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