Problem avoidance in Eastern Germany
It’s not the first time I’d been in this position. Metaphorically, not geographically. Blood in the veins of my eyes, a throbbing sensation on the left side of my chest. I was in a field in Eastern Germany, with a piece of plastic separating me from oblivion. This field was saving me from a different sort of oblivion, the kind that quickly caught up if I stopped absorbing the iridescent hues of the sunset over the middling valleys, if I stopped looking for every grain of wheat in a plot of several hundred thousand. I’d gotten here because I needed to be lost, but I needed to get un-lost fairly fucking quickly too.
The date is July 2019. One of the before-fore times, back when masks were reserved for upper-class sex parties and most people had little idea what would happen if a bat shat in the eye of a pangolin. I’m technically homeless at this point, and about three days ago my partner of two years was… not deported per say? But not made to feel massively welcome by the UK government. So she’s in India and our relationship is as dead as the humour in a Farside comic strip. Very.
So what’s a boy to do? I’m allergic to sympathy and the phrase ‘time heals all wounds’ makes my scrotum retract into my body. We both temporarily called the strange city of London our home, and each street is caked in memories, like the crust that surrounds the inner-workings of kettles in hard-water areas. The irrepressible itch to gallivant is building up inside me. So I take the cash I’ve saved from work, my student loan and the deposit for our home. And I decide to get the everloving fuck out of here.
£10 flight to Dusseldorf. Sweet. Festival looking for helpers near some town called ‘Bad Sulza’. Happy days! I’m sure I can get a train there. Because hey, German public transport is ruthlessly efficient, right? I get a hostel, try and plot my visit and string together whatever German I can remember from Duolingo and Ramstein songs. I get the feeling that the phrase “Du hast micht” isn’t going to take me far here.
As a Brit and as a peasant, I don’t understand tipping. I’m also terrified of having any kind of power over another person’s life, so I’m usually the kind of person who rates everything 5 stars. I can be in an uber and the driver could shout at me, smoke in the front and try and re-enact Fake Taxi and I’ll still wind up saying he was an excellent conversationalist in the comments. So when I’m walking into café’s and attempting to order ‘Das Kase Brot’ (I’m so sorry Germans), I’m liable to make it rain like a Poundland Akon. Which is fine, because all tourists are loaded right?
NOPE! I really need to save my cash if I’m going to make it to September on around £1000. Unfortunately, everytime I walk into a shop like what up “das vegetarianisches essen” (I’m really sorry), I always wind up with a fucking cheese sandwich. Every meal is cheese. I am fuelled by cheese. I dream of cheese, and the dreams are really fucking weird because all I’ve eaten is cheese. At night I take the form of any number of cartoon mice and I can only assume I must have terrified my dormmates by murmuring “arriba arriba” in the night.
When I’m not reeling from the cheese sweats like a recovering heroin addict, I’m exploring the wonders of Dusseldorf. There’s a river that’s pretty nice. There’s a big-ass spire which costs money to ascend, so I just look at it from a distance. I mean it’s great, but it’s no Blackpool tower. There are a few galleries, a fairground and plenty of riverside bars with communal long tables. I walk through them all like a ghost, soaking in their smells and sounds, but not dropping the euros to participate. I am the cheese boy and when I leave, it will be as though I was never here.
Did you know? Germany is big.
Maps are bullshit. I’m telling you. The UK is the equivalent or an insecure businessman who builds a giant golden tower with his name at the top. Not naming any names, but someone who is well hung doesn’t do that. Same thing with British cartographers. I mean its about a 4 hour train ride to pretty much anywhere in the UK but Jesus fucking Christ that is not the case for Germany. Germany could eat Britain and still have room for another half a Britain, but that’s not something the cartographers want you to know.
Dusseldorf train station is filled with shops, cafes and bookstores. People are milling about, and they do not avert their gaze from their course for a second. I go to take out cash, and the second my card is in the slot, a woman begs me in English for a few Euros. She’s pregnant and she can’t afford food and she’s worried her baby will die. I give her a Euro. Another woman sees this and tells me she’s pregnant. I give her a euro. A man comes along and says he is pregnant. I do not give him a euro.
