From the interstices

I got up early in the morning and had a nice run up the valley to part of an Alpine walking trail network.

Today was to be a long, 300 kilometer  day trip around the area, but several of our group bowed out pleading fatigue from the rainy transfer trips the two days before and wanting to gather their strength for another one the next day. Two of us were enthusiastic to do some riding, however, but to compromise by cutting the day’s journey short. After some discussion, a third joined us. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, we were three out of the five Italian bikes on the tour: one 2004 Aprilia Caponord ETV 1000, one 2016 Ducati Monster 1200, and my 2015 Aprilia Caponord 1200 Rally.

We left a little after the others for some spirited riding. You might think that this meant some exertion of physical strength or quick reflexes, but in fact it was mainly a matter of concentration and focus. Motorcycling is above all a mental game. For example, when I traded in my Kawasaki Versys 650 for the Capo 1200, one of the biggest differences I noticed was how sluggish the new bike was to turn. At first it felt like I really had to work to get the bike leaned over to any extent at all around curves. I attributed this to the heavier weight of the bike and figured I’d just need to muscle it around more. Fortunately though, I soon discovered the difference was not one of strength at all, but of timing. Before long the bike was tilting in and out of curves practically by itself, all because I learned just how far in advance I needed to shift to get the bike to move.

Likewise when approaching a curve, everything is about choosing the speed and the line, which are matters of judgment, not reflexes. And of course the range of speeds even available to choose from depends upon what you’ve been doing before that, so you need to plan ahead. Riding in the Alps — or any mountain roads, for that matter — is all about focusing on the moment. Just allowing your thoughts to wander for a second — if it’s the wrong second — can mean an accident. I caught myself a couple of times in the first few days lapsing momentarily, and then having to scramble to recover. The last couple of days I’d gotten better.

I had the concentration thing down. Now I was working on relaxing. The most efficient movement comes from the smoothest action, and smoothness is difficult to achieve when tense. I could manage it at lower speeds and easier roads, but only occasionally when the going got tougher. We would see. There was still over a week left on the trip.

230 km

The next morning dawned dry but with the forecast of rain in the afternoon. We had a longer ride than the day before ahead of us too. Despite all that our company managed to muster up some optimism, and we oiled our chains and headed off in good spirits.

The first part of the journey went smoothly. We had to backtrack over the road where the blockage had been, but it was clear though covered with remnant dirt and gravel, and the pass road following it was dry and manageable. Then came a much trickier pass where the road was narrow and in poor condition to boot. There was a constant worry about oncoming traffic coming around blind corners. We eventually made it down from this and decided to avail ourselves of a longcut option that would really be a shortcut by cutting off some further and even higher passes. We took a two-lane highway followed by A roads (high-speed freeways here in Austria, rather than unlimited-speed autobahns) for about 50 kilometers, then did one final, more minor, pass and then a B road to the Bikerhotel Schönauer.

260 km

Today the plan (after my morning run, part of which shown above) was to head west and south into Italy and ride the Dolomites down to Arabba, a skiing-related town set amidst mountain pass roads 50 km due west of Bolzano. Things started smoothly enough — it was another beautiful day, and the roads alternated between wide sweepers and occasional straight sections and hairpinned ascents and descents on minor passes.

On the Austrian side the roads were a bit thinner than yesterday but still in excellent condition. Once again cars and other vehicles were quickly left in the rear view mirrors, and only buses presented any serious problems. But once we crossed over to the Italian side a nuisance that had been present but minor in Austria became a major one — cyclists.

Yes, there were three species inhabiting these Alpine roads: drivers of cars, trucks, and buses (collectively, “cagers”), motorcyclists, and finally, cyclists. The latter were total animals, physically powering their way up these grades of 10% or more that lasted for miles, all with just a pair of water bottles on their bikes and perhaps a couple of energy bars in their jersey pockets. I have no idea how they made it even a few kilometers on that amount of provisions — the calories burned and the amount of water sweated must have been prodigious. I don’t know what they must have thought of us motorcyclists blasting loudly by them with just a twist of our wrists, but to my unending surprise not a one gave us the finger or even so much as a dirty look. In turn we riders did our best to give them a comfortable berth, which was much easier for us than it was for cars. The only problem was we were busy trying to watch out for cars ourselves, especially ones coming the other way and sliding out into our lane — perhaps due to passing some cyclists. But we couldn’t simply hug the right side either since there could be cyclists just around the next bend.

