The day started with a big disappointment. I just found a tremendous hole in my alpaca jacket which has served me so well since February. I must have been careless while packing it in my bag. Be more careful while packing.)
Since Saturday I am in the state of Thüringen, near Berga, at Toril's Rocky Mountain horse farm. Quite interesting place. Many things to say.
Thüringen is in the former east Germany, quite in the middle of the country, surrounded by five states, including Bavaria and Saxony. The capital is Erfurt, which had been an important stop on the trade route with Asia in the middle ages. It also homes Weimar, where Goethe and Schiller had lived. In size and population density, the state is one of the smallest of the country. Because of its big forests, it is called the "Germany's green heart". When I traveled across Germany's cities a few years ago, Erfurt and Weimar had been my favorites. Small, town-like, nice atmosphere.
Toril is from the Netherlands. There she taught animal behavior for several years to students learning to train animals for people care. She also bred dogs and horses, and dreamed of having a more extensive horse farm one day. She never thought that she would fulfill her dream before she retired, but then some day a friend told her about this incredible offer: 20 000 euros for a huge farm house and barn, in the middle of the countryside, in beautiful (and apparently, sunny) Thüringen. In the Netherlands, she says, "you have to be a millionaire" to afford a farm. For this reason the Dutch who want to have a farm usually migrate to more welcoming lands: France, East Germany, Canada ("in Canada, you can buy hundreds of hectares of land for the price of a house in the Netherlands..."). So Toril didn't think much more than twice, and bought the farm, thinking that she would renovate it and perhaps move in later on. But within the first year she loved it so much that she quit her job and moved in, together with her three year old son and horses.
Her horse breed is the Rocky Mountain. Originally from Kentucky, it is a gaited horse (i.e., I learned, which can do a fourth speed, between trot and gallop, smooth and more comfortable over long distances). She came across this breed because of this peculiarity, which she first encountered in another breed, and fell in love with. So she searched for other gaited horses, but it turns out that gaited breeds in Europe have a fussy temper, and she also wanted a peaceful, easy-going horse. Her search for the good combination brought her to Kentucky in the States, and to the Rocky Mountain breed.
I must say that indeed these horses are incredibly beautiful and loving. Here are sixteen of them: two stallions, and I think six foals and the rest of them are mares. The coat color varies between sand and dark, almost black, usually with blond to white mane and tail. The nose is straight. The horse is rather small, pony-like, and extremely elegant. Most of them are incredibly sweet and quiet, and have nothing of the nervousness that I usually know from horses. They come to you, smell you, enjoy being pet, look at you with their inquisitive, sometimes sad looking eyes. It is hard not to fall in love with them.
But gosh, how much shit can a horse shit. For the first few days they were all in the pasture, and Toril said this was a holiday for her, because she didn't have to take care of cleaning the stable. Now I understand what she meant. Yesterday we brought a few mares and their foals back to the stables, because we shall train the foals a little, and because it was raining for the last few days and Toril didn't want the foals to stay wet and cold for so long. (In the wild, says Toril, they would have more shelter than they do in the pasture. Also, in the wild, a good part of them would not survive through the Winter. It was quite a journey to take these few mares out of the pasture, without having the others follow, under the wet and cold rain, but it was so beautiful to walk with these horses, on the road between the pasture and the house, that I thought it made it all worth being so wet and cold.) And, since yesterday afternoon, I have shoveled five carts of horse manure out of the stables. I keep thinking how great this manure would be for a gardener. But Toril said that there aren't many gardeners in the area. Someone came once to pick some up, but it didn't suffice. The manure keeps on piling up behind the barn. I wonder how she will deal with it eventually. The issue is perhaps not so pressing for her, as in fact she aims at keeping the horses on pastures as much as possible.
***
How Toril got the pasture that she now uses is an amazing story in itself.
It turns out that back in the communist times, the region used to be intensively mined for uranium by the Russians, and thereby quite destroyed. Now the German government tries to rehabilitate the area. The soil was not greatly contaminated but anyway they covered it everywhere with plastic sheets, and ten to twenty meters high of sand. Now they try to regrow vegetation on top of this soil. Because the water doesn't drain they have big erosion problems, and drainage canals and lakes have to be built. Water quality must be monitored. All day long one can hear the tractors coming and going on the road, transporting sand everywhere. It's taking decades to do all this. But eventually they want to turn the area into a nature reserve park.