Cross Country tickets are dispensed in the ticket office, emblazoned with the colour red, painted in clear spatial blocks. I am greeted by a machine which tells me to take a number. I do, and within 5 minutes a woman at gate 18 shouts my name. I ask to get to Bad Sulza and she tells me that, with three changes, she can get me to Erfurt. I have to make it on my own from there. Sure, I say! How hard can that be?
It’s a great 9 hours, being stacked like a human Tetris piece. The lovely fahrkarte-frau (I’m sure that’s not a phrase) has given me ample time to get between platforms, and the trains all take off and arrive to the minute. But it’s late into the evening and I’m exhausted from navigating these unfamiliar settings. Also, the ticket-lady has not given me enough time to load up on cheese between stops. So by the time I get to Erfurt, and realise that I have to run to catch the last train to Bad Sulza, I’m close to passing out.
Bad Sulza literally translates to ‘Bath Salts’. But when I arrived, I wasn’t greeted by toothless junkies. Instead, I was greeted by a shack. One, singular shack.
There were a few other houses nearby the train station, but this shack was the most imposing. One direction led to trees, the other to fields. I am in a forest. Hit troll with axe.
A horde of pensioners start moving towards me, so I resolve to head into the forest. I could have asked them for directions, but I wasn’t thinking straight and was fairly certain they would try and lure me into a gingerbread house. Google maps tells me it’s a 2 hour walk to the festival site, with my big-ass rucksack and side bag which spanks me with every step I take. I follow the fernlike tall trees past obscure monuments to fallen bearded men, past white benches adorning the side of the path. Past large clearings with stages and white benches aligned for the viewing audience. Past stone bridges, flowing water and weeping willows over ponds. All the while, I don’t encounter a single person.
I really miss the pensioners.
I’m sure the good people of Bad Sulza don’t routinely engage in human sacrifice. I’m sure they were all just indoors watching the same football match. I’m sure that as the park led to town, on a slope, surrounded by rustic buildings and painted picturesque houses, that every single person had a perfectly normal explanation for staying home that day.
But I didn’t see anyone.
The mounting sense of weirdness escalated with every step that I took, hungry, shattered, bag-spanked legs continued to mount the slope. I hurriedly looked behind me every few seconds, somehow more terrified of seeing somebody than not. At the top of the hill was a field, actually at the top of the hill there were only fields. I could have cried.
Cornfields are notoriously creepy. There are no scarecrows outside Bad Sulza, only row after row of slender grains, stretching back towards the sky. Every step, every slight incline, pulling me down, my bag daring me to fall over. The bag tightens around my neck and I feel like a politician in a cupboard. You know what they’re getting up to.
The process of taking selfies is oddly calming. If you ever wonder if you’ll die in a field, selfies are highly recommended. Hills and blisters eliminate the last of my inner cheese-fuel. Aside from the Wunderbar (yes that’s a real German Brand) that I stuffed down my gullet 7 hours ago, I’m running on fumes. My shoes might struggle to get into heaven. They don’t have much of a sole anymore.
If you’ve ever been completely exhausted, you’ll know you reach a point where the world takes on a magical hue. Every fragment of your surroundings is coloured correctly, like the world was in your childhood memories. Details you never would have noticed are the loudest thing in the world, after your own heartbeat and breath. The ladybirds escaping from spiderwebs, the sharp lines between grain seeds. I absorb all the detail because it takes me away from my collapsing body and the mounting sense of panic that’s building at the top of my stomach.
My incline declines, after the third mile. I’m walking past livestock, pet goats, dogs in back-gardens that aren’t fond of the English. No german dogs seem to like me. Maybe no one told them World War two was over. I see some children playing in the street, and don’t ask them directions, because no one under 10 in mainland Europe can speak English. Admittedly, no one over 10 in England can speak their languages either. There are some cobblestones and a cluster of houses that might comprise a hamlet. Cul-de-sacs have always given me the creeps.
