Top o’ the Mornin’! ☘️

It’s finally happened. I’m OVER winter. Done, finished. It’s a sadistic whore, and I’m not playing any more. 3 inches over night. Whoopdeeedo. “Too little too late, Sweet Cheeks,” I said to it as I looked out the window and you know what IT said?

“It’s not about you,” said the snow on the lilac bushes.

The nerve…

Still, after our not–all–that–great saunter at the golf course yesterday, Bear was a happy dog.

“It’s about Bear,” said the snow on the deck.

“Shut up snow.”

“Yeah? Well YOU shut up. I challenge you to find something quieter than I am,” said all the snow everywhere.

I was half-hoping yesterday we’d at least see the tracks of some ungulates, but no luck. It would have been difficult, though, since we were out there while the snow was falling AND melting. I am not sure Bear found tracks with her nose, but she may have. She’s very quiet about her discoveries.

In St. Patrick’s Day news, yesterday I was cleaning out emails and I found a treasure. Back in the day, my cousin Linda set up my Aunt Jo and Uncle Hank with a computer and an aol account. They wanted to use it, but the learning curve was steep. When I went to Montana for Christmas in 2000, I spent a lot of time teaching them because, 1) that was part of my job in CA and 2) it snowed all the time.

They got pretty OK using it. The typing was the hardest part, and they both knew that it was just going to take practice. Sitting at a computer wasn’t really their style, but they tried. I got into emailing them once a week and sometimes they answered with a letter. Sometimes they emailed me back, but not often. ☘️

> Date: Saturday, March 17, 2001, 10:11 AM
> Dear Martha Ann,
>      Time to let you know that we are
> still around. Jo has has been a bit 
> under the 
> weather lately.  I took her to the doctor yesterday
> hope that gets her going 
> again.
> We both wanted to wish you a Happy St Patricks day.
>      I finialy got around to building a
> table for my kitchen table top. 
> didn”t turn out to badly. will use it on the  patio
> that is if  we should 
> ever again have warmer weather.
>      Your aunt Martha is doing okay
> about the same. Your Aunt Jo isn:t as 
> fiesty as usual but says she still likes you and will check
> with you later.
>                
>                
>     Hank
>

When I was a little girl I lived with Uncle Hank and Aunt Jo for four months. Sometimes I’d get in trouble, and I would think they didn’t love me any more. My Aunt Jo figured that out and after she lectured or punished me she’d always say, “I still like you, Martha Ann” and she would hug me. It became our code for “I love you.” ☘️

The featured photo is St. Gall and the Bear. St. Gall is the patron saint of Switzerland. He was an Irishman who came across the channel with St. Columbanus. I first learned of him from How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill. I expected How the Irish Saved Civilization to be a satire but it turned out to be legit history that set me on a life-changing course of discovery.

Oh, and as for me? Ancestry has recently let me know that my folks came from central Tipperary during “the starvin'”. I knew when; I didn’t know where so that was cool. My great granddad worked on ships in the Great Lakes where he met my French Canadian great-grandma from whom I inherited a droopy left eye. I can’t find their photos but here’s my dad looking like a Leprechaun. He got the droopy eye, too. In color he had black hair, a red beard and snow-shadow blue eyes. ☘️

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2023/03/17/rdp-friday-ungulate/

Museum and Memory

Throughout my childhood I was dragged, grumbling sometimes, through many local museums. But in 2005 I woke up to their importance. And where? In the tiny village of Bubikon, Switzerland. The museum is a “castle” — a Commandery, a “Ritterhaus” — of the Knights Hospitaller from the 13th century. I saw it in the company of the resident historian who showed me everything. Fascinating. It is an amazing place in a very small village. The purpose of these places was — beyond housing and training knights — forming a buffer zone between warring lords. Nothing like a community of fighting men to keep the local enemy off your back. (Featured photo from the Swiss National Museum, the Ritterhaus in 1530 or so)

In many ways it’s similar to the Rio Grande County Museum in the fun-filled, scenic town of Del Norte, Colorado. The Ritterhaus at Bubikon is not on anyone’s tourist list, and to see the exhibits without a special guide you go to the snack shop and tell the woman running it that you’d like to see the exhibits. She’ll unlock it for you, and you’re free to wander around. My friend Lois and I did this. We went in the snack shop for lunch and then I tried to take Lois around the museum, but couldn’t. When I came back and asked when the museum opened, everyone (five people) in the snack shop looked at me in surprise. “What? An American came here to see THIS??? Ja, what about the Matterhorn??”

