There’s an aspect of solo travel that subconsciously ties whatever you’re reading at the time to the context of your trip. With nobody else to talk to, you naturally think about what you’re reading. It’s strange. Years after I read a book, I might entirely forget what happened in the novel but I always remember the context in which I read it. There’s plenty of books that I’ve read that I couldn’t name any of the characters or plot points, but I’ll forever associate the idea of beach or DMV or hungover to how I felt while reading it.
Thus, the Twenty Days of Turin will be linked in perpetuity with the two days I spent in Bonn, Germany. It’s a book that takes place in Turin, Italy and I read it in the birthplace of Beethoven. As far as I’m aware, there’s no connection between Turin and Beethoven, but these two have somehow become linked. I read the book in museums about music, on a hike up Drachenfalls, and sitting in an old hunting lodge in the middle of a forest. For the latter location, I was sweaty and the gnats joined me as I lunched there, probably because I’d come from climbing a slug-covered mountain and smelled quite delicious to them. I finished the book drinking beer and watching the rain rolling in over the valley and thinking about Covid, which is still in the air and mutating but we try to think it might still dissipate and leave us with a sunny, stress-free valley someday soon.
I didn’t know it then, but those very rains would lead to the death of over a hundred Germans a week later, for the valley some twenty miles off would suffer from one of the worst floods Germany had seen in a century. And there I was watching the distant rains with my chin in my hand and the book sat atop a beer ring stain, hoping to God the restaurant took credit.
As for Bonn, it is a pretty little city right along the Rhine. The train to get there follows valleys and vineyards up the coast and there is something very lonely and isolated about the towns that dot the river. They’re squeezed up against the shore and can only cut back two to five streets until the incline is too sharp to continue to build. Bonn managed a city due to its being in a valley dip, but the town I went to for the hike, Koenigswinter, fell into that cramped town model. I read a dirty old plaque that said Koenigswinter used to be a tourist spot with donkeys, casinos, and that a dragon had once lived in the mountains. Now, they sell antiques in Sunday market fair with their church bells going and their recently re-opened shop fronts are repainted. I walked through it with my backpack up into the woods, until the town disappeared entirely and there was only forest with slugs and snails, the smell of rain, and the clanging church bell far below.
I thought about it a lot on that hike, but there isn’t really a theme that connects the book to Bonn, except maybe one feeling I got at the Modern Art Museum. They had a room in an exhibit called Sound and Silence that you could walk in alone and you’d turn the corner, only to see utter darkness. The walls were lined with black foam that absorbed all light and you faced a hallway which gave no indication into how far it went. There was a speaker overhead whispering ASMR-esque sounds and I stepped forward into utter darkness, only to glance over my shoulder and see the lighted corner. Yet the more I stepped, the more the darkness surrounded me, until I was blind and walked with my hands out, my palms bumping into the soft foam wall and the speaker mouthing sounds like I was in their throat. It was a sudden blindness I wasn’t expecting and I was alone with only strange sounds. But if I just looked over my shoulder, there was the light and the exit. There was the hand sanitizer unceremoniously placed at the entrance that was near empty from all the use. There was the fountain outside that created an ever-changing maze with walls of water, that families took turns running through and a twenty-something sat on a van and sketched them as they screamed with delight when suddenly shot through with a jet of water.
And I thought, this is summer. I could still feel the hand sanitizer dried to my hands and I watched the rain come that night, happy that it would help me sleep and unaware that the rivers were rising all the time and soon, so very soon, that the water would spill over.
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