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Want to Make the Olympics? Try Bobsledding.

sperkins-pom — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It’s about 9:30 a.m. on January 20, a Sunday, and a sled packed with four large, helmeted British men is horizontal in turn 16 of the . I stand trackside just beyond the turn on a small viewing platform, and as the sled levels out into the straightaway, I realize it’s pointed almost right at me. I take a step back—more a flinch than anything. I’m not actually on the bobsled track, but I’m close enough that my spidey sense goes off. As the sled flashes by, I can feel the wind. It must be going 70 miles per hour? Eighty? It’s hard to say, and it’s already around another corner and out of sight.

This is my first live bobsledding event, but I’m already aware of several truths about the sport. The first: you must be slightly insane to even try bobsledding. I mean: “I’m going to slide down this here mountain on ice. Who’s with me?” Uh, not me. Definitely not me.

But there are less obvious truths, too. No sport on earth translates as poorly to television as bobsledding. Consider the speed: I knew bobsleds went fast before I came here. I watch the Olympics. In the early 1990s, Cool Runnings had a special place in my adolescent heart. But it took me being here, at the 2013 Europa Cup of four-man bobsledding, to really get it. On television, your sense of speed comes from the changing cameras and what the announcer tells you. You know the sleds are moving fast, but there’s no thrill. At a live bobsled event, it’s different. It’s all thrill. You hear the sled coming long before you see it. You feel the track tremble as it slides by. And then silence. It’s just you and the mountain.

In all sports, setting is important, and television does an excellent job of capturing the roaring crowds at, say, the Super Bowl. Based on the broadcast, viewers can imagine what it must be like to be at the Super Bowl and feel confident that their imagined setting is close to the real thing. Not so in bobsledding. The kunsteisbahn is tucked into the shadow of a mountain just across a small lake from the city of Königssee, a place of fairytale-like beauty. The surrounding area was once the hunting grounds of the Bavarian royal family. Today, it’s the gateway to the Berchtesgaden National Park. The Alps here are as rugged and sharp as shards of broken glass. The track’s bottom-most U-turn is only 40 meters from Lake Königssee. When standing between the lake and the track, you become aware of a strange juxtaposition between speed on the mountain and peace on the water. When a sled comes, the track moans and creaks, and, for a moment, the scene seems violently foreign—the peace shattered—until the sled is gone again and the lakeshore returns, suddenly, to serenity. I’m so affected by it all that I must occasionally remind myself that the beauty of this place is real, and that people are doing this dangerous thing in pursuit of the Olympics.

THE HOLY GRAIL OF bobsledding is the Olympics, which, as you know, comes every four years. In terms of importance, the World Championship, which happens every non-Olympic year, comes next. And while prestigious, both these events are essentially weekend-long tournaments. You can’t have a sport with only one meaningful event for two days per year, so in addition to the Olympics and the World Championships, bobsledders participate in different circuits every winter. These circuits (in bobsledding they’re called “Cups,” as if this wasn’t confusing enough) take place at multiple locations and are decided, at season-end, by an accumulation of points, much like NASCAR or Formula One. The accumulated points also count toward a driver’s world ranking (the push athletes aren’t ranked), which determines qualification for the Olympics and the World Championships. Some circuits are worth more points than others and are therefore more prestigious. A stage win in the Europa Cup, for example, is worth 120 points, whereas a win in the top-tier World Cup earns a driver 225.

While the Europa Cup is not the most important event in bobsledding, and while the best bobsledders often skip it entirely, from a live-spectator perspective it’s appealing because there are no crowds, and I don’t have to elbow anybody out of the way to get trackside. I have a lot of access, in other words. But it’s not just physical access. There’s something inherently interesting and relatable about watching people compete when they are not yet the best at what they do. Athletes at this level are good, but they haven’t developed the steel-eyed ruthlessness of the top competitors. As a spectator, you see more mistakes at this level. You can watch the athletes learn. There’s a kind of purity on display here that gets painted over at the highest level. At an event like the Europa Cup, you get to go through the refining process with the athletes.

As I sit in the finish line grandstand and watch sleds finish and stop, little white chunks fly up behind each passing crew, an ice wake of sorts. Some of the brakemen don’t get on the brakes fast enough and blow right through the finish area, and the race MC makes an announcement reminding athletes to stop quickly.

THE KUNSTEIBAHN IS 1.27 kilometers long for bobsleds (longer for luge, shorter for junior events). Completed in 1968, it’s the oldest, permanent, artificially-cooled bobsled track in the world. With a maximum downhill grade of nine percent, it takes some doing to stop a full sled, and gravity has a part to play in the process: maybe the last one-fifth of the track is actually uphill. The rest is up to the brakemen, who sit in back and pull on levers that drive a kind of rake into the ice.

