An alternative hill walk

Just follow paths and trails you don’t know. Where does that lead to? Maybe it is an easier route to reach the top, walk over the summit from a different angle... Is what I must have thought that day when I decided to follow a not so promising path that ended in the fields.

But it was late Winter, even if the sky looks Spring on the pictures, and no crops where planted yet; just some thick winterish grass, soft and spongy under my boots. I turned and overlooked the valley where I came from: a group of houses already far away, that I just past on the trail that I walked many times before.

A fence, and the slow climbing path covered in shades; the sun is still low at this time of the year. Trees without leaves, in spite of the clear blue and cloudless sky. It is warm, and climbing a sweaty job; but it is all worth it, seeing the hill in a different perspective.

I cross the border many times, as a jig-saw walking from the Netherlands to Belgium and back, but all the same land: Limburg, as borders are never made by the people who live here, but by those who know better. For economic reasons; a bit for Germany, some for Holland and the rest kept for Belgium; so they all had Cole and marl. What the inhabitants thought, that they divided families, the decisionmakers could not care less... History is made by those who profit from it, and has nothing to do with human needs or feelings.

Some spots are still wet. Winter water stands in small pools, as shallow ponds marking the path and make it muddy to find my way uphill. But who cares? Be grateful for this early Spring, and don’t think about the consequences of the climate change. It only spoils what can be good.

Already for weeks I’m looking for a stick to help me climbing, but even in a touristic town, situated in a valley between hills I can find none. As if they don’t exist anymore. Just gone! To little money involved for an economic event, I guess. That is what frightens me: the measuring of all in terms of capital, in terms of profit; because I know that cannot last for ever. This economic system will grow to death at the end. There is not such as endless; it is a law of nature that everything has to end...

I pass a root-cellar, caught in shades, lightened by the sun: some dark, some bright; a picture for a painter, a study in the landscape. It is wired; so no-one steels the roots? One does not even need a special pair of scissors to cut through. All those younger then me can jump over; that is said: if they are interested in roots of course.

Sheep on a dry moor, yellow in the bright daylight. Yellow of marl, the main ingredient where this land is made of. A lot of chalk in the soil, but also loess as a rich greasy deck that covers as a top layer. It is fertile land, good land, and yet most of the farmers are gone. Everyone wants a job in the service-industry today, but what will we eat tomorrow?

The sheep are not aware, they just try to graze outside the covered area; their slim heads through the fence, through the wire grazing the green. They don’t care, and I pick as many as I can and throw it over the fence. It seems as if they look grateful up to me. In return I take some pictures, and they don’t care less...

To be continued…