Some areas were populated by a fourth species as well — hikers. Obviously for the most part we didn’t see these at all, but there were various transits between trails, and parking lots and trails, where they needed to walk along the road. They also amazingly did not shout or shake their fists at us, even when they were obviously standing waiting to cross the road as we were blowing past. In any case, it was good that everyone got along harmoniously, because when some cyclists were weaving through side pedestrian traffic, cars were stopped or waiting, and a bus was coming in the other direction things were close to getting out of hand.

Around 1 pm Päivi and I stopped to decide whether to take a shortcut to the hotel. Thus far the weather and been beautiful and the riding not too taxing.

So we decided to take the long way, which was still only an extra 70 or so kilometers on the map. Wrong move though. Hardly had we gotten going when clouds started looking ominous above the peaks to our left. They moved in steadily until finally they opened up. We stopped to wait the rain out in a restaurant, but after a coffee and a snack it became apparent that waiting wasn’t going to do much good. We just had to press on and push through.

Heavier and heavier the rain came down until at one point it started hailing like mad as well. We stopped again, then resumed during a respite. The rain soon returned, without the hail, thankfully, but now we continued. Supposedly only a few kilometers more. Finally we hit the town of Arabba, but our hotel was apparently out on the other side. Soon we came to some stopped cars and pulled into the left lane to go around them. Only to run smack into a black rushing torrent coming down from the hillside that had thrown a low wall of black mud, stones, and logs across the road. Game over.

We retreated back to the edge of the town and collected ourselves under a building overhang. There was basically no practical way around at this point, only long, soaking wet pass roads. Eventually an SUV from the Carabinieri came rushing through, then an ambulance, and, finally, a bulldozer. At that we started to have some hope that we might get through after all. Around an hour later, we did, and five minutes later we pulled in in wet and bedraggled state to the Hotel Alforte, where kind though excessively talkative staff greeted us with Italian warmth.

240 km

This morning we woke up somewhat refreshed, though still not feeling completely caught up on sleep, grabbed breakfast, and rushed off on our bikes at 9 to hit the Grossglockner. Grossglockner, or Großglockner as they prefer to write it here, is the highest mountain in Austria, as well as the name of a toll road that runs past its base. We started off with a couple of other guys from the group, but soon lost them as their pace exceeded Päivi’s comfort level on our first full Alpine ride. We slowed down as we rode past 1000 meters, to 2000 and finally 2500 meters up off on a side road from the main pass. We parked our bikes and looked out across a valley to a glacier.

Below us was a wash of loose stones and pooled water, evidence of what one of our companions said, that the glacier had come much lower in earlier years. Not much time for discussing the finer points of climate change, however. Back on the bikes and onward and upward. We ended up stopping once more at the highest point of the main pass around 2500 meters, and then down to Zell am Zee, celebrated base for Alpine skiing in the winter, but a snarl of traffic now in the summer. There we had lunch, then turned around and headed for home, arriving back around 3:30 to the hotel.

Motorcycles rode almost universally aggressively. There was not much of an attitude of cruising through the scenery here. Campers, small trucks, and cars alike were dispatched with little mercy; only buses were paid a wary respect, primarily because took up more than their lane (and were long) and were therefore difficult to pass. Furthermore they had a tendency to swing out into the oncoming path when taking hairpins, which meant they had to be watched out for.

I doubt it was the riders themselves to blame for all the aggression though — the roads were so full of delicious curves and teeth-sinking slopes as to drive even the most mild mannered of motorcyclists into a frenzy.