I’ve seen the same thing at “my” museum. Tourists from all over the world drive through Del Norte, and seeing that the museum has a public restroom and tourist advice, stop and ask for directions. Sometimes they want to see the exhibits. To save money, sometimes the lights in the back rooms are turned off, so there’s a rushing around to turn the lights on. Not quite as hardcore as locking the door, but…

Not too long ago a 100 year old woman, descended from original settlers in Del Norte, came back to celebrate her birthday. Many of her family’s possessions had been donated to the museum. She wanted to see them and be around them, so the museum had a party for her. Among the things that were done ahead of it was I was asked to translate some shipping documents and a will. I gave it a shot, but wasn’t at all sure I could do it so I marshaled the help of a historian friend in Zürich. The old lady was thrilled. She had never known what they said.

For the past few months “my” museum has been closed while the two people working there have digitally cataloged the collection. It’s been a lot of work and they’re almost — but not quite — finished. The museum is set to open next month. The stagecoach over which the museum has been in negotiation with the city where I live will be coming to the museum to stay at the end of April.

My mom’s birthday was yesterday and while I have very mixed feelings about that woman, I owe her a lot. I see it in my life every day. My love for rural places and my appreciation of history, those two very important things, came from my mom and they are major components of my life and personality. But maybe the biggest gift (besides life) that woman gave me is the gift of observation. I was a dreamy little girl, lost in my thoughts much of the time. My mom didn’t like that for some reason — I don’t know what. We — my family — might be wandering around in the world, and I wouldn’t be paying any attention to it. Sometimes her reminders to look at the world were accompanied by a slap. Sometimes by a voice filled with wonderment. Either way, I looked up. My life would be and would have been so much less if she hadn’t been serious about teaching me that, to “Look, Martha Ann!!” That included stopping at every local museum along the way on family road trips. Sometimes when I’m at the Rio Grande County Museum I can imagine my mom accompanying me and saying, “Why is that in a museum? I used that every day of my life growing up!”

That’s why I gave my mom’s Crow moccasins to the Rio Grande County Museum. It was my “Thanks mom. You’d have liked this museum,” even though the moccasins don’t have much to do with Rio Grande County or any part of Colorado; the Crow didn’t live here, but I do.

My mom in the early 1940s when she was teaching elementary school (one room school) on the Crow Indian Reservation. The pin she’s wearing — and in the photo — was made by the parent of one of her students. It’s a coups pin. Each hanging strand of beads is meant to represent a coups counted by the owner. I think, at this point in history, it is just jewelry. Interestingly, the cross on the pin is just like the cross of the Knights of St. John Hospitaller, the knights who lived at Bubikon. Pure coincidence and totally meaningless, but still cool.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2023/03/08/rdp-wednesday-museum/

Family Ties

Long ago I had a family in Switzerland. It’s difficult to explain and kind of a personal story, but among the treasures I’ve carried with me from that time are two plates. My Swiss family wasn’t exactly Swiss; they were Italian. They’d gone to Switzerland at the end of WW II when things in Italy were pretty dire. One of them was from Puglia, the other from Trieste. Pietro and Laura weren’t exactly “mom and dad” — “mom” could have been my mom, but “dad” only a much older brother. I’m still close friends with their son.

I didn’t speak Italian or any form of German, but my Spanish was decent, and my “mom” had taken care of a Spanish woman in Zürich when she first arrived in Switzerland so she and I spoke Spanish together. My listening comprehension in Italian was surprisingly good, I guess from watching Fellini movies over and over for years. My “dad” and I developed a unique language that drove their son crazy. He is multi-lingual as are most Swiss, but Pietro and I did fine with our language and spent hours wandering in the forest with Daisy the dog — talking! He loved cooking and taught me to make focaccia like that his mother sent him north with when he left Puglia at the end of the war. There were no opportunities in war-torn Italy and Pietro’s large family was very poor.

The story of the focaccia he traveled with is at least as good as the focaccia (which is amazing). His sister was already in Zürich and he was going north to join her and, hopefully, find a life. He said he only had a small bag of clothing and a giant focaccia that was supposed to feed him all the way to Zürich. Half was for him, half was for his sister in Zürich.

My experience with Italian trains is certainly different from Pietro’s back in the late 1940s, but one thing that remains is that they are prone to going on strike. When Pietro got to Milan, there was a train strike and he was stuck at the “Monument to Eclecticism and Fascism” — Milan’s main train station — for several days. All he had to eat was the focaccia so, when he finally got to Zürich there as none left for his sister.

