Life at the Brook - a narration (part 5)

martinamartini (55)in #story • 7 years ago (edited)

My home is Carinthia, more precisely, the valley of the river Gail. I grew up in the sixties and seventies in a simple family home on the mill brook, in Hermagor, a tiny town fringed by mountains in the Alps, where the smaller river Gössering merges into the Gailtal valley with the dreaded river Gail. My episodes "Life at the Brook" are about my nature-related memories.

Life at the Brook (part 5)

[//]:# (!steemitworldmap 46.630520 lat 13.365641 long (EN) Life at the Brook, a narration series... d3scr)

Waterfall and water weir

Where once farmers proudly offered their animals for sale, nowadays there is a simple playground and sports field with some colorful play equipment for children and a simple football goal. Both is moderately frequented, a little sleepy. From this former cattle place, on which we children often romped, you can hear the thunder of the waterfall already.

If you continue walking along the maple tree alley, you will see the wide waterfall soon on you rright side. It breaks down over an artificial concrete wall, and on the left of the waterfall there is the large weir, from which the Mühlbach stream is derived.

Some time ago we said that the waterfall area was situated at the beginning of a "fitness mile". But everything changes so fast. Every track of this fitness mile is missing. The path through the Gösseringgraben is now hardly used as a running track or for fitness exercises. Rather, one encounters mountain bikers, but mostly you meet walkers and often one gets the impression that taking a walk is no longer possible without a dog...

The path is thus a walking and hiking trail. Especially in summer the creek is a wonderful recreation area. With its different growth zones, it might be a botanist's paradise, but I know nothing about that.

A stays at a streams or a waterfalls is said to be very refreshing and strengthening. Maybe this effect can be explain and justified, but this has always been irrelevant to me. I feel well close to wild waters. It works!

Tests of courage at the waterfall

Every now and then, after my homework, I went by myself to these places. I waded through the refreshing mountain waterin the shore area of the small river. I regrded the different colors and shapes of the bigger stones in the stream bed and investigated the driftwood that got caught. Since I observed from other children, that they approched the waterfall at certain positions,I did this on my own, too, of course with appropriate caution. Yes, close to the waterfall, a nice bath was possible. Over time, the falling masses of water had created a pool in which one could swim a few tempi.

A brave group of children had also found out that you could get under the waterfall from the east bank. You could easily reach the area between the waterfall and the wall and there we. stood, close to the wall. looking at the falling waterfall from the inside and it appeared like a mighty curtain falling down and down... A very special hiding place!

We also found safe places where we could stand under the waterfall and let him give us a massage. None of us children suffered injury from the falling water.

Balancing from stone to stone was also a popular game. Some of the stones were slippery, with a thin layer of algae. Slipping could lead to painful falls. Those who participated showed that they were not afraid of falling.

The Frog

In the area where the Gössering river came up to the weir, the water also formed a deep pool. There was a vortex due to the suction effect.

Unfortunately, one day an unhappy frog fell victim to this pool. I made this scary discovery when I was a six-year-old girl walking with family members along the creek. This frog of enourmous size should have landed as a specimen in a natural history museum. Never again have I seen such a large specimen of a frog.

The ways of the water and how they were influence by humans did not matter to me, at that time. However, I was not indifferent to the frog, who had fallen into the pool and eventually, after a desperate struggle, lonely exited his life. A trap built by humans - not to catch frogs, but ...

This experience, so-to-say, struck a notch in my soul costume. For the first time, I became aware of it. that we humans sometimes create artificial, sometimes absolutely unnatural constructions that can become a deadly trap for humans and animals.

The stone of strength

For me - and still is - the entire nature close to my home was a powerful place and had something mystical for me, here and then.

Some sensitive people who deal with special places of power. One of those sensitive people is Peter Bachmann, a distant relative of my family and a relative of the well-known writer Ingeborg Bachmann. He advanced from a restaurateur and hotelier to an internationally renowned producer of gourmet products and is known for his organic smoked salmon. His enterprise is seated at Obervellach near Hermagor.