When the sleds stop, the athletes just sit there for a moment, and it’s easy to imagine them silently thanking God for delivering them safely down the mountain. Their heads are the only visible body parts, and the sled is so small you’d think they’re a bunch of kids. Only when they stand up and help the track crew move the sled off the ice does it become apparent how big they all are.

The weight of a full sled is capped at 1,388.9 pounds, and teams add weight to get as close to that number as possible before competition. Teams with heavier athletes require less added weight and can use a lighter sled, which is easier to push in the start. Where, exactly, do you find big, fast people who aren’t doing other things? Jordan Smallin, one of Team Great Britain’s brakemen, told me most of the athletes are former “sprinters from athletics or rugby players.” Smallin ran hurdles at a national level before making the switch to bobsledding and looks about 6-foot-3 and 200 pounds. He joined the team in the spring of 2012, which seems like a short timeline, but is not exactly atypical in the world of bobsledding. Look at Lolo Jones. She didn’t start bobsledding until after running hurdles in last summer’s Olympics, and she’s already a World Champion bobsledder. Even the pilots, the position that requires the most skill, are basically indistinguishable from push athletes because most of them spend a season or two as pushers before moving on to pilot.

IT’S NOW 10:30, AND I’m standing just outside the starting house at the top of the hill. I can see four Polish men on the starting line. Their sled’s runners are slotted into the ice’s starting grooves and the little push handles stick out on both sides. The athletes have helmets on, but I can tell by the way they shift their weight and breathe that they’re keyed up. They should be. The start is everything.

In fact, the start is so important that the MC announces each sled’s start time in addition to its overall run time, like a race within a race. If you think about it, bobsledding is an exercise in managing momentum. For most of the race, it’s the driver’s responsibility to use gravity to build momentum by taking good lines through turns and by not hitting walls. The only time a team can actively add to a sled’s momentum is at the start—in those first 50 meters when they push. This would be fairly straightforward, except these are all big guys who have to run on ice and then load themselves into a tiny, human-propelled bullet. And they have to do it all in about five seconds. Mistakes made higher up the track are worse than those made near the finish, because the effect of squandered momentum is cumulative, and a mistake in the beginning can render the rest of the race pointless. The sled load is crucial to giving the pilot a chance, and teams practice this year-round.

The Polish team’s run starts off like all the others. They lean into their task like four guys pushing a broken-down car. The driver jumps in, but as the pusher on the right side tries to hop in, he catches his inside foot on the sled’s lip. For a moment it looks like the sled will slide down the mountain with him running alongside. But just before the sled enters the first turn, the brakeman, from a seated position, reaches out and grabs his teammate around the waist and pulls him, face up, into his lap.

The athletes standing in the nearby warm-up area stopped their high kicks and squats to watch the commotion, and they burst into applause and shouts of “nice!” as the sled enters the first corner with all parties aboard.

After the giggles and applause, the gallery goes quiet for a moment. The Polish sled avoided catastrophe—the pusher could have been seriously injured—but accidents do happen when people decide to slide down mountains on ice. People get hurt. Some die. The last fatal accident in bobsledding occurred at Königssee in 2004, when a women’s two-person sled crashed in a training run, killing a 24-year-old Yvonne Cernota, who was just making the transition from pusher to pilot. (In the 2010 Olympics, 21-year-old Georgian luge slider Nadar Kumaritashvili crashed during a training run, struck a pole, and died.)

As heart-stopping as the Polish sled’s close call was, I don’t dwell on it. But something about the way the brakeman pulled in his teammate and the way the rest of the athletes cheered stays with me. In that moment, I became aware of a kind of camaraderie that exists among the gathered athletes. It takes something—a loose switch, a difficult-to-satiate need for adrenaline, or a whole lot of willful ignorance—to jump in a bobsled and shoot down a mountain, but there is more to it than that. It’s not just about their shared Olympic dream, either. Bobsledding—with all these repackaged athletes—is a sport for second chances.

You won’t see this on an NBC broadcast. Or, at least, you can’t see it on your own, without it being packaged as a lame character piece about overcoming adversity. At the Europa Cup, where so many of the athletes were good-but-not-good-enough at football or hurdling or whatever before they transitioned to bobsledding, everyone is overcoming adversity. Their peers from their previous sporting lives gave up on their Olympic dreams long ago and resigned themselves to watching the games on TV. But these guys refuse to let go. It’s that second chance that binds these athletes together. Well, that and a 12-foot aerodynamic sled.

��() is a writer based in Heidelberg, Germany.

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Three Naked Hours in the Baths of Baden-Baden

sperkins-pom — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“You know it’s fully nude, right?” the woman behind the ticket counter asked. “And co-ed?”