My Swiss family was the “reward” for choices I made that were pretty crazy at the time, a leap of very blind faith. That leap took me exactly where I needed to go.

I wear my Swiss dad’s gold chain around my neck and wherever, I live, I hang two decorative plates they gave me for Christmas. The Christmas before my Swiss “dad” died of lymphoma (soon after New Year, 2000 😦 ) I was able to talk to him on the phone for a little while and speak Italian. Laura returned to Trieste after Pietro died, and I visited her there in 2004 when I went to Italy to study Italian. We spoke on the phone often, and, in the process of cleaning out all those old journals, I found her letters and noticed the linguistic evolution from Spanish to Italian. Family is where you find it and I miss them.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2022/04/09/rdp-saturday-plate/

And THEN….

After what seemed to be a llllllooooonnnnnnggggg drive I arrived at my friend’s house. The dogs were VERY happy to see his dog and his dog, Frosty, was happy to see Bear and Teddy. They all instantly started running around the back yard sharing their dog joy at the reunion, tumbling around and being happy. Today I’ll go pick up my paintings. If I find they’ve been sold (highly doubtful; I suspect the gallery would have told me somehow) I will be mixed happy and irked because it was a LONG drive. Oh, I said that already.

The friend I’m staying with was my student nearly thirty years ago now. Some of the stories in our lives are almost unbelievable when we look back on them from a distance and this story is one of those. Through a bizarre concatenation of events (I think it was destiny) I ended up with a Swiss family. Not Swiss/Swiss but the family begun by two people who’d immigrated from Italy to Switzerland after WW II for better opportunities. There’s even a movie about people who did this Bread and Chocolate. I love Switzerland very very very much and I like the culture, also, very very much (though my experience is limited to the north eastern part, the German speaking part). BUT it’s not the most open culture in the world and it wasn’t easy for my friend’s parents when they first arrived to find a niche, but they did.

Because of this bizarre concatenation of events, I went to the village of Gfenn which is north of Zürich, saw the Lazariterkirche, chapel of the community of St. Lazarus that was built in the 13th century, got hit by a bolt of inspiration that is nearly beyond description, leading to Martin of Gfenn.

We just don’t know. I think sometimes we just kind of bumble around and once in a while something grabs us and shakes us out of our sense of normal and plops us exactly where we need to be to do whatever it is we need to do, and sometimes we don’t know what that is until we’re standing in front of it.

And stranger still, he bought a house about 3 blocks from a house in which I used to live in Colorado Springs.

Seriously. If you think you know what’s going on and why, you might be wrong.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2021/07/31/ragtag-daily-prompt-saturday-tumble/

Once Upon a Time…

From “The Examined Life” 1997

The trail in the drawing is one I took once when I was outdoors with my friend back in the day. We were in Switzerland, his home country, on the Berner Oberland, in the famous region of the Eiger. We’d gone up to the Jungfraujoch, done our sight-seeing, and gotten back on the Jungfraubahn to return. Instead of riding all the way down to the station at Grindelwald, we got off the train at a station up the mountain and walked the rest of the way down to Kleine Scheidegg. It was the dream hike of a lifetime and I wished then (and even more now) that it had lasted longer.

A lot of summer hiking in America’s national forests means hiking with cows. Range cattle can be sketchy. One of the few times I was ever afraid hiking on a trail alone I had accidentally gotten too close to a calf, between it and its mom. Realizing my predicament, I froze. I knew better than to keep going when the calf in question was in front of me and a small herd of “moms” was behind me.

The cow that was closest to the calf, lumbered past me and backed the little cow against the the closed gate I needed to go through. (Here we can debate “need” vs. “want”.) Slowly a red cow whose coat matched that of the “endangered” calf came up the hill a couple of friends behind her. Soon the calf was protected from one lone woman hiker, her dog and her hiking stick by a 4000 pound phalanx of bovine nannies. They lowered their heads.

Disappointed, I turned around.

In Switzerland, on that lovely winding trail, we were accompanied by Swiss cows. Swiss farmers love their cattle which, for the most part, aren’t raised for steaks and burgers, but for milk and cheese. In spring, Swiss farmers dress up their cattle in flowers and bells and take them up to the mountains and, when fall comes, decorate the cattle again before bringing them down. The word “alp” means “pasture.”

