Karnap to Kettwig: biking across Essen

Connecting the dots through the Ruhr Pott

Connecting the dots: Karnap to Kettwig

Karnap to Kettwig; that was my goal. To bike the whole way across Essen, from the upper northeast corner to the lower southwestern tip.

I didn’t plan out a detailed route; I loaded up coordinates for a possible 30 geocaches and tried to connect the dots.

First I took the subway as far north as you can get in Essen: Karnap has a reputation as a dirty sooty industrial ghetto. I saw a bit of that, and a few used car lots. But also some “gentrified” neighbourhoods where the old brick rows houses had bark-mulched gardens and Audi’s parked in the driveways.

The southern border of Karnap is the Emscher River and the Rhein Herne canal. I followed the canal west on a smooth, wide gravel path as far as Essen’s inland harbour: a scary and soulless area; although I was astonished by an amazing pile of empty South American fruit juice barrels.

Hundreds of empty juice barrels from South America piled up in Essen's harbour

I suddenly realized I had been here before when I passed the customs office. I had taken bus 196 here to pick up my guitar last year. Such epiphanies happened to me the whole trip. I was constantly going from not having a sweet clue where I was, to knowing exactly where I was, and five minutes later back to completely lost. Connecting the dots.

From the harbour area, I crossed a major road, turned into a subdivision and took a path into the woods. Soon the path started climbing and I realized this whole green space was a former mining site. The hill was made from mine tailings. I went to the top, enjoyed the view and went down the other side.

The trail brought me out in the middle of the Kleingarten Verein Weidkamp – a huge patch of little garden allotments. I slipped through some rough streets, over railway tracks and disappeared into a little valley of horse pastures and wooded bike paths surrounding the Barchembach.

Narrow, grass-lined country lanes led me to a huge cemetery called Schildeberg. This Sunday was Totensonntag; the last day of the year in the German protestant churches, a day when families visit cemeteries and fix up gravesites. From the cemetery I rode among some real sketchy rowhouses before landing back at the railway tracks.

Ripshorster "Park" and Knappenhalde on the horizon

So often I felt like I was heading somewhere I shouldnt be going with my bike and then, like this time, I was suddenly surrounded by bikers and walkers headed into a park. “Park” is a bit of an exaggeration: there used to be endless mining and steel buidlings here in Ripshorst; they levelled it all and now you can stroll over miles of rough gravel and patches of cement.

On the bright side, the level treeless landscape allowed me a view of Knappenhalde, the highest feature in Oberhausen, a former coal dump. I had seen it tons of times from the car on Route 223 (Mülheimerstrasse) and had been wondering for years how to get to it.

While sketching out my trip, I had discovered a geocache on the map on a hill called Zuckerhut (Sugarloaf). I knew as soon as I read the title, it had to be the hill I was looking for; and I decided to add an extra 10 km to my trip so I could climb the crazy little thing.

view over Duisburg from Knappenhalde

The neighbourhood around Knappenhalde (which I guess means Miners Coal Dump) was the scariest of the day: long empty brick factory buildings, and mechanic shops housed in old brick huts. The walking paths to the coal dump were wrapped with red and white construction warning tape but I wasnt letting that stop me.

It’s 102 metres to the top of the halde; hard work considering I’d been biking fairly steady for the last four hours. I promised myself lunch when I got to the top, and for dessert I took in the fantastic sweeping view of Oberhausen and Duisburg from the look off tower on top. Industry and junk yards as far as the eye can see.

I rolled down into some pretty dense residential areas, found my way to a thin green space; really little more than the buffer around a swamp of a stream in Hexbachtal (Witch Stream Valley).

Through the streets of Essen

Suddenly I realized I had ended up here last summer with Robert and the gang after the navi sent us into the middle of a bike race. I only recognized it because we had been forced by circumstances to drive through this park, something I don’t normally do.

From Hexbachtal, I went through Borbeck again. One of my students told me today I missed a nice castle by about 300m; just serves to underline that driving from Karnap to Kettwig doesn’t mean I’ve seen all of Essen.

In Schönebeck I squeezed through two tight little road tunnels under the train tracks. You couldn’t see if any cars were coming the other way because the tunnels both had a ridiculous bend in them – scary!

It was getting on for 4:30, the sun was about an hour from setting and I was only halfway to Kettwig. It was time to stop messing around.

Through the woods of Essen on wide gravel paths

Luckily there was a long road that took me straight to Kettwig. Or it would have, if I hadn’t suddenly decided I remembered a short cut… from three years ago.

