GR5 - Day 29 - Remembrance

13.05
I wake from a deep sleep in my tent filled with condensation. Ah, grassy riverside campsites. After good coffee and good conversation warming up in the main building, I head out from Rothau and uphill. Uphill means +700m to Struthof concentration camp. On the walk up, a series of panels relate 'life' in the camp and I grow wary. Trying to radiate calm and handle weird emotions while going uphill is not efficient walking. It's strangely sunny and quiet when I get up there, schoolbuses alight and children spill out next to the old gas chamber.

Onwards, to 1000m. There's a moment of lightheadedness on the climb up to Champ du Messin : because I just ate? Or haven't eaten enough? Too fast on the way up? Or did I cross a patch of heavy feeling, mine or older, living in this toilful forest? Hard to say anymore. I'm always slightly hungry although since food also means pause or reward, it coud be entirely in my head. I crunch some trail mix, slip my mittens back on, and slow down on the climb.

Once I reach the crest, it's about four hours of gentle walk at 1000m up, between trees, with the occasional vista. East of the crest, the 'Ancienne Metairie' frames the hills flowing down into the Strasbourg plain. Further east, behind the Rhine, rise the high hills of the Black Forest, higher than the northern Vosges. I get these informations from a couple of hiking pensioners, who spend time recommending I hike the southern part of the Vosges - luckily that's exactly where I'm headed. Onwards and the forest is full of schoolchildren (where are the witch, the ogre, the wolf?), up to the huge open field of Champ du Feu. I can see the pair of Donons, my whole path, these last 40K.

I cross paths with Franz Jan again and it gets me thinking about all the lone hikers who chose to walk their own path, those who cross yours and wander on. I'm glad to be meeting with people for real in a couple of days. Still, it feels good knowing that at least one other is moving on the same track, same rhythm. Are there others right by, a day ahead, a day behind, so close we'll never meet?

In the afternoon I head down, down, running in a trance through the shadowspanned woods, when the path throws me with a roar at the foot of the magnificent Andlau waterfall. Washing like catharsis / everything away.