"I go where I love and where I am loved,
into the snow;
I go to the things I love
with no thought of duty or pity"
- Hilda Doolittle in The Flowering of the Rod
I'm on my way to the Berchtesgaden National Park. It is Friday afternoon and between seasons. The trees still have red, old leaves. Winter catches me on the way. A snow blizzard takes over the roads, slowing all the cars down.
I'm stuck at the top of a mountain road in the middle of a snowstorm, just 10 km before my final destination of the day in Berchtesgaden National Park. It's the first snow day in this part of Bayern, so it's definitely not the best time to drive up the mountain and back down, but my trip was planned a while ago. I have two nights booked in a modest guesthouse in Ramsau bei Berchtesgaden, actually on the outskirts of the village, so I hit the road as planned. At least there's still light outside.
I'm not the only one in this situation, but I'm the only one out on my own. My car not responding to commands is freaking me out. I have great difficulty both driving forward and driving backwards. A truck with household products derailed in the snow and is now blocking the road. As such, the snow ploughs cannot get up and the snow keeps piling up. What was going to be just a short drive from home, an hour or so, quickly became much longer.
The handsome cop who's on the scene to stop the cars isn't particularly helpful, but other people are. Immediately connections are formed in a crisis situation. Even here, in Germany, a country that normally pays so much attention to respecting personal space.
A local woman with a little boy, who decided to stay up here and simply walk around and enjoy the snow, guides me to gently drive backwards.
Danke, I say. It is so cold, and soon dark, and I have nothing to eat.Here, she says, going through her backpack, I can give you this.
She gives me their last two pieces of Lebkuchen (chocolate-coated gingerbread).
Vielen Dank, I'll take just one piece.
No, take them both. And keep the box too!
A couple pulls overs. The young man gets off:
Where are you headed to?
Ramsau, I say.
Me too, but to no avail.
I am now blocking the road. I can’t seem to turn my car around, with all the ice and snow that keeps falling and the car sensor constantly warning me that I am skidding. An elderly man notices my desperation. He climbs into my driver's seat. His wife approaches.
The policeman said we should all drive down the mountain, she says, but on the side we came up, and take a detour if possible. They’re going to close the road at the bottom on this side.
A woman with two small children in the back seat knocks on my car window: I’m from Ramsau. Maps won’t easily give you the alternate route to get there, but you can follow my car if you want, I’m heading home with my kids.
As we all start driving down the mountain in a slow and narrow line, the snow ploughs are just starting to drive up. I drive all the way back to Bad Reichenhall and then all the way around the mountain without losing sight of the car going in the same direction. Visibility remains terrible as snow keeps pouring down, but we arrive at the guesthouse in one piece, my car and I. Although I don't usually eat sweets and gingerbread is not what I would eat if I did, I have never enjoyed a hot cup of tea with Lebkuchen so much.
I go out looking for a restaurant for dinner. The nearest one is open according to the information on Google Maps, but in reality it is closed. Betriebsurlaub. Annual leave. All I can do is walk back to my accommodation. I’ve had enough driving in the snow for the day. I drink another cup of ginger lemon tea and retire to my room, where I read the feedback received on the poetry collection that I've been working on for some time. I start reading the comments and filter out the helpful ones.
*
Breakfast is patiently prepared in the morning by the couple running the guesthouse. Their 11-month-old boy crawls around with a ferocious curiosity typical of his age. You can see that he is used to people. I eat as much as I would normally eat in a day. Clearly emotional eating after yesterday's adventure. It's OK, I tell myself, a day spent walking, predominantly in the snow, is awaiting.
I walk, wrapped in waterproof layers, through the forest, along a mountain stream with turquoise green water, among fir trees and snow-covered benches, to the Church of Ramsau, St. Sebastian. I am here in this village for this church. With snow around, it looks different than in most Instagram-friendly pictures I’ve seen of it before, and the mountains, especially the Watzmann, Germany's second highest mountain after the famous Zugspitze, are barely visible in the background. And yet, although I'm not a religious person, I love the church, I love the cemetery, I love the silence.
I also buy some food from the only shop in the village, which will soon close until Monday. The food is not at all cheap, one can really tell that they have no competition. All cafés and restaurants are closed. They are either on Betriebsurlaub or opening only in the evening.
I walk back to the guesthouse. This time, on the other side of the river. I warm myself, I eat. I read. I dream. I'm looking to see how I can get to Hintersee (translated: The Lake at the Back) and Zauberwald (The Magic Forest) the easiest way by car. For half an hour, I clear the car and the driveway of snow, otherwise I can't leave. I remember the winters I spent , during the pandemic, as a local, in the ski village of Lenggries. There is something very familiar about the physical work of snow removal, I immediately feel at home.
