Post 30: Another Pennsylvania

 

Ehrbergkopf

     I decided to go to Colmar alone after seeing my friend Lane's itinerary for Normandy. It didn't look like much fun, two days of whirlwinding around, carrying a heavy pack and not knowing where to sleep next. I knew how it would go. I'd be, unhappy, stressed out and annoyed with him, I'd probably stop speaking. Even as a I sit here now and write I feel annoyed again. I went to Colmar because I had to go somewhere. It wasn't so big (I was a bit overwhelmed by Paris) but it was fairly touristy and therefore no one would wonder what a foreigner was doing there, and, maybe most importantly, it was in Alsace. 
    I had an attraction to the region, because it's some of my ancestors were from. My great-great-great-grandmother was from there before she moved across the Rhine to Waltershofen, Germany to be with Benjamin Allgeier (the man I am named after) and then from Waltershofen to Green Township, Pennsylvania. For me, going to Alsace would be kind of like going to back to a kind of homeland, my very own heimat, supposedly. It would become apparent throughout the journey that my roots really are in the United States and I can never be anything but American although really I'm getting ahead of myself. 
    From Paris I took the TGV to Strasbourg in the morning, spent like three hours there then hopped on a  Fluo train to Colmar. I arrived around 3pm I think. Because there was a good deal, I booked three nights in a one bed hotel room. I was alone. It was fine. I ate cold cassoulet out of a can, Granola brand chocolate cookies for dessert and read a book. 
    The truth is I was realizing I really don't like leaving my comfort zone but for the moment I tried to set up one in Colmar; I got to know the place. It has such a picturesque, classsic and medieval old town, mostly closed to cars and full of great restaurants and cute little shops. People from all over the world walking around. I was happy to be in France amongst all this new and different stuff but I'll admit even things like overheard conversation between American tourists were a great comfort, so were the anglophone tours (though I never went on one). Outside of the city's old parts was I'd guess fairly representative of a midsize french city, there were the huge socialized apartments, the densely (compared to the USA) arranged little houses, an impressive hospital and a bakery every few blocks. The second full day I was there I would go on a big hike up to the Chateau Hohlandsbourg in the mountains outside of town, and it's the mountains, the Vosges, that I really want to talk about here. I loved, and I still love those mountains. I took the bus down to the last stop, then walked through Wintzenheim and some vineyards to the trailhead, past ancient crumbling walls and the narrow vineyard tractors chugging away. It was getting cloudy.
    What I couldn't stop thinking about was Pennsylvania. So much in Alsace reminded me of Pennsylvania, the wooded mountains seemed about the same height, the soft pretzels were just as abundant and delicious, etc. I noticed the granites that made up the mountains, just like granites you'll find in PA. The mountains like those I'd spent so many camping trips exploring with my family or the boy scouts as a kid, scrambling up stones and boulders, slipping on leaf litter. Did I enjoy where I was because it was like Pennsylvania or because it was Alsace? Silly question I guess, both can be true, but it ran through my head. I made my way up the hairpinning trail, following signs put there by the local Club Vosgien. My thoughts went back to my ancestors, their motives to choosing the area now lost to time but I did wonder, did they go where they went because even in a far-away foreign place, across an ocean, they were looking for home? Did Benjamin and Catherine go into those forests in the back of their property and think of the Europe they'd left behind? 
    With these questions on my mind my ancestors became less myth and more human. They, just like I, had a place that they missed. (They never returned to Europe after moving to the USA.) Now, I know what it looked like, a little of what it may have felt like there. I think of the courage, the sorrow of tearing oneself away from somewhere in which you are entrenched, and the brazen hope to build something unknown and new. Paradoxically though, thinking of the thoughts of Benjamin and Catherine I was making more myths. No one knows what these people thought, why they left, what they were really looking for. They left no diaries, it's all just inference and good guesses. My story, their story, is mostly lost and as such any emotions or motivations I ascribe are fictions, myths of my own creation; thus my ancestors are me and my story is my own and tears fell from my aching, weary eyes. Benjamin would not have walked through the woods in contemplation. Thoreau had only just published Walden, Muir was still in college, and America was still wary of the woods. 
    Now I don't fear the woods, I feel more comfortable there then I do almost anywhere, but I do fear the trailrunner who may see me weeping on my way up to the Ehrbergkopf. It wasn't much but an outcrop of jutting granites on a small crest. I took a little break there, sat on the stones covered in moss and lichens, in moss that grew on top of lichens. And yep, there it was again, reflections of Pennsylvania, Delaware, the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. My Appalachian mountains, my Vosges mountains, my Black Forest, my materials of being blurring into each other. I imagined I was in the Eastern US again; tracing a route through some unknown corner, a memory I forgot. 
    But every time I dredge up the memories I do have, mostly the good ones (I remember so little of my life before like, age 15, I guess that means it wasn't very good) I wonder "Am I scattering this place and homeland into fictions? Making it something it wasn't and isn't? Nostalgia-blind and tainted by a yearning I refuse to exhaust? Do I, by telling myself I am not in the 'right' place, provide myself with a shabby excuse for not living a certain way?" The questions weigh me down even now and who knows when I will let them stop. 
    I left the Ehrbergkopf and kept going up. The trail was steep, rocky, dusty despite the humid air gravid, as I'd soon learn, with soft rain. I put my rain coat on and kept ascending, though few drops made it past the forest's canopy. A large sign painted HOHLANDSBOURG ← put me on track to the last upward scramble before the great castle loomed tall in my view. There were benches at the top, a small parking lot with the road, and one lone trailrunner with whom I shared the view. From the top you  got a great view of Colmar, Wintzenheim, Wettolsheim, the profound flatness of the Rhine River valley, and the mountains of Germany's Black Forest across it, like the siblings of the Vosges. The view was something real, something stunning and it took me out of my head finally. My tired, mahogany eyes met the earth. I was in Alsace, a castle was behind me. I floated in an uncommon mood, light and empty, impressed but unsure. I was all alone. 
    

In the distance you can see Germany, a line of mountains then a faint larger group of mountains behind it, Waltershofen is in between those.

    There's a book I purchased in Colmar called Après le virage c'est chez moi (My Home is Just Around the Corner) about finding our place, like our physical location we live in in our world. I'm eager to read it but hesitant too, like I am afraid it might change what I think. It's like third on my to-read list anyway, I gotta get through some others first. Oh, I don't know, maybe I'll write an update to this thing in a few years when I figure more out. It's weird how four years ago in Hawai'i I was talking about homesickness for Kansas and now I grow tired of it and find myself wanting to go back to the east coast. It's weird how preoccupied I am with where I live.