Chapter 72 - Winter in Klingenbach

It's mid-March here in Klingenbach, and as I sit here it's snowing again. The winter hasn't been as bad as I feared, but we've had frequent light snows. Actually, I like snow although Bob hates it; he only feels the cold and doesn't appreciate the beauty. Snow changes the village and surrounding fields, easing the severity of the starkness of winter. This softening of the sharp edges gives it a look that I - raised in Texas - have rarely seen. It looks like a holiday card or an old black-and-white movie on late-night TV. The spire of the village church rises above the white roofs, and you might almost imagine Father Joseph Mohr gazing out a garret window in 1816 while writing the poem, "Silent Night." He and the composer, a schoolteacher named Franz Gruber, both lived in Oberndorf, an Austrian village near Salzburg.

Before the winter actually began, we noticed some changes. These wooden snow breaks were installed along the roadsides outside villages around here. Their purpose is to prevent huge snowdrifts from totally blocking the roads. That was certainly a daunting thought for me! Visions of the village totally cut off by deep snow darted through my head.


Notice the pole alongside the road. Up and down the roads they attached these two-meter poles topped by reflectors on top of the short reflector poles. So I asked myself after seeing these snowbreaks and tall poles, how much snow did they expect, for heaven's sake? Blizzards and avalanches?


We had been told several times that this part of Austria didn't get much snow. So why the extreme preparations? A few years ago they had so much snow in these parts they had to call out the army to shovel off roofs to prevent collapses. So I guess it's better safe than sorry, but it kind of freaked us out! At any rate, we haven't had that much snow this winter. The most was about four or five inches in late January which is nothing compared to what some areas of the U.S. had this winter.

So here are some pictures of the snows we've had. These are out our front window.






This is snow, not rain. I was trying to do something arty with the camera.


These are out our back windows.








This is the village from one of the nearby hills. I like this view of snow-covered roofs.


So if you'd don't have the snow softening the harshness of winter, you get to look at everything looking so brown and dead.








If you look closely at this picture, you can see smoke wafting through the air of this pretty village. A lot of people here still heat their homes with wood stoves. You see huge piles of chopped firewood in yards and in areas alongside the roads outside the village. Smoke sometimes fills the air from all the wood stoves which certainly doesn't enhance the purity of the air. It has an acrid unpleasant odor, much different from the whiffs we'd occasionally get from neighborhood fireplaces during cold spells back home.


It certainly seems like such a contradiction; they're supposedly so concerned about the environment and have all these rules and regulations on so many things like homes, cars, businesses, trash, etc. Austria is ostensibly in the vanguard of the green movement in Europe. They pride themselves on their attention to the environment - which is why we have five different trash cans in our flat (plastic, paper, garbage, metal, glass), and it takes a year (literally) to build even a small house because of all the environmental restrictions. But they ignore the quality of the air they breathe. I could write reams about smoke-filled rooms here where even babies and small children inhale masses of secondhand smoke, but then that's another story.

So that's winter in the vineyard country of Austria. I'm ready for spring!