Life at the Brook – a narration (part 4)

My home is Carinthia, more precisely, the valley of the river Gail. I grew up in the sixties and seventies in a simple family home on the mill brook, in Hermagor, a tiny town fringed by mountains in the Alps, where the smaller river Gössering merges into the Gailtal valley with the dreaded river Gail. My episodes "Life at the Brook" are about my nature-related memories.

Life at the Brook Part 4

The cattle bars

If there was still time for us children and if we ran a bit rather into the creek, we arrived at a large green area, on which iron tubes of about eight centimeters in diameter were mounted horizontally at regular intervals in about one meter height. Even though we children knew that these stakes were used to tie cattle at the occasional livestock markets, we completely blotted out the use we could not identify with. These "poles," as we called them, were a fantastic playground. They served us to balance, we rocked around it and romped in between.

Here is a picture showing the meadow, the former cattle place, the walk was a bit devastated because of a construction site; Nowadays, here is just a simple playground.

These mighty poles remained us to play for a long time, as the cattle markets were no longer held. To my knowledge, there are neither photos of the market nor of this construction. I remember how they felt and smelt of iron and light rust.

Toughening up

On the side of the small meadow, which faces the Gössering river, a short haul road leads to the river and continues on the other side of the river, a so-called ford. At low water level, the river could be crossed easily with a tractor. This flatter, easily accessible place and the riparian zones were gladly integrated into our games.

It was a place for me to toughening up my body. The waters come from the mountains and are very cold even in summer. Every year I started waded in the water in spring. At the beginning, it was to endure only for a few seconds, but after consistent repetitions my stay in the river got longer and after some training, I could stand in the shore area in the water for minutes and walk on the rubble of the streambed. It was wonderfully invigorating. We had no idea from Kneipp cures. https://www.kneipp.com/us_en/natures-expert/water-cure/ We children only wanted to play in the water!

My plastic "Kroki" and real water dwellers

More often than with other children, I was walking alone or accompanied by relatives. I can vaguely remember that during such walks with parents or grandparents, game animals or teddy bears had to be with me when I was in preschool age. They were my companions and playmates most of the time.

The bathing of a small inflatable yellow-green crocodile, which I put into the water on a thin hemp string on early spring days, in simple meltwater puddles, which spread on the natural promenade, I was very excited. The earthy smell of the puddle, mixed with the smell of meltwater ...

At that time, everything was much busier than today. Even in such puddles one could discover those little fire-bellied toads, which have a yellow-black drawing on the ventral side. Although we were cautioned not to disturb the toads, we sometimes turned them around to see their tummies. They were small natural wonders for us.

Photo: This is not a fire-bellied toad, but a young common toad, but I have only this one at hand...

Later, I walked alone or cycled into the narrow creek of the river Gössering with the oversized and much too heavy bike that my mother lent me. I enjoyed my loneliness, my connection with all nature around me, to watch the wild animals, to listen to the humming bees and singing birds and to look at all these plants full of vitality.

Is it only my imagination that at that time there was much more crawling and a greater diversity of species? Or did I perceive everything more attentively and intensively and was so impressed?

In fall I collected some colorful leaves when they floated down from the trees. I especially liked the nicely shaped and jagged leaves of the maple trees from the alley along the cattle yard and pressed them between newspaper sheets.

Collecting Cockchafers

Today, nothing is left from the former cattle market. And probably no one rememembers that in times of cockchafer plague this place was set up as a delivery point for the collected beetles. There they found their end. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockchafer

We children suppressed any thought of the inevitable destruction of the beetles after our gathering, even though the scent of the scalded insects was widely discernible. We were happy about the little money we got for collecting.

Because of the devastating May bug plague, every household was obliged to collect a certain amount of these bugs. Old and young went to collect them. Who did not collect any, had to pay a kind of fine. School classes moved out in the early hours of the morning to remove the clammy crawlers from the trees and to shrub and peel them off in buckets. As macabre as it sounds, but especially in collecting the May beetles I have learned to appreciate the beautiful aspects of getting up early, the experience of the morning awakening of nature.

No, I had nothing against these creepy-crawlies. Individually, they are beautiful and interesting to watch. Cold termperature makes them clammy. They can be easily picked from the leaves, their food source. By the hand warmth they start to crawl, and that pokes and tickles very strange.

My parents also showed me the caterpillars of the cockchafers. They look like fat white worms. They explained to me the great damage caused by these pests in agriculture, as well as in gardens.

The caterpillars were "disposed of" by the residents of the Mühlbach stream in a simple way: They started, as we used to say, a "sea voyage" to the Danube and finally to the Black Sea...

Vineyard Snails

I can not remember what some day moved me to collect a whole shoebox full of snails along the two streams, and to carry them into our home. It may be that I owe the suggestion to a children's book by the Bavarian author Ludwig Thoma, which I borrowed from a local library. I can not remember the details. Maybe it was because I wanted to try a variant of the cockchafer prank by Max and Moritz, a funny story of the German author Wilhelm Busch.

However, the snails did not stay calm, of course. At some point, the lid of the shoebox lifted on the table in the middle of our kitchen, and the snails sought to free themselves. They did not get far and had to be taken back to the edge of the forest where I had collected them in the wet grass, after a after vigorous rejections by my family.

It is puzzling why people complain of grasshopper plagues that destroy their crops instead of enjoying the vast amount of nutritious animals that would otherwise have ensured their food supply. But perhaps the dreaded locusts are an inedible species.

Are people inflexible? Is there a lack of preservation options? Does it have to do with their beliefs and values? Can false pride be the cause? Were there wrong advisors (or none at all)? Oh, I tend to slip into the philosophical. Once again it has just happened!

In the next part I tell about the waterfall, power places and forces of nature ...

I am always happy about feedback!

Will be continued.

EN

Life at the Brook Part 1 https://steemit.com/story/@martinamartini/life-at-the-brook-narration-part-1
Life at the Brook Part 2 https://steemit.com/story/@martinamartini/life-at-the-brook-narration-part-2
Life at the Brook Part 3 https://steemit.com/story/@martinamartini/life-at-the-brook-narration-3

GE

Leben am Bach - eine Erzählung Teil 1 https://steemit.com/deutsch/@martinamartini/leben-am-bach-eine-erzaehlung-1
Leben am Bach - eine Erzählung Teil 2 https://steemit.com/deutsch/@martinamartini/leben-am-bach-eine-erzaehlung-2
Leben am Bach - eine Erzählung Teil 3 https://steemit.com/deutsch/@martinamartini/leben-am-bach-erinnerungen-3
Leben am Bach - eine Erzählung Teil 4 https://steemit.com/deutsch/@martinamartini/leben-am-bach-eine-erzaehlung-4