the oasis

Posted on June 29, 2023 by Christoph Rehage

Q&A

Moments later, Toni appeared. He was the owner of the farm.

“How about you store your trailer in my garage?” he asked.

Sure, I said. that would be nice. We moved the Caboose inside.

“Why don’t you just sleep in my son’s apartment?” Toni asked. His son had recently moved out.

the morning

So I woke up showered and well-rested on a mattress in an otherwise empty apartment in the farm house. Toni had prepared breakfast in his kitchen.

“I gotta go,” he said, “have all the food you like, and when you leave just close the door behind you!”

And then I was alone in his kitchen. Only his cat Jackie was there.

I played with Jackie for a while, then a friend of Toni’s appeared and I played with her three dogs. Jackie was nowhere to be found. Maybe Jackie didn’t like dogs.

shredding

The road meandered quietly through the hills for a while. Tractors were everywhere in the fields, gathering the harvest. Some of them were driven by boys who looked like they were fifteen years old.

And then I got on the main road to Munich. It had a bike lane, so that was good. But there was a lot of traffic, and it was very noisy. I decided to listen to Children Of Bodom on my earphones. The cars and trucks kept roaring by, the Children kept shredding, and I kept stomping my way into Munich.

suburbia

I never saw the sign marking the city limit. I guess it must have been there somewhere. But I felt the city drawing closer anyway: the road kept getting busier, and the buildings kept growing closer and closer together.

Sometimes there were apartment complexes, sometimes there were office buildings, and at some point I entered a suburban zone. There were expensive-looking villas and apartment buildings. All of the streets had speed limits, and they were very quiet.

I noticed that most of the street signs were from a colonial context. Some of them had disclaimers with information about some of the atrocities committed by the German colonizers. The sun was about to set. I kept walking.

And then suburbia gave way to a patch of forest with some fields next to it. There was one single house in the middle of the fields.

I had arrived at the oasis.