The New Bike

Salzburg is a bike-friendly city, with wide paved paths on both sides of the river that runs through its middle. These paths make it easy and practical to cycle to the city’s centre and well beyond. My husband’s office is also on the river’s edge, so the path runs right next to it. However, it’s about 15 or 20 kilometres south of our flat, so he’s been commuting by car over the autobahn for the past 19 months.

That’s changed now, because, after thinking about it for the past year, we finally bought an e-bike. This is an ordinary pedal bike with a rechargeable battery attached. Though the rider must continually pedal the bike, the battery gives it a boost, upping the speed and reducing fatigue. It’s particularly great on inclines, powering you up hills with little effort. Set at the highest of its three power levels, it gives you a zippy cycle.

So Himself now rises about an hour earlier each morning and bicycles to work. It takes him about 45 minutes, perhaps twice as long as it would by car, but it’s good exercise. The weather’s been extraordinary for the past two weeks—warm and sunny, clear and mellow in Autumn’s unique fashion—giving him another reason to enjoy the trip.

I stood at the window as he left this morning, watching. The low-lying sun shone brightly, but the houses cast long early-morning shadows over the street. Across the way, mists rose from the fishing pond. I held my cup of coffee, waiting for the bang of the garage door. Then he emerged from the shadow of the house and wheeled onto the street, his laptop secure in the backpack clasped over his black windbreaker. Off he went, sunlight briefly flashing on the black of his helmet before winking off as he rode again into shadow and then out of my sight.

He looked, I thought, completely European, off to join the many sensible and confident cyclists on their way to the office. Gute Fahrt!

A Year On

It’s snowing in Salzburg this morning, a rapid fall of small bead-like flakes. It’s gone quite cold again, minus four or five by the downstairs thermometer. For the first time in a month, I shovelled snow yesterday morning. I was out again today.

Now I watch as tits and nuthatches swing from the bundles of peanuts suspended over the veranda. Waiting for their turn at the food, they flutter high into the underside of the roof and perch on the edge of window sills. Blackbirds pick at the seeds on the balustrade ledge. I think I even spotted a robin a few minutes ago. These birds have become as familiar as those I watched from my window in Ireland.

I note this particularly because yesterday marked a year since I first saw Salzburg. It is a year since my husband began his job here. It’s been a remarkable time in which I’ve had to learn a different aesthetic and cultural vocabulary. How strange the architecture and landscape seemed when we first arrived. I could see beauty in it, but it was an foreign, even austere, beauty after the mist-softened grey stone and green of Ireland.

I’ve learned in this time a chastening kind of humility that arises from the inability to communicate about the simplest human transactions. In fact, I’ve learned more humility than I have German.

I gained far more respect and admiration for those immigrants who leave all behind to make new lives in foreign lands with far fewer resources than I have. Hard as it is for me, at least we arrived with a secure job, were given assistance through the bureaucracy and were eased by the reality that English is the lingua franca in Europe and much of the world. I can’t imagine how isolated and frustrated I would be were it not for that.

I’ve learned to navigate the buses with some ease. In that too, I’ve been lucky, because Salzburg has a very reliable, efficient and accessible bus system. Each stop is announced in advance and shown on a display. I just have to know the name of my stop, and I’m fine. In Rome, for instance, stops are neither displayed nor announced, resulting in anxiety and missed stops. Nor were the buses as regular or predictable as they are here. I can get where I need to go within just a few minutes of my appointment times.

I’ve discovered also that it’s easy enough to get around on the bicycle. I had been used to a bike being a piece of recreational equipment for which I dressed in sportswear. I’ve gotten used to seeing woman biking in skirts and heels, men biking in suits. In winter’s cold, now I can bike very well, thank you very much, wearing my long down coat, hat and gloves.

I’ve had to navigate supermarkets with the unfamiliar mingled with the familiar. How do you find evaporated milk for meatloaf if you can’t name it in German to the kid stocking the shelves? The closest equivalent, I’ve found, is bottled ‘Kaffee Milch’. And bread crumbs? Describing it as ‘cut up bread’ got me to the bread cubes, which, as it happened, were next to the bread crumbs.

