Bird Song

Himself has been considering cycling to work, a fair distance from our flat on the northwest of Salzburg. So yesterday, a clear day after a stormy night, we decided to bike the route to check it out.

We cycled the now-familiar path along the River Salzach, reaching the Altstadt in about 20 minutes. As we rounded the final bends before reaching the city’s historic core, I looked up to see the Hohensalzburg rising on the Festung, from which it dominates the city. Clustered forest-like around its base were centuries-old domes and steeples. Beyond it stood the green-covered Alps, and I thought what a storybook picture it looked. Salzburg seemed to me in the moment a gem, a wonderful place to live.

We continued southward along the river, a route less familiar but still one I have travelled to reach my yoga class. We were cycling now past moderately sized buildings – municipal and private offices, university buildings and apartment houses – that line the quay south of the Mozartsteg.

The bike path was still crowded, filled with skaters, walkers and cyclists on this pleasant Sunday afternoon. In fact, I found myself manoeuvring carefully to overtake slower cyclists while avoiding oncoming ones. Along the path, people paused in walking their dogs to talk. A man leaned into a car, talking to the driver as he stopped in the street. Two middle-aged nuns stood talking to a man and a woman as they peered into the window of a bright red van. ‘Super!’ said one nun just as I passed her.

As I wondered what had excited her enthusiasm, I thought, ‘She’s just another woman, not much older than me. Why shouldn’t she be pleased by ordinary things on a beautiful spring day.’

About thirty-five minutes along we entered a wooded area, the river still to our left. By now I was getting tired, and neither of us was sure how much farther we needed to travel. We knew only that the campus of buildings was beyond where a tributary joins the Salzach. The trees in the wood we passed were green with the freshness of spring, the ground damp beneath then. As we rolled along I realised there was no litter, unlike in America or, even worse, in Ireland where rubbish is indiscriminately strewn along green lanes as well as  remote tracks. Is the corporation of Salzburg better at picking up rubbish, I wondered, or, more likely, is its population less apt to litter?

Another fifteen minutes along, we passed a beer garden or gasthaus on what seemed to be the shores of a small lake. People sat on the grass or at tables under the trees. Then the trail rose suddenly, and we were on top of a large dam crossing the river, water roiling dramatically in front of it and swelling more calmly beyond it. A few minutes along, we came at last to the convergence of waters, one river pouring into another.

By now, it was as though we had left the city behind us altogether The river here was wide and placid. Swans shone white on its surface. The water was pale, pale blue-green and nearly opaque, a smooth nearly unearthly colour after the clear bog brown of the rivers we knew in Ireland. Rising steeply just beyond, jagged, tree-covered Alps framed the scene.

We passed families playing on the sandy shore and fishermen stretched beside their poles. A pair of women walked behind shaggy Yorkies, one cream and one caramel. A woman in jeans rested her head on a man’s shoulder as they walked along, hands held tightly between them. Along the shore, a small clear stream revealed pale sand and brown pebbled in its shallow depths before it flowed into the opaque pale turquoise river.

We found at length what we had come for and turned to return to the city. Now late in the afternoon, grey clouds, warning of another storm, massed overhead. In the wood to our left, pale green of new beech leaves and broader leaves of white-flowered horse chestnuts filtered the light overhead. It was, briefly, so like Ireland, where the intensity of green seems at times to tint the very air. For the moment, the path was deserted; no cyclist or jogger or skater or dog walker passed us. Other than the murmur of the river and the whirl of my wheels, it was very still. Then I heard from the wood, very distinctly, what it took a moment to comprehend.

Coo-Coo. Coo-Coo. Coo-Coo.

Ahead, Himself wheeled around and raised his hand, pointing to the wood. Stopping and straddling my bike, I nodded. Yes, yes, I heard, I heard.

Coo-Coo. Coo-Coo. Coo-Coo.

Though I  had never before heard the cuckoo's call, there was no mistaking it, two clear notes repeated again and again. It was sweeter than I had imagined, soft but clear and sustained, like chimes, reverberating through the dense green wood.

