Nehaveigur

There was the crumbling Belle Epoque mansion, and around the mansion was an overgrown park, and behind the park was the river. To get there, you had to leave the gravel paths that circled the mansion and venture into the tall grass. Once a year a neighboring farmer would bring his family, and with their scythes they cut the grass, piled it up to dry and eventually loaded it on their hay wagon pulled by an ancient tractor. If I was lucky, the farmer let me ride on the tractor next to him. He smelled like the goats he kept, had a wrinkled face from a life spent outdoors, and his best memories were from when he fought with the Wehrmacht in France.

During the hottest weeks of summer before the farmer and his family made hay, my father used his ride-on-top lawnmower to cut paths in the tall grass, with my favorite one leading past the horse shed that hadn’t seen horses since before I was born, through a row of pine trees, down to the bank of the river.

The river was deep and in summer it flowed slowly. On the opposite bank, which was just as overgrown as ours, there was a tree extending over the water, to which someone – it may have been one my siblings – had fastened a rope from which you could swing.

If you went upriver a little, there was a tree stump in the center of the river that we would swim to. Because it wasn’t visible from where we entered the river, and because it was surrounded by water, my brother called it America, and the name stuck. At the time, and for a long time afterwards, it didn’t occur to me that I’d eventually move to and live in the actual America.

Wherever I go, I seek out rivers, but I haven’t been back to that first river as an adult. They say you can’t step in the same river twice but I haven’t ever completely left the Erlauf in the first place.

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