“Yes,” we said, sliding the bills across the counter. Thirty-five Euros for a three-and-a-half hour bath and brush massage at Friedrichsbad, the famous bathhouse in Baden-Baden, Germany. The woman opened the till. Tom put his arm on the desk and leaned in. “Do people ever leave when you tell them that?”

One of the bathhouse’s managers standing nearby overheard the question and told us that people often do leave when they’re told the nudity is mandatory. Not everybody’s comfortable naked. As Tom and I walked toward the locker room, we passed a middle-aged French man with what appeared to be his three 20-something children (two boys and a girl). The four of them seemed to be having second thoughts. They huddled around the manager, whispering questions. The girl, in particular, looked anxious.

Like the French family, I was a little nervous. I’m an American, and therefore by definition pretty uptight about nudity. In the U.S., we will lock you up for streaking, and this sort of co-ed bathing just doesn’t happen back home. It comforted me that some French people, who I would normally assume to be more easygoing than Americans when it came to the naked human form, appeared so frightened. But as I disrobed and tried to prepare—mentally, physically, spiritually—for the rest of the afternoon, it occurred to me that I might look just as uneasy as the French. I figured, absent clothes, the only way to really draw attention to oneself in a place like Friedrichsbad is to appear obviously uncomfortable. I needed to stay calm.

Before I stepped out of the locker room, I took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and slung my towel over my shoulder. I’d heard stories of Friedrichsbad’s bathing attendants snatching towels off of frightened Americans, and I didn’t want to give anyone the satisfaction. If I was going to be naked in public, I was going to be naked in public on my terms.

Nudity in Germany

Baden-Baden has a very James Bond feel, in that it reeks of wealth, is full of upper-class Russians, and sits in the foothills of an area in Germany called the Black Forest. All the Bond-extra-types that fill the town’s streets come for the city’s spas and its famous . The Casino, as it’s called, is the type of gambling establishment where the patrons wear tuxedos and ball gowns. (It’s also the setting of Dostoevsky’s The Gambler.) Walking around town, seeing display cases full of gold Fabergé eggs and streets lined with Ferraris, you get the sense that extravagance has deep roots here. Mark Twain visited in the late 1870s, noting, “It is an inane town, filled with sham, and petty fraud, and snobbery, but the baths are good.”

Friedrichsbad, the city’s fully-nude, completely co-ed, 17-stage, thermal-powered bathhouse, was built in 1877 and has stood as an emblem to all that is high-class and naked ever since. The building sits up a small flight of stairs from Baden-Baden’s old town, right on top of a thermal hot spring. Its façade is all stone, and like all neoclassical buildings, Friedrichsbad gives an impression of vague importance. And as far as bathhouses go, it is important. Friedrichsbad is one of the landmarks for . (Link is not safe for work.)

The FKK movement began in the late 1800s, arguably as a kind of reaction to the griminess of the industrial revolution. If industry was the manifestation of human impurity, with all that soot and heat, being in the forest, naked, was about as far to the opposite end of the spectrum as you could get. For the last hundred years, Germany’s nudists have succeeded in relaxing societal opposition to public nudity—and the laws governing it— to the point where public nudity is almost a non-issue today. (By comparison, even in San Francisco, the U.S.’s most liberal city, it is still ).

Today, you can find FKK clubs from the Alps to the Baltic and everywhere in between. The Internet is awash in FKK fan sites and forums, and it’s not difficult to find extensive maps of places in the country where showing a little skin is the norm. Even some of Germany’s most prominent tourist locations, like , have been taken over by nudists.

Nudity Bath: How it Works in Baden-Baden

The first step in the Friedrichsbad bathhouse experience is to shower (stage 1). Then you put on some sandals and head into the saunas (stages 2 and 3), where the floors are too hot for bare feet. From there, you can follow signs directing you toward each subsequent stage, or you can just wander around the steam rooms, pools, and saunas because you’re naked and no one is going to tell you what to do.

Tom and I spent about 15 minutes in each of the two sauna rooms—one 54 degrees Celsius (129 degrees Fahrenheit), the other 68 degrees Celsius (154 degrees Fahrenheit)—sipping water from a nearby fountain when dehydration loomed. Both rooms were tiled from floor to ceiling and smelled of chamomile, which I later found in a small metal box hanging from the ceiling. The box looked like a tiny, silver birdhouse, which I thought at first was an ornamental pull-chain for the lights. Only half of the 15-odd cruise ship-style recliners and chairs were occupied in the 54-degree room, and I lay down near a sprawled, middle-age woman who looked up at us with the one-eyed glance of a dozing cat.

