A literary reportage by Michael Gleich

Sauerland-Wanderdorfs / Sauerland-Seelenorte / A literary reportage by Michael Gleich

LOCATION

Back. Forward.

I left the Sauerland when I was 19. Some time ago, I was surprised by the opportunity to write about special places in the Sauerland. Places of the soul. I wanted to write about places that are meaningful to the locals and can be experienced by visitors. About their spiritual aura, regardless of denomination and faith. I couldn't believe my ears: places of the soul? A completely different form of hiking than I knew from my childhood? Open spirituality in the Catholic Sauerland? I was both skeptical and curious.
The next thought: What a great opportunity to experience my homeland in a completely new way! To walk through it with a different perspective. To explore it with old familiarity and fresh questions. What's more, the perspectives of the 'Sauerland exile' living in Berlin and the hiking tourists from the city are similar. Both believe they know this low mountain range landscape and the people in it. Both might be surprised at what they discover beyond the clichés. So it could fit. I set off on my journey. Back. To the front.

The narrator

Michael Gleich, born in 1960, grew up in
Oberhundem (Kirchhundem municipality), lives in Berlin and works
Berlin and works as a journalist, author and presenter.
presenter. He is an enthusiastic hiker and
practicing meditator.

Birth - The 1st stage

It is quiet. Now, at midday, the songbirds seem too sleepy for concerts. The fresh scent of water mint accompanies me, bunches of meadowsweet make the air taste of honey and vanilla. Coming from the south, I hike through the gorge-like Mühlental valley. Towards Alme, a village near Brilon, on the northern border of the Sauerland. There is no mill to be seen that gave the valley its name, no stream after which the village was named. In search of the source, I follow a dry stream bed that leads north in gentle curves. My idea of a spring looks like this: There's a small wall, a waterspout peeking out, its thin stream flowing into a basin, with the sign 'XY Spring' above it.

Behind one of the meanders, I experience something that completely overturns my ideas. First there is a shimmer that turns the gray stones silver. Then it glistens more intensely, a trickling and rippling everywhere, with nothing to be heard, as if someone had turned off the sound. Just two or three steps further on, the water becomes more turbulent. Air bubbles push up from below like strings of pearls and ripple the surface in small circles. Truly, this spring is bubbling.

Life - the 2nd stage

Behind this iron gate, force majeure determines life and survival. A place of danger, you can feel it as I step through the gate that Siegfried Stahlmecke has unlocked. The mountain doesn't want us. Even before we enter its realm, it blows an icy blast of resistance. While April cozies up outside with a mild 24 degrees, winds with what feels like zero degrees sweep towards us from the dark corridor. My ears, which peek out from under my red helmet, are freezing like in winter. The gravel crunches under my shoes. The tunnel is low, we walk bent over with our heads down. In silence, we penetrate deeper and deeper into the tunnel. For the first few meters, you can literally feel how hard the miners fought their way down into the depths 250 years ago. Using Hamm and mallets, as my fingers can read on the rugged surface, they worked their way down. Sometimes they only managed ten centimeters a day. The cones of light from the flashlights reveal how colorful the rock is to the left, right and above us. Rich rust-red, from the iron ore. Yellowish when the sulphur content is high. Beige when sand has been washed out and caked in over millions of years. Hardened salts whiten the walls. The water trickling down everywhere makes them shiny.

Farewell - the 3rd stage

This cemetery is full of life. Its surrounding wall with its crevices and niches has already become a biotope for moss and wall rue, hawkweed and cranesbill. 300-year-old lime trees stand in a circle as if in reverence. A fire salamander crawls in slow motion to its place in the sun, which is sending its first warming rays. It extends the wooden crosses, which stand in finely circled rows, by long shadows. Now, as the sun rises, it becomes apparent that all the graves face east. They are not in a cemetery outside the village, but right next to the church. The dead and the living are neighbors. A cheerful noise drifts over from the neighboring children's playground. Baker Rittmeier has the rolls ready, a smell that could wake the dead. Simple elegance on the graves: the parish priest of Wormbach once ended the beauty contest to see which farmer had the thickest gravestone. Since then, there have been simple wooden crosses and everyone, rich or poor, has to take their place. Everyone is equal before death.

Change - the 4th stage

Again in a cemetery. This time in the middle of the forest. On the morning of January 19, 2007, the tree corpses were piled up to ten meters high. They lay criss-crossed over each other. They had been cut down by someone they called 'the glorious one' in German. In Greek, his name is Kyrill. The winter storm swept through Europe with wind speeds of up to 225 kilometers per hour. It also devastated huge areas of forest in the Sauerland. Areas with spruce trees were the worst affected: Although they grow quickly, they only have shallow roots in the ground. Kyrill, the killer, had an easy time of it.

A few weeks after the hurricane, Stefan Knippertz took two rolls of red and yellow barrier tape, each 500 meters long, and cut his way through the thicket. "I was the smallest of the rangers, so I was singled out to crawl between the tree trunks and mark a path with the tape," he remembers and has to grin.

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