BEFORE

In love

It went very quickly, falling in love with mountain farming. And it was like that always is with the best things in life: not planned.

In spring 2013 my friend Kathrin and I donated a few days of vacation to Bergbauernhilfe Südtirol and exchanged our office for a stable. I was looking for a way to spend a lot of time in one piece in the mountains, much longer than usual in hiking holidays or mountaineering. It was already clear to me that I was the mountain type and not the sea type. Even when I lived for two years in Hamburg with the Baltic and North Seas practically on my doorstep, I wasn't at Timmendorfer Strand or in Sankt Peter-Ording.

I had two options in mind: I could either go to an alp for a season and change from milking to crap to a farmer's wife, or I could hire in a mountain hut, a kind of alpine club hut. With the excursion to the mountain farm in South Tyrol I wanted to test option A, whereby the mountain farm was not an alp, but at least a farm and at least in the mountains. How was I supposed to know if I was even made for farming? I had already seen many mountain huts from the inside on my tours. But a farm, let alone an alp, never has. Maybe getting up early would annoy me. Maybe I'd get tired, literally, of cleaning up. Maybe I'd be wondering what cow had ridden me.

Kathrin and I landed on a mountain farm at 1,430 metres just below Plose, an organic farm with goats, chickens and a donkey.

"You come from Frankfurt and Cologne," Bauer Arnold greeted us when he picked us up at the train station in Brixen. "And now you're coming to us," he thought out loud.

"Yes, and we can get to it," we tried to convince Arnold on the way up. Half an hour up the mountain we had time to take turns poking questions at it and providing evidence of our drive.

"I hope we can make hay this week, now that I have two helpers," Arnold told us. "But probably the weather won't play along. Then we'll go into the wood!"

That was our cue. We two native Siegerland women absorbed the timber industry with their mother's milk. Well, we rarely liked 35 metre high mountain spruces - neither Kathrin, when she helped her father to make firewood, nor I, when I was there, when Dad and my brothers killed little spruces to build a bridge over the pond on our property. But we could tell of the Haubergswirtschaft, the centuries-old cyclical forest management principle from our homeland. After all.

Just arrived at the farm, we started. Grandpa took the scythe out of the shed to mow all around the house.

"I can do that," I shouted to him, overzealously.

"Can you handle the scythe?" he wanted to know.

"Yes, I know that from home," I replied, trying to make a good impression.

But frankly, I'd never mowed with a scythe before. Not even with a lawnmower. I never actually mowed anything before. Together, yeah, loaded and taken away, that sort of thing. Handyman's work. But mowed? Out of fear for the frogs and certainly also for me, Daddy, who hates lawn mowers as a matter of principle and who puts his life on the good old scythe, never let me get involved. Well, the story is quickly told. Every few meters a fence post stood in my way and the power steering of the scythe was somehow broken. I failed miserably. Wordlessly, my grandfather took the scythe from me, and the grass was mown faster than Kathrin and I could see. Then we scraped it together into piles.

Then we went milking.

"As a child I was often on holiday on a nearby farm here," Kathrin Arnold and I told Arnold, while Arnold showed us the goat stable.

"Did you also milk back then?" our boss wanted to know.

"Sure," Kathrin said, "it's just been a few years."

I'd rather not say anything, because I'd never milked anything either. We listened attentively when Arnold explained to us how his stable worked. There were two areas: the large playpen for the dairy goats and the kindergarten for the offspring. 24 goat ladies were to be milked, six at a time, practically in the milking parlour, so that we did not even have to bend down. Arnold lured the first six into the milking parlour with concentrated feed. "Before we start the milking machine, we must milk briefly by hand. That's how we clean the udder." The teats looked tiny in Arnold's big worker's hands. Carefully I touched a udder for the first time. I came very close to the goat from behind, which concentrated on its concentrated feed. Warm, a little bit leathery, but somehow familiar. 'Not so much different from my own skin, just a little rougher and a little firmer', I thought. While my fingers closed around a teat to elicit a few drops of milk from it, I had to swallow. "Do I hurt the goat? I wonder what she'll think of me if I steal the milk that's for her kids?'