Twisting throttle, upshifting, downshifting, engine braking followed by opening it up, just blasting through the terrain. Finally, we had found what our bikes had been born to do.

150 km

We awoke after five hours of sleeping like the dead. We had to get up and on the road, but I would never forgive myself if I left here without seeing the Festspielhaus. Fortunately its location within walking distance and in the middle of a park made it ideally suited as a running destination. It was a lovely morning, and I saw only two other souls in the park, one a dog walker, and the other another “culture runner” like myself.

Back to the road. After yesterday’s poor experience with the big, main autobahns, and more jams promised since this was Germany’s big vacation road travel season, we decided to change things up and do some B-road riding. For the most part this worked — the scenery was much better and we didn’t even go that much slower much of the time. We also saw a lot more motorcycles than we had on the autobahn, so it seemed we weren’t the only ones who found the great superhighways wearying.

But sometimes we ran into long stretches of crawling through towns and lights, and once we hit a road closure that left us with a 45-minute detour. At last when we had drawn to within less than an hour of our destination where we’d meet up with our merry band of Finns, one last complication arose. The road came to an end and the GPS seemed to be directing us to put our bikes on a train! While we were waffling over whether this was really what we wanted to do, the train left and the next one was a full hour later. We ended up waiting it out, for the ways to go around this turned out to be quite limited indeed. So sure enough, we rolled our motorcycles onto flat rail cars where an attendant strapped them down.

A fifteen-minute ride later and we were off on the last part of the journey. Thankfully this, at least, went smoothly, and we were just in time for dinner and some beers with our group.

515 km

Up for breakfast at 7 and then on the road, the first of two days riding to the Alps in Austria. My GPS didn’t take a great liking to the route I wanted to give it this morning, persisting in doing something different no matter how many via points I put into it. Eventually it led us into the small harbor town and onto a short ferry.  (It was of the type that is always free no matter where you find them in Finland and Sweden, but here in Germany we were made to pay.) Then we got onto some small roads winding through farmland that were quite pleasant.

 The landscape was full of windmills, and, later on, fields of solar cells as well. Germany seemed to be moving into the future regardless of whether other countries were coming along or not.

I wonder whether the situation had been similar leading up to World Wars I and II. Had Germany also been so far ahead of everyone else back then that they eventually lost patience waiting for them to catch up? Certainly something had gotten Nietzsche and others alternately praising and damning German culture but always focusing on it as if there were few other developments worth noting in their contemporary world.

All of this was rather ironic considering how things stood 1500 years before that, when the Roman Empire represented everything civilized, while the Vandals, Goths, and other rough-living German tribes were like packs of wild wolves tearing away at its flanks. An East German colleague of mine in the research community had once laughingly remarked that “The wrong side sure won that war!” But in the story of human history, victory goes always to the strong. The Roman Empire was decaying from within, and there was some vitality in the Germanic culture that led them to defeat it despite vastly inferior technology and military discipline.

We finished up with the small roads in the morning and got onto the big A roads — the autobahns. My GPS had the speed limits stored for all roads, but once we hit the on ramp the display just disappeared. Indeed, cars were just flying by in the left lane. We stayed to the right, Päivi’s 500cc machine not being up for the exalted speeds that were possible here. But surprisingly we ran into problems when cars came in from the on ramps in front of us, because, however fast they liked to drive, the Germans did not particularly enjoy accelerating and would take their sweet time to come up to speed.

But in general things ran pretty smoothly and the drivers seemed pretty good, handling the large disparities in speed that tended to crop up with aplomb. Unfortunately, all of this smooth flowing meant that when things broke down, they broke down badly. Somewhere along the A9 southwest of Berlin there was a major accident in the morning, leaving at least one car in flames, which in turn lit a brushfire and caused the road to become blocked off. Traffic built up behind while the police inexplicably didn’t close off the entrances further up. Passage was only prevented for an hour or two, but the resulting jam-up lasted for the rest of the day. It was so bad when we hit it in the afternoon that traffic would literally halt for several minutes at a time, then advance one or two hundred meters, then halt again.  We did this for almost four hours. It was hard to believe that there was absolutely nothing blocking the highway, but that was indeed how it was when we finally crawled up to the trouble spot at the end of the afternoon.