You might think I’d be glad when my dying phone tells me that I’ve reached my destination. I am, until I realise that I am not looking at a festival, I’m looking at a pub. I walk into the beer garden, and heads turn in my direction. I am a cowboy, busting past the double doors into a western saloon. Tension rises. I do finger guns and say “Hallo! Spraken zie English?”
One guy at the back does. He’s the perfect aryan, with a chest that looks as though it was chiselled from granite. My endorphin high brain thinks ‘I bet he has really sad looking nipples’. People who exercise too much always get droopy nips. He tells me he speaks English and I praise every deity under the sun (here’s looking at you Cthulu!) “Please…Please tell me you know about X..Fest”. He says yeah, he hosts it in the field at the back of his pub.
But I’m about 13 days early.
That’s okay though, because, he tells me, there’s a guy in the back of his field who’s setting him up.
I venture out to go see this guy. Turns out I’ve won the lottery, because there’s not one but 3 guys. They’re all trying to set up a bench and I shout “Hallo! Please please tell me you’re here for X-fest”
“Heyyyyyyyyyyyyy man”
Oh that was a long hey.
“Yeah, this is X-fest! We’ve been here about 5 hours just setting this place up”
I look around. There’s a trailer, a big ass tree and a bench with a table. This is in no way, shape or form what their page looked like on Workaway, or on the internet. It’s 3 guys with no food, no water, and nowhere to sleep behind an empty field behind a pub.
One of the guys is from Spain, apparently a teacher. The other is from the next village over. Finally, my host, Wyvern, is a nomad, from a group of about 30 people. That’s pretty cool. The guys have travelled pretty far, but not as far as me. They keep telling me I’m crazy, coming all the way over from England to come to this place. I look at the semi-assembled bench, and the flickering trees around us, which are fading into night. “Yeah!” I laugh. “I must be crazy”.
Having their first break, all the guys have a lot of questions for Wyvern. The other German guy only speaks German, so god knows what he’s saying. The Spanish guy wants to know that there are more people coming. “There’s going to be children, right?” he asks. Come to think of it, he asked that a few times.
To be honest, there’s only one question on my mind. Where, in the everloving fuck, is the food? Wyvern laughs. “Well, I’m glad you asked that Ash! Now… have any of you guys ever gone dumpster diving?” It’s a funny joke, so I laugh! I laugh all the way into the back of his white van. I’m still laughing as the door locks behind me. Then I stop laughing. If there are any gimps hidden underneath the tarpaulin, I don’t want to wake them up.
The van splutters over bumps, and I bounce like I’m in utero inside a mid-twerk Miley Cyrus. We pull up to the first supermarket. Nothing! It must be bin day! Same with the second! Oh but the third time is the charm, and pull back the lid, we’re greeted with the sweet, sweet stench of success. There’s not a lot inside, but at the bottom of the bin, our stinky bounty awaits us.
As the smallest, I’m first in. I’m the human equivalent of a claw machine, angled by my legs hoping to hook my hands around something. Today’s prizes are:
1) A carton of slightly gone off coleslaw
2) Some iceberg lettuce (thankfully wrapped)
3) A readymade salad, in decent condition. Bulgur salad, with cranberries. I don’t l know what that is and I don’t find out.
4) Some unbagged bin pickles
5) Some yogurt
6) An veritable fuckton of flowers
In the moment, I’m amazed at the amount of good stuff that supermarkets wind up throwing away. Taking our haul into the van, I’m hit with the aromatic smell of rotting vegetation. One of the yogurts bursts all over our lettuce and pickles, which has also seemingly gone off, leading to a fairly rancid cocktail in the bottom of this bag by the time we get back to our field. Is this what Sauerkraut is?
Wyvern wants to know if I’m hungry, but smelling the yogurt marinaded bin-pickles has somewhat diminished my appetite.
