Fire When It's Freezing
January - February, 2021
There are plenty of changes to look forward to when you move to a new continent, and one of the new experiences that Kirb was particularly excited about was something he called “real winter.” In the movies - especially ones set decades in the past - Berlin seemed to exist in a perpetual state of light snowfall, with only a dusting on the roads and sidewalks and the air filled with unending soft, falling flakes.
The Pacific Northwest isn’t a particularly cold or snowy place, and all the stereotypes about the rain are entirely true. It is very wet. There might be a little bit of snow here or there any given winter, but it is by no means a snowy place. Once every five years or so there’s a blizzard that shuts everything down and causes all the automobiles to slide and spin down the steep, icy hills, and these are festive times for the citizens who enjoy that particular brand of winter chaos. But these meteorological events happen rarely, and Kirb has only enjoyed a few of them in his long and storied life. Berlin is even further north than Seattle, and according to popular media, it seemed to snow there all the time. Reliably snowy winters had to be in his future moving forward, right?
Well friends, we hate to be the ones to tell you this, but climate change is real. For the first several years we have lived in Berlin, it hasn’t snowed here with any more frequency than it did back in Seattle or Portland. But by all accounts, it used to. When we first arrived in Berlin and asked the locals what the winters were like, we were regaled with stories by a few old-timers about a year in the not-too-distant past where it started snowing in November and didn’t fully melt away until April. As it thawed, layers upon layers of dog poop did with it, making each slushy step an unpredictable gambit. So, this is what we came to expect each winter...but it never came to pass (the snow part at least; Berliners leaving their dog poop all over the sidewalk is quotidian). Similar to the Pacific Northwest, there are one or two bouts of snow per year that only stick around for a few days, though there does seem to be an annual two-week stretch where the weather drops down well below freezing and the canals turn solid. When this happens, people invariably gather out on the ice and drink and skate and throw a frozen canal party, which is incredibly fun and something we never got to experience back home. For the most part though, the winters are merely cold-ish and gray and rarely anything close to a “winter wonderland.”
Every year we wonder if this is going to be the year where we finally get prolonged snowfall, where we finally experience “real winter.” Since we were both working predominately from home due to the omnipresent and seemingly never-ending pandemic, this year seemed the perfect time to be snowed in. Nothing about a foot of snow on the ground would be particularly inconvenient, in fact, it seemed a wonderful shake-up to the otherwise stagnant routine of after-dinner walks and cross-neighborhood treks to exotic grocery stores, the only places of business allowed to be open for months on end.
In late January, we started seeing snowflakes predicted on our weather app and began to get excited. Our pal Christoph asked if we were interested in doing some winter camping outside of Berlin in Brandenburg, and Kirb was intrigued; Mazz not so much. For all the camping he’d done throughout the years, he’d never gone winter camping, and he’d definitely never spent the night out in the snow. It sounded equal parts thrilling and miserable, but any opportunity to get out of the apartment and do something new was wildly enticing. So, he packed up all of his cold weather gear and met Christoph at the subway station on a cold and wet early Saturday morning. If snow was indeed coming, Kirb was going to meet it head on with a smile.
We talked several years ago about how surprised we were to arrive in Germany with five bags full of possessions - one entirely devoted to backpack camping - only to learn that sleeping overnight in the wilderness is illegal in this country. Since then, we’ve stayed in several proper German campsites, but hadn’t dared to “stealth camp” on our own. We really, really don’t like being reprimanded in German, and Germans really love to inform you that you are breaking the rules. They will go out of their way to chide you for virtually any infraction. But just as there are rules for literally everything in Germany, so too are there rules for not following them. As Christoph is a Brandenburg native, he understands these more nuanced parts of German culture thoroughly. With him as a guide, the prospect of being chastised by a farmer or nosy hiker seemed far less daunting.
