happy trails !
joining the ranks of great thinkers like thoreau and rousseau and other "__eaus" who ruminated outside
Grüß Gott meine lieblings,
I am writing from one of my ancestral seats, Neumorschen in Central Germany. It is the 800-person village where my Huguenot ancestors settled after fleeing France during the Protestant persecution (though fleeing the French is a reasonable thing to do regardless). Eventually, the Puhls married into the Matsko family — once astronomers to Hungary’s royal court — and became godless grain millers, the divine power in their lives plucked from the skies and overturned to the current of the Fulda River, the force that spun the ancestral water wheel and milled the ancestral grain.
I arrived at my grandparents’ house x barn x grain mill (now broken, RIP) after a three-day backpacking trip in Karwendel, a region of the Austrian Alps, with my dad, his partner, and my aunt. On my merry trail, I heard the phrase “Grüß Gott” for the first time. Though German, it is a greeting primarily used in Bavaria and Austria (Germany/Austria is not a monolith). It literally translates to “greet God,” but according to the esteemed Wikipedia article I just read, it is meant as an abbreviated “God bless you” or “God be with you.” As I huffed and puffed up the mountain, God was not with me. As I arrived at the summit, God was with me indeed. (God in the atheistic sense of naturally occurring awe).
On the way up, we passed through the gates and contraptions farmers use to ensure their herds don’t flee the mountain. It’s like CAPTCHA but to make sure you’re not a cow (a misogynist would have a yo mama joke about this, but I am pure of heart and only have the best interests for women, especially for yo mama <3). The destination was Falkenhütte, a cabin where backpackers stop for a night before continuing to the next cabin along the range.
As we arrived, I finally heard the coveted cows. They too were guests of the Falkenhütte (they booked early and reserved the entire mountain right outside).
As we all know, cowbells ring when they chew. That night, I learned that cows never stop eating. From our shared eight-person room, as my hiking party and I lay next to each other in the top bunks, we heard the cowbells clang and clang and clang. In the bunks below us, a group of 50 to 60-year-old Austrians on their annual group trip. The truly orchestral composition of cowbells ringing and four Austrian women’s powerful locomotive snoring was so riveting I couldn’t bear to lose one second of it to sleep. The quartet lasted between the wicked hours of 10 PM to 3 AM, where then the one Austrian man joined the players with his own horse-powered snoring, his arrhythmic bass servicing a divine harmony. It was a wonderful show. A seven-hour musical binge. Oh art, what you do to me!!
Hut rules dictate that everyone must bring a sleeping bag so they do not have to wash the blankets. During brief intermissions of my room’s recital, I contemplated the embryonic feeling of my sleeping bag. Fill a sleeping bag with goo and, brother, that is a womb. You just got yourself a niiicee womb. At one point, I was wrapped up in my sleeping bag so fetally it would have been legal to abort me in a Roe v. Wade America. Could be nice!
I rose from my night of entertainment around 6:30 AM. A second trimester full grown adult. Doctors say I’m healthy!
At breakfast, we packed “jauses,” the German word for a lunch that you make at breakfast, and took them on our second day of hiking. On our first day’s ascent, the cow CAPTCHAs were primarily wooden gates, metal bars on the floor, things you could only navigate with thumbs, etc. But at altitude, our thumbs offered little protection. The traps were electrically charged wires that were, in my opinion quite perversely, solar-powered. My dad said it was like the sick neoliberalism of celebrating that renewable energy powered the electric chair… yep… anyways, on our second day, I wanted to summit this mountain:
But my group settled on a smaller one that involved less scrambling and more delicate navigation around cow leavings. On the top of the mountain stood a lone wooden cross, its base strapped to the summit with four metal cables. I took a secular hike along someone else’s religious pilgrimage.
Curiously, our hike had been relatively bug-free, save for the peak that housed the cross. I was first to arrive at the summit and as I awaited my hiking party, about 50 flying ants and an array of small, sodium-pillaging bugs landed on me. Unfortunately, many died (I was sweatier than they expected). Here is a 0.5x I took during the battle. I am adding “war photographer” to my Instagram bio as we speak.
When I was rejoined by the others, we ate gipfelkuchen (summit cake). I really don’t know if this is a German tradition or if this guy just gave a can of cake to my dad when he bought his hiking shoes. Unfortunately, there is no way to verify! God bless
My aunt divided the cake into four while fighting her own battles with the bugs, nearly dropping the whole thing and turning it into bodenkuchen (floor cake. haha). But she saved it! It was yummy:)
As we descended the mountain and quickly lost site of the bugs, I considered why the pests only exist in such force at the site of the cross… a pious man would claim those bugs are the Devil’s temptations, sent to disturb our meditations on God and His Kingdom. I am, of course, a multi-hyphenate with many achievements, qualities, and traits, and unfortunately, none of them are piousness :( I suspect something in the wood is rotten (which is not a passive-aggressive statement about the state of Christianity and its recurrent place in Western nationalism, it’s just an observation about this specific place).