We sat and sweat. Bathers came and went.

I didn’t have a notepad, on account of the moisture and nowhere to, uh, put it. After sitting for a while, looking around, I realized my intense interest in my surroundings—my mental note-taking—might be freaking people out. It’s not that I spent three-and-a-half hours ogling the other customers. (Although you should know, reader, that I felt ogled at times.) But as I looked around, my gaze would inevitably fall upon the naked bodies of the other bathers—and, well, it got me thinking.

Throughout our lives, how often are we actually naked? Excluding showering and (for some) sleeping, it happens pretty seldom, right? I mean, the only other time we shed clothing is when we’re getting intimate. Try as we might, it becomes difficult to divorce intimacy from the act of being nude, and this coupling casts a certain strange, erotic shadow over the proceedings at a place like Friedrichsbad. Don’t get me wrong, there was no hanky-panky going on (and frankly, there’s not a place in Friedrichsbad where it could). I only mean that it creates a social situation that’s ripe for misinterpretation. Turning to look at a person when he or she enters a room becomes complicated because anything anybody does—those perfectly normal, friendly signals we give to one another all the time without even thinking—is re-routed through this erotic zone in our brain that has been activated by the absence of clothes and which we can’t really turn off. So a casual glance becomes a potential check-out. A friendly smile is now a creepy wink. That’s what it seemed like at first, anyway.

Reckoning with Public Nudity

As I worked my way through the idea that the inside of the bathhouse came with a different social contract, it came time for my brush massage (stage 5). When my number was called, a middle-aged, bald masseur led me to his massage table and said something in German that I didn’t understand. I asked if he spoke English, and his response was “Face up, please.” For the next 10 minutes or so, he scrubbed my every pore, save the obvious. The guy was thorough. After he was done, I was finally able to fully relax. Nothing’s weird after you’ve been cleaned like a farm animal by someone who speaks another language.

Next, Tom and I hit the steam rooms, the first of which was near capacity. People shuffled around, stretched, and hosed themselves down with the cool water that was piped in along the walls of the two rooms. The seats in the steam rooms were like step pyramids, and at one point the couple seated on the step above me stood and began cupping the higher, warmer air in their hands and scooping it down onto one another. When they left, I stood up and tried it myself. It was like reaching up and grabbing handfuls of Mississippi summer.

The more time ticked by, the more ridiculous my initial angst over how to comport myself in the bathhouse seemed. Why should I feel eye contact with a stranger passing in the hallway was inappropriate just because we were both nude? Why was I feigning interest in the ornamental ceiling when a woman stood up and exited the Jacuzzi? After a while I couldn’t figure out what was weird and what was normal, and it took me the better part of an hour to realize there really wasn’t any different social contract in the bathhouse, just because everybody was naked. Everyone had signed on for this, and the same rules applied: just don’t stare.

After a while, considering the novelty of the situation, it almost felt wrong not to look around. Although I must confess: I saw some things I wish I could un-see. I encountered an old man whose butt looked like two globs of mud dripping down a wall. I watched an obese man with an apron-like belly displace an impressive amount of water in the warm, stage 9 bath, which had a filter that slurped and gurgled whenever someone waded in. At one point, Tom turned to me and remarked on the incredible effect pants have had on the shape of the human body. He had a point; everyone at Friedrichsbad looked like he or she wore an invisible belt.

It’s Not for Everybody

In Friedrichsbad’s promotional literature, the pools get the most photo space, especially the stage 11 “Thermal kinotherapeutic” , a circular, about-40-feet-in-diameter, three-feet-deep, exactly-28-degrees-Celsius (82.4 degrees Farenheit) pool located under the building’s central dome. The red-white-and-gold dome is molded with deep quadrilateral reliefs, which converge near its apex around a circular skylight. It’s quite a striking place, especially when compared to some of the other rooms, which have little ornament on account of the steam. The domed room is also the place where Friedrichsbad’s two wings meet and one of the bathhouse’s two permanent co-ed areas. (During “separate bathing” days, the two wings are segregated by sex, but the central dome and an adjacent, warmer pool remain co-ed. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Sundays, and bank holidays—we were there on a Sunday—Friedrichsbad is 100 percent co-ed, and, male or female, you’re free to wander as you please.)

Tom and I had floated around in the pools for about a half-hour when the French family we’d seen in the lobby entered the pool area. The four had been tense when we’d seen them earlier. Now they were naked and couldn’t hide their fear as they tiptoed quickly through the pool area and then back into the wing from which they’d come. As they scurried, they covered themselves—hands over crotch and across chest—as though someone had just yanked back a shower curtain on the whole family.

