A Question of Settling

I suppose the logical question is what did we do for the Fourth of July yesterday.

Nothing.

I worked, trying to finish a rambling, disjointed post (see above) before moving on to my German lessons. Himself was at the office, playing mediator between his European team and the expectations of their American counterparts who, of course, were all out of the office. We roasted potatoes and a sea trout for dinner and afterwards took a walk in the fading light, walking first under the trees along the pale green-blue River Saalach as it tumbled northward toward its convergence with the River Salzach, then turning back along the Salzach to home.

There were no fireworks. There will be a splendid display during Salzburg’s Rupertikirtag festival in September. We’ll wait for those. Nor I did not pull out the U.S. Marine Corps Band CD. No Stars and Stripes Forever for me, not this year. It was day like many others, a day on which we were grateful for dry weather, a comfortable place to live and loving companionship.

All this seems to answer another question, one that was put to me all the time while we lived in Ireland: ‘Are you settled yet?’

An unsettling question, that. A question that’s nearly impossible for me to answer. I suppose I’m a kind of unsettled individual, at best. I’m a drifting sort of person, unsure and aimless at the best of times, a girl who is still waiting to grow up, fighting all the same growing old.

An American acquaintance in Ireland, someone I knew causally over the two and a half years we were there, told me as we were preparing to leave that it was just as well. ‘You’ve never settled here,’ she said.

When I told him, Himself was indignant on my behalf. After all, we had our house, which we had designed and furnished with care. We lived among a network of a large extended family. We attended weddings, christenings, First Communions and, particularly, funerals. We voted. We had gym memberships and were greeted on the streets and when we went into shops. Who was to say I had not settled?

Yet, in a way, she was right. Such intimacy as we developed with others remained within the family. In some ways, we were waiting for life to begin. And then, almost suddenly, we uprooted and moved to Salzburg.

Have I settled in Salzburg, then? Can I even define what that would be?

Skirting the question yet again, I think back to when we moved to our house, our first house, in Thousand Oaks. Himself envied me, he said, because I seemed to take to our new neighbourhood at once, in a way he never did. It was the archetypal California ranch-style neighbourhood of irregular blocks punctuated by cul-de-sacs, neat sidewalks bordered by grassy ‘parking strips’, a neighbourhood very much like the Sunnyvale, California, neighbourhood I grew up in. It was so like our childhood home that my sister said on seeing it for the first time, wonder in her voice, ‘You live in Beverly Cleary’s house.’

That suburban community with it tidy, mid-century stucco houses surrounded by rectangular lawns and patios was far from the dwellings in the small Irish towns where Himself spent much of his youth. It was further still the rolling farmland where he spent the rest of it, the same countryside where I, apparently, failed to settle during our time there.

And now we live in a flat at the edge of a central European city, in a neighbourhood that cannot be termed urban, rural or suburban, having elements of all three. When we arrived, we had few reference points, architectural, social, cultural or familial. My circle of acquaintances is small; it is through good luck or magnanimous fortune that we have wonderful neighbours who speak fluent English, else I would have been cut off nearly completely.

And, yet, oddly, I have settled, if by ‘settling’ one means a sense of feeling grounded in my surroundings. More and more, when I look out the window of the flat or of the bus, or take in the landscape as I cycle to the market, I feel at peace with the scene around me.

I struggle, naturally, with learning German. Even though I make my way around the city comfortably, being unable to speak fluently affects me at odd times. When the phone rings – which it does rarely – I answer wondering whether I will be able to understand the purpose of the call. If it is Himself on the other end, my tension immediately relaxes. I put off making appointments, wanting to avoid those awkward exchanges in stumbling German with the receptionists who answer the phone. (Once one woman, frustrated with my incomprehension, hung up on me. I took a deep breath and called back to begin again.) I worry about what could happen if I found myself in a real emergency.

Sunday I participated in a 5K Frauenlauf – a fun-run – as part of a team from The English Center, an English bookshop and language school. Standing in line before the start of the race, I asked the woman in front of me, in German, the time. Disconcertingly, she answered in German, and I was too ashamed to admit I didn’t understand what she said. I am used to hearing German over loudspeakers, but I long for the day when rather than sounding merely interesting, it will be also comprehensible.

But still, simply participating in the race, albeit as part of a team of English speakers, created another tie between me and the community. All along the route, Salzburgers stood and cheered as we passed.

‘Bravo, bravo’, an old man shouted as I turned the corner on which he stood. That I certainly understood.

I’m not suggesting that by doing the Frauenlauf I am now settled. It was a single morning; afterwards I came home and slept, nursing the hip I’d thrown out along the way. I rose the next morning – the morning of the Fourth of July – and went about my business. Alone, as usual, for most of the day, I limped, my hip still sore, and wondered how I will manage the medical system here to have it adjusted. In America, in Ireland, I would know how to find a chiropractor and how to make an appointment. It’s not so simple here. It’s an example, however small, of how I have not ‘settled’.

