On the Lonesome Road
I stepped off into obscurity on a platform in the rural town of Scheirstedt in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. I was new to the area and had exited on to the right platform but took the wrong route on my way to teach at a nearby chocolate processing facility.
The small station was at the edge of a community surrounded by farmland. I was lost and I was late, yet I found some odd joy in staring at a vision of the loneliness in the fields before me. The day before I had taken notes from a hand-drawn map on a white board and followed a route that I supposed to be correct. It was there under dark foreboding clouds heavy with rain alone and unable to call anyone having forgotten my cell phone that I discovered something amazing.
I released a guffaw. Again, in my life, I was alone — me and the elements of Zoroaster: with my spirit as the fire, the earth below my feet, the cold spring wind blowing against my face and an impending downpour on the horizon. It was both haunting and primitive. The beauty of the solitude offered up a bestial joy and a simultaneous welling of tears. I laughed at the primordial beauty of the wheat and rape fields before me and I mourned the dearth of human connection; of being lost in the middle of nowhere in Germany having forgotten my phone.
A month earlier, I had arrived in Magdeburg, Germany ready to start a new life. A small company hired me while I was still in the states to work as an in-company teacher and I jumped at the chance for a new beginning. I left a stagnant relationship, and an hourly-wage job for a new chance in a different place.
For much of my life, I had felt alone and misunderstood especially since the autumn of my 13th year. I started boarding school that year and entered on to a path over the next 12 years that led through a series of events that often left me struggling with some form of setback or disappointment. As a result, I seldom had the sense that I belonged to any group or area. It was probably for this reason that I was able to renounce everything: relationships, creature comforts, and discard any clothes that could not fit into two suitcases and fly to Germany in early spring 2006.
Because of my education, I landed a job as an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Teacher in an area once part of the Warsaw Pact in the former German Democratic Republic known to locals as East Germany. My chosen profession had credibility issues. EFL teachers have a reputation for comprising of husbands or wives of a local, post-grads looking for adventure, literary misfits, or alcoholic language coaches on leave from Saudi Arabia. I arrived in this area for a job that had such a reputation to work for a company that hired people with such a reputation. I sought to overcome both.
Before 1945, Saxony Anhalt did not exist. The Russians created it. Previously it was two different states: The Province of Saxony and the Free State of Anhalt. Saxony was a Prussian province created after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. Anhalt existed in various forms since the 12th century. In 1945, the Russians created the new state from an amalgamation of these two states, and other cities and principalities. It was here that I stepped on to land that had witnessed the movement of humanity for more than 1000 years.
50 Kilometers to the north lay Magdeburg, a city in which Martin Luther went to primary school. Protestant and Catholic armies decimated the city a few years later during the 30-Year War and a few hundred years later, Napoleon used the part of that city for artillery practice. In January 1945, the RAF destroyed much of it in a fire-bombing raid.
95 kilometers to the east lay Wittenberg. It was there that Martin Luther, lecturer and professor at the University of Wittenberg, walked down main street of the city and nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the cathedral and started a revolution that split Western Christianity.
90 kilometers to the south-east of where I stood, near Leipzig, Napoleon lost a major battle in 1813 against a coalition of Prussians, Russians and a number of dukedoms. In April of 1945, 125 kilometers to the east near Torgau, Russian and American armies met at the Elbe River.
For 40 years from 1950 to 1990, Russians occupied the region and attempted to further their grand socialist experiment. 70 kilometers to the west, in the Harz mountains, lay an invisible border that separated the two Germanys for 45 years. It was a border lined with towers, electric fences, and mined strips of land. In 1989, there were 19 million East Germans behind it and one million Russian soldiers stationed to protect them against NATO armies.
I was in a region that had witnessed the rise and fall of artistic, architectural, literary, musical, religious and political movements for centuries. It was an area untamed by the Romans and one that had witnessed the westward movement of barbarian tribes and armies.
As I stood at that small station outside of a small city deep in the heart of eastern Germany staring out beyond the fields of rape, and wheat, I envisioned people moving across from west to east and from east to west. I saw humanity and felt its history. Though, I was lost and had gone the wrong way, my path led me to discover a deeper insight into the clash of humanity on the Elbe plain.
In this depressing little corner near an obscure German town, I saw before me civilization spanning from the primitive farmer eking an existence to the sophisticated, smartphone-welding, calloused teenager pissing away the previous night next to a train station platform. It struck me that people had roamed through this area since the Bronze Age and had somehow cultivated this soil for centuries and were still prospering. I imagined it all while staring at those fields of wheat and rape.
After three kilometers and 30 minutes of reflection, I arrived at the entrance to the city of Aschersleben. I flagged down a taxi driver who took me back the way I came and delivered me to the correct destination where I confessed to taking the wrong path. Though I was late and barely earned enough from the remainder of that lesson to cover the cost of my train ticket, I returned home with a deeper understanding of my life as a microcosm of the universe. The truth on the path next to those fields was far more revealing than my explanation to the plant manager.
For a few minutes on an April day in 2006, I experienced a trinity of wisdom through envisioning the past, the present and the future of my life. By taking a wrong turn I discovered something about myself and the experience revealed a truth about the world that resulted in a deeper understanding of the universe itself. While the future often seems dire, people have lived and survived through war, famine, fire for millennia. Life will go on and people will go occasionally astray especially when taking the wrong path after leaving a train station next to a town they have never visited before or since.