Our hike started more or less at the red dot…

About 1/3 of our way down the trail to Kleine Scheidegg, we were slowly approached by three cows, the bells around their necks sending happy songs across the mountainside. Raised the way they are, Swiss cows aren’t suspicious of people. Their bovine curiosity brought them to us and together we all walked down the hill.

I didn’t take a photo of this, so I had to draw a picture of the trail. I didn’t put people or cows in it. Maybe if I were drawing it today, I would.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2020/05/30/rdp-saturday-outdoors/

Ich liebe die Schweiz

I love Switzerland. I’ve been there ten times, give or take, and if I could, I’d live there. If my heart has a home (outside of Heaven) it’s Switzerland, or maybe it’s the other way. Heaven might be my compensation for not being able to live in Switzerland.

In front of me here are my talismans. There is a photo of the restaurant in Zürich with Goethe painted on the front I took in Zürich in 1998. There is a Wanderweg sign I took from a fallen tree in the Canton of St. Gallen. There is a photo of the Jungfraujoch I took the summer of 1997.

My Swiss story is complicated and mostly private, but I can say this. The strange and dangerous choices we make in our lives are sometimes the very ones we need to take us to our destiny. I found not only my writer’s voice but my story in Switzerland in 1997 in the little church below, the Lazariterkirche im Gfenn.

2005 at the Lazariterkirche im Gfenn

I found other things, too.

I found Goethe in Switzerland, in profile, painted on the front of a restaurant across from St. Peter’s Church with the inscription, “In 1779, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe stayed here with the Duke of Weimar.” Seeing that there — without even (yet) having read anything by Goethe — I was awakened to the essence of time in Europe. It was one of those moments that explodes your brain and catapults you from the person you were toward the person you will be. Then, of course, a few years later, I read Goethe. Here’s his beautiful poem about the Zürichsee, “Auf dem See” (“On the Lake”).

Und frische Nahrung, neues Blut Saug ich aus freier Welt; Wie ist Natur so hold und gut, Die mich am Busen hält! Die Welle wieget unsern Kahn Im Rudertakt hinauf, Und Berge, wolkig himmelan, Begegnen unserm Lauf.	And fresh nourishment, new blood Suck I from the free world; Nature is so fair and good She holds me at her bosom! The wave rocks our boat Upwards with the rhythm of the oars And mountains, cloudy heavenwards, Meet our course.
Aug, mein Aug, was sinkst du nieder? Goldne Träume, kommt ihr wieder? Weg, du Traum! so gold du bist; Hier auch Lieb und Leben ist.	Eye, my eye, why do you sink down? Golden dreams, do you come again? Away, you dream! As gold as you are, Here too are life and love.
Auf der Welle blinken Tausend schwebende Sterne, Weiche Nebel trinken Rings die türmende Ferne; Morgenwind umflügelt Die beschattete Bucht, Und im See bespiegelt Sich die reifende Frucht.	On the wave blink Thousands of hovering stars, Soft mists drink The towering distance all around; Morning wind envelops  The shadowed bay, And in the lake is reflected The ripening fruit.

Over the years I also learned that part of my family came from Switzerland and I learned their amazing stories (and wrote them into novels).

Switzerland is not just places and history. It is a family to which I once belonged. Long walks in the forest, the Wallisellerwald. Christmases and birthdays. Quiet explorations of unknown places. Following the Sylvester Kläuse through the snow in Appenzell on New Years, and sitting in a tavern on a hillside in Usnacht next to an old Appenzeller man with a tiny spoon hanging from his ear. When young boys dressed as trees came in to yodel, I watched a tear run down the old man’s face. Maybe he was remembering when he was a boy, dressed as a tree, tromping and dancing through the snow, bells ringing, singing.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2020/04/19/rdp-sunday-swiss/

“Where are We?”

The word “wanderweg” is lovely — it means hiking trail, but to an English speaker it also says “wander this way.” I “stole” this Wanderweg sign from a small forest in the Canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland on a visit about 20 years ago 😦 . I don’t think anyone missed it as one of the holes is clearly ruined and the tree on which it was afixed was down. Swiss hiking trails are (naturally) extremely well marked and signed all along the way. I HAVE gotten lost, but it wasn’t the fault of the Swiss signage. I wasn’t paying attention.

Here in the US, trails are marked too. However, as it is an immense continent rather than a conveniently compressed confederation, trail signage is not as consistent or clear. One of my favorite trail signs is the “trail confidence marker.” I was “wandering” with my friends in Penitente Canyon a few years ago and we came across one. We stared at it a long time trying to figure out what it meant and we decided it did not give us any confidence at all.

