stars

Posted on December 3, 2023 by Christoph Rehage

leaving Göttingen

A while later we were all together again, sitting in a fast food restaurant on the way out of Göttingen. It had taken my friends just a few minutes by car. For me, in my poncho and my gaiters, pulling the Caboose through the snow, it had taken over an hour. My feet were wet, and I was hungry and cold.

And then we said goodbye for good. I was out on the road by myself again. First I followed a bike lane for a while, and when it vanished, I ditched the main road and walked through the villages. There was another decommissioned railway line that had been turned into a path through the fields, so I decided to take that one.

Walking was quite fun with all the snow everywhere, only sometimes it got a bit difficult when the Caboose and I had to navigate around some fallen trees that had collapsed on the path.

recognized

I wasn’t prepared for the way to get any more difficult than this, but of course it did. At one point, when the snow went up to my shins and I could hardly move the Caboose at all, I decided to just stand there and wait until someone walked by whom I could ask about the way.

After a while a lady with a dog appeared.

“You are the guy from TV, aren’t you?” she said, and then she told me that the way ahead would get a bit better further on.

And it really did. I was in a forest enjoying the road conditions when an old man with yet another dog walked past me, pointed at the Caboose, and said: “Do I know you from TV?”

unrecognized

A bit later another random stranger started talking to me. I had just finished walking a stretch of road with no sidewalk, no bike lane, and no shoulder to walk on, feeling relieved to have made it to a village, with my head torch on my forehead and clouds of steam hovering around me.

“What are you doing?” a guy asked me. He had just appeared out of nowhere with a rather serious look on his face.

I told him I was a tourist.

“What do you mean, tourist?” he proceeded to ask.

I told him I was traveled by walking.

“Aha,” he said, not sounding very convinced.

Then he got out a bag with some food and a bottle of lemonade.

“Here, I bought this for you,” he said, “when I saw you walking alone on that road I felt sorry for you.”

His name was Benny.

stars

I walked for a few more hours that day. Or rather: that night. At some point the stars came out, and I felt mezmerized as I was walking down a dark country lane, the snow crunching under my shoes, my breath evaporating rhythmically in little puffs in front of me, and the universe once again becoming spatial in the night sky.