KW-06 The one where we anger the Weather Gods
I went for a walk last Wednesday. I’d been chopping wood all day, and the pigs were safely snuffled up snout to snout in their little house, dreaming the dreams of fat hairy pigs, and I fancied a beer. I don’t keep alcohol in the barracks, that is if we don’t count the six demijohns of experimental fruity grog which didn’t really get finished off last year, which we don’t. And whilst it’s technically possible to get beer delivered from the one pizza delivery company that does that, it’s a fairly ridiculous way for a “self sufficient” woodland hermit to be carrying on, so that mostly only happens when visitors from the big city come to stay. Mostly.
It was a beautiful moonlit night, cold as the proverbial, but icy beautiful. When it gets as cold as it does at night here, the snow doesn’t exactly turn to ice, but into really hard snow. The sort that you can walk on top of without sinking in - I swear it’s an undiscovered phase of water - superhard, uncompacted snow. I expect some skiiers know what I am talking about. In the middle of the winter lots of things around here feel as if you are at 3000 meters above sea level - the quality of the dark, cold and silence, the sharpness of the moonshaddows, the brightness of the stars. You don’t see those things in the forest, you see them at the top of an Alp.
Either way, it’s a good way to go for a walk. The 24-hour petrol station is about 8km away, so a round trip in the snow should be about three hours, mostly in the forest.
I have nothing to report pertaining to the journey there, though it did start to get proper windy towards the end. While I was inside, though, it started to snow.
Not a problem. I was suitably dressed for snow and wind, and started to head back.
By the time I was completely snowmannified, it started to hail. That’s ok. Hail doesn’t bother me, and snow and hail together is quite an unusual experience, and we’re all about the experiences. I saw a small band of deer, not enough to really call them a herd. Is there a collective noun for a small collection of deers? Let’s go with band. A few cars came whistling past me. Some of them even beeped their horns to let me know that I probably shouldn’t be out in this weather, making them pay attention to what was on the road.
There is a stretch between the two forest portions of the walk that is higher and more exposed than the rest of it. It’s a little bit of a hill, and at the top of it, you’re probably the highest point in the countryside. Coming up this hill, the gods decided to add rain into the mix. And 100kph gusts of wind. I found myself doing that arctic explorer thing of head down grimacing, bravely battling the assaults of nature. The delightful moonlit stroll was very quickly turning into a Reinhold Messner adventure.
I looked at myself, feeling quite ridiculous.
This is not K2, I have plenty of oxygen. I checked myself over - I wasn’t in pain, nothing wasn’t working properly, my spirits were good - so I put my chin up, stood up straight with my shoulders back and started to sing Bjork’s Human Behaviour
If you ever get close to a human
And human behaviour
Be ready, be ready to get confused
There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic
To human behaviour
I think someone up there heard me. I would not be defeated by any amount of weather that could be thrown at me.
Which also marked the exact moment when the sky directly above me was split down the middle, and lightning erupted directly, and I mean directly, overhead. I swear the boom happened before the flash.
Now I’m not really scared of much, but I definitely got a bit of a wiggle on from here. I’ve always said I wanted to die interestingly, but if this had been it, it would have just been a random scorching to death. I wouldn’t have had the chance to tell anyone that it wasn’t a random lighting strike - it was a deliberate smackdown from Thor and Zeus, from Ukko, the Finnish weather god, Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec hurricane god; Yu Shi, the Chinese rain god; and Indra, the Hindu god of the storm. All at once!
In other news. Sharing works! It really works. Nine people clicked and shared the newsletter last week (probably a record), and we got nine new readers. So thank you so much to all of the former, and welcome! to all of the latter. I am sure there will be more photos of pigs next week. That weather story turned out longer than I planned.
I sorted all the seeds, planned all the sowing, and it looks like I won’t be buying any seeds this year! Except a few pumpkins, because they did so badly last year. And thank you very much to the two folks from the UK who are sending me a couple of very specific seeds I can’t get in Germany (a particular sort of tomato and a my favourite pumpkin - nothing nefarious!)
I chopped a lot of wood. It’s still all about the wood - it was true in my first blog post, and it’s true now - https://www.thebarracks.de/post/it-s-all-about-the-wood-stupid
And finally, the pigs have not escaped in over a week. I’m still not exactly calm about them, but I’m not on the constant edge of panic either. So that’s nice.
This week coming, it looks like there might be a few days of sunshine. Next week last year, according to the newsletter, I got some grass mowing in! It would be nice to get a few days of ground prep in for next year. I’m putting a lot of thought into soil conditioning this year.
Until then, be adorable, and I shall sign off with much pirattey love.
Your
Pirate Ben
xoxo
PS: Please sign this petition. It’s about chopping down some of the last ancient woodland in Europe.
https://www.naszademokracja.pl/petitions/w-obronie-najstarszych-drzew-karpackich-olbrzymow