Berlin in six hours and 70 years

Berlin. Call me when it's finished.

Construction, renovation, scaffolding, fencing, cranes, detours, ugliness. Everywhere I walk there are new buildings going up and a new underground going down.

I'm on a mere six-hour layover en route to Corfu from Paris. I've never been to Berlin, and have heard so many proclamations of love for the city that I had to sample it.

I've never actually "got" Germany. I love German beer but I hate the stodgy food. I have no affinity for the language. I don't care for cars, Kraftwerk or cabaret.

Granted, this is only my second time in the country (well, third if we're counting such brief blitzes as these; I took a day trip from Salzburg to Berchtesgaden in 2009 to see the Eagle's Nest, Hitler's fascinating mountaintop teahouse) but a week-long trip by public ferry boat five years ago to see the castles, towns and villages of the Rhine left me alarmed at my indifference. Much of it either seemed pretend, like a kind of Disneyland, or sterile, where flat soulless malls and assembly pavers filled bombed out centres once graced with pinnacled churches and cobblestone streets.

Now I'm staring in disbelief at these horrendous, riveted industrial pipes that pop up all over Berlin. The size of tree trunks and painted blue or pink, they thrust into the air and twist around buildings and blocks and over streets like a giant Tinker Toy oil refinery. The only other such pragmatic disregard I've seen for urban aesthetics is the vital but ugly system to funnel heat from Ulaanbaatar's powerhouse into the city centre from the outskirts so the residents don't all die in the frigid Mongolian winters.

Yet there are pockets here of deep beauty. The cupolas of the Neo-Renaissance Berliner Dom and the ionic columns of the Altes Museum flanking the lime trees in the 16th-century Lustgarten. The enormous Baroque churches of the Gendarmenmarkt, mirroring each other across the grand plaza of the Konzerthaus, where Beethoven's ninth premiered.

It occurs to me as I return to the airport that I may be missing the point of Berlin. It buzzes with birth and growth and vitality as the fifth German republic in a hundred years adds its own signature to the city's eclectic blend of architecture while galleries of young artists sprout inside extinct factories.

Or maybe I'm just delirious inside this 45 degree oven masquerading as a 45-minute airport bus.


Two views of Berlin

An American tour in Paris

Why do tourists humiliate themselves? Here comes an American-run tour, thirty strong, stopping and queuing for ice cream. Against the fashionable Parisian backdrop of women in easy backless summer blouses they've been decked out one and all in reflective yellow vests like a kindergarten class on a roadworks excursion.

The Paris Five

At the foot of the Pont Saint-Louis on the Isle Saint-Louis, across from the red awnings of La Brasserie de l'Isle Saint-Louis and beside the red-awninged cafe Le Flore en l'Ile, overlooking the Seine and overlooked by the Cathédrale de Notre Dame, at perhaps the most charming, most Parisian spot in all of Paris, I was arrested by five young men in their bare twenties—sporting van Dykes and waistbands that fell below underpants elastics—on flute, clarinet, guitar, two-piece drum kit and double bass, jamming in the long summer light on "Memories of my Father" like a seasoned jazz quintet.

Shakespeare and Co.

Books for sale plaster the walls of the most famous bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare and Co., a running maze of ceiling-high bookcases that tower to the ancient rafters in perpetual overflow in a two-storey, one-time monastery.

Upstairs is a reading room where the books are not for sale. Having been acquired as collections, often as estates, many are old and out of print.

In the corners are worn and cracked leather seats with collapsed cushions and shredded arms from the claws of the resident cat, and in one of them is me, reading passages from the out-of-print Selected Prose by Henry Miller amid the sparkling motes of morning light.

The sole window in the reading room is open to the fresh air and overlooks a small cobblestone path below that trickles out through a narrow garden and into the traffic of the Quai de Montebello. Beyond is the Seine, above it Notre Dame.

An old portable typewriter, maybe a Remington or a Royal, sits in front of the window atop a table where a young woman, consumed, captive to her notebook, scratches pencil scribbles into the morning quiet.

And suddenly a swarm of tourists who have heard of Shakespeare and Co. squall up the stairs and into the room, wheeling around us and clicking like chattering birds. They snap photos despite the signs requesting they not and pose in front of books they don't touch, spewing loud, vapid commentary and filling their iPhones with images of what their lives are not so they can be admired by those at home.