My first day in the Ruhr Pott, a Kettwiger had invited me to play soccer with his team in Kettwig and we had biked there together. I always remembered that bike trip fondly, and naively believed I could replicate it.

I ended up in a dead-end path out beyond some monastery’s compost pile. I’m not joking. And then round 5.30, I found myself biking through deep woods in the deepening dark hopelessly lost.

It was quite a relief to finally see the Ruhr river by moonlight. It would have been romantic if:

a) I hadn’t been alone
b) I hadn’t been so exhausted
c) and I wasn’t freezing to death.

The bright side was now that I’d found the river, I wasnt hopelessly lost anymore. I just wasn’t sure how to get to the train station.

Finally i had found the Ruhr; now to find the train station

I found it though at exactly 5 seconds after 6.02 pm. I know this exactly because I was just in time to watch the 6.02 train leave for Essen. The next one would arrive in exactly half an hour. But then waiting around on that cold windy train platform had its bright side as well. I think the hypothermia kept soreness from setting into my overworked muscles.

Sitting in the train headed home, I thought about what I’d seen. I’d been from Karnap to Kettwig but I hadn’t see all of Essen. I saw just one thin slice of the place. At most, like the explorer in Stan Rogers’s song Northwest Passage, I had traced “one warm line, through a land so wide and savage.”

I had connected the dots. The interesting thing is: I didn’t learn much about the dots themselves, but more about what’s between the dots. My trip from Karnap to Kettwig hadn’t been much about Karnap or Kettwig; it was all about the ‘to‘

PHOTOS FROM THE TRIP – - -   sLiDEshOW Of thE tRiP

 

P.S. I read this awesome poem after I’d written the stuff above. too late, but im sure i will use this poem in another post somehow. I just wanted to stick it on the end here cause wow – its all about what i was trying to do…

Where the sidewalk ends

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

by Shel Silverstein

Caching in Beepburg: a short spoiler video (bring your own coffee mug)

What a nerd I am!

Here's all the proof you need. Me all excited about solving a geocache last weekend in Beeeeeepburg. Youll hear in the beginning of the video, Ive beeped out the location as well. I dont want to spoil the fun for any cachers who might want to find this cache on their own.

But I do want to show off just how big a geocaching nerd I am. I guess. I mean why else am I showing this?

Anyway. I did this video in one breathless take (haha) and so... at the beginning I start to explain the clue which helped me find the cache. But you can actually see the smoke come out my ears when I realize I have the clue in my head in German and I try to translate it on the spot.

The clue was:

Sufficient supply of Material at hand. Assistive equipment you have to bring yourself.

 

Download now or watch on posterous

Caching_in_Beepburg.wmv (10253 KB)

 

 

Children please grow up! Seeking sanity in the Car vs Bike debate

"Children, please grow up!"

Thats my thought every time I read some silly rant from either side of the Car vs Bike debate. Scott Latimer, writing in The Globe and Mail, offers no helpful solutions but he sure has a great headline: Im afraid of cyclists.

Latimer is at pains to say he isnt against bicycling but.... he describes cyclists in terms that are far from reasonable:

"I watch them weave and dart through the city, betwixt and between moving cars, parked cars, pedestrians and myriad other obstacles on or near the roads."

"There is no space as it is, let alone for bicyclists who seem to move randomly amongst the chaos, without care for traffic lanes or traffic laws."

The same quite honestly can be said of many automobile drivers. In full auto-entitlement fury, Latimer suggests that letting bikes share the same road space as cars is unfair to the gas guzzlers:

"Bicyclists have the right to bike safely and properly, but motorists also have the right to drive without constantly worrying about when a cyclist might suddenly appear, speeding along without (shudder) a helmet."

Latimer admits he doesnt know what the answers are, only that "our current transportation model is broken."

The answers however are out there.

1) Latimer complains there are no rooms for bikes because:

The reality is that, in 2010, our roads are bursting at the seams.

Yep. And you my friend are part of that problem. It aint the transportation model thats broken. Its the mindset of people who live in 416 and think its okay to commute to 905, as Latimer does. David Suzuki has this advice for you:

If you are moving, choose a home within a 30-minute bike, walk or transit ride from your daily destinations. A convenient place to live reduces the amount you drive, which means you'll lower your greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants.

And you'll also make room on the road. For all of us.

2) Latimer suggests we'd all be safer with big beautiful bike lanes. It seems he believes more infrastructure is the answer:

"I would be for bicycling in dedicated bike lanes, or bicycling in any context that is safe and accessible and doesn’t force cyclists to imperil themselves riding in heavy traffic."

