Riding Out
Encounters in Germany on two wheels
Hello!
I’m writing from the streetside table of a cafe down the street from my apartment. After months of keeping busy, I have virtually empty schedules now. I have spent a lot of time cycling. After an outdoorsy friend explained the German Knotenpunktesystem, I went home and became literate in German cycling signage. Suddenly, my apartment was not just defined by its proximity to neighbourhood cafes, but proximity to the Berlin Wall (Mauerweg), the Berlin-Copenhagen Route, the EuroRoute 1, the Usedom to the Baltic Sea. With so many options within a fifteen-minute radius, it took less effort to get out the door than to decide on something to watch on Netflix. On weekends, I might explore with friends. Mostly, I go alone, to get a break from myself. I can forget myself by focusing on the road, discovering lakeside mansions near Potsdam, or a conversation plugged into my ears. Below are some wandering thoughts on what I’ve discovered going around Germany when there’s no agenda.
Recreational Trail Recommendations: If you ever plan to visit Berlin, here’s a good map to start, or you can take Komoot’s recommendations around Berlin or Bernau, the Havel River, or the Treidelweg. If you’re in the EU, zoom in for a pan-European cycling route close to you.
When you enter the woods beyond the Ring in Berlin, you never quite know when they will end. It could be a tiny park bordered by two major roads. An hour before an interview, I went cycling and followed a familiar road until it required a turn. Instead, I crossed the intersection and followed a path into the trees. For the five minutes it took to cross the park, nature wrapped me in stillness. Once I re-emerged, I had to look at my phone to see where I was and race all of fifteen minutes back home. The woods could stretch longer, sometimes lasting an hour of head-down pedaling.
I am not a good rider. Despite being on a road bike, people overtake me on creaky frames with a pitiful fit. Along national routes following major rivers and tree-lined canals, silver-haired retirees pedal forward as I gather myself to cross cobblestones and gravel. Commuters in dresses and heels go twice my speed when they are also thrice my girth. People without legs smile and nod encouragingly as they row past. Cycling, like most sports, may start out more accessible to some, but ends up accessed by those who are most obsessed.
Outside of the city, German towns are usually connected by tree-lined roads. One-third of Germany is covered in forest and often the surest route from one hamlet into the next medieval town is to follow the trees. You might pass pines with cracking trunks growing on dusty soil. An hour later, you might go through a spruce forest with neatly piled timbers, the scent of their dust still lingering in the air. Some communities tend a tunnel of trees to block the gusts, while wheat fields may have a row of saplings that still need another decade to prove their worth.
The only certainty of any country road is that it will mutate. Most of the time, major routes like the Berlin-Copenhagen are well paved and cleared of dead leaves and needles. But eventually, that paved road will lead to cobblestones, sand, gravel, or packed rock-dirt. Sometimes, towns will flank their medieval roads with tiles. Just as often, they will lay down parallel concrete slabs with gutters that bump you along. The occasional pocket of chilled air hovering like an invisible cloud mystifies me out of my fixation on the road. Even though they say you can look at things more closely when walking, cycling forces you to feel your way through every mile.
My weekend cycling friend reminded me that it isn’t about “killing kilometres”. Shortly after her text, I entered Krakow Am See and considered a bench by the lake. If she had come, we would have taken that bench under the willows, snacked, and lingered for at least an hour. Alone, I would have passed time observing things. What I saw before sitting down were the people fixing their gaze at me. Of course, I could have chosen to look pointedly ahead at the lake. But this lake was small and noon was hot. Instead, I got lunch at a cafe in the town square and charged my phone.
The further I ventured from Berlin, the more double-takes replaced cycle-by greetings. Could it be my bike, which is a fine Giant Cadex 2 of 1992 vintage? Or perhaps the ill-matched green bag I attached in front. Perhaps they thought a kid who hadn’t reached puberty was cycling alone. But if they saw my face—bewilderment. Adults have stone faces that pull slightly down. Their blond-haired kids stop and look straight at me, pupils scanning up and down my face, their jaw slack. Some parents grab their child’s arm and whisper. Many turned their heads in sync, like a pack.
While I am still cycling, I am seen as a non-German. But when I drop my bike on the side of the road to snack, I could be a cyclist in need and passersby ask, “Alles ist gut?” If I cannot have both friendly and helpful, I am more reassured by the latter.
Despite warnings of German (lack of) hospitality, the most welcoming people I’ve met were in places I’ve stopped or stayed at. As the patrons stared on, the woman who ran the garden cafe along the Elbe River smiled, took my order and gave me a generous affogato. A receptionist waited for me to arrive two minutes after the 6pm check-in cut off and showed me the bike storage, explained the buffet and keys. A Deutsche Bahn ticket lady in Hamburg searched and explained my bike ticket options between our mutually broken English and German even as the line slowly grew behind me.
