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| Jake and I, crossing by foot from Germany, over the Rhine, and into France. Jake's 27th Birthday. |
2023 has been the slowest year on themainstem and consequently as I return to writing here on the blog it is on the back of a hard-learned lesson. It’s a lesson on losing yourself and the questions of what does finding yourself look like, and what to look for when you don’t know what you’re looking for anymore.
- I was lost and there’s just no other way to say it.
Change knocked me out and robbed me, and when I woke up I was on a street I didn’t recognise, in a part of town I had never been to before. Needless to say, the move to Denmark was packed full of difficulties. The kinds of challenges and discomforts and absences that I had experienced before and knew to expect with a change of this size, and it ended up being a great reminder of how it feels to be right in the middle of a difficult situation; pretty difficult.
It’s only fitting that a trip to Germany to see Jake, (Howdy, partner) was the straw that broke the camel's back. - click me ⤦
-- We started these blogs at the same time; coming up to three years ago, and shortly after we lived in different cities and then different countries to one another. If it is your first time visiting themainstem, Jake is likely to be a character that you become well acquainted with, but you may also get a fitting introduction to him in the succeeding paragraphs. Last year, 2023, has also been dry on themainstem because I had no time and energy for our usual trips and adventures, and in that sense not much (that screams ‘blog me!’) had happened since cycling to Denmark, with Jake in the summer of 2022. I couldn’t let the year go by with nothing at all worth blogging about - so, a trip down to see J-Man was as fitting as anything. --
The surrounding forest is thick with deciduous trees; a bright and intense orange marks the momentum of November and has begun piling itself alongside the roads and blanketing the forest floor. We arrive at a commune in Clausberg, a small locality in the Wartburgkreis district of Thuringia, in central Germany. Jake lives here now. We’ve hired a camper-van for a few days to go and try and visit some winemakers in the Alsace and to celebrate Jake’s birthday.
Jake hops out of the hire-van first and Patrick climbs out after him. There are seven or eight living at the commune permanently, with work-aways coming and going. That’s how Jake found the place and came to stay. He’s in a state of near-residence; papers and the bureaucratic hoops of long-term-residency coming back to slap him in the face as always. Patrick has lived there around two years now and takes care of the garden and the permaculture for the community. I hop out; lock up the van.
We parked inside the driveway, giving way to a series of buildings in assorted sizes and styles. A boar hangs upside down, cut open from its neck down to its belly, under a pergola out front of some of the main buildings. One or two days, Patrick says, it’s been hanging there. Jake tells me he was sleeping in a roomed area above the pergola when he first arrived, but now he sleeps in a dormitory style building, adjacent.
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| Jake, standing in the doorway of the main building. Clausberg, Thuringia. |
I see Jake’s quarters, currently the only inhabitant in the dormitory building. Below the dorms (on street level) are storage areas for tools and materials, one of which Jake has turned into his ‘workshop’. He shows me and it’s humble to say the least, but that’s what the guy is all about. The building is haunted supposedly, which no longer bothers him. We talk a little bit about facing your fears and what it actually means to do that - We speak about this a few times over the next few days.
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| Moths from around Clausberg, documented by Daan (?) |
I am shown a few other main buildings, workshops, storage areas, living quarters. We have some toast, local cheeses and meats in the kitchen. - Who buys toilet paper? Who collects money and pays for groceries? How does egalitarianism actually work? (And how do I sign up?) - We meet Daan, a very fine taxidermist, specialising in mammals. He shows us his studio and I allow myself two questions from the myriad that are crowding my head. I think I ask him how long a piece takes and if he has a favourite piece in the studio at the moment. A beaver lays upturned in a bucket and a wolf, found locally, stands low and poised on the back wall. The beaver’s rump and tail is the first thing you see when you walk through the studio door. There’s too much information to take in, and a few minutes in the studio was just a glimpse at a lifetime of work. Daan was a founding member of the commune and pays himself with his taxidermy work, creating pieces for museums now and less and less from doing work for private clients (hunting trophies, I am told). Upon my return to Copenhagen; Jake passed on this documentary on Taxidermy, which Daan had recommended we watch. You can watch it here, for free: Taxidermy: Stuff The World (2005)
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| Jake's room. |
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| The goose that watches over Jake while he sleeps. |
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| What did I tell ya. |
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| The traditional taxidermy method of making an inner for a skin. The body is made from straw and shaped by tightly binding with chord. The heads are made from molds. |
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| The poly. An old picture from Jake, from summertime. |
We head up to check out the garden next and the polytunnel. Beans, cucumbers, tomatoes and squash grow or begin to grow out of vines, mushrooms sprout in a raised bed. Outside, large savoys are flanked with radishes of two varieties, potatoes, brussel sprouts, lettuce, and herbs. I suggest whey might help to repel the cabbage moths that are all over the cabbages and sprouts. Jake had mentioned there was a man down the road with goats, - making cheese from their milk - and I remember whey being used to repel squash bugs and cabbage moths and hearing that some winemakers were using it to prevent powdery mildew as well. It’s a typical waste product in dairy production and it’s a good way to get nutrients back into the soil… at time of writing, I am waiting to hear if this has been implemented or has helped any.