"Safe driving involves knowing the patterns on the road – having an expectation of what other drivers will do at a particular time and in a particular scenario. But with cyclists, there appears to be no clear pattern to their movements and no obvious location to expect to find them when you’re driving."

Sorry. The answer is much simpler. Infrastructure just lulls drivers into a false sense of security: "Ah, I can drive fast here, cause there is a nice white line painted on the road to protect me."

Turns out, less infrastructure and more ambiguity makes drivers slow down and <gasp> look around them, and even interact with pedestrians and cyclists.

This isnt a new idea. Tom McNichol wrote about in WIRED back in 2004. For his article he visited a traffic circle (roundabout) with Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman.

It's the confluence of two busy two-lane roads that handle 20,000 cars a day, plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians. Several years ago, Monderman ripped out all the traditional instruments used by traffic engineers to influence driver behavior - traffic lights, road markings, and some pedestrian crossings - and in their place created a roundabout, or traffic circle. The circle is remarkable for what it doesn't contain: signs or signals telling drivers how fast to go, who has the right-of-way, or how to behave. There are no lane markers or curbs separating street and sidewalk, so it's unclear exactly where the car zone ends and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver, the intersection is utterly ambiguous - and that's the point.

Monderman and I stand in silence by the side of the road a few minutes, watching the stream of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians make their way through the circle, a giant concrete mixing bowl of transport. Somehow it all works. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of crossing bicyclists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through fleeting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around the circle with hardly a brake screeching, horn honking, or obscene gesture. "I love it!" Monderman says at last. "Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can't expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road."

Maybe we're not ready for all of Monderman's ideas in Canada just yet. (At the end of the WIRED article, McNichol watches as Monderman walks backwards into the traffic circle to test his theory.) But the underlying principles can go a long way to bringing sanity back to the streets.

People need to calm down, slow down and look each other in the eye.

I (who ride the bus) am tired of the endless squabbling between cyclists and drivers. Id like to spank both groups and send them to their rooms. But perhaps a better answer is for everyone to try and act a little more grown up.

We all get scared once in a while Scotty. But part of growing up is learning to deal with our fears. When you really face your fears, really look at them, you often discover things arent as bad as they seem. It's going to be okay buddy.

 

 

 

Nordstern - part of the Emscher Landschaft Park - looking for wilderness among the cracks of civilization

See and download the full gallery on posterous

 

I took my first walk along the Emscher on Friday. Work took me up to Gelsenkirchen to some offices in the middle of, or maybe right next door to, Nordsternpark - yet another former mining site turned outdoor recreation space*.

The Emscher is one of three rivers that, along with the A40 autobahn, make up the skeleton of the Ruhr area. The other two rivers, the Ruhr and the Lippe were used for drinking water and the Emscher got the short, or dirty end, of the straw: it has been used as a sewer and industrial waste water canal since the late 1800s.

They began fixing it up - renaturalizing it - in the 1990s - that project has gone forward in spurts and spats but is now going full steam ahead and they expect to have all 80km of the river pristine and clean by 2014. We'll see - it was a little stinky Friday but not bad.

These parks represent a different approach to nature and wilderness - different than Im used to - opposite to Thoreau's ideas of preserving nature - this is finding nature among the crack's of "civilization", this is squeezing it into the empty spaces, this is re-engineering nature after we've stripped it all away.

Still it works. I can relax a little here and find some breathing space. There is natural beauty and life. Okay, it doesnt compare with sitting on the shore of the Atlantic, or swimming in some hidden waterfall two days back in the woods. But on some small scale it works.

Today's walk was in some small way inspired by Alf Wight (better known as James Herriot), the vet from Yorkshire. He wrote about stopping off on his way home from calls to walk the dogs where ever he happened to be. Ill be back in Gelsenkirchen every week for a while now - and Ill be taking full advantage...

 

*Here are some other renaturalized industrial sites Ive visited in the Ruhr area: Industrial Ruins in the Ruhrgebiet, Zollverein Fotos, Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord, Fun on a Coal Dump, Astronomical Coal Dump.

And here's blurb from the Nordstern Park's home page:

The coal mine "Nordstern" (North Star) used to divide Horst and Heßler, two city parts of Gelsenkirchen. Today "Nordsternpark" not only links the two districts, but also business, culture and landscape. Shut down in 1993, site of the "Bundesgartenschau - BUGA" (National Garden Show) in 1997; thats the short version of the history of "Nordsternpark".