I am practically pushed aside by a vulgar American so she can pet the cat—"hey, kirty kirty!"—before she turns to her fat friends and yells "time-check! How are we doing for time? We need to make up ten minutes!" In waves they come, as they are drip-fed into the cramped aisles from their queue of uncouth on the cobblestones outside.

Then they clatter back down the narrow stairs and are gone. As the tempest clears and quiet returns, emerging at the foot of the bookcases across from me is a boy of nine or so sitting in an old wooden folding chair, unperturbed amidst the whirlwind, absorbed in a story.

There is hope for humanity yet.

The city of sorrows and living

Paris. It's one of the few places in the world I return to. This is my fourth time.

I love Paris. People ask me why, but it's for personal reasons that would be meaningless to anyone else. It was here where I had my heart, for the first time, truly broken. I was stood up on the Pont des Arts, the romantic pedestrian bridge which today is literally strained by that recent and tawdry phenomenon of love-locks. I sat in the Place des Vosges, sobbing a spectacle as I wrote a goodbye letter to the girl I loved.

Paris was cold. It was February and there was fog along the Seine. I was 26, I wore a second-hand woollen trench coat that the moths had started on, a narrow pin-stripe suit I found at the Salvation Army, and a new fedora I'd splashed out on.

My room was a crooked and peeling late night desperation at the top of five flights of dark, winding stairs. I was barked out of it in the morning in a language I commanded only in fragments, for using the shower, I think, without paying the extra francs.

I checked into the hostel on Rue des Bernardins under an assumed name instead and met a Dane who gave me ten francs on my last day there because I hadn't eaten in two days. I devoured bread and cheese gratefully, and cured it to something concrete with liquid yoghurt.

I played chess in the Jardins des Luxembourg. I eschewed the Eiffel Tower and wandered the lanes of the Quartier Latin. I shared strawberries with a stranger on a park bench and was invited to her house for coffee, where she practised her English discussing the recent election of a socialist parliament in France.

Today the thing I look forward to the most is tomorrow—breakfast of croissant, baguette, cafe au lait and jus d'orange at a table I shall own for hours.

It is the living here. The French live for now and eternity. They embrace artists, musicians and writers. What is the point of struggling every day like a rat treading water so you can one day enjoy your life? It is already here! And struggles will always come with it.

A warning on the Kettle Valley Railway

Wisdom on bears

About 7.30 in the morning I spot a bear fifty metres ahead of me. I must be downwind; it appears not to notice me as it emerges from the dense forest flanking the railway bed, saunters across my path, and slips back into the dark green shadows thick with deadfall. I halt immediately. Here's the thing with following a railway bed: there are two directions. You either go forward or you go back.

I've been waiting for this. I'm constantly seeing signs of animals, and indeed the animals themselves. There are deer prints all over the place, and a few days ago one strolled right through my camp, looking at me unperturbed from just metres away as I made my breakfast. On the trail I saw coyote scats, judging by all the undigested rabbit fur in it. There was a beautifully clear print of a mountain lion in the mud as I filled my water bladder at the river, and my uncertainty about other prints being cougar or bear was removed upon discovery of a big splat of bear poo fresh enough to still attract flies.

There is received wisdom on avoiding bears. One piece of advice is to wear a bear bell. This is simply a bell. You wear it like a cow. It goes "tinkle tinkle" and protects you from bears. You see, spooking a bear is something you don't want to do, because when they're spooked they can charge. It's usually a bluff because you've frightened them, but rather than putting your hands on your hips and saying, "oh, come on, now!" it's rather better to avoid the interaction to begin with. It's particularly easy to startle a bear in dense forest of thick green shadows. And sows with cubs aren't bluffing.

I do not have a bear bell.

Other advice, if you are on the receiving end of a charge, is to raise your arms above your head and bellow with all your bloody might to frighten it away. The frightened bear. You are trying to appear bigger than it. Than the bear. Bears stand on their hind legs at about eight feet.