Although Jake has mainly been doing construction work on the commune, life on the commune has led him towards a great many ventures. Hunting, skinning, tanning leather, processing meat, and making an array of things out of the materials they gather and have access to at the commune. I, like you, dear reader, are waiting for Jake to post about his doings and going-ons down there. He wrote a great piece about a hunt that can give you some further insight into a bit of how things are down there in Clausberg. I didn’t take many pictures ‘cause my hands were, as usual, very cold and I didn’t want to come across as commodifying, even if just for those who read themainstem.blogspot.
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| A sweet gift, from Jake. Two four-leafed-clovers and a lovely limerick framed inside a single-piece ash frame. |
It was a good time for us to get on the road as we had around five hundred kilometres to drive to reach the Alsace. Like they say, break up a long road trip with a nudey-bath and we had bookmarked a Roman bathhouse in Baden-Baden (Northern part of the Black Forest, bordering the Alsace) that offered a sixteen step treatment for thirty euros a piece. On the theme of facing your fears, it would leave the two of us with our clustery vine fruit on full display. We made it some of the way down, but the days are short in November and the weather was against us. Water pooled off the windscreen and the lanes on the road became less and less distinguishable as night closed in. We stopped outside of a national park area, outside of a small town, and parked the Hotel California for the night.
We were a little disappointed to find steps 13 and 14 (including the full body scrub) of our 16-step naked spa treatment, out of order, upon our arrival. Still there’s no putting a price on the liberation of letting your dong confront the public for a couple of hours. To avoid making eye-contact with others - or staring their array of beasts in their eyes - one is lucky enough to have the work of the Romans to admire. For whatever reason I had not yet in my 29 years learnt how to be free within my own body. I wouldn’t want people seeing my dinkleberries on the chance that they might think my dinkleberries are small, deformed or sad-looking and that I am in some way, small, deformed, or sad as a result. Misery loves company and luckily Jake was also nervous for the great-dinkleberry-display.The trembling fear to the transcending liberation of being one with the natural body, took around fifteen minutes, and after that it was deep relaxation and an achieved state of zen for the remaining treatments. At the conclusion of the sixteen steps, cascading through warmer temperatures into cold, we were offered to be ‘tucked in’ in a sleeping room or to lather ourselves in lotions and proceed for tea in the reading room. As we drove away from the bathhouse and towards the French border, we pondered what the ‘tuck-in’ would have been like and agreed to try it on our next visit.
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| First night. |
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| Excited, in the carpark of a dental practice (adjacent to the roman bathhouse). |
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| Outside of Au Fil du Vin Libre (Strasbourg) with the fresh birthday bounty. |
We had a lake we wanted to sleep at; in a national park, buried west of Strasbourg and North of the Vosges mountains and so decided to stop at a cave in Strasbourg to pick up some wines and food for our camp out. I had found Au Fil du Vin Libre on the web before setting out and marked it as something to check out in Strasbourg; and well worth the visit. Jean, the owner, was very lovely and helpful and we had a good chat about some of his friends (and my favourite winemakers). His shop hosts the work of a lot of France’s best vignerons but in a very humble setting; a true cave from a true cavist; go and check him out and buy some wine if you are in the Alsace. Jean sold us some saucisson and some condiments and confirmed that Lac de Pierre-Percee was a great spot to visit and spend the night in the van. By the time we got out there it was beyond dark, and we tripped and bumped the van down the fire trails towards the lake. The headlights pinged off the caps of dewy mushrooms along the trailside; standing in their colonies; as we drove passed. We talked about going for a morning run amongst the pine needles and surveying the array of fungi in the park; we ate dinner in the van, spoke a little about wine and all manner of other things, and tucked into the some bottles from Claude and Etienne Courtois from Sologne.
