Me and my Cornfields

What I’ve come to learn from nearly 50 days in east southern Germany I can relate in terms of the greatest natural resource here. It’s all about corn. I’ve realized that the depth of a cornfield and its growth are deceiving, I respect the orderly nature of its planting, and the fact that they stand up to numerous peltings of rain and mud. Taken as a whole, cornfields are beautiful, slightly ubiquitous, and you should not allow yourself get too caught up in one, lest you get a wee lost.

I want to remind myself, for the last time please, that every unknown situation will become known in time. All that is foreign will become familiar. It changes. It can’t help it. While the remote strangeness of the rolling hills and small villages no longer makes me wince, the daily confusion of work has passed into grudging acquiescence of a helpless situation, so now I am proficient in waiting and able to use small amounts of time for good use. Then of course there are still the times when I sit and have no idea what I am doing teaching in the middle of a forest.

The trees are some tall naked variety, platinum stalks shooting for the same thing from different angles, and all of the rest of us playing beneath their lowest foliage. Some guy told me yesterday we were Ewoks, and we are everywhere just like the wind and rain storming around and through them. More lightening and thunder in one summer than in an entire lifetime of Midwest Illinois farmland summers.

Perhaps it’s the corn. If only the movie people looked up a little more often out here. Unfortunately, the mud everywhere forces you to look down most of the time. The heat during the first two weeks of shooting was unbearable, but now ice packs have given way to hand warmers, sunscreen off and parkas on, and the shorts have been shipped or packed away for weeks. Food continues to be plentiful, and the drink truck is full, the food truck re-filling daily, and the kitchen trailer is our hearth with warm soupy smells. The camera truck has a crate of beer in it, the sound truck too. But the construction and lighting trucks are both dry. The costume and makeup trailers are always filled with cigarette smoke, and the trailers that house the kids and their distractions are filled with heaters roaring unnecessarily at full blast, making children and their smells a little steamier. So I have a classroom, it’s a tent with a table and a couch in it, and when I am here alone I turn off the gas heater, and when I leave and come back someone has put it on full blast again. The kids like to hang out and listen to Johnny Depp on my iTunes, just not be in the steamy trailer with the dozen other smelly kids. I leave one flap open for ventilation and quick escape into the woods behind, where I like to pee. I don’t go number 2 on the job, it seems to have turned off until the evening when I am back in my hotel room with a couch and balcony, over at the Wellness Center and Health Spa that I have called home for something like a month now.

In the evenings here I leave my nook and walk down the road 200 meters and to the triumphant Disneyland of Spas, where two restaurants and a massive buffet are open till 11pm, with a crappy nightclub, a large rurally decorated hall adjoining to a smaller hall, and a very civilized dining room for all the guests, those who are staying in the 1200 person spa and health center. Germans are healthy people, they go to places like this to sauna, relax, swim, get massages, do absolutely nothing, and then go eat tons of food and drink great beer and dance till they get sweaty in the evening, then go to sleep and do it all over again. Of course, in the middle of this sprawling healthopolis lay the spark plug of the wellness engine - a fairly large biergarten with padded benches and live accordion music every night, played to the background of a Korg keyboard and its pre-programmed Deutsche Volkslieder. Here you can find many people of the older persuasion in tight-fitting hot pants or sweaters tied around their necks, whooping it up to the sounds of slightly flat singers. And naturally, everyone is smoking. It’s pretty sweet to have this only 200 meters from the quiet and gentrified place I am calling home. A walk past (or through) yet another cornfield and you are there, which makes the rollicking rolling return walk all too easy. Oh, and all the food and beer is cheap, far cheaper than anyone of you can imagine coming out of a place which I just called a Disneyland. A biergarten in a wellness center. Me in a wellness center. Both very funny.

… and a Wedding.

If you are already married and therefore rightfully partial to the backdrop of your own ceremony, let me say that a close second will have to be the remote winey hills of eastern Slovenia. It’s shocking and worth so many words and photos and more words just because I had no idea that this existed where it exists. Bam upside your head gorgeous, and right feeling.