For the first time that day, I saw heads turn. Some people frowned in disapproval. It looked like I was right: the most assured way to attract attention in a bathhouse is to show fear. I empathized with the French family, who seemed to be having a genuinely terrible experience. For some, public nudity is just a non-starter.

I lay back on a large, almost full-body jet, and as bathers around me came and went, I began to float. It was nice—the warm water, the weightlessness, the bubbles. I closed my eyes, let my head sink underwater, and thanked God I had the good sense to not bring my parents to Friedrichsbad.

��() is a writer based in Heidelberg, Germany.

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Germany’s Drunk Bike-Riding Day

sperkins-pom — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It’s 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, August 26, and I’m sitting with friends in the middle of the central plaza in Bad Durkheim, Germany, trying to take it all in. It looks like rain, but the plaza is full of people. They eat bratwurst and crepes. They laugh. There’s a band somewhere out of sight playing flawless, note-for-note covers of Pink Floyd classics, Eagles tunes, and songs from The Muppets. People dance. A grey-haired man with a sculpted, imperial-style mustache serves wine from an open-air bar. We sit and stare. His customers stand up, raise glasses, offer one another flowery salutations, and clank cups. It’s not even noon, but everyone here is drinking.

My friend Tom sits down across from me and says he thinks he just saw a baby take a sip, although he’s not sure. Moments later, we watch a Mr. Bean-sized car drive past, carrying a blond woman who waves at the crowd like a pageant queen. is on parade. Throughout the day, she will make her way down Germany’s �±𾱲Բ��ٰ��ß��—and so will we.

The German �±𾱲Բ��ٰ��ß�� (literally “Wine Street”) is an 85-kilometer road that winds through the Pfalz (Palatinate), Southwest Germany. The decision to name a road �±𾱲Բ��ٰ��ß�� dates to 1935, when it was conceived of as a way to connect the wine growers in the region and increase tourism. The last Sunday in August is the �±𾱲Բ��ٰ��ß��’s big day, known as Erlebnistag Deutsche �±𾱲Բ��ٰ��ß��, which translates to “Enjoyment Day on the German Wine Street.” On Enjoyment Day, Police close the street to motorized traffic and people ride bikes, rollerblades, and sometimes scooters down the �±𾱲Բ��ٰ��ß�� to 15 different wine festivals in the Pfalz. In recent years, as many as 400,000 people have come to ride and drink on Enjoyment Day.

When we’re about half way through our first round of wine, my brother Mike, who arrived in Germany less than a week ago and seems overwhelmed, turns to me and says, “Geez. This is a lot different than a wine tasting in California.”

Like everyone here, Mike sips on a glass of Riesling, but he might be the only person in Bad Durkheim drinking from a 0.25-liter wine glass, which is the same size as the glasses you have in your kitchen cabinets. The rest of us drink from something called a Dubbeglas, which looks like a dimpled pint glass, holds a half-liter of wine, and is traditional to the Pfalz region. If a half-liter serving sounds like a lot of wine, it’s because it is. Drink two Dubeglases and you’ve already consumed more than a standard bottle of wine on your own. For those who wish to pace themselves, the Germans drink something called weinschorle, which is a 50/50 mix of wine and sparkling water.

In other words, this is a wine drinking festival; there’s not a lot of tasting going on.

The Germans have their own wine culture, and certain outsiders might scoff and think it low-brow (sparkling water?), but those folks are missing the point. It’s about inclusiveness, not pedigree—or at least that’s how it is during festival season. You won’t find any comparisons guides or places to pour out a glass of something you don’t like on Enjoyment Day. You will, however, laugh with friends, eat sausages, dance, and just generally have a great time. Relatedly, if you’re not careful, you will drink too much. So after spending an hour nursing my half-liter of Riesling, I decide to switch to schorle for the rest of the afternoon. I don’t want things to get out of hand.

At 1:00, we mount our bikes and head south to Wachenheim, population 4,699, where I sip from a glass of ��ǲ�é��ǰ�� (weinschorle made with rosé instead of the standard Riesling), eat a street-vender bratwurst, taste a sausage made from horse meat (good) and listen to a band of old-timers known as the Gentle Groove Agency perform N-Sync and Black Eyed Peas covers (not so good). In Deidesheim, population 3,735, my wife Irene orders a huge plate of meat: sausages, patties, meatballs—basically Germany on a plate. We sit in the gentle rain, washing it all down with Rieslingschorles. The Deidesheim festival is one of the Pfalz’s biggest, and the streets are so full of people we have trouble finding space to get back on our bikes.