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| Birthday eve, cassoulet from a can. |
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| The haul; Vouette et Sorbee, Saignee et Sorbee '17 - for the birthday celebration. Domaine Des Cavarodes, Ostrea Virgula '20 - special bottle from E. Thibault on kimmeridgian soil. He sells sea shells. Les Cailloux Des Paradise - Racines Blanc '20, Pinot Noir '20 and Racines Rouge '19. The blanc a little flabby, but another great year for the rouge. |
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| High stokage. |
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| The view of Lac du Pierre-Percee, birthday morning. |
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| Fly agaric, amanitas, fairy toads, whatever ya fancy. We found countless. |
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| Milkcaps looking very lactic. |
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| Ej, there's the birthday boy. |
The next day was Jake’s birthday and we had a day of wine-maker-visits on the cards, that did not happen. We explored a few Alsatian towns instead, notably Mittelbergheim; trying to catch Catherine Riss but to no avail. The main event; and one that we had booked after speaking to Jean from Au Fil du Vin Libre, was the restaurant Au Pont Corbeau back in Strasbourg. This was to be where we would celebrate Jake’s turning of age, in the evening. I had heard nothing but good things about this restaurant and it is my other major recommendation if you find yourself in that part of the country. Hearty Alsatian food and wines from the best vignerons of the region (sometimes spanning back to the early 2000’s), in a dark and crowded alpine-cabin style wooden interior. Ahead of our reservation, we started off the birthday celebrations with some Saignee de Sorbee from Vouette et Sorbee, by the river Ile (running through Strasbourg and four kilometres parallel from the Rhine), with Jean lending us some glasses in return for some of that good juice for himself. Jake got his birthday present; a pro-blogging t-shirt that I had made after many jokes of slogans that could serve as propaganda for the return-to-the-blog movement that we are trying (and failing) to pioneer. I sealed the gift with a Native American arrowhead from a group of three that I had bought online. Later Jake made a nice little wire stand for his, which I thought was neat. Before walking over the Rhine, and into Germany, to where we were able to leave the van; we stopped at a great university-style bar (full of young Strassies) for a couple of small beers and talked about poetry. I had been reading a lot, and writing just a little and it turned out so had Jake. His poems are really good; they clung to the air when he read them out loud. Maybe it was a couple of bottles of wine and the charm of Strasbourg at night speaking, but I remember thinking If he keeps writing, I’ll try and get them together one day and publish them.
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| A town called Allarmont in the Alsace. Beautiful; pass through if you can. |
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| 18th century wine press; Mittelbergheim. Notable village for it's quaintness, history and dense population of natural vignerons. Plaque reads "Wooden wine presses are first mentioned in 1546. Between 1595 and 1611 there were 40 of those presses in our village... In the 16th century the value of a press depended on the quality of the oak used to build it. Some of the trees cut down to make the presses were 200 to 300 years old." |
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| Jayman the big birthday boy. Drinking Vouette et Sorbee by the river in Strasbourg and holding up his present. |
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| The great, Au Pont Corbeau. |
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| Alsace! |
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| The '20 vintage of Schueller's Pinot Blanc, electric stuff, full of birthday power and energy. |
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| All the good people calling and trying to get a piece of the birthday boy. |
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| Jake's wire stand, for his arrowhead. |
Birthday hungover, the following morning was a lot of driving to get the van back to Frankfurt and wrap the trip up, but something had shifted in me that I had been slowly losing over the course of the preceding twelve months. So much change - countries, friends, work, living situations and so on; it felt like the only thread I had of my previous sense of self was my partner and my really neglected blog. It’s amazing what seeing a true friend, some quality time and some nature can do for you. It’s so important to get out of the city and give yourself the time and space to remember what it is to be fundamentally human. To feel love and peace and wonder again at the natural world; and to remember that we are lucky to be here on this fragile planet; at all. With some of these pictures here I sent off the good people of themainstem Instagram. It’s purpose - to drive a few close and potentially interested people towards this blog - was subtly but quickly replaced with a typical social-networking. It was a good lesson to start and end another instagram account. A lesson in losing and finding yourself again. In ode to a clear mind, a mind full of optimism and motivation and energy, in the wake of a world so deeply ridden with progress, with comparisons, and on a planet to which we have driven to near-depletion. If there’s any chance at a good life; a meaningful life; it is with your eyes wide open.
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| Us, at the end of our sixteen (-2) step spa treatment. |
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These damn jeans rip every time I wear them.
— Why do they make being good so damn hard?
My bowels are starting to shift…that’s Nature’s call, in the morning. At an airport of all places. Talk about waste. Why do they make being good so damn hard?
Bins here are filled with non-recyclables or incorrectly filled with recyclables. There’s nothing left to do besides shop, spend a few of your hard-earneds on coffee and bury your head in something.
— Do they still use Columbus aluminium for aeroplane shells?
Big Bird’s up now. Sun is peeking its nose out from behind the other side of the planet. What a spectacle to see all those people from above. Now, can you all see what I am talking about? The old Columbus looking glass. There’s no more such a thing as ‘travelling light’.
- The airport, at the start of the trip.
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