Winter In The Hinterland New post Warp speed in a snowsuit

There was exactly one streetlamp on the sledding hill, and it hummed. A deep yellowish-orange thing perched at the top, right next to Church Road, buzzing away like a wasp trapped in a jam jar (most likely a sodium-vapor lamp; half of 90s Germany glowed in that same ≈589 nanometers of orange). Hold on to that aggressively-average lamp – I’ll get back to it, because it’s the actual reason this whole thing got written down, somehow.

First, the hill.

The village I grew up in stretches across the flank of a hill in the Bavarian hinterland east of Munich, and near its center, along a gravel road heading toward the town’s church, creatively called Church Road, there was a steeper, undeveloped slope that the grown-ups, with the ruthless logic of rural naming, called Church Hill (no comment). We kids didn’t; to us it was Schlittenhügel (sledding hill), officially, and from the first real snowfall of every winter until the last gray slush it was the center of the universe for every kid from the village and the hamlets around it, from kindergarten all the way up to the end of elementary school.

The slope ran ≈70 meters from top to bottom and dropped ≈15 meters along the way – ≈16.6 degrees, or a ≈30% grade, which to a seven-year-old on a wooden sled is more or less the north face of the Eiger. Right across the middle of the slope ran a tiny, ice-cold trickle of water springing directly from the hill, cutting it in two (remember the trickle; it matters later). And we were out there in every weather the Alpine foothills could throw at us: sunshine, light snow, fog, heavy snowfall, and above all those gloomy, misty late afternoons when the daylight quietly gave up around four.

Our sleds weren’t plastic: my siblings and I had the old wooden kind, a slatted wooden seat on iron runners with a thick rope tied to the front, massive and heavy and frankly built for an adult, which turned every trip uphill into a cardio session of its own – especially under the full winter stack of T-shirt, pullover, snowsuit, boots, hat, scarf and gloves. By the time we reached the top we were steaming like dumplings.

Up there came the ritual: dig a lump of wax out of the snowsuit pocket and rub it into the runners, the more the better, the more the faster. And it wasn’t only about speed, either: those iron runners rusted like nobody’s business, so a sled that skipped its waxing left a rusty-brown streak all the way down the slope, as if a herd of reindeer with a serious digestive problem had stampeded across it; nobody wanted to be that kid. So: waxing, waxing, waxing.

Then you pushed, ran after it, threw yourself on and hoped for the best. Steering a wooden sled is less a skill than a polite suggestion – you aim, the sled considers your request, and then you either make it down without plowing into another kid or you eat snow face-first. At the bottom ran another road, and on the fast days you simply couldn’t stop before it, so you crossed it, sliding. Back then the roads stayed buried under snow for days, more slippery than grippy, which made the road less of a border and more of a risky bonus level.

And then there was the trickle: in some spots we bridged it with wooden planks, packed snow on top and rode straight across; in others we built ramps – and jumped it. Heavy snowfall, the half-dark of a German winter evening, 10 to 20 other kids yelling and giggling and screaming all around, and you, airborne, half a meter above a tiny creek on a slab of wood and iron, for one endless second before slamming hard into the snow or onto the ice somewhere below. I still don’t have a better word for that feeling than joy, the pure, undiluted, mouth-full-of-snow kind. Holla die Waldfee!

Ice, btw, was the other keyword. Over a few days the runs packed down and glazed over all on their own, and because that obviously wasn’t fast enough, we hauled buckets of water up in the evening (since, after all, it was conveniently already there), watered the entire slope and let it freeze overnight. Next morning: a fully iced hill – with extra slipperiness on top if it had kept snowing onto the ice during the night. We fell constantly; my arms and legs spent those winters more blue than skin-colored.

And the grown-ups? There were barely any older people around; hardly ever a parent, not even teenagers. We were kids, and kids were supposed to play outside, be loud, collect bruises and have fun, so we did, with a kind of freedom that feels almost made-up from where I’m sitting now. This was the mid-90s in a Bavarian village that already ran a few years behind the rest of the country (and was weirdly at peace with it). I checked the records, too: those winters really were snowy, with up to ≈40 centimeters on some days. Of course, that felt like a meter and more from a child’s perspective. Snow, freedom, no parents, one hill and every kid within walking distance – that was the whole formula.

The lamp

In southern Germany it gets dark early in winter; by four the light is going, and with it every kid on the hill. Almost every kid. On some evenings I stayed – not on any evening, only on the ones with real snowfall, not the light, polite kind but the heavy kind, big flakes coming down so thick that the world just switches itself off.

Heavy snowfall cancels everything. The lit living-room windows, the Christmas lights, the distant lanterns, the headlights from the main road: gone, swallowed whole. Same with sound – no kids, no cars, no dog barking three farms over, nothing left but the soft, whispering rustle of snow landing on snow, and that lamp, humming away in its little cone of orange.

So I’d stand right underneath it, tip my head all the way back and stare up into the void – or rather into the snowflakes coming straight down at my face out of the black, lit orange only for their last few meters. Hundreds – no, thousands, no, tens of thousands of little icy crystals, every single one of them heading for my eyes. And after a few seconds, every time, the switch flipped: the snow stopped falling toward me, and I was flying through it, up and out into the dark at warp speed. It was the Flying Through Space screensaver from our Windows 95 PC at home, just a thousand times more real, with frostbite as a bonus feature.

Perception researchers call it vection: the illusion of self-motion your brain builds when a large part of your visual field moves in one direction, the same glitch that convinces you your train is pulling out of the station when it’s actually the one on the next platform. Fill your whole field of view with white dots streaming at you, black out everything else, and the brain does the math backwards – if the world is coming at me, I must be the one moving. Knowing all that now changes absolutely nothing about how astonishing it felt then.

It was so strong that I sometimes lost my balance and keeled over backwards into the snow, because my body had decided we were going up, and up doesn’t need legs. I lost track of where I was, of who I was, of the cold creeping in through every layer. I stood there for half an hour at least, sometimes longer, until I was shaking and frozen to the bone – T-shirt, pullover and snowsuit be damned – and more than once I paid for it with a cold.

Sometimes my mom came out looking for me and called my name across the neighborhood. I never heard her, not once; she had to walk across the streets and all the way up, grab me by the shoulders and shake me before I came back down to Earth – or rather back out of space, onto a hill in Bavaria, as one very cold and very confused kid. I don’t remember which winters it was, or how many times. I only know it happened again and again, over several years, and that it never once failed to work.

What’s left of the hill

Church Road is paved now, the hill is built up, the trickle has disappeared into a pipe, and every street in the village is lit by bright white LEDs that leave no corner of the night alone; serious snow hasn’t fallen there in more than ten years, with only one excuse.

Things weren’t better back then, though – I’ll take 2026 over those prehistoric 90s any day, thank you very much – and the computer didn’t kill anything, either; if anything it handed me the picture. The magic is still around, all over the place, all around us, I’m convinced of that. What changed is how hard it’s gotten to slow down far enough to let it happen. Partly because I’m simply not a child anymore (outside), and partly because of the thing in my pocket that constantly draws me with a better offer for my attention than falling snow ever made. Plus, um, there’s the small matter of Sài Gòn, where the forecast hasn’t mentioned snow in, well, recorded history.

But if I ever stand in real snowfall again, I know exactly what I’ll do. I’ll walk away from the crowd, find a streetlamp a little off to the side – bright white LED, fine, it’ll have to do – stand right underneath it, tip my head back and wait a few seconds for the snow to stop falling and start flying.

It’ll happen again – I’m sure of it.