Every good wedding calls for scotch, even at 10am. So after breakfast the men of the village (well, about 5 of us) went to the groom’s room and sat with him, a finger of Bowmore in each glass. And there was much rejoicing. Suits were hung on the doortops with care, while the smell of lip balm and makeup filled the air. There was bustling and clicking, shaving and spraying, but not by anyone in our room. We had scotch, 15 year old scotch, and we had no intention of getting dressed too soon, just to seep sweat into nice suits on a hot, still Slovenian day. Besides, there was a groom to take care of.

I shaved my beard off eventually and raked the mole on my chin open, so I had another scotch while holding a reddening tissue to my lower jaw, smooth move baby. It stopped by the time everyone gathered downstairs in the bar hall around a monstrous table filled with meats and cheeses and twisted baked bread. Good thing. Tissue on the chin is a conversation killer.

Slovenian tradition calls for a wedding to occur on a Saturday, to have dinner and party, and for the guests to not leave the party until Sunday morning at sunrise. You do the math. Have you ever been to one of these?

I mean, there was the wedding, so lovely in the church. Then there was the procession along the road to our hotel, with a horse and buggy for the couple, led by a pair of slightly sloshed but good folk musicians, the accordian player especially swaying more than he needed. Once we arrived at the hotel a civil ceremony was performed outside, so both God and The Man had given their blessings. Oh and there was post-ceremonial wine passed around to all by the priest and then later by the justice of the peace. Then everyone walked upstairs to the hall for the great reception. To the background sounds of the increasingly sloshed accordian player in his dual role of verbose MC, we sat in lovely groups and began to eat, and this is where legends are made. We began with soup, then sliced elk meat, then a big salad, then a HUGE PLATTER of veal, chicken, elk, pork, and beef, enough for 8 people but intended for only the four people within reach, and we are talking massive platters, so four for a table of 16 people. Then we rested and out came the cake and deserts, and did I mention the cookies that were always there, and the water and the wine? Oh there were cookies, and oh there was wine. And after the dessert there came ANOTHER platter of schnitzel, baked and schnitzelled chicken and potatoes, and after that another soup, and finally, a wafer thin mint. We were like hobbits, with second dinner coming around 2am.

Basically, you eat in order to drink, and you drink to dance, you dance to eat, and all of it works in a circle until you realize the sun is rising and you are wide awake, and maybe even a little hungry again. At least one person failed to do the eating part of the circle and was a total mess. The rest of us were damn fine, and had a glass of wine at 6am to celebrate how cool we thought we were for pulling it off. We outlasted the entire Slovenian side of the family, but come to think of it, they had to drive home.

…Reunions…

I have carried precious cargo, but rarely the father of a bride in a rented car, and I didn’t break him nor try to, though I did stall the car a few times which he thought very funny, and asked if I knew what I was doing and offered to help. We needed a guide to get us to the city of Ptuj (pi-too-ey, yes, just like that) and John was born in a town just over those mountains over there, and perhaps we could also go there today he probed several times (but we didn’t, something about a wedding rehearsal at 5pm or whatever). He proved to be as much a tourist as the rest of us. So, I spent my first Slovenian day after my first Slovenian night (song cue) rummaging around a surprisingly perusable castle once the home of monks, then Romans, and finally an absurdly dressed line of German princes sent to look over their territory and collect cold cash from the poor, and to this I say PTUJ!

But by word of mouth all our party from the night before came to the same castle at different times, and soon the whole place was crawling with English-speaking people taking pictures, some of which were where one person will take a digital photo and then five other people will want the same photo taken on their own cameras, meaning five-times everything from the first photo. I understand why, but really, we all should get used to scheduling those photo-sharing parties for after the event.

That evening was the wedding rehearsal at the church 300 meters away from our hotel, with its magic aged tower endlessly peaking over a small chapel that can barely hold its artifacts and treasures let alone a wedding audience. All was normal until a few people quietly walked in on the rehearsal. It seems a well-known relic painting rests above the chapel altar, just behind the bride and groom now, and this painting attracts pilgrims in long caravans and large buses, part of a Relic Review if I may be so not-clever. The work is placed just perfectly so that, when the crowd of about 50 people finished trickling into the oh-so-very-small chapel, they seemed to turn to the bride and groom, gaze upon them with smiles, and sing lovely four-part harmony to them. They were far enough away, you couldn’t really see that their gaze and thier voices were focused just a millimeter above the heads of the priest and Margaret and Tim, and on the painting behind. So I stood at the door, checked for any stragglers, closed the church door again and quietly assumed that these were the all of Margaret’s Slovenian family members who couldn’t come to the wedding the next day, and just popped in to sing to them, and all of this made me and many of us smile. Tradition? Close family? No, after the song they all just left.

