s most noticeable feature.  Originally constructed about when construction on the cathedral first began, the 13^th century canals operated as medieval fire extinguishers.  The wooden houses, heated with fires and illuminated with candles, were a firefighters’ worse nightmare.  The baschles fed by diverted water from the nearby river, were an instant bucket brigade.  They could be quickly dammed and flooded to provide flame-extinguishing water.

            Today, the baschels operate as pure whimsy, which is found too rarely in life in general and cities in particular.  Local merchants sell small colorful wooden boats to children, who navigate the little crafts down the bubbling canals, holding a string tied to the boat and floating it along.  The baschles are also popular with toddlers and twenty-somethings, who kick off their shoes and wade in the cooling little canals on steamy summer days.  Needless to say, the dog population of Freiburg appreciates the handy little streams, going for walks in which the pooch parades down the canal while his owner walks on the adjacent sidewalk.  Since the canals are cleaned daily, they are fresh and appealing.  We sat in sidewalk cafes enjoying cool drinks or coffees and watching the parade of toddlers and others enjoying the cool little streams, wading in what was once the protective lifeblood of the city.  And is now, nothing but charming.  Like Freiburg itself.

HAPPY TRAILS

            Hiking in the Bernese Swiss Alps is like champagne for your feet.  And your eyes.  And your heart.  The trails are narrow dirt paths, or paved walkways, or gravelly snaking footpaths.  A number of trails start above Murren, the tiny car-free village that nestles on an outcropping above the Lauterbrunnen Valley. To access the trails, you catch a cablecar from Murren and climb, at an almost vertical angle, up a thousand feet or so.  As the cable car slides up the mountain, we pass sweating farmers, men and women, cutting hay with odd scything tractors and raking it into swathes with long-handled wooden rakes.  It has been surprisingly hot, even up at 7,000 and 8,000 feet elevation, with temperatures hovering in the high 80s and near 90.  The sweating women rake the golden hay onto big gray tarps whose sides they gather up to form a sling.  The sling is loaded onto a trailer that’s been attached to a tractor, and the tractor heads straight downhill with its load, or climbs vertically up to the next field.  Everything seems to defy gravity:  the tractor slowly crawling up the mountain face; the women raking while their feet grip the sheer mountainside, the cable car floating through space higher and higher.

            We reach the top and disembark.  Because it’s Switzerland, there’s a lovely restaurant at the top, with outdoor seating that overlooks breathless beauty.  And because it’s Switzerland, there’s a children’s playground at the top, too.  The Swiss seem to value the mountains, hiking, excellent viewpoints, good food, and happy playing children.  Everywhere we go, whenever there is a cable car or train stop with a great view, there’s a restaurant and a play area.  Mom and Dad sip beers, the grandparents tuck into hearty platters of food, and the kids slide and swing and have a great time.  Something for everyone.

            Where the Almendhubel cable car deposits us, directly opposite the massive faces of the Eiger, Munch and Jungfrau Mountains, there’s an additional attraction by the obligatory restaurant-play area combo.  We see several Swiss adults and kids headed to it with relish.  Taking off their shoes, they step first into a square that is filled with big rocks.  They walk over the rocks with their bare feet, and then step down into a second square filled with smaller rocks.  Over the rocks they go, and then step into a third square filled with gravel, followed by a fourth filled with woodchips, and a fifth filled with wooden bars.  The sixth step-down is into a calf-high trough of icy cold water.  Ahhh.  Nothing spells good podiatry fun more than walking over rocks, gravel, sawdust, and wood and then wading through glacial runoff.  We watch several people line up for the experience, laughing all the way.

            Although it’s difficult to say no to the opportunity to rip the flesh off your feet on a variety of unaccommodating surfaces, I decide to keep my boots on and embark on a trail that heads off through fields filled with Alpine wildflowers.  White, purple, golden, red; from teeny star shapes to big-headed blossoms; ground cover to knee-high; singles to clumps – the flowers are every shape and color.  It’s a profusion of colors, rainbows in the grass.  And the grass itself is a shimmering green, so that it’s a verdant background starred with colors and shapes.