**Also, for the real ones, I wore the hiking shoes I referenced buying in my last Substack where I deified REI (or rei-fied as my genius friend Shelby Latterman said in text…). I took the picture below knowing I would mention them here…sort of like a callback or a Chekhov’s hiking shoe. Luckily, the only bad thing that happened with these in the third act was that I slipped on my butt a few times :)
We were back at the hut for sunset and I uncharacteristically journaled. I am prone to journaling exclusively at emotional stoops (if someone read my journal they would think I am the saddest woman alive). My happiness I save for going on my phone (I love it on there). But on the mountain, fully offline, I journaled many happy things. One nearby mountain was shaped like an open palm, cupping sunset light as if water. I thought about how nice it is that two such harsh things as light and rock can soften each other. (And I was really happy to see Rock leave its toxic polycule with Paper and Scissors for something healthy and monogamous with Light).
As I wrote, I listened to an approaching thunderstorm. I had never heard thunder at an altitude before. I saw lightning strike the mountain across a small valley and seconds later heard the thunder roll across it. I could easily imagine a giant living above the clouds, dragging a heavy table from one side of their apartment to the other.
A few sentences in my journal successfully made their way into this very Substack, completing their less Alpine journey of paper to digital. I struggle with keeping anything to my damn self, so even in my private writing, I prioritize how it may be read over which of my demons need to be exercised. Creating art for private vs. public consumption has been on my mind a great deal.
Adam Smith, though famed as an economist, dabbled in moral philosophy. In Theory of Moral Sentiments, he wrote about the “impartial spectator,” an imagined objective third person whose reactions and judgments we use to modulate our behavior. At the time of publication (1759), the adjustments of behavior oft concerned propriety: how will society receive me? In 2024, adjustments of behavior concern things with slightly more nuance. Questions like, “Am I being cringe or, worse, corny?” My impartial spectator is a lazy little nobody vacantly scrolling my social media feeds. And it will be the death of my craft (my craft being posting online).
Currently, I value the consumption of art more than I value its creation, so everything I create is only given value when it goes out for consumption. It is impossible to kill the impartial spectator under those parameters!! And, trust me, at least for my ~craft~ it needs to die!!
A few years ago, I visited Wat Arun (a pagoda in Thailand) with my mom. Walls were lined with Buddha statues and as we passed them, she explained the meaning of each of their hand positions (aka mudras). We passed a statue of the Buddha with the fingers of his right hand touching the ground and his left hand laying flat on his lap, turned up towards the universe. This is the Bhumisparsha mudra, more commonly known as the earth witness mudra. This was the Buddha’s pose as he overcame Mara (temptation), his right hand touching the ground to call upon the earth to bear witness to his enlightenment. When my mom explained it to me, she used the phrase “by proof of this earth.”
(And now…extrapolating the idea from its context…and perhaps misconstruing it a little bit in the process…) The concept stuck with me because it was such a radical denial of “public vs. private.” To treat the earth as a witness to one’s achievements is to remove the need for an audience while maintaining a public spectator. I need a grand reception for my work. Well, ok, here is the earth! My impartial spectator transforms from an online troll to the ground. And no one could ever find a more impartial spectator than dirt.
So yes, I journaled and watched the earth and considered if the earth was watching me. There are many sentences I left between the earth and I. After I closed my journal on them, I put everything away and went fetus mode once again.
The next day’s descent was simple and easy. More cows, more of their traps, one big harmless slip onto my butt. As we drove out of the valley, we followed a glacial river, discovered an entry point, and went for an impromptu swim.
I dried off during the six-hour drive to Neumorschen, where my big mountain adventure was exchanged for paddle boarding on the Fulda and eating wurst :)
As all my outdoor time wraps up and I come back to the city, I hope to find satisfaction and fulfillment in being able to create for myself, knowing the earth is present even if it looks a looot like big ugly building... I will try to do this… But, of course, when I die, feel free to uncover my great bounty of craft to release posthumously :) Unless you think it’s bad <3 In which case, make edits and pretend that’s what I did ;) happy trails and love to all xoxoxo
Sileau Puhl or Sila Puhleau?
beautiful in every way— i’ve fainted !