Coo-Coo. Coo-Coo. Coo-Coo.

Then the notes stopped, and we were freed to continue, northward with the Salzach, toward home.

Walking

The flat by the wood had infected the imagination of each of us, though we were concerned by its distance from the city centre and what we felt was a down-at-the-heels aspect to the neighbourhood. It seemed somehow scruffy as well as remote. But Salzburg is not a large city, and the buses are said to be excellent. I certainly had no trouble getting from the hotel into the Altstadt. Every 5 minutes, one of two buses passes, each one going the quick 10 minutes into the city centre. I decided to see how long it would take from there to the flat.

Judging by a street map and the bus plan, it seemed two bus lines went near the flat, but which of the two was the one we had seen pulling away from a bus stop not far from it? I chose one of the two and boarded it at the stop by the river, just up from the Rathhaus in the Altstadt. It dropped me on an unfamiliar bypass far from winding medieval passages, cars whizzing by, near a sharp short path that crossed a narrow canal. It had taken 21 minutes, not too bad, I thought.

I waited as our sat nav, already programmed with the flat’s address and just switched on, located a satellite. Then I started walking, passing at first a series of small houses and apartment buildings along a narrow, poorly paved road. At last the street wound round a curve and opened out across a large empty field pocked with thousands of mole holes, ubiquitous around Salzburg. Across the field -– away in the distance -– I could see more low buildings. I walked and walked under a pale sun, comfortable enough on this spring-like day, but wondering how it would be in summer’s notorious rain or winter’s snow. By the time I came to the end of the narrow street where the flat lay and stood looking up at its dark windows, 18 minutes had passed. Too long to walk from a bus stop with a backpack full of groceries. Not doable in heels after a night out.

The street still seemed seedy. The house, shabby, its angular façade uninviting. The wood with its thin stand of conifers, unimpressive, monotonous. On the dark porch of the downstairs flat stood a toy JCB, the kind a toddler can peddle, and an infant’s push chair. They’d be noisy, wouldn’t they?

It was time to give up on the flat, despite the prickling sense that the woodcarver wanted someone who would care about –- care for –- his craftsmanship. Having seen it, I felt a responsibility toward him. Or, more particularly, his ghost. But the street, and the 40-minute journey from the town centre, was unwelcome.

I faced an 18-minute walk and a dash through traffic to the bus stop. But before I moved away, I turned toward the wood, thinking to explore what lay beyond the end of the house opposite the flat. There was a faint path, just a trace of previous footsteps, in the rough grass at the end of the low wall that surrounded a small garden. After a few metres, the ground dropped steeply to a path that circled a pond. Then I saw the swans.

There were a pair of them, necks rising elegantly over pure white bodies, gliding through the waters on the far side of pond, where the ice had melted. Nearer me, in the shadows, the ice had not yet dissolved, putting me in mind of winter’s afternoons spent skating. I followed the path, about the length of a quarter-mile track, the pond the size of football field of an American high school. Mallard ducks swam in the inlet of a tiny island near the shore; with them were the funny black-and-white fowl I think are called coots. Above my head, in the stillness of the morning, I could hear the high shrill call of a bird I didn’t recognise. Rounding the curve on the narrow end of the pond, I could see a pair of horses in a field just beyond the pond. A man walking his dog greeted another, pipe in his mouth; a third man strolled along drinking something from a bottle.

Sitting down on one of the benches that lined the path, I searched my map. I remembered the other bus stop, one much closer to the house, which we had seen as we drove away the day before. Maybe, by programming the sat nav with a street name taken from the map, I could find the other bus line, the one I didn’t take.

I started walking again and passed, not far along, what seemed like a small administration building. This was apparently part of a recreational area. There were other ponds, a lake for swimming, paths leading off toward another wood. And now, about two hundred metres along, I saw a bus pulling away. All within a couple of short blocks from the flat.

Maybe this can be done after all.