Landscapes

Late last week the weather turned spring-like here, the days warm and bright, soft air drifting in through open windows. It reached about 18 or 19 C yesterday, too warm for the wool sweaters that are all I brought with me. The mountain that’s closest to us, seen through the windows of our hotel room, is green, its snow entirely melted. The towering alp to the northeast though, the other side of which we saw as we drove from Munich, still rises white against the blue sky.

The close mountain is about as tall, relative to our position, as Galteemore, the tallest of the peaks in the Galtee Mountains, as seen from our windows in South Tipperary. The summits of the Galtees, though, were stripped of their forests millennia ago, cleared for cultivation, and through erosion became, over time, boggy heath land. The mountain seen from the windows here in Salzburg are still forested at its summit, deep pine green and faded brown conifers in the early spring. Here and there, halfway down, are large grassy clearings with isolated buildings. The clearings are steep, steep as those in the wild Connemara mountains in the west of Ireland, where highland sheep graze on spindly black legs in nearly vertical pastures.

I see no sheep on this mountain, only the occasional flash as the sun glances off a passing car on a road not visible from here. I will miss the now-familiar green meadows when we move this weekend to our flat by the wood. The mountains are more distant there.

I’ve been struggling with how to describe Salzburg and the surrounding Bavarian countryside. What does it look like? Why or how is it different from Ireland? Or the Mediterranean landscape of Southern California, also split by mountains? I’ve compared Salzburg’s mountains to the Wasatch in Salt Lake City, but they’re similar only to a point.

The landscape and the architectural aesthetic is so different from these that it’s as though I have no words, or am only now beginning to find the words, to write about it. Away from its historic centre, Salzburg is not particularly remarkable. Its buildings are low – no office or tall apartment blocks here – a bit blockish and fairly modern. Parks and green space are plentiful, and many are dotted with schlosses – grand houses of the past. A long narrow park with a path through it is lined with these schlosses, set far apart. Along the river opposite the Altstadt, a 10 or 15 or more large, square-but-gracious-looking pastel-painted schlosses sit side by side.

The river, the Salzach, is wide and shallow, at least where I’ve peered into it. Its waters flow north in gentle ruffles and are pale, pastel green-blue, through which I can see stones on a sandy bottom as through pale blue glass. It’s very different from the deep bog-brown smooth-flowing River Suir that runs through Cahir, rising fish glinting in the late sun of a summer evening. Thickly leaved horse chestnuts and beeches clustered on its banks are reflected on its mirror-like impenetrable surface. The rocky banks of the Salzach, by contrast, slope steeply down to the river and are nearly bare.

As a Californian, used to muted earth-toned and pastel buildings, I was impressed by the use of colour in Irish towns. Colour is even more evident in the cityscape of Salzburg. Buildings are painted deep, saturated and bold colours. Just from my window on one small neighbour, I see apartment buildings painted salmon, saffron, lemon yellow and rich sky blue. The white house across the way has a purple door and mailbox; even its chain link fence is painted purple. The office building next to it, also white, has window frames of magenta. The schlosses, as I mentioned, are pink, yellow, blue and gold. In the Altstadt and the surrounding distracts, rococo facades are also painted pastels with filigreed ornaments in contrasting colours.

In the country side, buildings are timbered, often with hipped roofs decorated open-work gingerbread shapes. Churches in country villages rise in tall, narrow austere blocks, with vertical thrusts of steeple attached on otherwise unornamented front walls. Many of the steeples bulge with onion-shaped bulbs just before their pinnacles. So unlike the stone churches of Ireland, they still startle me when I see their masculine silhouettes dominant in the landscape.

In memory, Ireland seemed comfortable and emotionally accessible from the first time I saw it. Although new to me, the landscape seemed natural, familiar to my psyche. Here, the landscape seems exotic, and though I once had the vocabulary of art and architecture, now I stumble, searching for words now lost to me. Like German, the landscape is not disagreeable; it’s just pushing me to find words to express meaning.

Leaving Tipperary

If autumn is the season of mists, so too, in Ireland this year, is spring. We awake each morning lately to a hard frost, temperatures below freezing and the rough grass surrounding the house stiff and white. White mist hovers above fields and hangs like a scrim over the mountains. The neighbour’s barns beyond the trees at the bottom of our garden are muted, as if behind gauze. In the early light, a rose-pink band rests just at the edge of the horizon; pale blue rises above it. Gaps in the row of towering Leyland cypresses reveal a blanket of white covering the field next to the house. Across the road and over the low, recently cut, hedge, the stubble of last year’s harvest is pale under the frost. Even as the sky brightens, the mist lasts the morning. Yesterday, as I drove down from Dublin, a pale faint haze obscured signs on the already-confusing web of motorway interchanges and roundabouts, making the drive –- the first ever on my own –- more stressful.

I was driving from Dublin, and on my own, because my husband left early yesterday morning for a meeting in Dusseldorf and then continued on to Salzburg in the evening. Except for return visits, it was his final departure from Ireland for the foreseeable future. He has ‘moved’, a reality that still hasn’t fully sunk in. I will follow him next week.

We drove up the night before and stayed in Bewley’s next to the airport. Before going, we went together next door to say good-bye to his mother, me staying only briefly so they could have some time alone together. She’s nearly 90, so we realise that for her, more than for most, each good-bye could be final. As I left her house and came through the lowering dusk back to our own, longing and sadness and a sense of profound loss overcame me. The line of our roof, neat and dark over white walls, the late sweet song of a blackbird, the tracery of still-bare branches silhouetted against the pale sky, all called me as tears brimmed. It was not so hard to leave California, where I had lived most of my life, as it is to leave this house and countryside.

In the car, we passed the ivy-covered ruin known as Whitechurch, a church so old that it was derelict as far back as the 16th century. Its churchyard, though, has received the dead in recent memory, and I thought how I must make time to visit it again in the next few days. We turned right at the Big Tree, the ancient beech carved with my husband’s initials as well as those of his brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews, and his parents, aunts and uncles before them. Beyond it, leading away from us now, the road rose up the hill we’ve cycled so often, with Sally, my mother-in-law’s border collie, galloping beside us. Just above the summit of the hill, the sky glowed deep rose-red, the darker horizon pressing low against it.

We passed Tincurry house on our right and Millgrove, the plain but handsome house -- it puts me in mind of Austin -- built by prosperous Quakers in the 18th century, on our left. Ahead of us, the Galtees lay shadowed blue against the slightly brighter sky.

‘Look,’ said Himself. ‘There’s a star above the mountain, just about to set.’

The road turned again, and a stand of trees stood between us and the mountain. When we had passed them, I searched the horizon but could see no star.

‘Where?’

He scanned the deepening sky, but --

‘It must have set already.’

And so we entered the new motorway and turned northeast, toward Dublin and away from Tipperary.