Summer shows Germany’s enthusiasm for cycling, perhaps because they persevere without Dutch-quality infrastructure. On weekdays, entourages of retirees have been on every path I’ve explored. On weekends, dogs, babies, and camping gear are dumped into carriers as families head to the lakes. Friends balance mats and tow kayaks down park reserves. No train is free of bikes in summer, and more likely so packed people squeeze themselves by the doors. Three-thousand euro racing bikes are stacked against rusting cruisers. Two elderly ladies with bony wrists and beaming smiles pushed their matching 90s mountain bikes with woefully unmatched handlebars, bells, and baskets. In front of the two-wheeler may be a three-wheeled transportation cart. People attach salvaged bars with repurposed planks and wheels to their chic urban hybrids. One guy held his bike upright to make room for mine the whole ride. Another guy cycled past me with a bike on his shoulder at Alexanderplatz.
Now, I ride to fill my days. I ride past the splinter nagging in my knee, the growing ache in my left wrist, the questionable condition of my left shoulder which has taken three major falls. I ride because it is all I have to fill my days.
In the beginning, taking coffee on my rides made me lookout for a nice spot to pause in. For the city, this habit made me notice a picturesque back alley or affectionately decorated planks serving as benches, justifying even the shortest ride through heavy traffic. The rides have lengthened and spending half of one severely dehydrated on a Sunday, I respect that distance is fuelled by water and not caffeine. To make those distances, I ride until thirst, low sugar, or a numb butt wear me down. In the city, it was about finding places, but once outside, it became about the places covered.
Filling my day cycling brings focus. With a destination and a day, I only need to arrive intact. No day ride is complete without questioning my decisions. Cobblestones designed shake country wagons clean jostle my joints silly. Before any sighting of a cow farm, horse ranch, or sheep pasture, I smell the hay and poop, some of which lie on the road as an obstacle course. Some forests are nurtured by miles by manure I wish my nose would tire of.
Riding is something I can still do. Ride for long enough, and I will get somewhere, see things. These routes have taken me well beyond Berlin’s expatriate-filled tech bubble. I would have liked Germans more had I never ventured out, but I would have appreciated Germany less.
Watching golden hour at the heel end of Lake Mürtiz after my longest ride, I don’t feel the same euphoria I did in my first cycling trips years ago. That 110 kilometres was hard. The comfortable sections felt too short, while the shorter uncomfortable, frustrating, and harrowing sections felt long. I did my best to recover my calories on a supermarket dinner, got full and stopped, stuck my feet into the warm lake water, and waited for sunset with all the other lakeside people. I was no less satisfied when I got up at 9:30pm before the sun even touched the trees on the far shore. By the time I was in bed, I had stretched, scrubbed the grime off every inch of my body and basked in the miracle of being clean on clean sheets. The next day, I would end up in a town with no sunshine, lake, nor people by dinner time. That evening, I tried my first fast-food Chinese meal in Germany as a mound of soybean sprouts in some amorphous brown sauce on rice. I was just as satisfied.
After long rides, I feel the dull ache of my calves, the loosening of my neck and thighs and glutes as I stretch. I feel my lungs swell, my breath pause. I feel for the cravings in my body — vegetables, salt, perhaps a banana. I feel in every fiber how I had gotten myself there.
Nothing I have encountered in Germany has been breathtaking. The sunsets have not the dramatic pantones of the Pacific Northwest. Find a hill to climb for five minutes and your reward is an endless flatland of grey, green or yellow. I doubt there is a wild forest as dense as my backyard in Vancouver. The food is passable at best, and usually because the dish is from elsewhere. Even the slurs on the street, denial of entry into clubs, and verbal abuses from waiters are as familiar as encounters in the US, Canada, Japan, or Hong Kong.
Still, it is thanks to Germany’s investments that I have been able to pedal myself to more places in this country than any other. I have been given access to the most populous nation in the European Union, the EU’s largest economy, a nation still grappling with its recent history and unwilling to wrestle with racism. It is far from great, but it is nonetheless good. While its road to fixing racism is long, I am happy we share the ones we ride on, to the forests and lakes we have an equal appreciation for. On my latest train ride back into Berlin, a man offered me a seat and fruits. When he saw my bike, he commented in German and when I didn’t understand, he asked me if I had modified it. Then he said, “It’s a nice bike. It must be enjoyable to ride.” Yes, yes every time.
Listenings and Readings:
Podcast & Transcript: “Robin DiAngelo and Resmaa Menakem: In Conversation” in On Being — a conversation that deserves a permanent place in the audio bookshelf
Podcast & Transcript: “Isabel Wilkerson: This History is Long; This History Is Deep” in On Being
Free Documentary: “Lowland Kids” directed by Sandra Winther on the Louisiana flood plain
Free Documentary: REFUGE | Human stories from the refugee crisis by Manga Carta
TV: Dear White People on Netflix
“On the Uses of History for Staying Alive” by Bathsheba Demuth
Novel: Stoner by John Williams
Article: “How China’s Insensitivity Toward Black Representation in Hollywood Is Growing” by Tony Lin
Tribute to Kat Davis, writer for Following the Arrows