All the same, that the Fourth of July, a date that should have resonated and made me homesick, passed without much more than a ripple in my awareness suggests an important, if subtle, shift in my consciousness. Being settled, like being happy, is a fluid state. I can’t define or describe it; I’m not sure I even know it.

All I can do is refer to the lightness in my being when I see the sun brighten behind the green wood outside the window. Feel the rightness in the sight of the corner of a familiar door reflected in the wardrobe mirror. Or know comfort in hanging heavy clean towels on the line. Sometimes, this simple peace is enough. 

Rivers

It rained for most of May, so we were particularly pleased that the Monday of the Pfingsten – Pentecost – holiday was sunny and warm. After a lazy morning, we decided about midday we packed a lunch of cold cuts and took our bikes out for a ride along the river.

We followed the River Salzach along its northward course away from the city. The bright holiday afternoon had brought many Salzburgers out. Spandex-suited cyclists on light racing bikes competed with middle-aged women walking with determination. Young couples pushed strollers. Light flashed bright, shade, bright, as we entered the shadows of the trees and emerged again. To our right, the wide pale green river flowed, the irregular facets of its surface catching the light from different angles so it glinted light and dark. Occasionally it frothed white as it tumbled over rapids.

About two kilometres along, the path turned inland slightly as we crossed a wooden bridge over a small tributary. Now woods lined both sides of the path, but we could hear the Salzach beyond, still on our right. A kilometre or less more, and the path opened out into the sun once more as we approached a spear-shaped spit of land, known locally as the Spitz. Here, two rivers join: The Salzach to our right and, to our left, the Saalach. Converging at the Spitz they flow together northwest, forming the border between Austria and Germany.

On the sunny spit, children played in the sand. A couple of teenagers sat talking, water lapping their feet, looking toward the opposite shore of the Salzach. We walked to the tip of the sand, the strand rapidly narrowing as we reached the slender point, the very tip of the arrow. There we found two pairs of black shoes, empty toes pointing northward, toward the water, as though two friends had simply walked out of them and kept going, away across the water.

‘Looks like the Rapture’, said himself, as the light sparkled on the water.

Sitting on a miniscule grass-covered promontory above the strand, we watched the rivers’ flow. The mingling of the waters of the Salzach met the water of the Saalach was marked by slow swirls, the underwater tension evident in a sinuous ruffled edge, one side pale blue-green, the other a deeper yellow-green. Moving side by side, the two waters began to dissolve one into the other. Gradually the distinction blurred, the curlicue edges dissipated, and the two waters were one.

We ate our sandwiches and drank our wine at a shaded picnic table at the V-shaped edge of the wood, where the path turned back on itself, running southwest along side the Saalach, away from the confluence of the waters. Walkers, joggers and cyclists passed us on one side, turned at the sharp bend and continued in the opposite direction on the others side of us. After a while, we put the remainder of our wine in the back of the bike and joined them, following our noses and, taking the path away from the Salzach, cycled on, with the Saalach – and Germany – to our right.

It was good to feel the warmth of the afternoon as we pedalled along, muscles working, under the overhanging greens between shadow and light, light and shadow, passing other cyclists and walkers. A young girl sat astride a tiny brown and white pony, which a man and woman led by its bridle; an older couple walked beside a young woman pushing an infant in a stroller. We felt relaxed and free, at home in the countryside of a new place that is becoming familiar.

On the opposite side of the river we could see the footpath on German side. At one point, water tumbled over the bank and into the river. In the stillness, shaded by trees and viewed from across the expanse of water, the foaming waterfall looked like a painting from the Barbizon School. The path, temporarily deserted at this point, seemed otherworldly, remote and isolated. Soon, though, we began to pass houses, and we could see ahead the bridge where the thoroughfare that links Salzburg and German crosses the river. We rode up the Radweg – the bike path – to the pedestrian bridge and discovered to one side of it an hydroelectric plant. There, arrested by concrete, the river swelled and surged, its surface opaque and taut with pressure, before slipping over the spillway and, freed, speeding northward.

We continued west along the road, heading for Freilassing, the town just over the border. I was curious to know whether I can bicycle there to shop, if necessary. And we discovered it can be done with relative ease.

At last we turned back, cycling back to the Spitz, where we sat in the late afternoon sun, drinking the last of the wine and watching children play on the strand. Beyond the children, beyond the arrowed-tipped stand, the waters of the two rivers mingled and poured away northward, where they will meet first the waters of the Inn, then the Danube and, eventually, flow into the Black Sea.