Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris, 23 November–14 December 1974

by Werner Herzog

A ladies’ bicycle, nearly brand new, was thrown into a brook; it occupied my thoughts for quite some time. A crime? The scene of a fight? Something provincial-sultry-dramatic has taken place here, I suspect. A bench painted red is half-covered with water. A cat has jumped up on the lantern above the front door of a house and doesn’t dare move any further, feeling that she is too high above the ground. She gently sways with the lantern in the wind. The recent storm, so the newspaper says, had hurricane winds of up to one hundred miles per hour in the Swabian Alb and peak gusts exceeding eighty miles per hour on the Feldberg. Now it’s much milder, veiled by clouds, like late autumn, wet, dripping water everywhere, drooping clouds, sticky grass. I saw pigs beneath some apple trees, no grass there any more, just a swamp, and the gigantic mother sows very carefully lifted one foot from the sloshy morass, then set it very softly back again and sank on their bellies as before. I quench my thirst by drinking from rivulets that flow across the meadows. Left turn in Biederbach, therefore westward; later somehow over the mountains. 1:30 p.m.