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The bear flutters north.
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This summer there was extreme continuous rain and flooding. In Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia alone, more than 160 people died and thousands are homeless. Hundreds of buildings have been torn away. Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia also fought with masses of water. “The floods in Bavaria have caused damage of around 300 million euros in the past weeks and months,” I heard on Bavarian radio. This message reminds me of a storm that we only experienced on Lechrain.
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You mustn’t imagine a thunderstorm there as if the angels were bowling. Two electricity meters had been knocked out in the villa, and we found them scorched on the floor in the hallway in the middle of broken glass after the impact. While I was working upstairs in the office, the answering machine next to me exploded. Barbara caught it cooking, a blue lightning bolt popped out of the oven, and in my mother’s room it pulled out of the socket. And everywhere it stank of sulfur, because when electricity is discharged, oxygen burns and sulfur dioxide releases sulfur dioxide. We met in the hallway, everyone shouted: “I just got the lightning …!” Apart from the shock, nothing happened to us, however, six electrical devices were over due to the overvoltage. And not only with us! In the middle of the village washing machines, refrigerators, televisions had been caught, the computers of the community, the district savings bank and our Mac were broken.
Blitzeinschlag. Foto: U.S. Air Force photo by Edward Aspera Jr.
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The two destroyed meters replaced the power station, nevertheless the light on the upper floor was no longer on. The red-faced electrician Riegele first tried to find this defect in the line with measuring devices – they showed nothing. Finally he said: “Yes, I have to listen amol where it sizzles.” And then he always ran his red ear along the wall, and halfway up the stairs he said with sparkling eyes: “It sizzles!” He picked up the chisel, knocked open the wall. I warned him: “You haven’t turned off the power! You haven’t turned off the power!” If you hit the cable with the iron … ”“ Oh, ”he said,“ I have to work on the living, but I can’t see where it’s sizzling. ”He knocked and knocked until the line was exposed. And in fact it sparked like a sparkler – witschju, witschju!
I had done this damage myself. When we hung up pictures in the stairwell after moving in, I had slightly touched the power cable with a nail. The fuse had blown, but after I flipped its switch, the light was on again and I didn’t care. But now the lightning bolt had shot through the line and the cable burned through at the defective point. The red-headed Riegele laughed at my mishap with the nail, fumbled the wires with a luster clamp and set a can.
Then there was the usual coffee, and then these people from Allgäu have a seat – he sat at the table for two hours, telling about his life. Of course, he had also seized the opportunity and fought on the front line as a disaster electrician, with the troops of the Technical Relief Organization he had been in the Caucasus, Turkey and other earthquake regions. He fit in there, this master of the makeshift! I am convinced that he was a sought-after man there who bridged everything that could only be bridged.
Electricity was to him what paper is to us. He only laughed because we had never seen lightning strike before. “It never occurred to me before that lightning could have wiped out our entire family,” I said. And immediately he went one better: his grandmother used crutches because of her osteoarthritis, so she could hardly move, but still cooked for the family. One day she was standing by the coal stove at noon, stirring the pots, while a violent thunderstorm was raging. Little Sepp was meanwhile sitting at the kitchen table doing homework. “Un do,” said Riegele, “hoat it an Wusch gemm!” The lightning bolt went through the chimney into the stove, the iron pan rings flew through the kitchen, a cloud of soot and ash swirled up and it stank of sulfur. Grandma threw away her crutches, ran out of the house like a young girl and shouted: “Dea Deifi! Dea Deifi! “
“It’s all half as bad”, the electrician explained, “The only thing that matters is knowing how to get around if you are caught by a thunderstorm in the open.” around our living room and explained in an almost perfect high German that was appropriate to the seriousness of the matter: “You can’t walk in a thunderstorm, you always have to squeeze your legs tightly and cross your arms across your chest, crouch a little and then bounce, bounce, bounce! ”And he demanded that we imitate this exercise immediately.
»A good recipe for authors«, I said when Riegele left, »you have to ‘tune the reader so elastic that he stands on tiptoe’. That’s Nietzsche’s advice for writers. “” Nietzsche, if you like, “said Barbara,” but don’t forget Master Riegele’s thunderstorm rule, above all we have to make the readers jump, and have fun! “
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This story appeared in ›Schröder tells: Languages spoken‹ in March Desktop Verlag. Jörg Schröder and Barbara Kalender said that the transcription of the sound recordings was edited by both authors.
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BK / JS