So at first Toril was here with her horses, but no land, and was looking for land. Eventually the city council learned that, and offered her a few hectares on the rehabilitated area, a few hundred meters away from her house, on the verge of the future reserve park. The grass on that piece is too poor for the cows, but perfect for the horses, which requite a poor fodder. The hope is that the horses will manure the soil and till it, making it more fertile for plants to grow back on it. How many horses and for how long one needs, this is still to be found. By now the grass is pretty much all eaten on their pasture, but Toril got lucky again a few weeks ago and was offered another "poor" land, not so far away, about 4 hectares. It needs to be fenced, and I shall be of some use for that.
Now Toril is gone to a meeting with the city council and the hunters. The hunters have been keeping on coming to hunt on her land, and they chase the birds away. Apparently the hunters must have some rights, as they are meeting to discuss the issue with Toril and the city. Toril says she is lucky, because the village people and city council prefers the horses to the hunters. People have been telling Toril that now that the horses are in the pasture, they go walk over there, which they didn't before.
So why did Toril get this house for so cheap, she got to learn after she bought it, from a man who had long gray hair attached in a pony tail, and one single tooth in his mouth. The house is very old. It is built of wood and clay/straw, some brick, and composed of three buildings enclosing a courtyard, which seems to be the standard over here. One house, one barn, and one building where the workers used to live (apparently, which used to include a dance floor!). It was quite nice although in need of work, but came along with truckloads of garbage, and the stables floor with a meter high of dung, which is probably why Toril got of for so cheap - nobody wanted to deal with all this junk, or move in such a dreadful looking place.
So the first few months, Toril spent just getting rid of the garbage, and as she cleaned, the neighbors would come by and relentlessly tell the story of the people who had been here. The man and his wife used to have goats, and he had some talents in renovation and did some nice work on the house, but things went a little sour, the wife had drug problems, and the man became alcoholic, and started to pile up garbage in the house. I forget how they eventually got into needing to sale. The neighbors could not stop telling that story. And those who didn't at first, did after just being asked.
***
In front of the house, between the house and the pasture, is another building farm. It is very big, with two upstairs floors I think. It is for sale. (Toril dreams of somehow getting it and making it into a hotel, although, she is not so sure about the hotel idea. She says, "from far it sounds great, but then, you have to clean all the time, I didn't do six years of study to clean people's shit". As long as it's horse shit, it's fine :-)). Now lives in it only an old couple in their nineties, but it used to home seven families composed of several generations, with a total of forty children.
This state of occupation used to be common for such old big farmhouses, because when the Russians came to mine the region, they sometimes destroyed entire villages, and the homeless people found a new home in these big farmhouses. This is also why one finds in the area such oddities as a green pasture where a village used to stand before, with a panel reminding it as the only remaining memory of the village. Or a church, in the middle of nowhere, with not a single house surrounding it (the story tells that the church has been saved from destruction, because when the Russian man who was in charge of demolishing the village came, he found a lady in tears over a tomb in the cemetery, and for that reason he did not have the heart to put the church down as well).
Besides the destruction from mining, the Russians left here another relict of the communist times in the form of an amazing kindergarten system - in contrast to most of the rest of Germany (the west?), where I am repeatedly told that it is very hard to find a kindergarten place, because anyway the mothers are expected to take care of their children - for the communists, both men and women were expected to work. Toril takes her son to kindergarten from 8:30 to 3:00, five days a week, including a very nice warm meal at midday. The kindergarten is very nice, with a great atmosphere and lots of very friendly teachers, the kids are taught good manners, and both Toril and her son are quite happy with it. Toril had no trouble finding a place, and in fact, they were quite happy to have her son, she said. And for it, she pays about a hundred euros per month, and if she went through the hassle of filling up the pile of paperwork that it requires, she would actually pay nothing for it, as her status of single mom allows her.
***
The people in the area are quite amazed by Toril's sense of initiative, her desire to do things and her ever-flowing ideas. Toril says this is yet another remnant of communism; because people were not allowed to take initiatives, those who had any have left, so that now the region is mostly populated by people who have not much desire to change anything or to do something special...
