Celebrations and Holidays
Gerhard Kress
Many things stick out as special. Family excursions on bicycles, especially during school holidays. Living on a council estate in the city of Frankfurt’s periphery, we had a small forest three streets away and a larger forest with potential for family picnics and staying out all day. Making dens, climbing trees, falling into a lake and fighting off ants and midges to eat your sandwich in peace. The smell of old diesels passing us on the roads to the forest, followed by the meadow’s freshly mown grass and quite different smells on the paths that cut through dense forest undergrowth. Until we’d come to a lonely spot suitable to settle for the afternoon.
Lederhosen. An entire summer lived in short, rugged and rustic lederhosen. These days ridiculously expensive, but in my childhood, cheap and worn by children for their practicality and indestructibility, like an electrician wearing their overalls. Usually second or fifth-hand. Identified by your personal body odour, including a summer worth of sweat and besmirched by whatever nature could throw at you. At night, stood up as they kept the shape of your bottom and thighs. The smell! …but you quickly got used to it.
Another holiday, another age and another country. I had only just turned eighteen by dendrochronology, though more like thirteen if measured by the level of maturity. Unlike my family, having worked in my school holidays, I was loaded. Unlike my peers, I did not spend money on the latest sapphire for the latest in vinyl playing technology. A girl I had met in Luxembourg, taking a year out to hitchhike around Europe, invited me to visit her in New York for Christmas. We communicated badly as my English was, erm, poor. But my letters must’ve amused her sufficiently to extend the invitation. My parents had met her father when he was on one of his annual visits to the vast international Frankfurt book fair. They trusted him with their precious son. But nobody in my family had ever flown, let alone across the vastness of the Atlantic.
America was a culture shock, but I took everything in my stride with the naivety of a toddler. New York was great, but we spent Christmas, my first Christmas without my family, in forested New York State. Up until then I thought of this as the highlight of my holiday. It wasn’t, not quite. ‘I attend university in Portland, Oregon, on the East Coast of America, would you like to come with me?’, Jill asked. ‘We can take the train up and into Canada, cross all of Canada until we hit the East Coast and come South via Seattle.’ ‘Or,’ she said, ‘We could hitch-hike.’ I probably thought she’d be impressed if I opted to hitch. After all I’d done lots of hitching, some of it even more than twenty miles. When Jill’s father asked me if I’d looked at a map I felt a bit embarrassed. The thought had not occurred to me. I was relying on Jill. (Again, more like thirteen than my chronological age of eighteen). The next day we stood by the road with thumbs up, ignored by many drivers. Eventually one of them stopped. Jill talked and waved him on. He was only offering two hundred and fifty miles. It was at that point that a sense of reality, a sense that I had agreed to something of dimensions I had not properly understood, began to worry me. Actually, it was more like being hit by a sledgehammer. It was a warm, sunny, blue-sky, winter’s day. Why worry. But now I was worried.
I’ll spare you the details like standing in knee-deep snow in the middle of the night, jumping on each other’s feet to stop toes from developing frostbite. And I’ll gloss over the journey across the Rocky Mountains, the many trucks blown over by a violent storm we managed to miss by sheer dumb luck of our timing. Nearly three thousand miles in eight days and especially, eight nights, of sitting in other people’s cars, some of it scary, and hoping for the best. The student house in Portland was a large, old, wooden, warren of interesting rooms and corridors, filled with music and long haired hippies playing Beethoven on cellos. Within a week of crossing America my maturity had probably caught up with my age.