Abenteuer in der Urwelt

(Adventures in pre-history)

Sometimes people just kinda save your life, y'know?

I don't mean this in the literal sense of someone jumping into the waterhole in which you're drowning, diving deep to free your ankles from the reeds, dragging you to shore and resuscitating you. I mean they save you just by being a) themselves and b) around you at a time when you need it.

I think it happens to all of us at one point or another, and it's certainly happened to me a number of times. Let me give you one example, which occurred six years ago in Moscow, where I lived and worked during my first year as an ESL teacher.

When I arrived in the city, I was allocated a flat which I shared with a complete stranger (and any other 'ESL person' reading this will know exactly how much of a lottery that is!). As it turned out, he was not a fellow English teacher, but a German teacher from the 'Globus' arm of the International House school there. I know "globus" sounds like a mildly embarrassing medical condition, but actually it's the name of their school of international languages.

This guy's name was (and still is) Reinhard, and I was extremely lucky to have drawn him as a flamate – as I appreciated even more after meeting the other male English teachers in Moscow. Quite a few of them* were just awful, having come to Russia either to drink themselves silly, to sleep their way through as much of the local female population as their complete lack of charm would allow, to preach some capitalist creed to the 'ex-commies', or to start fights with Russian guys in bars ... or for other, equally abhorrent reasons. 

Meanwhile, my year in Moscow was the first time I'd lived abroad ... and what a place to start! There were times when it all seemed too much, and I quite seriously thought I was going mad. But it was always sanity-enhancing to get home at night, and find that it really was home. The flat became the 'sanctuary', a place to relax and laugh, cook and eat, drink and talk about lu&e**, and generally to feel sane. So yeah ... have to acknowledge quite a sizeable debt to Mr Reinhard, especially considering what's happened since, with ESL becoming my career and whatnot. He was one of those 'life-saving' people )))

Something else I want to mention here, and it's this: without wishing to cause any offence to people I've known for a long time, I have to say that quite a lot of what happened before Moscow seems kinda vague these days ... as though it were part of some pre-history known only from a partial fossil record.

I mean, of course that's not true of every part of my life. Obviously I remember personal relationships, close friendships, family relations (including those with cats), and lots of stuff about making music and travelling and so forth. But the day-to-day realities of life then – how I spent my working days, what I did on weekends, what things I had in my house, what bills I had to pay, how it felt to be 'me' as I walked down the street on a typical day – a lot of that stuff might as well have taken place in the pre-Cambrian era. So in a way, my little 'Moscow period' was where pre-history ended and history without a prefix began.

You may wonder why I considered it worthwhile mentioning all of this. Well, there's basically one reason. Last night I arrived in Stuttgart, the capital of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany, and waiting for me on the station was my old flatmate Reinhard, who I hadn't seen since he left Moscow six years ago. It was quite a moment, and I wanted to try and give you a sense of it. That's all )))

Reinhard is in fact a Stuttgart native ... or pretty close to being one. He took me for a drive just outside the city today, and showed me "the mountain where I come from" – meaning the one on which he was born (I think) and which he often played on while suffering the condition of extreme smallness known as 'early childhood'. This, I thought, was a reasonably impressive thing to be able to point out to someone through a car window as you speed along a German motorway.

Not much further down the road we passed a small but unmistakable extinct volcano, classically cone-shaped, which Reinhard told me was "where my parents grew up". Once again, not unimpressive.

Almost as much fun as this was a guided tour through some of Stuttgart's better bars the previous evening (though I'm reasonably sure that none of Reinhard's family members were born or grew up in any of the places he took me to). We got a round of applause as we entered the first of them ... which is certainly as good an introduction to a 'bar crawl' as any I've ever had )))

(Actually, an objective observer would probably have attributed this applause to the fact that a band had finished their set just a second before we went inside ... but why allow an objective observer to spoil the moment, when you open the door of a bar and a crowd of people immediately start clapping and cheering? That would just be silly!)

Back to the pretty Baden-Württemberg countryside that I was talking about before: there were essentially two things which drew us out there today. The first was that I love nature documentaries, especially those produced by the BBC Natural History Unit, of which Sir David Attenborough was the pioneer. (I was happy to discover that Reinhard is also a fan, which was great because it meant he was also keen on the excursion.) The second is that, back when I suffered from extreme smallness, I was completely obsessed with dinosaurs.

