Above Bad Eisenkappel

Central Europe #1: Ramblings from the Carinthian slopes

This is not the Austria I had been expecting. Two years of seeing and hearing about gun toting officers demanding vaccine passports while Austrians blundered on with their lives blinds you to the possible warmth of reality; I indulged my father in this trip to the south of the country, though was kind of itching to move even further south across the border. As such, in this land where our collective amnesia over human atrocity is writ large in the collective stereotype, I was pushed once more into questioning my assumptions about people.

Too long taking in anything online does that of course (more so than more considered and direct forms of knowledge gathering); it pushes us towards squeezed stereotypes of who we might meet. The gentle irony of the reality; one warm provincial type urging us to visit the museum he curated at the top of a tower in Klagenfurt. We never made it but all three of us felt the authenticity, as he prepared to hike with his wife, a Sunday Carinthian stroll in the woods.

Carinthia: perhaps a better name for the landscape than the national title, because at least it breaks free of all the later layers of labels and tries to evoke a distant past, a greater rootedness. Really this is a world of Märchen: the fairy tale ur-forest perhaps, witches and wolves and elves around the corners. We gorge on wild strawberries and think of gingerbread houses. I always pictured it as long lost, except for a small patch around the Black Forest, itself damaged by the acid rain I wore T-shirts to rage against as a teenager. In fact it extends far and wide, giving way to meadows of unfamiliar flowers - at least, for this boy only used to fynbos crowds on the Cape mountains. And I recall Peter Wohlleben's "The Hidden Life of Trees", telling the story of these grand European beings and their conversations, understanding each other far better than we hear the Österreich dialects of German or Slovene.

Down in the Cape, the most prominent conifers are plantations of pine, growing out of place and climate, leaving strangely empty undergrowth that doesn't quite know how to cope with these European intruders. In Carinthia the forests have roots, and the yellow thistle things and creamy foxgloves and lush mosses and scurrying sounds and orange butterflies resting now and then like cats - highlight that these firs and larches aren't interlopers. Somewhere there might be bears hiding (and elsewhere fairy folk): and wolves have made such a comeback across the continent that French farmers are agitating for greater livestock loss compensation. It doesn't take much to get French farmers agitating, perhaps, but they're usually grounded and in this case it's a genuine concern - rewilding at all costs part of a rushed top down state environmentalism that could be done much better with more patience, trust in local knowledge, and genuine negotiations. European leadership hasn't been much good at that in the last few hundred years if not before; and have spread their impatience to the rest of the world of course (which already had plenty of bad examples of our own).

Here streams trickle, even with summer spiralling forward: compared to the gentle rivers I'm used to, round here rivers are done in big brush strokes. The forests are soft, well-watered affairs. And up in the distant Alps to the south, there's still plenty of snow in late June.

What are they, we wonder? Eventually, we'll make it to the far side of the Kamnik-Savinja Alps in Slovenia; for now they're a curiosity, looming up far too close to be the more famous Julian Alps. Neither range are really to be our "conquests" on this trip, which is aimed at gentler slopes. I have nothing against reaching the occasional summit, but "peak-bagging" has a touch of the comically tone deaf Victorian gentleman to it as an activity, along with the hurried itineraries of my youth. The mountains are mostly not their summits, after all.

Like the butterflies, bees are active in the meadows and the undergrowth: fat, delightfully noisy and content. A challenge to all those honey bee-apocalypse petitions I've signed, though it just makes me realise again that experience is partial. We've lost genuinely disturbing numbers of insects in recent decades, bees included. The windshield splatter count in our hire car is not high, as a reminder. It won't start at the end of our walk, and the German-only manual gives us no clues. Eventually my brother gets enough reception to track down a vital titbit on a chat forum, and we discover that clutch and brake at once unlock the ignition. Tech, data, 4G in the air that might be knocking out the insects (and of course, whatever governments and the companies who pay them might say, we simply don't know enough about what all these frequencies are doing). And we're off home for the night.

Another day, another shrine: these Catholic lands are full of them. Mary, Jesus and the Saints look down beneficently upon the traveller, so much like Durga or Kali in rural India. There are empty huts on stilts, reached up ladders, which we innocently ascribe to bird hides. In fact they're the haunt of those other fairy tale figures, the hunters; a feast for the pot aided by lead shot, perhaps. And here in the only Austrian valley with Slovenian speakers there's also a statue shrine to the partisans, fighting vigorously against the Nazi occupation and suffering for it. It is apparently only a few years since the first Austrian politician publicly acknowledged their bravery; we arrive just after a commemoration day for those massacred back then on the edge of the woods. In winter, the narrow tracks of these valleys in the heart of Europe must become remote, maybe lonely and sometimes frightening. Of course, part of me has always longed for that remoteness from the metropolis. The ‘people of the hills’ worldwide, historians and common sense tells us, are less inclined to obey orders from the city-based empire; at times the all-too human wolves round here were tracking down guerrillas who knew the land, knew its plant abundance and its secret glades.

When I was tiny I thought conifer woods in Switzerland were the Hundred Acre Wood in Winnie the Pooh. They had a mystical quality I could touch: 100 was such a big number that it felt like infinity, like trees that stretched back to the heaven I'd so recently arrived from. Electric cattle fences were strangely part of that memory, and lifting a gate, its plastic handle safe to touch at the end of a long and potentially prickly wire, brings back these sensations. The cows themselves are a satisfied creamy colour, seen above and below the zigzagging paths. Memory is stirred by the senses, mere brain memory often feels thin in comparison - so do these sensations help bring me back to something primal in my own story?

But then, there are dog roses flowering too: which I only met in South African gardens. My knowledge of plants, such as it is, is grown in the Kaapse countryside. These long midsummer days, experienced by me for the first time in twenty four years (a passage of two Kumbha Mela cycles), are a juicy part of this world. I like the long evenings; I like too describing our Cape winters to the locals and feeling the specialness of being from the underpopulated South of the globe.

Longo Maï is the name of the farm where we stay. The name confusingly turns out to come from neither Slovene nor German but from Provencal dialect - a Languedoc blessing for long life. It's an eco farm connected to many others (some in southern France, some as far away as Ukraine and Nicaragua), doing its own bit for decades now to connect with the land and help a community to grow doing so. Such eco communitarian vibes always interest me, but I also always look out for how the arts are honoured, since for me any community needs art to breathe. There are intriguing theatre productions down in the valley, born out of the community here in part it seems - and the history book on the shelf shows music and spectacle as part of the group's journey. My interest is duly piqued, though this is a fleeting visit. We do work out that the gruff local who puffs his cigarettes early outside is not our host but a longer term visitor, a generous geologist identifying the rocks of the slopes and the soil types that emerge on top. A symbiotic dance of the pedosphere, plants and rocks and sunlight and rains and seed transporting animals weaving together an ancient story.

Our cottage lies at the top of a steep path, where a dreamy swing flies out from the birches it's tied to. For the first time in a very long time, I'm breathing out. And in that space, there's room for conversations to bubble up between the silences, and although my father, my brother and I have met from three continents, with very different experiences and probably fractured opinions over the past years, we connect in the open-minded sweetness of the forest evening, over a glass of local red and good food prepared unfussily. And with gratitude for such places and times.