There is a wider selection of products available here than in Ireland, but this abundance itself is bewildering. How do I choose from among the displays of twenty or more wurst, for instance, each with its name and description in German? I just plunge in and choose, pointing and gesturing when I have to.

There are so many ordinary things like this we’ve had to learn to negotiate: Road signs, doctors’ offices and health insurance, going to the hairdresser, paying bills online through interfaces that shift, apparently randomly, between German and English. I can’t just write a cheque, because all transactions here are handled electronically: There are no cheques. That was another thing I had to discover.

Some of these difficulties I’ve learned to manage with grace; with others, I was forced to practice keeping my frustration in check. Which is a learning experience in itself.

And, of course, I’ve learned to shovel snow.

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.

The Fall

Even though it had rained on and off since morning, last Wednesday after lunch I set out  to run some errands: A trip to the bank, to the grocery market and to the local Tabak, one of the ubiquitous stalls that sell, along with sweets, newspapers, postcards, and tobacco, bus passes. But rolling along the narrow paved road that cuts through a field for a couple of kilometres before passing under a main thoroughfare, my wheels splashed through puddles, sending ripples of muddy water onto my clean trousers. Rain spotted my glasses and begun to soak into my trousers. The sheer unpleasantness of it made me want to turn back. But, no, this is what I signed up for. We were not going to get another car; I would have to get used to it.

I carried on as my imagination unreeled stories. It summoned the image of me flying off the bike onto the pavement, followed by the bleak scenario of someone calling Himself at the office as I lay motionless. Who would this stranger know to call?

I rounded a narrow bend and headed for the sharp steep footpath up the embankment to the thoroughfare. Preparing to make the ascent, I turned my wheel to mount a shallow kerb. My front tyre caught just at the edge of the kerb, slippery with the rain, and I was pitched off, landing prone on my left side, my face in the muddy grass, bike tossed to the right.

Stunned, frightened, a little angry, I gently pushed myself up. Everything seemed to work, and I stood. I shook with shock and cold and, yes, indignity. Mud coated my new black trousers and my favourite jacket. It beaded up and dripped from my thighs and knees. My jacket front was slick with it. I felt grit on my face, and my hands were brown. My hat . . . where was my hat, my lovely hat, where? . . . there, crown down in the mud.

I looked at the quiet dark apartment buildings across the road. No movement, no one raising a window to ask if I was okay. I was both relieved that apparently no one had seen my indignity and wounded that no one showed concern.

Lifting my bike out of the mud, I considered turning back. I couldn’t be seen like this, least of all in the calm neat interior of the bank. I hurt; my knee stung, my hip ached, my shoulder, the bad one, felt again twisted and wrenched. I wanted to slink home to safety, to comfort, dry clothes and a hot drink.

But I also wanted to go to yoga class that night, my first in Salzburg, and I needed money for the class fee. Our cash cards hadn’t arrived yet, so the only way to get it was from the teller. People must fall off their bikes all the time and carry on with their business. I would go on.

Shaking, I mounted the bike and peddled the few metres to the steep path up the embankment. I dismounted and pushed it up the hill to the busy thoroughfare and then peddled in the direction of the bank. This meant crossing a busy two-lane roundabout bringing traffic on and off a motorway that passes below. Soon the footpath had disappeared, and I was squeezing myself and the bike into the narrowest space possible between a weedy verge and the path of traffic. I dismounted again. Cars and trucks streamed along too fast for me see them coming around the curves.

The world seemed grey, hazy, out of focus. I hesitated, transfixed, at road’s edge, pushing the bike cautiously over the kerb, then pulling back as another car raced toward me. Finally the driver of a long-haul lorry paused, flashing his lights, and I hurried with the bike across the lanes and crossed the centre of the roundabout. On the far side, traffic was less thick, and I crossed again, then the last motor way exit, and I was at last on the footpath, safe on the other side, feeling relieved and very naïve.