See, within a few kilometres of 'Mount Reinhard', there's a quarry at a place called Holzmaden. This place is central to a geographical region called the Swabian Jura, which is quite a remarkable area ... partly because it used to be under the ocean, and partly for its geological make-up. I'm a little fuzzy on the exact details, but it seems that layers of shale formed in the Jura over hundreds of millions of years. And as you know if you've handled shale, it deposits in a different way to other kinds of rock. It forms distinct layers which, with the right tools, can be pulled apart quite cleanly.

The other thing about shale is that it tends to expel oxygen from the spaces it wants to occupy. Oxygen causes bones to decay, but if a creature dies and is then covered in shale, sometimes its bones don't get enough oxygen for this process to occur ... and so they are preserved.

In the 18th Century, a German paleontologist started digging up the layers of shale in this area, and he found some truly astounding things. The Swabian Jura subsequently became the origin of many significant dinosaur finds; without the contribution of this area, your brain probably wouldn't contain quite a few of the 'familiar' images of dinosaurs that we all carry around with us. For example, a pretty hefty percentage of all the icthyosaur*** and plesiosaur**** specimens in the world have been found here. So we got our picture of the prehistoric seas largely from the Swabian Jura.

(Fellow dinosaur nerds may be interested to know that the first archaeopteryx skeleton was also found near here in the 1860s. This creature – a major 'missing link' between the existence of reptiles and the later development of birds – helped fuel Darwin's insistence that all species were created by a process of natural selection. It also seems to have made his wacky theory more palatable to others, so it really was a hugely significant find. Archaeopteryx was actually the thing I wanted most to see, but unfortunately it's on display in a different town to the one we went to. Oh well ... next time.)

Anyway, about 200 years after that mad frenzy of discovery subsided, I was born. Then, six or seven years later, I became aware of dinosaurs, and collected as much paraphernalia related to them as my parents would buy me.

Lastly, a further 25-ish years down the track, David Attenborough and his awesomely talented crew made a brilliant documentary series called The Life of Birds, which is still one of the most fascinating things I've ever seen on a TV screen. In this series he talked about archaeopteryx, and also brought to my attention something that other people would confirm later: if you want to see these amazing fossil finds with your own eyes, one of the best places to start is the Swabian Jura, and in particular Holzmaden.

And so, with Reinhard in agreement, there we were.

I must confess I'm usually not that much of a museum person, though I do make exceptions. (I can never pass up the 'oddball' ones, like the Museum of Parasites in Tokyo, or the occasional vast-and-undeniably-fabulous collection like the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.) And though we were only there for about an hour and a half, The Holzmaden Museum of Prehistory definitely makes it onto my list of favourites. The paleontologists' workshops were really great, and in three of the four main display rooms, at least 50% of all the things I saw just blew my mind.

Too many highlights to mention here, but the ammonites were great (Reinhard told me he often used to find them on 'his' mountain), and I loved the details in the skulls and tailbones of the icthyosaurs.

However, in some ways perhaps the best exhibit was an an enormous display of lily fossils, frozen in their ancient form and covering an entire wall. Whereas all the other things we saw here were extraordinary for scientific reasons, this one was difficult not to regard as a work of art, with nature itself holding the brushes.

I would absolutely love to have this thing on my living room wall (though admittedly, I'd need a bigger living room than any I'm ever likely to have!). It would give my eyes an excuse to wander for indefinite periods across the canvas, with my thoughts following. This kind of languid visual and mental 'wandering' is one of the most enjoyable reactions I've ever had to visual art, and it reminds me of Kandinsky's answer to the question "How do you create your paintings?" He answered "I take a line for a walk." 

A lot of my favourite art takes me for that kind of walk ... and here, in Holzmaden, were a bunch of flowers in a swamp doing exactly the same thing. Amazing )))

Ooh, and one more thing: after you've checked out all the exhibits, you can pay a fee and the curators give you some tools and let you loose in the quarry outside the museum, where some of the fossils on display were found. Unfortunately I had a plane to catch and so wasn't able to search for my own archaeopteryx specimen ... but what a cool idea!

So that was my day out in the Swabian Jura, thinking a lot about pre-history – both my own subjective kind, and the actual kind.

Thanks again, Reinhard. See you in another five or six years, in a completely different city, where we'll do a completely different thing. Don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to it already :-)

(* Just want to stress that this doesn't apply to every male teacher I met Russia's capital. Only to, y'know, a significant percentage of them.)

** 'Life, The Universe and Everything' – the title of a novel by Douglas Adams, of whom both Reinhard and myself are big fans.

*** Enormous swimmy-about things that looked kinda like ancient sharks. The "20-foot fish" above is one of them.

**** Those swimming dinosaurs that resemble popular artists' depictions of the Loch Ness Monster.