Back at our hotel, there was a very large room with a very small bar and several long tables. Stairs led to the level above it, a balcony ringing the lower room and sharing the tall wooden-beamed ceiling, the balcony running by the huge kitchen and ending at the entrance to a large hall that was already being decorated with flowers in white and soft green for the wedding reception the following day. Directly below this room, back on the first floor and opposite the tables and bar, lay a sunken room with brick ceilings resembling a wine cellar, except it was filled with solid old wood tables set upon old upright barrels or notched into booths lined with equally old wood. Along the walls were shelves, and on the shelves were various implements of farming that were as old as the land. Throughout our time in Slovenia we would be told the uses of every one of the tools or devices, which resembled tools of torture more than of the land, especially highlighted along the walls of this cold brick cave. But this night, our widening wedding party once again slowly gathered to fill the room and all the tables, with the last of the new arrivals dropping their bags and grabbing a seat, the bartenders busily shuttling into the cavern, the kitchen working late. Plates of pizza with a sunnyside egg on top, steaming buckwheat porridge in a heated crock, hearty brown goulash with mystery meat, wild boar with polenta, mushroom soup, long phallic sausages, and so much more came out and went down, to make room for more and more wine (again, from the hill across the patio) provided to us by the bride’s mom and dad, whose generosity to her daughter’s guests deserves more than just a mention in a blog. They flat-out took great care of us, thanked us way too much for making the long trip to Slovenia, and smiled at our satisfaction with everything in and around us. Tim’s mom, she was always smiling and stayed up way past her bedtime smiling every night to keep us “young people” company and out of trouble.

As the night continued, we realized that this was the first time so many of us had been in the same room in over a year, marked by an increase in the fluttering flashes of digital cameras, some with the ability to take movies, and all with red-eye reduction turned ON. The movies have been rated T, for teachers only. And with all the next morning to awake, eat breakfast, shower, shave (women too), lounge, drink whiskey, and try to relax the groom, with the wedding only a short walk down and up the vine-lined road, we all meandered to our various receptacles of sleep. Except for those few who had to call a taxi 20km away into our pitch-black heaven to drive them to the other two hotels just a few kilometers away. For those of us walking to our rooms, it was oddly OK to pass the taxi driver at the bar waiting patiently for his passengers, drinking his second beer.

Roadtrips…

My week and a half in Slovenia and then Munich was freedom, a great pause in the Great Film Project and a sweet and sturdy wedge filled with friends, plus a nice continuation of the life I had left exactly a year ago. It’s best said with picture accompaniment.

The autobahn was not as lovingly fast as usual, Germany rolling slowly by in raining grey from top to bottom, until we crossed over into Austria where the road signs turned a lighter blue and we entered the mountains. We met long tunnels south of Salzburg and all the way through the country, a highway contained in tunnels burrowed into the feet of tall hills, one after the other each no shorter than half a kilometer. The end of one left a half minute of daylight before the next hill towered above you, with fog falling from the top down its sides and through tall thick trees and lush untouched greenery, evaporating as the tunnel’s mouth opened and the VW glided safely through the mountain’s side and beneath its belly for another few minutes. This went on for a few hours and until we came across the signs for Graz, a city I thought may be in Slovenia, but it would be another few hours before we pulled up to a muddy wet river and into a gully that was the Slovenian border. No strip search, but definitely a passport check and our one word, “Jeruzalem” before we dipped into first gear, second and third gear, up over a bridge and into the former Communist territory previously called Yugoslavia.