I steadied my hat on my head and started pedalling down the footpath, which sloped away from the elevated roundabout. Seeing the bank ahead, I pedalled fast, wanting my stress to be over.

A gust of wind. My hat blew off. I pulled the brakes tight, dismounted and let the bike drop. My favourite hat, the motorway exit, the speeding cars. Don’t let it be blown onto the road. Don’t let it fly out of my reach.

I got the hat and, clutching it in my right hand as I held the handlebars, peddled along the footpath. Flying by a sign, I recognised among the string of words a single one, Fahrrader, and an arrow pointing to the street. So, I surmised, you’re not supposed to ride the bike on the sidewalk? People do it all the time.

I was still shaking. How do people manage, in this bicycle-friendly city, where everyone, including staid-looking women much older than myself and men bent and white haired, seems to pedal themselves routinely? There are bike racks everywhere. There are bike paths and signs pointing to mixed bicycle and pedestrian use. So how does one negotiate this stretch?

Entering the cool grey space of the bank, I brushed the hair from my face. It was bare.

‘My glasses. I’ve lost my glasses.’ In a panic, I spoke out loud.

Immediately in front of me was the bank manager, half turned saying goodbye to one of tellers, briefcase in hand, on his way out. He stared, mouth open. Mud-splattered, dazed, shaking and now babbling non sequiturs, I must have shocked him.

‘I fell off my bike.’

He recovered his equanimity before I did. Welcoming me, he asked if I were all right before introducing me to the teller and saying goodbye. The teller, a young man with very good English, got me some tissues and I swiped at the mud on my cheeks, forehead and hands. Black grit sifted over the counter in front of me as he handled my transaction and retrieved our new bank cards from the back. He asked me to sign the back of my card and some papers, which I did, unable to focus, the last letters of my name sprawling beyond the blanks.

His calm helped me recover my own. I began to relax, my breath slowed, and I felt once again the solidity of my body, its uprightness and strength. Self-consciously, I made small jokes, as if to demonstrate that, no, I’m not a crazy woman, and yes, I’m recovering my senses. He asked where I’d fallen, and I tried to picture the muddy patch of grass, near a tiny canal, thinking my glasses would most likely be there. They are my only pair other than reading glasses, and the thought of quickly replacing them was daunting.

Business finished, I was calmer now. I had at least made sense of my disorientation, that vague vertigo that comes of not seeing clearly. I mounted the bike and pedalled off. Ahead of me I spotted what I had missed before. There is a path that takes cyclists and pedestrians safely past the roundabout, as I should have known there would be. I followed it through a maze of tunnels under the interchanges above, eventually finding my way to where I had fallen. I retrieved my glasses, muddy but unbroken, and, before going home, went on to complete my other errands.

It was after nine that evening when I got off the bus after yoga and walked the six-and-a-half minutes back to the flat. My husband had dinner waiting, and he sat with me while I told him about the day. It had taken only 30 minutes to get to class, but the return trip meant waiting 15 minutes at each of two stops, stretching the trip home to an hour. The class was demanding physically. It had been a long time since I had practiced the sequence that moves from downward dog to plank and chaturanga to upward dog and back to downward dog. It takes great stamina to hold one’s upper weight on outstretched arms through the entire sequence, and the instructor had had us do it over and over without pause. My hands, arms and chest muscles burned with the effort, and my left shoulder and hip ached from the fall. I was exhausted.

As I ate, I described how the instructor had introduced me, explaining that I don’t speak German. She would, she told the rest of the class, try to give me brief instructions in English as she directed them in German. Naturally, I hadn’t understood what she was saying, but she had told me before class this was her intention. But the other class members suggested that she simply go forward in English alone. It would give them a chance to refresh their skills. So she did. Impromptu and for my benefit, she gave the entire class in English. She stopped a few minutes along to see if anyone had a problem with this, and not one in the group of about 40 objected.

‘So,’ asked Himself. ‘How did it feel to be the least educated person in the room?’

Stupid. It made me feel very stupid.