 We hit a few more jams after that, totalling up to maybe an hour all told. The late summer sun slowly set on what had mercifully been a beautiful day, and the land rose up as we coursed into the northern foothills of the Bavarian Alps. Soon we found ourselves speeding through black night on the German autobahn!

Finally we rolled in to Bayreuth at 10:30, a total of 14-1/2 hours one road, of which 9-1/2 were actually traveling. We were bushed.

Our arrival was a study in contrasts. Bayreuth was a German town about halfway along our journey to the Alps, suitable for breaking our journey, but we’d chosen it because we’d been toying on and off with the idea for a while of attending the Wagner festival held here each year. A week of Wagner performances at the opera house that the great composer himself had had built during his lifetime. They were presented without any sort of subtitles as far as I knew, and there was a ten-year wait to get tickets. You had to be pretty hard-core, and I was still in the process of figuring out whether I was that hard-core. But anyway the hotel we were at was within walking distance of the hallowed Festspielhaus, and opera lovers from the world over would be coming to stay here within the month.

Indeed, it seemed like they were already here, judging by the number of tuxedoed individuals walking in and out of the lobby when we arrived. Meanwhile we climbed off our bikes and tramped up to the desk wearing our sweaty leathers. To the staff’s credit they didn’t bat an eye, but courteously went about efficiently checking us in. The man at the bar even fixed us up some sandwiches after the kitchen had closed, and brought them with two steins of Bayreuth’s finest local brews. Our coasters proudly proclaimed in enthusiastic letters, “Das ist bierkultur!”  I guess that doesn’t need any translation.

650 km

We got up in the morning around 8 feeling much restored after 10 hours in the horizontal position and made our way out into streaming sunshine on the cafe deck for a morning coffee. What a difference a night’s sleep makes! While being on a boat made it different — so that we didn’t get that full refreshing sense of freedom that you reach already that first morning out on a motorcycle trip — there was still a pleasant sense of a clean break having been made from our life back home.

The boat had an interesting meal arrangement in which an extended “brunch” was served from 9:30 to 1 in the afternoon, which you could re-enter as you pleased. We elected, like many, to dive in at 9:30 for a late breakfast, then return just before 1 for lunch. Two meals for the price of one, though it was not particularly cheap nevertheless. We wouldn’t arrive in Germany before 10:30pm Finnish time so we’d have to make it some time before another proper meal.

All in our group but us were planning to bravely sally forth and ride 200 kilometers straight off the boat, allowing themselves to make it all the way to Austria with a single, big 800km day after that. Päivi and I, especially with her 500cc bike, lacked the appetite for this. We’d check straight in to a local hotel on the first night, then do the ride to Austria in two 500-600 km days. We’d miss the first day of riding in the Alps, but hey, we’d be on our motorcycles anyway, so who cared? Besides that I’d noticed that a certain town by the name of Bayreuth happened to lie around halfway along our route. I booked us a hotel within walking distance of the famed Festspielhaus where the Wagner festival was and has been held since the great composer’s own time. I was still deciding myself whether I wanted to embark on the 10-year wait to get tickets to see the Ring in its original birthplace some summer, in German without subtitles and all, but in any case the chance to walk on those hallowed grounds where great art held the highest place was an unexpected bonus to this trip.

