Finding community and climate change on an overseas adventure ... - LNP | LancasterOnline

Finding community and climate change on an overseas adventure [column] | Outdoors | lancasteronline.com

ASSINGHAUSEN, Germany — Nestled in postcard fashion between cow-grazing meadows and forested hills lies a small medieval village in the Sauerland region of Germany where its 760 or so inhabitants care for each other and the land around them.

Everyone, it seems, knows one another, perhaps because they are outside daily. They walk the streets and their dogs, and water the flower boxes and landscaping on their lovingly cared-for homes.

Many hike or ride e-bikes on communal paths through the fields and forests that private property owners are obliged to provide. At least a third of the homes, even the old half-timbered ones with ornate slate roofs, have solar panels. Power lines are buried and utility poles don’t mar the town’s streets. You won’t find litter.

Wind turbines are visible on the mountain ridges outside of town. (Despite being one of the least sunshiny countries in the world, Germany ranks fourth in solar capacity).

But even in this place of progressive living in harmony with the land, climate change has arrived with disruptive force.

This is one of the most heavily forested regions of Germany. Or was. Everywhere, whole mountainsides are being clear-cut of spruce trees, some more than 100 years old. Generations of residents who grew up surrounded by greenery suddenly find their landscape an Armageddon.

Even in the glassed panorama restaurant in the nearby ski resort town of Winterberg, we sipped our hot chocolate and savored apple strudel while looking out on brown swaths of stumped mountainsides.

The culprit: spruce bark beetles, tiny insect pests that are running roughshod through forests, killing the trees en masse. A healthy spruce tree has no fear of bark beetles. It emits sap and resin that trap and kill the invaders.

But several years ago, a prolonged summer drought accompanied by record high temperatures changed things. The water table shrunk. With tree roots unable to tap water, the production of protective sap shut down, allowing bark beetles to explode. For several years now, there has been a mass rush to clear-cut trees of all ages to salvage some commercial value and to try to blunt the deadly march of the insects.

For the people of Assinghausen, who for centuries grew up with woods all around them, it is a shock to their sensibilities.

“The old forest is completely dead. It makes me very sad,” said Sabine Noellke, the mother of Jule Noelkke, a former exchange student who stayed with us in Lancaster several years ago and with whom we were now visiting.

German foresters now regret they chose to make their forests a monoculture of spruce trees. The government is investing $878 million to replant, this time with a variety of tree species.

Jule’s father, Christof, drove me one day through the woods the family owns that he is desperately trying to selectively cut to save other trees.

We went along a dirt two-track where he keeps nearly two dozen Charolais cows in several meadows, not to produce milk but just for fun. In the fall, he drives the cows down from the meadows through the town’s streets to winter in a barn behind the family’s circa 1749 home and weekend tavern on the main street.

Cristof said recent unusually dry summers have dried up a stream that fed a water source for the cows. Now, he has to fill a trough with water from a tank he drives into the fields.

These jolting, unexpected displays of the fire we are messing with by damaging our planet was thankfully counterbalanced by experiencing the comforting sense of community we found in Assinghausen and surrounding villages.

There is no better example than attending a traditional schutzenfest.

For centuries, small villages in this part of Germany have held these marksmen’s festivals each summer. In medieval times, a town formed informal militias to protect themselves. Immediately after World War II, shooting clubs were forbidden for a few years.

But now, the shooting competitions and multi-day events in shooting halls are social gatherings for the entire town to celebrate community and local pride.

We attended the one in the nearby town of Wiemeringhausen, where our beloved Jule was the outgoing schutzenfest queen.

We attended pre-festival cookouts at private homes, parades and two days of spirited gatherings in the town’s schutzenfest hall, attended by all ages and filled with food, ceremony, dance, traditional clothing, live music, on-the-table-stomping patriotic songs and an endless flow of freshly-tapped, locally made Warsteiner beer.

As part of tradition, the event revolves around shooting at a crudely made wooden caricature of an eagle mounted on a pole. Suitors take turns shooting at the bird and the one who sends it shattering earthward is the schutzenfest king for a year.

In reality, becoming the king is a time-consuming and expensive honor for an entire year, requiring him to preside over many events and outlay much of his own money for food and drinks.

So why do it?

“They love all the people being together and having fun together,” offers Sabine.

“You are giving back to your town,” adds Carlos Noellke, Jule’s older brother. “Also, it’s an honor.”

For some who have moved away from their hometown, the schutzenfest is a welcome reunion.

“It is a special thing,” says Alica Hanfland, 26, who grew up in Assinghausen and is still a volunteer firewoman there, but lives several hours away in the city of Dusseldorf where she is a policewoman.

“We live in a small town, right? So we are all connected with each other and this festival is so important. It’s such a beautiful tradition,” says Hanfland, who has studied in the United States.

Schutzenfests are once-a-year events. Residents of these close-knit towns are further threaded into a sense of community and caring by informal clubs known as a stammtisch. Youths in the town form these small social groups around similar interests and gather regularly to hang out, discuss life and take outings. Often, these associations endure a lifetime.

Not surprising, then, that Hanfland plans to leave the city when her contract is up and move back to Assinghausen.

“The city is so anonymous,” she says over a beer at the schutzenfest while a band marches down the aisles, belting out thumping old regional songs whose lyrics are known and shouted heartily by all.

“You can walk there and say hello to people and they’re like, ‘What the heck is going on!’ And you’re just saying hello, you know. I will move back. It’s more exciting and spontaneous in the city but I just want to spend my life in the countryside because I love this community.”

• Ad Crable is an LNP | LancasterOnline outdoors writer. Email him at acrable@lnpnews.com.