After an hour and a half of switching between local and regional trains we arrived in Müncheberg, only about 30 miles/50 km from where we began our morning in Neükolln. The snow was falling in fat flakes and already beginning to stick to the concrete. From the Müncheberg station we needed to take a local bus into the town of Buckow, where we would begin our hike into the Märkische Schweiz nature park. Christoph’s pack was relatively small for an overnight - he’s into ultralight gear and has upgraded to the point where he can fit everything in an extremely thin waterproof pack. Kirb’s overnight setup is neither small nor discreet, and his gear is now somewhat dated, so he looked every bit a wandering backpacker. Knowing this, he let Christoph get on the bus first, and immediately upon seeing us, the driver gave us an acrid look and asked angrily in German if we were tourists. Christoph, ever calm and collected, told the man that we were visiting someone in Buckow, and the driver scoffed audibly as we walked past him to our seats. Was the driver angry with us because he could tell that we were going to camp overnight in the desolate, frozen woods? Christoph wasn’t entirely sure of the root of the man’s antagonism, only that many of the older generation of Germans simply “have a bad habit of trying to make everyone else feel as miserable as they do.”
Even in the height of summer, the wilderness in Brandenburg isn’t exactly awe-inspiring. The whole region is quite flat and covered in fields; the woods aren’t particularly dense and essentially all look the same. And no matter where you hike, there’s probably a small village only a few kilometers away in any given direction. Christoph had an app on his phone that allowed him to follow a set trail, but even with this paid service we found ourselves consistently off track, hiking across snowy fields to try and make our way back to the correct path, which was almost never clearly marked. The thick snowflakes quickly became wet sleet, and as Christoph pulled out an umbrella, Kirb realized that he really should have brought one of those for himself. Before long, his rain shell was soaked through and he had to move everything in the outside pockets of his pack into a waterproof bag inside as the exterior fabric became waterlogged.
After a few hours of hiking along logging roads (there are little-to-no foot trails in the Brandenburg wilderness and virtually every “hike” follows along a muddy backcountry road), we arrived at our destination, a small lake called Stafsee. We found a nice flat place to stay next to the water, but one of the rules of stealth camping is that you’re not supposed to set up your tent until the sun goes down. We still had a few hours before sunset, so we decided to hike another half hour to an emergency shelter marked nearby on the map. It wasn’t exactly clear what we would find there, as an “emergency shelter” could be anything from a gazebo to a full-on cabin, but regardless it would offer some cover to help keep us dry until we could return to the lake under the cover of darkness. What we found was a best-case scenario, if a little unnerving. The shelter itself was a proper cabin with a small bed and a table, though the room was filled with discarded junk and mangled blinds hanging from the windows. Above the bed on a narrow shelf, someone had laid out a series of animal jawbones like prizes. This room looked like the hovel of a forest-dwelling psychopath; it was not the “good” part of what the emergency shelter provided us. On one side of the cabin was a large, covered gathering area with picnic tables where we were able to sit, relax, and enjoy some whiskey as we played cards to pass the time. On the other side of the cabin was a covered wood shed, where we were able to stock up on dry firewood and newspaper for the freezing night ahead. We scrounged a bag of small logs and kindling from the pile, and Kirb and grabbed two equally-sized, thick rectangular blocks that could function as a dry table or chair at the campsite.
We discovered upon returning to our campsite on the lake that we weren’t the first people to think to stay there. Covered in snow at the edge of the water, someone had already fashioned a fire pit. The snowy sleet was still falling, so we set up our tents as quickly as possible and then chucked our wet bags inside to keep them from getting even wetter. Kirb’s jacket was soaked through in the arms, and his undershirt was still damp from hiking all day with a heavy pack. Christoph had made the mistake of going for lightweight trail runners instead of proper hiking boots, so his shoes and socks were completely soaked through and his feet were freezing.
Kirb has sat by countless campfires in his life, but he never appreciated any of them the way he did that particular fire on that particular night. Campfires are always welcome at chilly campouts to keep the cold night at bay, but he’d never been wet in actual frozen weather without having a warm dwelling to retreat to. Even though the wood was dry, it still didn’t want to light, and required Christoph using his camp stove like a flamethrower to heat up kindling until it reluctantly caught. As we huddled around the flames, steam rose in plumes from our wet clothing, and Kirb realized with a newfound profundity how much mundane things like hot soup and dry socks could be enjoyed and appreciated in the right situation. This fire was so much more than recreational, it was essential. Rejuvenating. Life-sustaining. In video game terms, it was a heal point before facing the Final Boss: the Long, Frozen Night. We were both able to dry out our wet clothing almost completely, sitting probably just a little too close to the fire, simultaneously scalding and freezing like poorly-microwaved burritos.