The sky clears around 4:15, as we ride south out of Deidesheim. The street out of town slopes to the south for what seems like miles. No one pedals. We just kind of glide along, two or three abreast, telling jokes, remarking on the beauty of the castles set back behind the vine-covered hills. I build up enough momentum to pass some slow movers and decide to just ride it out. When I look back to check on Mike and Irene, I turn forward again and find myself on the opposite side of the road, riding through oncoming traffic. When I get back to the right side of the �±𾱲Բ��ٰ��ß��, no one yells or scolds me. People just smile and chuckle. I’m sure they’ve seen worse.

On a regular day in Germany, if you fancy a drink and a ride, you risk serious punishment. If you’re caught drunk on a bike, you can lose your driver’s license. If you have one too many, it’s best to just walk the bike or find a cab. Enjoyment Day, however, is not a regular day. As Barbara Imo, a tourism official in the Pfalz put it, the police are “more lenient” with people who break these traffic rules on Enjoyment Day. Of course, people do overdo it sometimes, but as a general rule, as long as nobody crashes wildly in front of a cop: no harm, no foul.

Enjoyment Day, then, represents a kind of respite from rules governing alcohol consumption and moving vehicles. All the little towns in the Pfalz are one or two miles from one another, which is perfect for biking. And whenever you can bring hundreds of thousands of people to otherwise sleepy, rural towns, it’s a boon for the local economy. So rather than enforce laws about drunk biking, which would cost a lot of money and probably cast an authoritarian shadow over an otherwise good time, the police just regulate where you can ride your bike on Enjoyment Day—the �±𾱲Բ��ٰ��ß��—and block the street from cars to minimize injury. So in a sense, to ride your bike on Enjoyment Day is to break a rule without really breaking a rule at all. It’s regulated mischief.

“Regulated mischief” is a pretty German way of dealing with things. If you’ve got a lead foot, you can take your Porsche out to some isolated stretch of Autobahn and really open it up. If you want to do hard drugs, there (link in German) where you can go do hard drugs; they’ll even give you clean needles. Prostitutes? , but only in certain places. The philosophy is more about managing than controlling.

Germany, in other words, is that old high-school friend we all use to have whose mom would say, “I’d rather you don’t drink, but if you do, I’d rather you do it here, at home, under my supervision.” If my memory serves, that woman’s kid threw great parties. Today, that party is on the �±𾱲Բ��ٰ��ß��.

I DRINK WHAT WILL be my last glass of schorle in a field off to the side of the road somewhere between Deidesheim and Neustadt an der �±𾱲Բ��ٰ��ß��. In the field, surrounded by acres upon acres of wine vines, are maybe 300 young people: late teens, early twenties. A stocky, brown haired boy in a sequenced blazer is dancing atop a stack of house-music-bumping speakers near the road. As I walk toward the wine tent, I pass a blond boy of maybe 19 fast asleep in a bale of hay. It’s nearing five now, the sun is out, and shirtless youth are dancing all around.

As I dance and laugh and high-five my friends, it occurs to me that if you were to swap the wine vines for corn stalks, the wine for Miller Lite, and the house music for country, we could be in Nebraska. The idea that we’re partying in a kind of bizarro version of Middle America somehow comforts me: it’s proof the world isn’t such a big place after all. At six, to further prove my theory, the police come and shut the party down. They’re reopening the road to traffic, they say. Before we go, I watch a young man face plant off a picnic table.

We mount our rides and make for Neuestadt, where we intend to catch the train back to Heidelberg, where I live. This is when the falls start. As I ride down a roadside bike path, I come up on several members of my group surrounding a body in a ditch beside the trail; tall grass covers the body’s arms and obscures its face. On closer examination, I realize this person is Rena, one of my fellow riders. She has fallen into a patch of thistles and can’t seem to stop laughing, despite the red welts forming on her arms. Moments later, as I gaze up at the vine-covered hillside, I’m involved in a low-speed collision with Irene’s back tire. It’s enough to topple me over. I too am unhurt, and as I get up I assure myself that such an accident could have just as easily occurred without the wine.

We gather ourselves, push on, and soon arrive at a rail crossing. The crossing forms a kind of junction, and we stop to consider our options. The road continues on, over the tracks, in a more-or-less straight shot into Neustadt. According to road signs, however, the official bike route peels off from the road without crossing the tracks and winds up into the hills before descending again into Neustadt. Six of us decide to take the trail; the rest of the group chooses to follow a friend named Leah into town along the road. But as Leah sets out across the tracks, she catches her front tire in a grove and falls to the side, hard. We dismount and run over to help her up. Her knee is bruised, but she’s otherwise fine. (I learn later that during Enjoyment Day, in Neuestadt alone, after seven severe bike accidents and three fistfights.) As we turn to go, the bars at the rail crossing begin to descend. They come down so quickly in fact that I’m unable to turn my bike around before they’re down completely, and I’m forced to ride around one of the barricades, as though I were trying to beat the train. Safely around, I turn back onto the bike path only to see the train cross the tracks at a speed that seems not far from the sound barrier. It didn’t even blow its horn.