Many years ago, he designed a divining rod nature trail that led from Obervellach to Radnig and through parts of Hwermagor. He discovered places with particularly strong energies, and these were provided with charts and described in a small booklet for hikers. A stately stone was erected in the Schützenpark (the park in front of our house) at his instigation, marking such a place of power.

In the picture left the energy stone, on the right a historical stone monument *

Unfortunately, I cannot say how much of this very impressive divining path is still left. I went along this trail it in later years and enjoyed it a lot.

http://www.oberkaernten.info/gailtal/hermagor/wuenschelruten-wanderweg/
https://www.meinbezirk.at/hermagor/lokales/schneerosen-am-gailtaler-wuenschelruten-wanderweg-d2041327.html
https://www.meinbezirk.at/villach/lokales/wuenschelruten-wanderweg-in-obervellach-naehe-hermagor-d1141178.html

Unfortunately, such tourist projects, even if they were created with a lot of love, are not permanent.

I'm convinced that Hermagor and its surrounding is full of power places and everything is still far from deciphered and unravelled.

But maybe that's a good thing. Isn't it nicer to go on a voyage of discovery and train your receptors yourself?

The rigors of nature

As a child I considered it as an impudence or as a nasty prank of the forces of nature, that my birthday (in early July) was fairly regularly affected by harsh thunderstorms and hailstorms. Year by year, my only party of the year ended abruptly due to bad weather circumstances. As sweet as the brooks were to me, as welcome as the sun and heat are to me, so little did I like lightning and thunder and the destructive hail.

Every year my girl friends and I would sit in the garden with strawberry tart and lemonade... But then... All at a sudden, the sky turned yellow, just as if the celestial act had been staged and ordered by a crap for exactly my celebration. Then the hail pelted down, we fled into the house. Sometimes windows were smashed. With and without window panes, such a birthday party is over.

In my children's party time, I did not suspect that I would also experience the spurs of the devastating earthquake that happened in Friuli, Italy, in 1976, and some menacing flood situations.

Flood

Yes, the Gössering river and the brook Mühlbach could become a torrent, merging into a sinister broth. Both were able to overflow their banks, forming a murky lake to the east and south of our house and wreaking havoc.

Here I would like to mention that there is another small stream in Hermagor that flows from Möschach in the valley Gitschtal to the river Gössering. As small as the trickle appeared on ordinary days, floods could make the place bad. The inhabitants trembled in front of this little brook, hence the name "Zitterbachl".

The brook bed of the river Gössering was strengthened sometime in the seventies or eighties for the protection against high water. A barren channel now reminded of an oversized bobsleigh track. In the course of this renewal, the feral growth was removed on the banks, which had been a popular retreat for me in my childhood.

For me it seemed that the Gössering river even gained momentum with this "flood protection" and that it literally pushed the floods out of the stream bed in the curve in front of the park. Maybe to be compared to cars shooting into a curve too fast in a race. But I do not want to assert that. It was probably just a felt impression.

Our garden has been spilled

After prolonged rainfall, one of my parents' beautiful flower gardens was destroyed during a flood in a summer in the early eighties. Our once picturesque garden was covered by a thick silt blanket, which raised the level of the garden by ten centimeters or more. It was the end of many rare narcissus species, but also of a lovingly created rock garden. The layer was not lifted off at that time. The level of the garden was risen and it remained that way.

Often I complained as a child that our house did not have a cellar like the homes of some schoolmates. Only when I was involved in the cleanup after one of these devastating floods, I realized why our house, which is separated from the brook only by a narrow street, was not built with a cellar and why the entrance is only accessible via a few steps. I know too well what it feels like to wade ankle-deep into muddy water as a result of a flood. A few years later the flood came back...

As a strange fate I feel that I am always present in natural disasters in my old hometown. Whether storm or hail storm, flood or earthquake, it's as if something magical pulls me to these events. But I dare to say that because there are no more witch hunts these days!