The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Cowbell

Another 9-hours-of-sleep night and your many prayers did won­ders for us both! Thank you! Andrew woke up, if not fully cured, cer­tainly much much bet­ter than yes­ter­day and pre­pared to carry on—we were afraid we’d have to take this day off alto­gether and hope to sur­vive extra-long days ahead to make up for the lost time. We were out the door a lit­tle after 9 a.m. to another bless­edly rain­less day, and this time there was not a canal path in sight.

In fact, the scenery was as star­tlingly beau­ti­ful today as it had been bor­ing in the past few. Leav­ing Bad Grö­nen­bach we slipped through a for­est car­peted with moss, came out into a mown hay­field, climbed up to the crest and saw—the Alps! It was our first sight of them. Even this near­est ridge at a dis­tance was impres­sive, shrouded in fog and mist, craggy bare peaks etched against the sky. We could watch them grad­u­ally approach most of our 20 km into Kempten today, get­ting closer and darker and starker.

The land is gen­tly hilly now too, and given over almost entirely to dairy cat­tle. We found our first pas­ture full of cows wear­ing old-fashioned cow­bells around their necks, tin­kling gen­tly in the breeze. These are curi­ous and people-oriented cows: they usu­ally came run­ning over to greet us when they saw us across their min­i­mal­is­tic but elec­tri­fied fences. A few sheep, goats, horses, and even lla­mas pop­u­lated the coun­try­side as well.

I was think­ing today that usu­ally when peo­ple talk about lov­ing some par­tic­u­lar city, what they really mean is a very small cir­cum­scribed area of the city that some­how qual­i­fies as the real thing. But when you walk from city to city as we’ve been doing, you real­ize how big a city is, how much of it doesn’t enter into your mind when you think of that city, and how basi­cally unat­trac­tive it is, though per­haps inter­est­ing despite that. This doesn’t even include the res­i­den­tial sec­tions: I’m think­ing of the indus­trial and com­mer­cial zones, the ones that bloat and expand and mul­ti­ply around the charm­ing, tiny, cen­tral parts of old cities. We’ve learned that we can arrive at our des­ti­na­tion city and yet still have 3 or 4 km to walk before we get to where we actu­ally want to be.

Kempten, as it turns out, is pre­cisely this kind of nor­mal, lived-in kind of town, with a healthy ring of com­erce and indus­try all around. It’s two towns, actu­ally. This has caused some baf­fle­ment in the past fews days of look­ing at the map and see­ing one old cen­ter labeled “Kempten (All­gäu)” and the other called just “Kempten.” It turns out that this is a result of 16th cen­tury heritage—not when Luther passed through, but because of Luther. Kempten declared itself Protes­tant but the old abbey begged to dif­fer, and the even­tual set­tle­ment of the dis­pute resulted in two Kemptens.

It’ll be another early night for us as Andrew hope­fully kicks this cold for good. We’ve only got two and a half more days in Ger­many, mostly west­ward, before our encounter with the Alps becomes up close and personal.

paul sailhamer says:
September 15, 2010 at 3:12 pm
My wife and I and friends were in Kempten last month dri­ving to Ober­am­mer­gau. I rec­og­nized where you were by your descrip­tions before you gave the name, Kempten. Godspeed!
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