Arriving at the Hintersee parking lot, I decide to go around the lake. The path is really clean and not very slippery. It's still snowing and windy, but my body has already gotten used to the weather in the last 24 hours. I remember the time I lived in Calgary, in Lenggries, the vacation in Northern Norway, above the Arctic Circle, in Tromsø, or the writing retreat I attended in Iceland. I somehow feel at home, even though I've never been here before. I just love snow. What could have been death just a day before becomes a form of desired, sought after blessing. I love the forest. It seems that many landscape painters before me also adored it . Apparently it's been called the Magic Forest for over 100 years. I return to the car quiet, tired, and happy.
In the evening, at the accommodation, in the common area, an Iranian couple with a little girl with big eyes ask me:
Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Do you speak German?
Yes!
Do you know how to stop the hot water? We only wanted water for one teacup but now we have 10!
They are pointing towards the forbidden function (more precisely the area covered in plaster) of the coffee machine. I don't know how to switch off the hot water, so I apply the only immediate solution that comes to mind: I unplug the coffee maker. We pour the hot, unused water from the paper cups into the large kettle next to it, on the same table. Which they didn't see, apparently. And we all laugh out loud. I recommend that they drink their tea at the table with an electric heater and a blanket.
I go upstairs to my room, a room of one's own, and continue to work on the volume of poems I set out to finish here. Little by little, a collection is really coming together and all I am doing now is polish. I read comments received from mentors and readers who also write, the kind of people who pay close consideration to the rhythm of the phrase, the importance of the words, their meaning, their order. I am told that yes, it is a unitary volume, but look, poems flow best when you give the paper white space, when you allow your sentences to be short and trust your readers' ability to read, to feel on their own, and to draw their own conclusions.
*
Around 11 am, the 10-cup family and I release our cars from underneath the snow, check out and say our goodbyes. The little girl is still looking at me fascinated. I look at her too. We look at each other as if there is nothing else in the world but this moment.
I drive to Schönau am Königssee, which today looks like a ghost town, although normally it is full of tourists. It's understandable though, the cable car isn’t working, the ferry isn’t going the full route to Obersee, and the ski season isn't open yet. But then I also see tourists, a few, gathered in the same place. We all want to take the boat on Lake Königssee to the pilgrimage church of St. Bartholomew. We are enough people to fill it. Theoretically, according to information on the web, the boat does not run between November 5th and sometime around March-April next year. Also theoretically, according to the chalk writing on the blackboard at the ticket counter, tickets are sold out today. Yet both things are untrue.
On the boat, the captain has a brief exchange with the guide after we make considerable progress. The boat stops in the middle of the lake. The captain opens the windows. He plays the trumpet for us. Behind him, you can hear the echo of the opposite mountain. It's like it's just us and the echo here. Then we continue on our way. The journey takes over half an hour.
I walk around the peninsula. In my mind and then on my phone, I start writing this essay. My worries, fears, dreams, losses, and thoughts begin to settle.
Nowadays, it has become a form of pride to assert our neurodivergence. I don't know what neurodivergent species I am. I go through various variants in my mind and in online tests. Anxiety, high-functioning depression, OCD, ADHD, autism (it's not called autism or Asperger's anymore, it's a spectrum, and women are diagnosed later, because they can mimic socially acceptable behaviours better than men). I score slightly above average on all of them but without a clear diagnosis. They all sound like stigma, like saying: Aha, now I finally know what's wrong with me, what has been wrong with me all along!
With me or with the hurried, productive, over-stimulating environment? I identify the most with the HSP (Highly Sensitive Person) label, which is not a disease. But then what is it? A personality trait. Not that uncommon, apparently.
I prefer to travel alone. I consider myself a woman who thinks and feels too much.
When I see new things, when I move in new spaces without speaking, out of the everyday and freed from the eternal list of everything that has to be done, my core thoughts come together, as if all else disappears temporarily and only the essence remains.
The essence that later becomes word on white paper.
No matter how hard I were to try, no matter how much empathy and patience I were to have, I do not and will never know for sure what it is like inside another human being, intellectually and emotionally. I can only ever know what it's really like inside of me.
Oh, my friend, how is your blue? is what the Romanian poet Nichita Stănescu once asked.
I think that's why we write and read. For someone, an acquaintance or a stranger, to say: Yes, that's exactly how my blue is! Or: No, my blue is different. And then to be able to talk about the ways in which we are alike or different, about what makes us human. About the essence. Perhaps when we write and read, we listen primarily to understand and not necessarily to react. We give ourselves and the text enough time, we give the other's voice enough time to reveal itself without trying to control it with our own expectations.