Apparently (according to research I did later) they are signs on this largely mountain biking area that let bikers know they’re still on the trail. Any trail sign is a “trail confidence marker.” On the trails in Penitente Canyon they are numbered so as mountain bikers whiz by, they can tell they’re still on the trail. But for someone moving more slowly it’s like, “Huh???”

The hiking trails in the Laguna Mountains in California were not just clearly market, but imaginatively marked. The Sunset Trail (a 3 mile loop) was marked with a little picture of the sun setting over the ocean, framed by pine trees, an actual view you could get if you climbed a particular rock and faced west at the appropriate moment.

Wandering implies (in English) that you don’t know where you’re going, you’re just going. The truth is we’re all doing that all the time even if we think we know where the trail leads. That says that the “trail confidence marker” can only tell you you’re still on the trail, and, god-willing, you’ll get back to your car.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2020/01/26/rdp-sunday-wander/

The Best Library of My Life — St. Gallen Stiftsbibliothek

On a winter’s day in a deep and dark December in 1997 I opened a door way that led into a gaudy rococo structure that housing thousands of books I could never read.

It was the Library at the Abbey of St. Gall in St. Gallen, Switzerland. I had just dipped a toe into my personal medieval period. I’d recently read How the Irish Saved Civilization (which I’d bought because I thought it would be funny…) by Thomas Cahill, and I was excited to learn that a couple of Irish monks — Columbanus and Gall — had crossed the channel in little round boats and carried the Bible (and other books) up the Rhine. Gall got pneumonia at what is now St. Gallen and left Columbanus on his own to journey to Italy. Apparently Columbanus was a irritated with Gall for being such a sissy, but pneumonia is no joke…

Columbanus and Gall on Lake Constanz (dem Bodensee)

Gall set up a hermitage and a small library with a few books and he gathered followers and saved souls. He is the patron Saint of Switzerland. His animal friend is a bear. The story is:

… that once he was travelling in the woods of what is now Switzerland. One evening he was sitting down warming his hands at a fire. A bear emerged from the woods and charged. The holy man rebuked the bear, so awed by his presence it stopped its attack and slunk off to the trees. There it gathered firewood before returning to share the heat of the fire with St Gall. The legend says that for the rest of his days St Gall was followed around by his companion the bear.

At first, the library itself disappointed me. I guess I wanted to open the door and enter the 8th century or something. The current library was built in the 18th century. I find it very difficult to see anything in a baroque room, and the Abbey Library is one step beyond baroque — it’s rococo. It’s so full of embellishments and ornaments that my mind becomes confused.

Main hall of the Library of the Abbey of St. Gall

But once I got used to it — and librarian came to talk to us (we were the only people there) — I stopped trying to see through the gold and stucco and began to see and understand where I was. He showed me a medieval map of the world.

8th or 9th century CE map of the world

You can see that it’s oriented (ha ha) to the East, the rising sun — Christ. All the three continents are surrounded by sea. The map is less for navigating physical space as it is for navigating spiritual space. This is a somewhat unusual medieval map of the world because it doesn’t SAY Jerusalem is the center, but it is. I saw a couple other maps on which cities were drawn, and Jerusalem was always depicted as the largest city and had tall, shining towers. Although I didn’t understand at that moment, having only at that point dipped one toe into the medieval world, that the physical and spiritual worlds overlaid each other and that the physical world was but a metaphor for spiritual space.

Of all the amazing things this man explained about the books in the glass cases, other books on the library’s locked shelves, and books too old and fragile to be touched at all was that there are some written in languages people don’t know any more. Apparently researchers are working on that, but I thought at the time that it is incredibly sad. Here are words written in very difficult circumstances, with oak-gall ink on parchment with quill pens, stories, ideas, beliefs, philosophies, knowledge and experiences that their writers were desperate to transmit to the future. And there the three of us stood — my friend, the librarian and I — discussing how no one could read them.

He took us into a hallway behind the main room — it was modern, gray and white — with doors along it. “All these rooms have people working on this problem.” Just then a young woman wearing white cotton gloves came out of one of the doors and greeted the librarian. I got a vision of busy young people in white gloves behind all those doors struggling to decode old words. I wondered what they would find.