When we get back, I decide that this is all a little bit too much human interaction for today, and I ask about the sleeping arrangements. There’s a clearing past the trees which is, on the whole, pretty damn majestic. There’s a huge oak in the clearing, surrounded by a circle of twigs in what must be intentional design. The tree is hollow in the middle, and there appears to be some miscellaneous shite buried deep in its base. Wyvern pulls out some hammocks, and a sleeping bag, just for me.
If you bury some fabric in a tree for a year, when you come back, expect it to have some more residents. My sleeping bag had more legs than a pub crawl with Amy Winehouse. The result being, that my body was covered with little red bites for the next few weeks, a fair price considering I’d effectively performed hundreds of tiny home-invasions. Fun fact: If you ran your hand across my chest it actually spelled out ‘poor life decisions’ in braille.
We all put our hammocks up in the enclosure surrounding the tree, dumping our bags in its base. There’s a plug back at the car and I abandon my phone to it, praying it’ll load up on life saving energy by early tomorrow morning. At a little past midnight, I turn in to my hammock, cocooning up and planning the most nerve-wracking escape of my life.
Buckle up dear reader, because shit is going to get heavy.
In my hammock I feel many things. I feel cold and I feel itchy. I feel hungry and sleep deprived. I feel pain in muscles that I was not aware that I had. Unpleasant as these feelings are, they’re saving me from something. Next up is the wave of dread. I kick myself for the impulsive tick that tells me I can escape anything if I run fast enough. I’ve ran away from debts, mistakes, relationships and myself, all with varying degrees of success. This time feels different, the stakes feel higher. I have no home. I have no job. What I have is 850 Euros and an infested sleeping bag in Western Germany.
The comes the anxiety. Oh god, I’m trapped here, why did I think this was a good idea? Why the actual fuck has no one told me that this wasn’t a good idea? It’s just a typical Ash adventure. What’s unusual about this mentally unstable idiot turning his life upside down to go gallivant? Jesus fuck why do I always wind up gallivanting when it always turns out like this? I really like that word in case you can’t tell.
Depression hits me like an old friend. Feeling like everything is hopeless can actually be pretty comforting. Looking around me, I realise that I’m not in a hammock, but a cocoon. It fits. Right now I feel like I’m a hungry, hungry caterpillar. Have you ever had a hum in the back of your mind, just somewhere in the house? All day? And you don’t realise its there because it’s always there, it’s just a part of you. Until all of a sudden, it ends, and then it’s all you can think about. It’s been 4 days since I said goodbye to my partner of 2 years, and if I think about how much I miss her I think I’m going to wake the others up with my crying. So I don’t. Instead, I decide how I’m going to get out of here.
The manic energy I got when I quit smoking has never fully gone away. This tension to do something, whatever that is, is constantly there. But doing requires belief. I’m entirely enclosed in my sleeping bag. My watch tells me its 2am. Two of the guys are still up, one is heading back to sleep. I can find another country to bus it to, and somewhere that’ll take me in. I just need to get to a big city. I think my nearest one is Leipzig, which my inbound train would have headed onto. 2:30am, the others are winding down and brushing their teeth. I can do this. I believe I can do this.
There are two places I turned down to come here, and a few that I was going to visit after the festival ended. I’ll get myself a hostel room in the meantime, have a shower, get these insects off me, change into some clothes that aren’t encrusted in sweat, that haven’t been “slept” in. But first, I need to get to the train station in Bad Sulza, 3–4 miles away. The first train is going to be about 6 O’clock. If these guys are half as uncomfortable as me, they aren’t going to sleep in. Besides that, the sun comes in around 5:30am these days. So I need to be gone by then.
By 4am, everyone is tucked into their hammocks, snoring some of the most beautiful snores I’ve ever heard. I try and dismount my hammock before it tips me over, and I land on all fours, like a cat. One of the perks of dyspraxia is that you learn to give your clumsiness style. I’ve got all the grace and poise of a duck on ketamine, but when I fall over you better believe I’m landing like ‘paint me like one of your French girls’.