In general, I neither want to dominate nor be dominated. I know I have a hard time adjusting to other people's rhythms. So do they with me, the one always waking up and setting off in the morning, when everything is still frozen and the country roads and mountain paths are still almost empty.
I know that the experience of nature, in the presence of discussions, gossip, social criticism, reference systems that we always try to impose on each other, as a forced self-validation, is much diluted.
You will die alone, I keep on hearing. Don't we all die alone one day?
What matters more is how we live. Authentically, without judging others, constantly in motion for as long as we are alive. With the only life we have (at least this concept holds true for those of us who don't believe in the Resurrection or reincarnation).
Why do we always have to talk about God? Why can't we just be in nature? The one that doesn't impose artificial ways of being on us? The one who is guided by her own moral principles?
I don't claim to have the answers, but I wish more of us could live more often with the ambivalence of questions and situations, without a universally valid, definitive answer. Oh, my friend, how is your blue?
I have fewer and fewer absolute truths, fewer and fewer certainties, fewer and fewer answers to impose on those who live outside of me, in their own shades of white or blue. A few though, I have, but I limit them to myself. To my biological and inner universe. To the limits of my own body, my own brain, my own sensitivity.
Other than that I wish, more than anything, more acceptance and tolerance for all of us.
I can only really interact with the world in the written word. Never in small talk settings, which are always full of social complacency. Although I am so often told how outgoing and charismatic I am (seem).
I know how to interact with young, restless children, when our eyes randomly meet in a crowd, and we smile at each other, study each other's faces without shame and without looking down. Thirteen years ago, one year ago, meetings with small children would always bring tears to my eyes. I'm closer to menopause now than I was then.
And although I've always had reproductive health issues, I no longer find myself crying involuntarily when I'm faced with children. Now I know, more than ever, with almost 100% certainty, that I’ll never carry children in my womb. I know it and I accept it. I feel joy, peace, and connection.
Everywhere I go, people want to talk to me. On the ship, it's full of couples, families, groups. Some invite me to sit next to them. But no, I end up going back and forth, in solidarity, next to a woman my age, who is exploring the lake, like me, alone.
Yes, sometimes I'm afraid of snow, I'm afraid of spraining my left knee or my right ankle, both of which have happened before. I usually have microspikes, snowshoes, hiking poles with me. This time I have nothing. Only the sole of the boot meeting the snow at every step. Sometimes powdery, fresh, unsullied, sometimes with ice under it, and with me treading energetically, slowly, in the footsteps of those before me. L
Finally, on Sunday, when the ferry departs from St. Bartholomew's Church to Schönau, stags and deer look for blades of grass in the snow on the opposite shore. Small black figures, in the distance, in a universe seemingly of their own, against a white background and, seen from here, almost motionless.
I leave, on water and then on frozen ground, back to everyday life, to people. I know something else, among my few certainties. A platitude. A trip is always a pretext: not to see new things, but to see ourselves better.
A radical idea strikes me: what if there is really nothing wrong with me? If I'm simply an introvert who likes to keep to herself? At least when I travel. Beyond genuine and sporadic forays into the lives of other travellers.
What remains at the end of the journey?
The wilderness. The snow. The dream. The quest. The road. Facing fear. Slowing down. Listening. The intrinsic truth. Ambivalence. Self-acceptance. Simplicity. Essence. The acceptance of others.
The moments when a blue and another blue really meet, even if the meeting, relative to a human life, seems to only last a few moments. Sometimes everything just happens. Or not.
Acceptance. Stripping of all that isn’t truly mine.
The wait, before and after.
White as the paper before the pen.
Diana Radovan PhD ELS is the author of the hybrid, multigenerational memoir Our Voices (2022). Since 2004, Diana has been publishing her poetry, fiction, essays, and hybrid work, collaborating regularly with visual artists and mentoring other writers. Her writing has previously appeared in Arc Journal, Wild Roof Journal, The Poetry Question, Feed, Headline Poetry and Press, Wax Poetry and Art, Quail Bell Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Poetry Breakfast, Dog-Ear, Text+Bild, Liternet, and elsewhere. Her hybrid essay On the Way won second place in the Tupelo Quarterly Prose Open Contest and was a Best of the Net nominee. Her story The Artist was long-listed in the Disquiet International Literary Contest and her poem Bear Wings was a finalist with Midway Journal in the Action Words contest. Her creative practice is deeply anchored in the rhythms and restorative cycles of nature. She believes that nature-anchored storytelling has the power to elevate our inner narrative. Romanian-born, she lives in the Bavarian Alps, where she writes between languages and across borders. Find out more at www.naturewriting.net or follow her on Instagram @dianaradovanwriter.
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