This is why you have to hang your food so high in a tree when you make camp. (NEVER keep your food in your tent beside you, because when a bear comes inside in the middle of the night it will not make the distinction.) The dimensions for hanging your food are: ten feet in the air (so the bear doesn't simply pull it down) and six feet out from the trunk along the first branch, suspended by three feet of rope (so it doesn't simply climb the tree and pluck it like a sack of apples; black bears are exceptional climbers). So, the perfect tree has, as it's lowest branch, a stout projection at ninety degrees.

This perfect tree does not exist, by the way.

Grizzly bears can't climb trees but they are bigger (yes, bigger) so you have to hang it higher. And disregard that other stuff about bluffing, because grizzlies are territorial. The best thing to do is climb a tree.

This morning it's a black bear. With no choice but to press on, I pick up two stones to clack together and make a sharp sound that carries well ahead of me and walk cautiously forward. The bear is either disinterested in me or unaware and already gone.

I'm not in grizzly country. I don't think I would do this trek in grizzly country. This is what I tell the hunter I meet that evening who says to me, as I walk into a public campsite with a long branch I am using as a walking staff, "Is that all you carry with you? A stick?"

"You know, you're wrong," he says. "Last year my friends and I saw a grizzly with three cubs just on the other side of this lake. About two hundred metres from us. It stood up and looked at us, then behind it at her cubs, then at us again."

I wish he hadn't told me this story.

The perils of trespassing

In Rhone, a tiny hamlet where once stood a train station, I come across a cyclists' rest stop next to a restored caboose that has "Kettle Valley Railway" emblazoned on the side. There are picnic tables in the grounds, pit toilets, and a hammock suspended under a roof. This will be tonight's campsite.

I remember cabooses from my childhood. I grew up near a railway and was intrigued by the turreted and chimneyed living quarters that sailed by, tailing the train. Lamentably, they were decommissioned on all trains years ago, so it's a nostalgic treat to find one. Through its windows I can see it is clean and well-kept, and judging by the pamphlets and guest book on the benchtop it's being used as a tourist office of sorts. There is also a stove of cast iron and three bunks. I try the door handle but it's locked, so I can't fulfil my childhood dream of sleeping in a caboose, even one that isn't going anywhere. Instead I set up a makeshift tent over the hammock with my tent fly to keep the warmth in overnight. I go to look for water.

The railway bed follows the Kettle River. Through Rhone today, however, it runs through farming country with long stretches on private land. I find myself separated from the river by barbed wire fencing surrounding a no-man's-land studded with "No Trespassing" signs. I need water to cook, or it will be dry oatmeal and hard pasta. Walking half a mile up and down the road looking for some way of access, I finally spot a rickety cedar fencepost hidden by bushes below the level of the road. I attempt to scale the metre-high wire.

When I step on the lower wire of the fence, it squeals in the old wood like a pig having its teeth pulled. With one leg over, straddling the wire with a barb in my groin, I hear: "woof!" Through the obscuring roadside vegetation, at equal dog's eye level I see what appears to be a black and tan rottweiler, set on the road, fixed on my location in the bushes. Then another big black dog joins it, staring straight at me. "WOOF!" The trespass guards have arrived.

Dogs would be through the fence in a second, so I quickly opt to return to the side from which I came—"see? I am un-trespassing!"—even though this is the side the dogs are on. At least I would have an open avenue of escape for a few seconds before they run me down. I try to slow my panicked scrambling, while still moving like a greased bobcat being given a bath, and unfasten the accumulating barbs in the crotch of my pants lest the dogs set upon my legs before I unmount this fence. All this haste demonstrates the simple genius of barbed wire: it entangles the hasty.

Mercifully, the dogs remain on the road. As I disentangle my tackle packet and emerge from the sunken hedge onto the road myself, I see first that the black-and-tan is nothing but a scruffy mongrel and his mate a fat, grizzled old labrador. Following twenty metres behind is an elderly couple on bicycles. I thank the gods that today is not the day I die being mauled astride barbed wire by dogs.

"We thought you might have been a bear," they call out. "We were just out for our evening ride." I explain sheepishly that I'm camped at the rest stop and was looking for water. They kindly offer me the use of the garden hose at their house, right across the road from my campsite. As much as I need, they say. I feel foolish for not simply knocking on the door and asking in the first place.

That night, fed and snug in my sleeping bag, in the hammock strung up at the end of the caboose, I have everything for a comfortable sleep. And I survived my is-this-a-mauling? encounter with dogs. Those people were nice.