The signs showed towns whose names we couldn’t help but butcher and we laughed at our naïve ignorance in the confines of our German auto, four Americans on their first drive into the heart of Eastern Slovenia, listening to Cher and U2 (aka, the BonoRail) on the radio. We won’t talk about starting in the wrong direction, because we never were lost. We will talk about finding ourselves creeping up a road pointed straight for our destination, then turning off the road at the sign we gloriously and triumphantly discovered pointed us to our own promised land (Jeruzalem), and then driving up a slow road arched by tall trees straight out of Marin county California. We crested the hill, emerged from the trees and saw a great sprawling valley before us stretched to the horizon miles around, a valley literally filled with vineyards terracing in all directions from the bushy green trees at the valley base and up uneven rolling hills to the top, meeting our road and the few old houses built next to it. This one road dove and rose up every hill we could see, one ancient path now paved with a few tributaries connecting everyone, the view on both sides showed only more vineyards, more hills, houses. Infinite flowers, natural and not pristine, everywhere, green lushness in every direction.
Where on earth did this come from? In moments we rose up a hill and drove past the church where Tim and Margaret would be married, and past the place we would eat that night. We came to one of the hotels and finally up and over around and down we arrived - via a hairpin turn that almost sent us tumbling (happily?) into another vineyard - at our hotel, settled also at the crest of a hill. All of this would be our environment and our home for five days, with all our old friends from Munich coming by this same road to this same rolling valley. And as we pulled up, Margaret’s mom came out with a big smile to welcome us to her country, and there wasn’t a sound outside the car except familiar voices laughing and the scrap of gravel beneath feet.

Dinner was a long table with many plates filled with bacon, pork, sausage, lard, bacon fat, veggies with spicy peppers, local mild onions and pickled artichokes, and bread, all home-made, home-grown, or home-cured. The wine in unlabeled bottles came from the kitchen in waves, homemade from the vines outside the window (“This wine comes from over there”) accompanied by natural sparkling water that came with its own carbonation from the ground an hour away, at a spring that Margaret’s dad wanted to take us to, badly. As long as you kept eating, you could keep drinking and mixing your sweet Muscat with the sparkling spring water. Eating is essential in Slovenia, because drinking is essential in Slovenia. Therefore, the food tends to be the kind that sticks to you, so you can unstick it again, with something nice like good wine. Highly scientific, highly civilized.

The house itself was a maze of oldness, with old wood lining every angle and crevice, an old bar in a nook and the opposite staircase that turned round behind the old stove which they still use to bake their bread. The other side of the stove was ceramic and heated the room behind it where we were told stories of how children would sit on it as the bread was kept warm below. The staircase rose higher into levels of small eating areas, all contained under an old wood roof with hatch windows that showed us the starry night and the quiet valley of wine dark and silent. A room off the highest level was a bedroom renovated but with a corner that still preserved its centuries old natural ground, with a natural dirt mound for a bed, and a sparrow that had gotten in through the window and was content to rest on the dirt. I refused to look for the bathroom and chose the edge of the vineyard, standing with a very principal character at my former job, acquiring a mound of teenie bugs on my back that I returned to the group with.  They appreciated the relieving story but killed the bugs.

Back down in the dining room, the cook / owner kept bringing more wine and the people kept getting louder and the music changed from the traditional to the inane to the radio to German drinking songs to nothing. Conversation. The table went from pristine and orderly to a slew of empty bottles and mounds of meat and bread. And digital cameras. Around it sat friends from Denmark and England, New Zealand and Ireland, the US and Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Slovenia, all connected not only by this marriage but from past encounters and old friendships. It was a night that made even the most subtle connections stronger just by our seats around this common table, in this small old room in this house which had stood for centuries on a hill above terraces of vineyards with a moon hidden behind clouds above. I couldn’t help but keep saying, “How cool is this?” and “Life is so f***ing good…”, or “I’m going to go pee again… no outside… I’m serious, c’mon..”

About one hundred hours later we realized that some very important people were not really wanting to drink or eat anymore, nor could they, so they were whisked away the 2 kilometers up and down hills in the dark to the three hotels, headlights working overtime in the pitch darkness to catch the details of slowly passing crops and hedges where animals might lurk, illuminating the road just a little late around the hairpin turns, all the way home. Safe.