• 

  Me in St. Gallen with a Snow Nativity

• 

  A page from my scrapbook: quotation from Thos. Cahill’s book

• 

  St. Mark from the Bible brought from Ireland from St. Gall

• 

  Initial pages of the Bible brought from Ireland

• 

  Ivory and Gold cover of a Bible depicting St. Gall and his Bear

Of all the wonders in the library, though, for me one of the most wonderful was the inscription written in Greek over the entrance which, thanks to Michael J. Preston, I could read on my own.

Medicine Chest for the Soul

I continued to pursue St. Gall in various places in Switzerland that winter, including a trip to Basel to see the Gallus Portal at the cathedral. I learned a lot — not the least of which that ignorance is a wonderful wonderful wonderful thing because once curiosity is awakened, and you chase knowledge, you will get more than you possibly could have imagined.

I didn’t know HALF of what I was looking at that winter, but on my second to last day, my friend’s mom told him to take me to visit a little medieval church near where they lived. The church is in the village of Gfenn, outside Dubendorf, both north of Zürich. And the rest? It’s historical fiction. ❤

Lazariter Kirche im Gfenn

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/09/18/rdp-wednesday-library/

My Grandma’s Trunk

I found a trunk very similar to my grandma’s trunk on an auction site, though it’s larger and in slightly better condition with the original paper covering still in place. It has patent dates of 1865 which seems pretty likely to me for my old trunk. It means it’s likely to have belonged to my grandmother’s grandmother, Phoebe Copenbarger, the daughter of Elizabeth Snavely (Schneebeli) the last person in my family to have the glorious Swiss name of Schneebeli. Phoebe very likely bought it new and took it with her west from Wythe County, Virginia (See The Price) to Iowa by covered wagon in the 1860s.

The other posts I’ve written (that will certainly make this one less cryptic and provide needed context) are here

“Schneebeli” means “Little snowball” and the family actually had/has a crest. This is really, “Schneebeli von Baden und Affoltern am Albis.” I’m afraid if I saw three snowballs on a shield I wouldn’t be sure whether to laugh or fight, but yeah, this is legit. But I guess it means any fight they fought was a snowball fight…

Navigating Time Travel

Reading a street map is becoming a lost art. Is that OK? I rely on my phone, too. It’s like having a wife who sits in the passenger seat with a map and tells me where to turn. I’m sorry for the sexist remark “wife” here but in my life that person was either my mom or me so it isn’t all that sexist. When I was in Switzerland with my friend L I opted NOT to pay extra for GPS because I was going to have a “wife” who could navigate. I wasn’t thinking that, 1) L drives everywhere in her life because 2) her husband is blind and 3) not everyone LIKES maps as much as I do and 4) she wasn’t really good at reading a map and 5) Switzerland is what one from out here where the second largest town in an area as large as Connecticut has only 4000 people, well, we might call Switzerland “compressed.” Where the next town HERE might be 14 miles away, in Switzerland it might be half a mile.

I can tell you, it led to some pretty ugly moments, but we always got there, and L got better at map reading. All was well.

As for me here in the wild and woollies, my cell phone service data plan doesn’t cover the San Luis Valley. I have a Rand McNally road atlas in my car, but with no co-pilot that’s a bit of a problem but there is this little trick of pulling over and looking at the map. I’m pretty good at that.

Maps fascinate me. In the process of writing my historical novels, I found old maps to be like time machines. While writing The Brothers Path I tried to imagine the moment when Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat and what kind of panic that might have inspired in some people — including my characters. In fact, the first line I wrote of that book was THAT moment, the moment when the brothers Thomann and Andreas realized they were about to witness something that had never, ever, ever happened before* and one of them, Thomann, quickly apprehended that it could result in a lot more deaths if not a riot. Thomann told his brother to run. In fact, the first line I wrote of that novel was, “Andreas! Run!”

But where? Zürich today is not Zürich of the 16th century. It was a walled city — and it had been walled more than once, a series of walls ever reaching outward as the city grew. I found a map. A beautiful 16th century map with the names of the various gates clearly marked. I saw the roads (old, old roads, still there, paved, lined, traffic filled, but old) that would have taken them out of the city that horrible day. There was a squat little tower called the Ketzitzturli (sp) that would have put him right on the road home.

Many of the streets in Zürich carry the names of the towers to once they led. I found it pretty easy to drive in Zürich because I knew this old map so well.

*The leader of the Reformed church, Huldrych Zwingli, executed his former friend, the Anabaptist, Felix Manz. It was the first execution of a Protestant by a Protestant and it happened only 3 years after the beginning of the Reformation. Both men had once been priests.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/06/26/ragtag-prompt-26-navigate/