Text: Gong Tieying
When it comes to the Black Forest in Europe, it is mainly two places. One is the 8.5-square-kilometer Braunje Forest between the Old Quarter of Paris and the New District of La Défense, France. The other is a gentle plateau in baden-Württemberg, located in the southwest corner of Germany and bordering France and Switzerland, which is about 160 kilometers long from north to south, about 40 kilometers wide from east to west, and has a total area of more than 6,000 square kilometers of forest mountains. It is full of towering fir trees, and from a high place, this layered dense forest looks like a boundless black curtain, so people call it the Black Forest.
Germany's Black Forest is a favorite of people in nearby countries! It is also a world-famous tourist destination. There is fresh air; lakes where water can be drunk; hot springs where healing water can be cured; many beautiful towns; it is also the home of the famous German writer Hesse; and there are many increasingly rare industries: glassblowing, organ making, iron and tanning, and the handmade and painted cedar cuckoo clock is world-famous; it also produces famous delicacies: Black Forest cherry cake, Black Forest ham. It has become a summer resort for Germans to escape the summer and take a tourist holiday! As someone who spends all day in the city with cement buildings, who wouldn't want to go to nature and experience the joy of returning to nature? Because people come from nature after all!
It is not easy for us to go there.
But here comes the opportunity.
Several of the countries we visited to Europe that year were on the edge of the Black Forest. It is impossible to visit on official business, so there is no chance to go to those beautiful attractions, and it is said that the most attractive place there is Swanstein Castle, which we have no chance to see. However, although those attractions were not visited, we had the opportunity to stay in the city near the Black Forest and pass through the Black Forest by car, so we still felt the charm and intoxicating atmosphere of the wild black forest!
Neuschwanstein Castle is a symbol of Germany, and because it is the prototype of Disney Castle, it is also called Cinderella Castle.
Soon after we left Freiburg im Breisgau and took the highway, the Black Forest appeared before our eyes! At this time, the road was lined with mountains, and our car was passing through the valley. There are no houses or people on the slopes on both sides, and they are all densely covered with trees. Probably because the altitude of our location was not high enough at that time, it was not so much through the Black Forest as it was through the colorful forest! There are very few black and green fir trees on the mountain, and one after another is a broad-leaved tree. It was late autumn, and the frost-beaten leaves were colorful, with dazzling reds; translucent golden yellows; and bright apricot yellows. Some of the trees are red, some are yellow, and some are dark green mixed with a few fir trees in a bright yellow! It's all about showing you the variety of life. As the road surface gradually rises, the color of the forest is also becoming single, the red is gradually less, the yellow is gradually less, the darker the green, the higher it is, the darker the color of the tree, until it becomes a black and green. At this time, if the car drives up a high slope and looks down from above, this forest is indeed like an endless black curtain, this is the authentic black forest!
It may be a good time for vacation, so there are very few cars on this highway through the Black Forest, and the Germans seem to be open-minded, deliberately letting us people from the Far East feel the charm of their Black Forest. Yes, we were indeed mesmerized by the beautiful scenery of the Black Forest. At this time, no one in our car spoke, just now or talking about the wind in the carriage has become extremely quiet at this moment, some look at the scenery outside the car window, constantly silently reading, this route is too good! It's much better to take a car than to fly!
Yes, after all, human beings came out of the forest, no matter how happy you live in a few hundred square meters of reinforced concrete buildings, once you come into contact with the original dense forest, your illusion of a good life will collapse in an instant, because in the genetic genes of human beings, every "ring of the year" of human evolution is recorded, and these genetic codes are waiting for a time to wake you up! Our earliest life was in the sea, so the child grew in the amniotic fluid at the beginning of development; we first crawled, so the child was born on all fours; our ancestors learned to stand, so the child must repeat this process forever! After that, we humans thought we had become great, first by building castles, city walls, and later by enclosing ourselves in the urban home of reinforced concrete, and we ordered "Three mountains and five mountains to open the road, I am coming!" We build land around the sea, we destroy forests and cultivate, we want to transform nature, we want "man to win the heavens", the good times when people live in harmony with nature in the dense forest have long been forgotten by people, although nature has warned arrogant people again and again, but people always turn a deaf ear! As Heidegger, who meditated in the Black Forest, said, man's conquest of the earth was in fact the loss of man's own foundation! As if echoing with the genetic code in the body, at this moment, when the aroma of the forest drifts in through the gap of the car, it immediately soaks our cells and suddenly awakens us: this is the most suitable home for human life! No wonder the Germans loved the forest so much!
The forest is intoxicating, and the authentic German cuisine in this dense forest also makes us appreciate it. It was time to eat, but several of the older people in the group still wanted to find a place to eat Chinese food. We recommend that since you are abroad, you should still taste the local flavors! At a highway break, we found some German truck drivers eating at a small restaurant, and the food in front of them was either a large pork knuckle, and some were goulash, which was completely different from the Western food often eaten everywhere in Germany, and the restaurants were full of tempting meat aromas. Because it is not Western food, everyone quickly agreed, and lunch was solved here. Soon, these two dishes according to the gourd painting scoop point came up, each pork knuckle weighed a pound, stewed rotten, there were some steamed potato strips, sauerkraut on the plate, stewed elbow in addition to a little salty, and the taste of the country is very close; beef is a bowl of size, but also stewed rotten, next to a small pot of noodles, is beef mixed noodles. Later, we learned that both of these were authentic German-style meals, and the dish of stewed elbow was called "Spike Hackson" by the Germans; the noodle beef was called "Gulasch".
German cuisine is mainly sour and salty, and the seasoning is relatively strong.
Looking out over Lake Constance
After lunch we set off again, and the car started to slide down the mountain after reaching a high point, at which point the trees on both sides of the road began to thin out, and the towns and villages on the roadside began to increase. Suddenly, a sparkling open water appeared in the far distance to the right of the car, and the driver told us that it was another tourist resort in Germany: Lake Constance. The beauty of Lake Constance is well known to Germans, but to the world, it is hidden in a deep boudoir, and not many people know it. However, on July 1, 2002, a major event that caused a sensation in the world made Lake Constance world-famous.
Lake Constance, also known as Lake Constance, is located at the junction of Switzerland, Austria and Germany and is jointly managed by all three countries.
That night, a tragic collision between two large US and Russian aircraft occurred over the Lake Constance area, killing a total of 71 people on both planes. The crashed Tu-154 aircraft belonged to Russian Bashkir Air, with 12 crew members and 57 passengers on board, 52 of whom were children and teenagers. The children in the plane, from the Bashkir Autonomous Republic of Russia's Ural region, are preparing to go to Barcelona, Spain, to attend a UNESCO-sponsored summer camp. It is said that the children came from a school, were good students who could sing and dance, and they were rewarded for their excellent results in the final exams and went to the United Nations event. Since the June 30 flight failed to catch up, they took a charter flight instead. The charter flight took off from Moscow, stopping briefly in Munich on the way to Barcelona, Spain, while the Colliding Boeing-757 Cargo Plane belonged to DHL and took off from Bahrain via Bergamo, Italy, before flying to Brussels, the capital of Belgium. At the time of the incident, the two planes were flying at an altitude of about 12,000 meters, and the huge fireball formed after the collision illuminated the night sky. Subsequently, two planes crashed near the city of Sigmalingen, and the wreckage of the burning planes was scattered within a 32-kilometre radius around Sigmaringen County, igniting houses, schools and farms on the ground.
Sigmaringen County
The driver told us that according to the newspaper reports at the time, when the two planes entered the air traffic control area in charge of the command center of Zurich Airport in Switzerland, the alarm system was not working properly and could not send a signal outward because the navigation system of the airport command center was undergoing maintenance. In addition, there were two controllers on duty late at night on the 1st, but one of them was resting at the time of the accident. Official regulations clearly stipulate that whenever the collision avoidance warning system fails to function properly, two controllers must be present. Because of this irregularity, 5 minutes after the two planes flew into the Swiss jurisdiction, the command center found that the Tu-154 passenger aircraft was flying at the same altitude as the Boeing 757 cargo aircraft, and the duty officer asked the Tu-154 passenger aircraft to reduce the flight altitude 50 seconds before the collision to avoid collision with the Boeing 757 cargo aircraft. At this time, the tu-154 aircraft automatic early warning system instructed the aircraft to rise, the Russian pilot believed that the ground personnel instructions should prevail, so the aircraft descended; and the automatic warning system installed on the Boeing 757 cargo aircraft found obstacles on the route, reminding the pilot to lower the altitude, so the aircraft also descended, so the two planes collided when they descended rapidly at the same time. Afterwards, the Russian side accused the Swiss command personnel of discovering two planes flying at the same altitude 10 minutes before the collision, but only issued a warning to the Tu-154 aircraft when they were only 50 seconds away from the collision plane, and did not send any warning message to the Boeing aircraft. It is said that the EU's consideration of the air disaster has been protracted since then, and the father of a dead child in Russia can't bear it and kills the Swiss air traffic controller on duty.
At this time, the Black Forest region has long since returned to its original tranquility...
Through the Black Forest, let us experience the unique charm of the Black Forest, the tragedy that occurred next to the Black Forest, those intelligent children who lost their lives for no reason, but also let us feel the impermanence of life!
Grasping the impermanence of life and being kind to the nature on which human beings live is what I feel when I cross the Black Forest!