But there wasn't much time to think. Arnold switched on the milking machine and showed us how the milk was led directly from the milking parlour via stainless steel tubes into a cooled tank. From below we were supposed to bring the calyxes up to the teats and then put them over them until they had become stuck. As soon as the hands were free, we went to the next goat. When we had milked the first six, we opened the exit for them and drove them into a waiting area, brought in the next six, gave this concentrate as well and milked them. Kathrin and I grinned at each other. "Cool, right?" I shouted over to her, and we clapped our hands. As soon as we were half an hour in the stable with the animals, we had forgotten the world around us. Cologne, Frankfurt, the trouble in the office, what did it matter? Now it was all about taking care of the animals and doing our job. And suddenly satisfaction germinated in me. At that moment I knew exactly what I was trying to do here - it made sense! And I was filled with the warmth and love of the animals. Yes, I know it must sound strange, because I had only seen most of the goats from behind, and I had mainly dealt with their teats. And goats are not dogs, which align themselves almost selflessly to us humans, quite the opposite. As cuddly as a cat, as stubborn as a child in defiance and as unsteady as the proverbial bumblebee in the ass. And yet I was already deeply touched somewhere inside and was looking forward to the next days. After milking, farmer Arnold showed us the milk tank and his small cheese dairy. "Tomorrow night, you can help me with the cheese," he announced.

Just a few hours we were here now, half a day and a short evening. But my life was about to change. I was about to change. I'd go home as someone else. I was closer to myself here, on this unusual terrain, than in all the last years in Cologne, Hamburg or anywhere else. For some things there would be no more room in my life, for others suddenly the possibility. I had catapulted myself out of a gruelling office routine in the big city and thrown myself into a daily routine that was primarily determined by the animals and the weather. From now on my diary had become unemployed, and I only needed my iPhone as an alarm clock. My new colleagues had four legs and were comparatively easy to handle. Instead of costume or suit I wore blue man, rubber boots and uncombed hair.

The next days on the mountain farm flew by. We collected the chickens' eggs from under their butts, went into the wood with our grandfather, looked over Arnold's shoulder while he was making cheese, tore down the old henhouse and saved the fawns from the motor mower. We sold the homemade organic products at the weekly market and helped our host family with the bookkeeping. We cooked egg cheese from the South Tyrolean mountain eggs from the Siegerland and stuffed chocolate bars into ourselves because we couldn't keep up with the calorie supply. We got dirty, sweated out all pores and slept like stones. We did what we had to do, and when we were done with one job, our boss gave us another one. We've moved as much as we've ever moved before in our lives. We were proud - and happy!

And me, I had caught fire. Suddenly everything was different! Because now it was clear to me that my torments in the office were finally over. I myself had it in my hands to finish it! Because I would set my sails again! I was less shocked that I had forgotten, but simply relieved because I had rediscovered it. With farmer Arnold it was obviously not only my arms and legs that had become stronger. No, the few days of hard work had sharpened my eyes and raised my will. "Ätschibätschi", my inner child shouted to me now more and more frequently when I was angry in the office, "but I can pull a tree out of the forest with the winch and climb mountains three and a half thousand metres high on my own! And if I could do that, I could do a lot more. Say no, for example. Or stop. Or yes. Or quit.

So with option A, I had hit the mark. Nevertheless, I wanted to secure myself and take a closer look at the second solution idea, a season in a mountain hut. For the summer I booked an alpine tour through the Ötztal Alps, which took our group to several three thousand meter peaks. Surrounded by rock and ice I was fully in my element. As much as I love the forest, above the tree line is also my territory. The clear, cold air, the rich emptiness and the feeling of having made it up here on my own made my heart jump. But after the third evening in a mountain hut I knew: I would not want to work in a mountain hut. I could also cook, serve, clean and make beds in the city. But being outside every day, in wind and weather, sun and snow, experiencing my beloved mountains with skin and hair, losing myself in the fog, sighing at cow bellies and falling asleep in the smell of hay, I could only do that on the alp.

Back in Cologne I dreamed big from now on. For a long time now I wasn't just interested in spending a summer in the mountains....