They thought I was... the owners were worried about... 

Oh!

"Bears."

Searching

I've long been fascinated with railways. Not trains, but railways. They're things that can spirit you away from where you are to places where you could be. 

Abandoned railways take you to times where you can't be. They are corridors back into history, connecting the present to places once relevant but since forgotten. To disappear down one of these isolated rights of way is to vanish into obscurity.

In my youth, when I backpacked around southern British Columbia and trekked the abandoned Kettle Valley Railway, hitch-hiking was my default mode of transport. On one trip I was picked up by a lady of about forty in a rented car. She was leaving her life behind, resiling from an interminable and rancorous custody battle for her 9-year-old daughter. Her character had been irremediably maligned in court, and she had lost her last appeal. I was shocked to think of what it must take to make a mother leave her child behind. She was philosophical but clearly broken by it.

I was just 23 and coming off the collapse of my own marriage. We were young and it was my first real relationship. We were together four years.

"So what are you looking for?" the mother asked. She was calm and kind. "Why are you out here on the road?"

I liked her. She was sincere and kind. I considered her question seriously but all I could come up with was a flimsy, "I really don't know." I was a bit unsettled, by both the impotence of my answer and at not having contemplated an answer at all. What unseen motive is moving me?

"I've come across a number of young men your age doing the same thing," she said. "Journeying, searching. And they're never really sure what they're searching for. It makes me wonder what it is." She paused reflectively. "I think maybe it becomes clear only later, after it's done." 

Now beyond her age then, I wonder if she was looking for her own answers. Looking back, had I been able to at the time I'd have answered her this: We have no idea what our lives mean. We just tell our stories and the meaning emerges, ethereally like consciousness emerging from our cerebral sweetbreads. That's why we tell our stories: we are compelled to find the meaning in our lives. 

I'm reminded of this conversation as I return to the abandoned Kettle Valley Railway, twenty years later, after the end of another significant relationship in my life. What am I doing? Am I looking for something? As young adults we are still weaving our tales; as old adults do we review them? Is this a manifestation of mid-life crisis? In our forties do we regress to our twenties to see where we went wrong?

Abandoned

East of Vancouver is a city called Hope, beyond which there isn't much. A hundred years ago, in 1915, a new railway followed the valley of the Kettle River and ventured into the craggy granite mountains and deep ravines of Similkameen Country to serve the burgeoning silver mining communities.

Twenty years ago I backpacked seventy kilometres along the bed of the now extinct Kettle Valley Railway, from Brodie junction, where it breaks away from today's Coquihalla Highway, to Princeton. It was a formative moment in my life as a young man in his early twenties learning about his independence, and I have ever since wanted to return to hike the rest.

The terrain was treacherous for the railway, especially crossing the Coquihalla summit. The steep mountain challenged rail's two per cent grade limit to reach the 1200-metre summit, and the line was regularly blockaded in winter by avalanches and mud slides. By the 1960s, the number of incidents that closed the Kettle Valley Railway for weeks at a time was breaking the back of the line's finances and it was shut down.

The highway I'm now on obliterated the Coquihalla section when it was built over the top of the abandoned KVR in the 1980s. My ears are popping as the bus hauls itself up the mountain. Dense forests of white spruce concede the altitude to stands of black hemlock which disappear into an early June mist engulfing the rocky mountain tops.

I remember driving this road in winter in my youth when I had held a drivers licence for only a year or two. It was white-out conditions. I crawled up a hill of black ice at 10 k's an hour at night with a visibility of maybe ten metres, the headlights reflecting bright on a wall of falling snow, everything black beyond. Standard stuff for the Coquihalla.

I was once picked up hitch-hiking by an old bloke who used to jump the rails of the KVR in the 1920s, looking for work in towns along the line. That was common then. Young men would sneak aboard the box cars when the train was at a slow roll, evading the rail guards and their truncheons.

The railway seems to have a history of forming young men. But as a not-so-young man anymore, I am preparing to hike the line from the other direction—a one-hundred kilometre distance from Rock Creek to McCulloch—and then mountain-bike the spectacular mountainside section of tunnels and trestles through Myra Canyon, a thousand metres above Lake Okanagan.

I bet it still has the power to form, and perhaps reform, men.