29 August Friday

This is towards the end of the tree-mauling process. Ultimately I wound up with 11 110 liter bags of leaves and twigs. I've decided that's more than a kiloliter. I don't know if there is such a term, but us serious tree-hackers need our own language.

Driving from Ticino to Düsseldorf takes a long time. I had my suspicions all along. I knew Jaimey’s email suggesting 600km would take me three hours if I averaged 200kmph was only baiting. In fact, for the record, I only hit 200kmph twice – and each time for less than 15 seconds. Going through Switzerland, I averaged about 48kmph due to the three traffic jams – at Gottardo, Luzern, and Basel. I saw the mess at Gottardo and Luciana told me it was blocked for 19 km so I panicked and went over the pass. (Luciano has an officious female alter ego who talks to me – and anyone else in the car. I am not hearing voices!) I had literally been going about 20m per minute. Later I heard on the radio that it was only blocked for 2km, but, by then it was too late. I went over the lunar landscape pass doubting myself. God, as usual, was smarter than I. As soon as I pulled back on the autobahn I saw the truck I had been waiting behind during the jam – it took him the exact same amount of time to get through the tunnel! Naturally, all my machinations had been for naught.

I realized something important, however. As I have noted before, the Swiss are tunnel obsessed. Even once you leave the mountains, they tunnel. There may be no apparent reason – the autobahn is traversing a field and suddenly it dips down under the surface for a few hundred meters and then resurfaces. The Swiss are just tunnel happy.

This led me to uncover a mystery with which I have been grappling for years. Why is the cheese everyone in Europe calls “Emmentaler,” called “Swiss cheese” in the US? I used to blame it on American ignorance and on a President without a passport. Emmental is too hard to say and no one in the US knows where it is anyway. Heck, most Americans don’t know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland anyway – just ask my mother. “Oh, you’re Swedish, does your family make kookoo clocks?” But now I theorize it has nothing to do with American arrogance, “Swiss cheese” is a topographical reference. The American military, frustrated, yet impressed with Swiss ingenuity, sussed out the Swiss propensity for tunneling and somehow that defense secret filtered into the mainstream vernacular.

Of my nine hours in the car, four of them took place in Switzerland. The German freeways are better. Well, except for the fact that you have to slam on your brakes all the time to go down from 180kmph to 100 kmph when one truck overtakes another suddenly in front of you. Actually I think it took a long time because, in general, the freeways in Europe are designed for the much less traffic here than in the US. This is fine 90% of the time, but during peak times, like weekends in summer, the traffic swells. Today, for example, about three quarters of the cars and trucks I saw were not local – just passing through. Once it got dark, people peeled off the road and almost all the cars were local and I could go about twice the speed. The German autobahn, it should also be noted, doesn’t go through cities like they do in most countries. This tends to reduce the chance of jams.

Around 22.00 I arrived at Heinrich Heine Universität. I was pretty proud of myself given that neither my map nor Luciana had any idea where I was. Unfortunately, my victory was short-lived as Jaimey was nowhere nearby. In fact, he was happily chatting with a colleague in some Thai restaurant downtown. He gave me some shoddy directions and I drove around Düsseldorf until I found him. I had a great big German meal as he watched and we walked around the Altstadt a bit. I had actually never been to the center of Düsseldorf before and it was quite nice. There were tons of people milling around the streets and river and in bars and restaurants. Quite festive!