It was upon returning to his tent to sleep that Kirb realized he had made an extremely stupid mistake: He hadn’t bothered to take his gear out of his wet backpack when he’d tossed it inside the tent. The sopping wet pack had soaked through the items inside as well, so even though the clothing he was wearing was now dry from the fire, the foot of his sleeping bag was completely damp. He woke up in the middle of the night with his feet in extreme pain, which was thankfully dulled by throwing on another pair of thick hiking socks. It was too cold to have his face exposed in the night air, so he slept completely encased in his sleeping bag, glad that Mazz has insisted on buying a new, warmer model before we went to Switzerland the previous September. It was not a pleasant night’s sleep.
We woke and emerged from our tents to find that Stafsee had completely frozen over while we slept, our campsite and the frozen water covered in a fresh dusting of snow. Talking about our experiences sleeping in the extreme cold, we found that both of us at some point in the night had woken up and were convinced that a wild boar was scouring the campsite, only to realize that we were hearing the other snoring away in their tent. We made short work of packing up and drinking coffee before hitting the trail, eager to get our blood pumping again for warmth.
The hike out was long and not particularly scenic, though the country roads that bisected the farmland had their own unique charm. These long, straight stretches are lined with deciduous robinia or “black locust” trees that are accented by round boughs of mistletoe, an invasive species that acts like a parasite on the trees where it hangs. After several hours following muddy logging roads and being forced to walk along country highways, we made our way into the small hamlet of Wriezen. As we entered the edge of town, cars driving down the highway visibly slowed down so their drivers could gawk at us with confused and angry expressions, utterly confused yet clearly incensed by two men walking with backpacks entering their dorf. Similar to the bus driver, it was hard to tell if the villagers were upset with us because we had broken the rules by sleeping outdoors in nature, or if they merely thought we were vagrants. If that was the case, they clearly weren’t all that perceptive, as we were both fully decked out in expensive outdoor gear (or perhaps the homeless in this area also prefer to wear Patagonia). Regardless, it felt eerily similar to the opening scene of First Blood, and Kirb fully expected a state trooper who looked like Brian Dennehy to show up and tell him that he wasn’t allowed to keep walking into town. These backwater cops were definitely going to make Christoph cut his hair.
When Kirb showed back up at home on Sunday night, cold and tired and worn out after two and a half hours on public transit that only traversed 40 miles/65 km, she asked him if he had fun, and he said that he did, though he wasn’t sure how long it would be until he wanted to do something like that again. If anything, the outing had scratched his itch to get out of the apartment and do something in nature after several months cooped up inside, and sleeping in sub-freezing weather with painfully cold feet had indeed reminded him he was alive and capable of experiencing new sensations. If that was all of the snow he got for the year, he could be happy that he was able to spend a weekend in the wilderness completely enveloped in it.
As it turned out, there was plenty more snow to come. Indeed, 2021 was the year we got a taste of “real winter.” As of this writing in February, we’ve had multiple weekends in a row where the ground has been covered in soft, white powder, and are in the midst of a long, continuous sub-freezing stretch where the entire city has remained blanketed in snow. Our friend Irina posited: “This exceptional snowy weather in Berlin this year is easily explained by the fact that nature wants to help us get through the lockdown without mental damage. I like this idea so much, don‘t even try to tell me I am wrong.”
Walking around in a winter wonderland feels genuinely cleansing after too many months sequestered away indoors. In a strange, duplicitous way, the snowy days feel similar to the campfire on that freezing night in the woods. The fire dried our clothes and refreshed our tired bodies; the snowy winter has invigorated our senses and helped soothe our tired psyches. And while we’re not exactly jumping at the opportunity to go and sleep outside in it anytime soon, we’re glad that “real winter” finally showed up at a time that has allowed us to appreciate it in ways we never expected.