It’s pitch black, and the floor around my hammock is littered with twigs. Every step I take is soft, slow. I take about 5 seconds to put my foot down each time, testing the weight and texture of the surface below me. I am not breaking a single fucking twig.
I get closer to the area where the car is, which is a bit brighter due to being near the lampposts and lights by the pub at the other end of the field. I grab my phone and my charger. Hello old friend. I turn it on and several loud bings blare from it, penetrating the darkness. Heh, penetrating. I shove it into my armpit and faff with the ringer.
I load up maps, and plot my journey and figure out when the next train is on its way. In my near pitch-black surroundings, I book a hotel-room, and figure out what stop to get off at. It takes me longer than expected, and the first rays of dawn are already poking out. My frazzled little noggin has got to make it out of here.
My luggage is enveloped in a fortress of wood, guarded by a moat of brittle sticks. Dead in the centre of the snoring group are our bags, stashed at the base of a tree. Each step is laced with panic, and hesitation over brittle twigs. Step. Step. Step.
Crunch.
For a heartwrenching moment, I think I’m not going to make it. But I pause, and no one wakes up. Time speeds up and I hook my bag in my hand and saddle the other one around my neck. With a crunch, and a step, I’m free.
Off down the muddy road, looking back, looking over my shoulder again, a few steps and I look again. I think about how getting out of this field would be a lot easier if I were an owl. Would I choose to be able to turn my neck 180 degrees if it meant I had to eat mice? Oh but then I could fly too! Yeah, worth it.
Each step of the several miles back to Bad Sulza station is powered by sheer willpower. I veer away from the main road, because one of the guys mentioned it was closer on foot down this side path. Cornfields stretch on for hours and I lose myself in them. I’m not thinking, just focusing on moving forwards, and trying not to let my paranoia catch up with me. No one is following me on a bike. No one is going to put me in their van.
I pass a river, with trees stretching on to eternity behind them, perched on rock laden hills. The roar of the river puts my mind at ease. Rushing water is a good reminder that none of your problems mean shit. That water is going to go on to erode mountains, and join an ocean twice the size of all the world’s land. Some of it probably passed through the tract of a dinosaur, some of it might have been pissed out by cavemen. This might have once been part of the piss of Aristotle, coming back through the water cycle again. Cool.
As I walk, I get the strange sense that my surroundings are looping. There’s not a human in sight, and the fields of corn don’t have much diversity. If you’ve seen one cornfield, you’ve kind of seen them all. I imagine a cinematic landscape shot, with myself walking off one-side of the frame and appearing at the other. Now I’m thinking with portals.
My surroundings are becoming increasingly familiar. I recognise part of the slope, houses, with all their smooth textures and rigid architecture. The houses thin out, and I’m finally met with a familiar dirty shed, at 5:30 in the morning. Oh that beautiful shed. I could have kissed it, if human-shed relations weren’t considered so taboo. Jumping over a trickle of piss at the train station, I wait the half an hour it takes for my train to arrive, bustling myself in with rural commuters, heading to the big city. Leipzig baby!
As the train jostles from side to side, I look around at the miserable faces of Germany’s early-morning workers, and find myself grinning. I must smell as bad as Post-Malone looks, because nobody is sitting anywhere near me. Considering I travelled across a country, walked 8 miles, raided several dumpsters and ‘slept’ in my clothes, that’s probably not a surprise.
When the train pulls in, I treat myself to a croissant (the well known German delicacy) and a coffee. The lady at the counter seems to enjoy my broken German and smiles in a way that says ‘you seem harmless and you probably really need this coffee, but please sit over there because you smell like my grandmother’s arsehole’.
I head into the Arthotel Symphonie for a night, and have the greatest shower of my life. The glass partition in the show fogs up as steaming hot water cascades from the shower head. I stay in there far longer than I needed to, just enjoying being enveloped in cleanliness, and feeling safe behind my little glass shower wall.
I step out, dripping wet, and notice a message on my phone. A man named Tacio wants me to come work for a hostel in Helsinki for a month. How could I turn that down?
*All names have been changed to preserve anonymity
