Report from Bavarian National Park

Where Hansel and Gretel have been found.

Myths embed deeply in our psyches, and this week in the Bavarian National Park, I was unable to rid myself of the forest I imagined for Hansel and Gretel. Poor Hansel! Poor Gretel! They wandered, unwanted, through a dark and forbidding wood. The trees were tall and remote, the ground stony, and the sunshine very far away.

We are in our third and last week in Europe. For a few days, as we recuperate from an unfortunate round of Covid-19, we have been staying with our friend Allison in Grafenwohr, Germany. Allison is a kindergarten teacher with short dark curls we know from our years in Vermont, although Germany now feels like home to her, since she has been teaching for five years on an American military base in Grafenwohr.

To be more apt, not wanting to infect Allison with a nasty virus, we have been glamping in her garden house, which is a lovely tradition of a tiny house in the back yard. Allison also has a covered back deck where we would eat together out of doors, and she has a firepit that we sat around the other evening visiting with Josh, an Army lawyer who is from our hometown in Georgia.

Last weekend she was an amazing guide—she knows the local hangouts, the best bakeries, the most stunning sights. She showed us an 11th century stone castle, the Nazi concentration camp now memorial at Flossenberg, and a woodsy ravine of large round boulders where troll-like creatures are said to live (a story that is 100 percent believable.)

When Monday arrived Allison was back to teaching four-year-olds how to get along, so Raven and I headed off on our own.

Raven was looking for iconic images to paint. I wanted to catch Germany’s wildest story.

Bavarian National Park is 24,250 hectares of low mountains on the border of Germany and the Czech Republic. It was created in 1970 and expanded in 1997. It’s part of the ancient forests of Europe, and is now the largest contiguous forest in Central Europe.

I guess we chose the wrong entrance for Bavarian National Park, but it’s like no national park I’ve ever seen in the U.S. Instead of nature forward, it’s resort forward. Think of Grant Village at Yellowstone and multiply that by a thousand. The resort is a small city of shops, boutiques, outlets, cafes, restaurants, and hotels. People are thick along the sidewalks, wearing high-end hiking apparel, their hiking poles clicking on the cobblestones.

Raven had located a hike to a waterfall using Google. Its trailhead was behind Hotel Waldhaus, but we found no signs directing us toward trailheads or the signs were indecipherable to us, and the GPS failed us. We arrived at Waldhaus by detaining a dozen people with pleas for assistance.

“Excuse me, do you speak English?”

Nien or yes or so-so or a little, and finally, offering by offering, we made our way through a maze of narrow uphill side-streets, past small inns and vacation homes, to a public parking lot near Waldhaus, four Euros for the day.

The trail started as a gravel road, steadily climbing through spruce and birch and fir, with a lovely creek whistling by on our left. We passed hordes of hikers coming down. Most were speaking German, and I wondered if everyone in Germany was on vacation or if it was a national holiday of some sort.

I know two words in German, and here I could put one of them to work—hallo, pronounced ah-low. Hello, I kept saying as we walked past. (The other word is kindergarten, which would weirdly come in handy later in the day!)

The trail narrowed suddenly and began to climb steeply. Now the ground was rock-shake and root-trip. Water dripped across moss-covered boulders and soaked the trail.

Mosses grew everywhere, bringing to mind Robin Wall Kimmerer’s wonderful first book, Gathering Moss.

We climbed for an hour although, weakened by Covid, we had to stop often to catch our breaths. Soon there were fewer people, and by the time we reached the waterfall, almost none. Already the hikers were back down in the resort having an aperol spritz or a bier or a coffee and cake.

(You can’t imagine how huge the tradition is to have a coffee and a dessert sometime in the middle of the day. I have seen hundreds of German couples doing this, stopping at an outdoor cafe to order coffee and a slice of cake.)

They were down there having a Black Forest while I hiked through a black forest—dark chocolate shade, the wet mosses like chocolate frosting, the immense boulders like large and luscious cherries.

Turns out, we should have been dropping some kind of crumb.

We sat awhile by the waterfall. I wish I could send you a little packet of what was there—the energized ions, the copper-beech sunshine, the granite groundedness, and the jingle of falling water.

When it came time to leave, we took a trail on the opposite side of the creek. It appeared to take us back to the trailhead.

Before I tell you that all roads do not lead home, and that I never got to see where that trail led, although I now understand where it did not go, let me tell you that it was one of the most beautiful trails I ever hiked. First, no one was on it. Second, it had been created some decades in the past by carving a four-foot level out of a steep mountainside. The ground fell sharply to the left into a deep forest of beech and spruce, and it rose sharply to the right into the same, but the trail itself was level. We just cruised along through Europe’s remnant Hercynian (post-glacial, temperate, broadleaf) forest. Often we were hiking with a wet and moss-softened rock-face to our right, and a sweeping, breath-taking plunge to our left. In the middle ground were mosses, ferns, delineations of granite formed under compression, leaves starting to turn yellow for fall, and mushrooms.

We hiked and hiked. That hike was like a mushroom trip, and I was buzzing with splashes of brilliant sunshine, patterns of leaves, the titillating drop, the granite boulders and cliffs, trickling water, spring heads. I don’t know if you’ve done psychedelics for healing or for wisdom, but I could have been on psychedelics. Or maybe it’s something Covid did to me.

We kept hiking. Now the time had come when we would have been back at the parking lot, but we were still far up on a mountainside winding away toward some unknown Bavarian destination, probably a slice of Black Forest Cake dripping with cherry syrup and a cup of latte macchiato with a leaf design in the foam.

Finally we knew two things. 1) We were headed in the wrong direction. 2) We were lost.

But I thought that I could see, far to the left through the canopy of trees, the rooftops of what could be the environs of Hotel Waldhaus. Then we found a random unmarked path going downhill toward the left, and I talked Raven into taking it.

We hiked and hiked some more.

Finally we came upon a strange buggy in the woods, painted brightly with the colorful hand-prints of children, and the word KINDERGARTEN written on it. Halloooo, kindergarten! No one was around, but it seemed we heard the laughter and voices of children.

“Hike toward the children’s voices,” I said to Hansel.

Before long we came upon a strange encampment, a green tarp tied to trees to make a large shelter, and beyond it, a group of children of elementary and middle school ages building a structure of rotted branches in a hollow of the mountain.

“Halllo,” Hansel called to them.

The two adults turned quickly.

“Hallo,” a tough-looking woman called to us. She said something in German, then quickly switched to English. “Are you looking for us or are you lost?” she said.

“Lost.”

The two instructors were out with the Last Children in the Woods. No, it wasn’t a school, necessarily, the woman said, it was a clinic. It was for rehabilitation, the kind-eyed and bearded man said, and I immediately thought of Outward Bound. I hope something was lost in translation, because I wouldn’t think that those beautiful German children lugging trees and rocks into place for their hut needed rehabilitating.

We thanked the instructors and headed the way they told us to get out. It worked. I couldn’t resist turning and getting a quick photo to prove to you that good witches saved us.

We had overshot Hotel Waldhaus by a half mile, and dragging like rag dolls, we found our way home.

American Nature Writing Masterclass

This course that I love to teach starts Oct. 9. We’ll be exploring many structures and forms of nature writing, as well as doing prompts to connect you with your own wildness and wild places you love. We’ll have a number of wonderful guest speakers, and I’ll announce them as soon as I’m home in a few days. More information can be found on my website. One person this week had difficulty registering. My website designer thinks they encountered a broken link on the website, and if anything like that happens to you, please be in touch.