Life at the Brook – narration (3)

martinamartini (55)in #story • 7 years ago

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.

Part 3 Life at the Brook

This post was published in German before: https://steemit.com/deutsch/@martinamartini/leben-am-bach-erinnerungen-3

https://reflexionen.wordpress.com/erzahlungen/erdachtes/erlebtes/muehlbach-stocksteinerwand/ (here is an earlier version in German, which I now completely revised)

Common children's games

When we played hide and seek we often hid behind the big horse chestnut trees in the park. There was also a child's play called "Room, Kitchen, Cabinet", whose rules of the game I cannot remember exactly any more. Another game called Temple Hopping was only practised by the girls.

Children's games (German):

http://www.spielewiki.org/wiki/Tempelh%C3%BCpfen
http://www.antoniabarboric.info/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Spiele-4.pdf

"Tailor, tailor, lend me your scissors' ..." was another game, which was somehow scary to me, because a pair of scissors, which had something scary for me, ever so out of context, where there is neither a tailor workshop nor scissors were present, but only the chestnut trees, which seemed huge to me, like dumb witnesses...

At that time I was even afraid of the other children of my age, who were sometimes very brisk and loud and brought something wild into and disturbing into my secluded world.

More Children's games (German):

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A4uber_und_Gendarm
http://www.sagen.at/doku/kinderreime/schneider_schneider.html

We children met in the park and went further into a narrow canyon of the river Gössering (the locals call it briefly the "ditch"), which was limited by the river on one side and the mill brook on the otherside.

Especially the boys loved the children's game classic "Robber and Policeman". They dominated the game and the more courageous of the girls participated.

Lumberjacks, covered with corrugated cardboard, lined the first part of the route into the canyon and offered an ideal hideout, as the whole area was ideally suited as a playground for exciting dramas with a peaceful ending.

A colorful crowd of children

The names are gone, even the faces...

There are no photographs of these playmates, no picture of us playing. I think I remember I remember some but most of us went to different cities after our studies or got married somewhere else. But I would need to be hypnotically transported back to this time in oder to remember. I can still hear, however, the shouting, laughter, and the hasty steps ...

At school, we were sorted by age and rarely came in contact with older or younger classmates of other grades. Here, however, in the wild, in those loose packs, in which the more active children set the tone, no one asked for age. If the older ones got too wild, the little ones just watched.

At that time there were many more children in each house than today. Today, prior to each visit by phone, appointments are arranged. At that time we did not know the word "appointment".

The old barrack

A little further on, past meadows and orchards, stood a wooden shack, which for a long time served as a simple youth hostel. After a devastating flood, it served only as an emergency shelter and later as a dwelling for a destitute family and their goat. Unforgettable scent memories!

I would like to have a photo or a drawing of this building. But unfortunately, such insignificant dwellings were not recorded photographically for posterity.

Now everything at the entrance to the canyon of the Gössering looks almost too civilized and too neat. The houses and gardens are well maintained. Carports provide comfort. The access road was paved to the last houses... How much nicer was this place as a playground for us children, when everything was much less tamed and wild herbs lined the road undisturbed.

The big puddle in a shady meadow

At the sport where right hand side was the barrack and on the left hand side is a big family house, below the arrow path to the Thurnfeld (plains), which leads steeply uphill to the church Maria Thurn, you could turn left into a very short stony and sandy road. Only a few steps further, a small bridge led over the mill brook, the Mühlbach.

With a little luck, we children had a big puddle of about 15 meters in diameter on the other side of the brook, which appeared and lasted for a while after the snowmelt or after heavy rains. We played around the puddle and nobody cared. The area around was slightly swampy, though not a true swamp. The meadow grass on the banks of the small pond was temporarily under water. What a joy when we discovered a few toads or frogs!

There were hardly any rays of sunshine on this piece of meadow, because to the west of it rose a piece of woodland and shaded the spot even in summer for a long time.

This biotope had something fascinating for us. The girls looked for flowers in the partially shady meadow and ran back and forth between brook and puddle. We were happy to weave wreaths or chains of large flowers or pick on the panicles of grasses.

The boys were clearly the louder troupe and sometimes all of us went climbing up some rocks and on tress and went balancing, to explore a locked overflow of the brook nearby...

At that time no adult thought about whether such areas should be secured. We played unattended and at your own risk everywhere - and nothing happened!

The raft

Especially beautiful experiences in this place were given to our little flock of children at the time as someone had created a simple raft of a few boards.

Presumably there had been a benevolent uncle or dad in the game, but it did not speak up to me and - yes, strangely, we did not question such a thing, it was easy.

The bravest boys ventured on this wobbly surface on the tiny pond and tried to move more or less successfully with large hazelnut sticks.

At some point the raft was gone, and then drier years followed.
The big puddle became less and less rare and finally disappeared.

For me, the gentle sadness aroused by this observation was bound up with the teaching of how earthly pleasures depend on external circumstances and how transient they are...

Although there are no photos of our activities, I can offer you a little surprise here.

A short film of mine, which I created together with my two youngest sons many years ago. There is an idea of the magic of my beloved Mühlbach: