When the traffic of the city fails to find its echo in the current of the Bächle, the residents of Freiburg—to make up for its lapse—increase their pace, coming as close as they ever will to hurrying. For some, it’s the sign to pick up and leave, on excursions to real cities, perhaps, or simply to the outskirts. An hour outside of town, in the heart of the Black Forest, the houses the people of the Schauinsland live in have rooms attached for curing every kind of meat, roofs that touch the ground, and ceilings built for little people, whose complexions are like ashtrays, their smiles the size and shape of bratwurst.

I loathe the leader of the hike, an awful Bavarian Hausfrau, bitter before her time; I jump every time I find myself next to her; at one point, I knock what looks like a medieval torture device from the wall. It may just have been a really grim scythe. You can’t spend too much time in a smokehouse, they say, or you’ll go blind. And look like a sausage, apparently. The bull with a bell around its neck runs to and fro, destined to be thought of by the rest of the herd as the asshole of the cows, I think, the ruckus it makes only perpetuating itself.

The fog comes quickly, arriving in clouds, engulfing the hikers, and moves faster, so that it gets mistaken for wind, and it always seems to be followed by hail, sleet, and snow, which sting the face, freeze the hands, and yet melt upon touching the ground, flowing down the road in streams that seem to mock the dormant Bächle.

All the photos I take won't amount to anything, I think, as I keep snapping, because you can’t photograph what you can’t see, and I haven’t had time to see the place; all I see are attributes of landscapes that are familiar to me in a place that, on the other hand, is not; where, it seems, the people could only exist in paintings by Grosz; cows moo differently; wind is visible; and blizzards might, depending on their mood, result not in the possibility of skiing but in floods.