The brunch on the boat was a tremendously rich feast by any standard. Here is but a partial list of all that was on the tables:

• Salmon caught off Norway and served uncooked, fileted and salted
• Thin-sliced roasted game from Germany
• Yoghurts of various thicknesses made by collecting milk from cows, probably in Finland, then fermenting it
• Carrots grown in the earth, pulled up, cleaned, and grated
• Seeds harvested from oat grass, collected, dried, and then sliced to flakes, and finally boiled in water with salt
• Other seeds harvested from wheat grass, ground up and baked with microorganisms that give off gas to provide a fluffy consistency
• Sausages made from the meat of animals brought into existence and raised on our behalf, probably in Europe, and then killed to give up their flesh
• A brown beverage made by passing hot water at a certain rate through beans harvested on the other side of the globe, shipped, roasted, and ground
• Sugar produced from cane also on the other side of the planet and shipped across the oceans

I could go on to describe the origins of the materials of the chairs we sat on, or the fact that they were painted just such and such a color chosen to be pleasing to our eyes in combination with the colors of the sea outside, and what the highly developed chemistry of the paint was, and so on. But I have made my point. Mankind has reached lofty heights indeed. Moreover I have weeks of leisure ahead of me, all earned by me sitting inside a glass-walled, tiered building tapping little squares of plastic that move up and down in a grid while staring at a glowing screen displaying quasi-repeating patterns of light and dark. Even science fiction authors in the middle part of the 20th century could not have imagined this. And yet.

We could lose all of this before another hundred years has gone by. Even now we are engaged in a race against death although we are barely conscious of it. Death, not of individuals, but of civilization itself. Everything we have built is dependent on fossil fuels we extract from the earth. These ships by which we trade and project goods across the sea, the tractors that groom the fields so that a few people can grow vast quantities of food, the machinery by which we construct our buildings, pave our roads, and ourselves travel to the places where our mental capabilities can best be put to use — all depend on fossil fuels. The vast bulk of the electricity that lights our homes and breathes life into our entertainment and data systems and our very networks of communication, depend on fossil fuels. If a man had to deliver the same amount of work we extract from a single barrel of oil, it would take an entire year of hard physical labor.

And yet the supply of oil, gas, and coal is limited, and we will exhaust it within the next century and perhaps much sooner. Awareness is there, but not in all parts of the ship, and it is a very big ship indeed that we must steer, with the direction it should be steered in not even fully known. We must develop technologies for extracting and transforming energy from more challenging and diffuse sources like sun and wind than the concentrated chemical energy found in fossil fuels.

The book A Canticle for Leibowitz is the best description I’ve ever come across of what might happen if our civilization collapsed. It was written in the late 1950’s and so the nuclear apocalypse which was our greatest fear at the time served as the trigger, but what happened in the aftermath could equally well apply after a failure of the primary engine of our civilization. The story describes a land that is but sparsely populated. Most people are subsistence farmers growing barely more than enough to live off the land. Here and there there is enough extra to support an enclave of monks who do not farm but devote their lives to attempting to preserve what light remains from that past civilization. They spend their days copying books, by hand, bringing the precious contents of their pages before they decay, letter by letter, to new parchment. Parchment which itself eventually degrades and must be copied anew. They do not even understand the texts that they copy, abstruse treatises on engineering and science, except that they know they held the keys to the soaring structures and networks we once built. They are monks, because returning to that better time is seen as bringing man closer to God.

The book follows generations of the monks, over the course of hundreds of years, as things slowly improved. In the end civilization was rebuilt. Not necessarily from the contents of the books, but undeniably from the faith in man’s capabilities and destiny that they inspired. And just as we have in some ways grown wiser since the excesses of the Greco-Roman civilization that preceded our own, the reader got the sense that this new civilization built on the ashes of the old was more humble and less headstrong than its predecessor, and likely to avoid the same doom.

It may be that this will be our own path. We have made it further than the Greeks and Romans, but we won’t quite win the race against declining oil reserves, and that will make all the difference. The period we live in now will be looked back upon as the height and the glory of human achievement, a bright white light shining forward in time to a darker tableau. Let us not take it for granted, which means both to enjoy it and to work to preserve it against what can be foreseen.

The boat arrived in due course at 10:30pm Finnish, 9:30pm German time. We rode smoothly off the boat and had a short 3km introductory ride in Germany to our hotel. It was in the midst of a surprisingly rural area despite the proximity to the harbor.

“The air smells different here,” Päivi remarked as we got off the bikes. I had to agree with her.

3 km