You can regulate things, I realize, but you can’t make them safe. I don’t dwell on the near miss though; we’ve had a little too much schorle for that. We gather ourselves and ride up the hill into Gimmeldingenn, a small town just north of Neuestadt and one of the highest points on our ride. We pedal past stone villas, and the sounds of our spinning tires echo off the walls. We cruise through rolling hills with rows of wine so perfect they look as though someone ran a giant comb through them. As we descend from Gimmeldingenn, we ride along a cherry tree-lined path and things seem suddenly still, like we’re the only ones moving in an otherwise frozen world. We’re warm. We’re happy. I take one last look at the hills, cock my head back and whoop.

��() is a writer based in Heidelberg, Germany.

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Migraines, Trains, and Automobiles

sperkins-pom — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

When Irene and I meet new people, everyone asks the same line of questions: What do you do? Where are you from? Where do you live? This last question always leads to a conversation about transit and commuting. As expatriate Americans, we value different things than our German friends. We don’t own a car here, and the question of how to get around presents a kind of cross-cultural paradox.

Our answers are simple enough. We’re from the U.S.A. We came because Irene’s a chemist and she got a job in Ludwigshafen, a port city on the Rhine. We don’t live in Ludwigshafen, however; we live in Heidelberg—and, for the Germans, this is where the trouble starts.

“Why would you ever do that?”

THE PROBLEM FOR THE Germans is this: it takes 55 minutes for my wife to commute from Heidelberg to Ludwigshafen—she takes two trams and a train—and over here, they tell me, anything over 15 minutes is considered transit purgatory.

Irene and I could have lived in Ludwigshafen, or just across the Rhine in Mannheim, but we chose Heidelberg, despite the long commute, because when the allied high command drew up bombing runs during The War, they didn’t put an X over Heidelberg. They bombed Ludwigshafen and Mannheim into near nonexistence. Heidelberg still has its castle and its old town. Here, you can walk down a residential street, look up at the ornamental facades and imagine a time centuries ago. In Mannheim, you can look up and imagine a mid-century apartment block in Cleveland or Los Angeles. We moved all the way to Europe; we wanted to at least live in an old building. This was the obvious choice.

At first, the idea of Irene commuting longer than three times the average German upset me. It meant we were not doing what the proverbial Romans were doing. But it turns out 15 minutes is an exaggerated figure. According to a , Germans spent, on average, 42 minutes a day commuting to and from work in 2000. A 2009 census study estimated (I had to double commute-to-work-times here) the figure was 53.4 minutes for American men and 46.8 for women. It seems Germans, or at least our German friends, are more opposed to the idea of commuting than the practice itself.

Nevertheless, a car, they tell me, would make Irene’s commute about 10 minutes shorter. The Germans, of course, love cars—or, at least, the idea of having a car. Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, VW, Audi—all fine automobiles. Then there’s autobahn, which lets them get out and really eat up the road. We’re Americans and every American has a car as far as our German friends know. Add that to my wife’s near-hour-long commute, and they don’t buy it.

“So, when are you gonna get a car?”

“Hopefully never.”

I tell them how in the Los Angeles area, where I grew up, a long commute is pretty normal. But that’s a bad excuse. The truth is I’m still a little shell-shocked from all the driving, the needless traffic, the boiling frustration, the stress. When everything is at least half-an-hour away, it warps your perspective on things: you begin to treat the time it takes to get from A to B as a write-off. At least on a train you can read a book.

THE TRAINS ARE GERMANY’S lifeblood. In addition to their super-fast Intercity-Express service, Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s national rail company, operates several networks of regional trains. Not as sleek as the intercity trains and not as fast, they connect metro areas with rural towns across the country. According to , Deutsche Bahn moves 1.98 billion passengers annually. (By comparison, across the United States in 2011—that’s million, with an “m.”) And those numbers don’t include the country’s trams, buses and metro lines, which seem to be everywhere. You can get wherever you need to go pretty quickly—and if you can’t, you move closer.

In the United States, it can be hard to find work without access to a car, and in many places, like Southern California, car ownership is damn near mandatory. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that per-capita car ownership is higher in the United States (777 in 2010, ) than in Germany (503, ).

Certainly, alternative transportation has something to do with car-ownership rates. We have buses and commuter trains and subways in metropolitan areas across the U.S., but most of them don’t have a large enough network to quickly get you where you need to be. Another important factor, of course, is the price of gas.