            Jeff and Max and I hike along, and encounter big Swiss cows.  BIG Swiss cows, their hides a soft tan.  They are all Mamas and babies but the Mamas still have horns.  They bear around their necks gigantic oversized bells that ring with every motion of their heads.  It has to drive them nuts.  Or drive them deaf.  Or both.  But it doesn’t seem to bother them.  They stand in fields along the trails and occasionally, on the trail itself, turning their big heads to watch us hike by.  One cow actually trots up to Max and stands before him, looking him in the eye, clearly waiting for something.  “What’s with this cow?” Max asks.  I’ve read that the cows liked to be petted but thought it was a joke. When I told Max, he reached out a hand and tentatively patted the cow on the forehead.  The cow moved a step closer and leaned into the caress.  Max patted her more enthusiastically and the cow definitely gave off a satisfied aura.  The cow stared after us, a bit regretfully I thought, as we moved away.

            Farms and farmhouses are sprinkled among the valleys we hike through.  The trail at times goes directly through farmyards.  I imagined the private property rights crowd in America going crazy at the thought of sharing nature with hikers.  Some of the farms have opened up little cafes: a table or two scattered on the grass beside the farmhouse.  We stop at one to get out of a high-mountain thunderstorm. We have coffee and Max has a “milkshake,” which is just a glass of milk flavored with chocolate.  Inside part of the farm complex is a cheese making operation. The farm is an old dairy, and inside sit huge wheels of cheese.  We buy a small slab.  It’s salty and mild-flavored. 

            The farms we come across are all working farms, including one from which several farm hands (kids of the farmer, it looked like, along with the farmer himself) had been dispatched to bring the herd down from the mountains for the night.  We stood on the trail and watched.  Down a nearly vertical incline, from the high mountain valley where they’d grazed all day, came a herd of cows, ambling in small groups of two or three.  Then the farmer whistled at his border collie, who snapped to attention. The farmer waved an arm at the most far-flung cow, and the dog dropped into a low, ground-hugging posture and took off like a shot, running up to the cow’s face and startling it so that it turned and joined its fellows.  The border collie trotted back to the farmer, awaiting further orders.  The farmer, impatient at the cows’ slow pace, sent out the dog again, and it went to work, nipping at the heels of the cows, circling right at their noses, hugely outsized by the cows but a dozen times more nimble on its feet than its bovine charges.  The dog got the cows into a faster walk, then a trot, then a downhill careen as the cows moved toward the barn at what can only be described as a brisk gallop.  I’ve never seen cows run before, and I’ve never watched a border collie do the work that is in its genes.  All told, the round-up took 20 minutes or so, and the cows collected at the bottom of the mountain and broke into two single-file lines, and walked slowly, one by one, into the barn to be milked.

            We smiled at the farmer appreciately, and he smiled back.  As does everyone on the trail.  On the Murren side of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, the hikers are nearly all Swiss or German.  As they approach us on the trail, they invariably look us in the eye and smile and say the Swiss version of hello, which is a regional dialect slang for the formal German “good day.”  Many times, they also say some little pleasantry that I can’t make out, but understand it to be the equivalent of, “Lovely day!” or “Wasn’t that last twist of the trail a killer!” They are friendly and open; eye contact is a must; chatting is advised. 

            On the Wengen side of the Valley where many more tour groups pass through, the hikers are more international:  Brits, French, some Italians, a few Germans and Swiss, and even a few Americans.  On this side of the valley, the trails are far more crowded.  Needless to say, I prefer the Murren side, with its more peaceful and isolated trails, and fellow hikers whose roots go down deep into the local soil.

As we go hike the trails above Murren, we see locals of all ages and in all configurations:  white-haired couples out enjoying a nice hike; families with young children; single people; and grown kids with their parents.  On a lovely, hot summer afternoon, with the sky a deep blue and the Eiger, Munch and Jungfrau mountains rearing their white-capped heads above us, the Swiss are out enjoying their land.  And so are we.