In Heidelberg, it costs more than €100 (about $125) to fill a mid-sized sedan’s 60-liter (16-gallon) tank. In the U.S., assuming a price of $4/gallon, that same tank would cost $64—or almost exactly half the Heidelberg price.

To put a finer point on it, consider this. My wife’s metro pass costs €72.90 (about $90) a month, and it gives her unlimited access to the regional trains, light rail, and buses in the 5,637-square-kilometer Rhine-Neckar metro area. To put that in perspective, for the last three years I drove a Toyota Corolla—not exactly a gas-guzzler—half-an-hour to and from work. I paid at least $200 a month in gas and insurance. Before we paid off the car, that $200 was $500.

Given the easy access to public transport and the high cost of car ownership, deciding not to get a car here was easy. We have bikes, and we burn up the bike lanes. If we need to go far, we take the train. I’ve already ridden Deutsche Bahn’s high-speed Intercity-Express (ICE) trains from Frankfurt to Mannheim three times, from Dresden to Frankfurt to Heidelberg once, and from Frankfurt to Hamburg and back once. The train carriages are like the luxury airliners of the ‘80s—except without flight attendants. In the dining car you can order an entire meal from a menu and watch someone prepare it in a little kitchen. You can drink draft beer from an actual glass, one etched with the beer's label. And you can do it all while moving at near-warp speed.

Well, sometimes you can.

LAST WEEK, I TOOK the one-hour ride from Heidelberg to Wiesbaden. The northbound train ran 10 minutes late, which wasn’t a big deal—until, just outside Worms, it stopped. I looked to see what platform we’d pulled into and realized we hadn’t arrived at any platform at all; we had stopped mid-track. The conductor made an announcement in German, and a woman across the aisle chuckled and rolled her eyes. I asked the guy next to me to translate, and he told me that the train had broken down. “Everything’s normal,” he said, “in other words.” I arrived in Wiesbaden over an hour late.

In some ways, the return trip was even worse. When the train pulled into Darmstat’s station, where I boarded, it was already full. I couldn’t find a seat and retired to the dining car. In the narrow hallway leading to the bar, a lanky blond man blocked my path. He held a camera up to a tiny open window, from which he appeared to be videotaping the landscape as we blurred past. (At this point, the train was flanked by hedgerows and there wasn’t much of a view.) Before I could say excuse me, he turned, wild eyed, and scolded me in German for forcing him to stop his film and step aside. I exchanged startled looks with the bartender, ordered a pils and clung to a nearby table for balance. All the seats in this car, like the others, were full.

It occurred to me, as I stood there, that there are universal truths when it comes to travel. For one, you will almost definitely encounter a crazy person. It might be someone recording a hedgerow from a high-speed train at a distance of two meters, or it might be a guy who listens to music through his iPhone’s speaker even though you see the headphones in his hands. Secondly, traveling just kind of sucks. Always. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a car, on a train, or in Air Force One. When you’re in transit, you’re looking forward to the destination. The padded seats and cold beers can only distract from that; they can’t replace it. You’re moving in that vehicle because you have to, not because you want to.

The Germans grew up with the trains. To them, there’s nothing new or impressive about all the things that had me so wide-eyed and giddy the first couple of times I took them. The dining car isn’t a luxury; it’s a place to escape the monotony of getting around. But also, for the Germans, breakdowns, delays, and overcrowding happen all the time. They’re not unnecessary bothers, but just an expected component of getting from one place to another.

From that all-traveling-is-traveling point of view, you can understand why the Germans look at cars like they do too. At least in a car you have control over where you’re going, and if your neighbor is trying to talk to you, well, you can roll up the window and wait for the light to turn green. Cars offer a certain individual freedom in a country where you’re otherwise at Deutsche Bahn’s whim.

Despite all that, public transportation makes too much sense for us right now financially and mentally—if not logistically. I’ve fought enough traffic for one lifetime. Irene, for the moment, agrees. I’d much rather sit on the train and daydream about what Southern California would be like with a high-speed network and a matching metro. It’s not the comfort of the trains I want, because that’s not guaranteed. It’s not the speed either. What I envy is the freedom of choice. The Germans are spoiled by the freedom to choose. If all travel options are bad by virtue of them being travel options, all you can ask for is a choice. In the States, you either stay home or you grab your keys and drive.

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Brian Blickenstaff Archives - ���ϳԹ��� Online

Want to Make the Olympics? Try Bobsledding.

Three Naked Hours in the Baths of Baden-Baden

Nudity in Germany

Nudity Bath: How it Works in Baden-Baden

Reckoning with Public Nudity

It’s Not for Everybody

Germany’s Drunk Bike-Riding Day

Migraines, Trains, and Automobiles

Brian Blickenstaff Archives - ��ϳԹ�� Online