This post is about a 11km walk from Kreuzbuche to Bad Nenndorf. I walk through the Deister forest, and I finally make it home.

I wake up in my last camping spot on The Longest Way. It is located at an intersection in the middle of the forest called Kreuzbuche (beech of the cross). There used to be a few big beech trees there, but they all died a long time ago. There also used to be a rare dwarf beech, one of the most beautiful types of trees that I know, but it got destroyed during a bout of Father’s Day vandalism some years earlier..

Luckily, I have the forest to myself at this time. I can hear a bird calling from somewhere in the trees, and I can see a thin curtain of rain outside of the hut where I have pitched the tent.

I do my exercises just like I have always been doing them since the time when I was down with a herniated disc in Budapest. I eat two bananas, and I drink a little bit of the tea that I have left over from the day before. I still have a chocolate croissant for the walk from Kreuzbuche to Bad Nenndorf. Good.

Home is just a few hours of walking away. I find it hard to believe, and yet here we are.

I follow the gravel road through the forest for a while. One time I run into a group of little kids. They might be four or five years old, there is mud all over their bodies and their little faces, and some of them have twigs and leaves in their hair. I am convinced that I have never seen a more adorable sight in my life. They are a forest kindergarten, and their teacher looks at me with wide eyes.

“Are you Christoph Rehage?” she asks me.

I mumble something between a yes and an excuse. I cannot talk. I have to go.

Then, just like that, I begin to recognize the trees and the shape of the ground, and I know exactly where I am. There is a tower close by. It’s called Belvedere Tower, and it was built in the middle of the 19th century as a viewing platform overlooking the trees. The trees have since grown much higher than the tower, and there isn’t really much to see at the top anymore. But that doesn’t matter to someone who just wants to be in the trees.

I have been up there countless times, sometimes feeling happy, sometimes feeling sad. There is a video that I posted to my Youtube channel 10 years earlier that I filmed on the top of the tower. It shows nothing but the trees in the wind.

And now I’m back. Walking. With the Caboose.

I climb the stairs up the tower. Round and round they go, up and up until I am between the treetops. Bad Nenndorf is somewhere behind them. The place that I used to call home in China is in the opposite direction, somewhere behind the curvature of the Earth. I look down at the Caboose. She is down there between the trees, and she looks very small and vulnerable like that.

Hey Boosy, I say.

Then I start crying.

The rest of the way is quiet. I walk the same ways that I have walked before so many times, and it somehow feels like I have already arrived.

I don’t take the direct way home. Instead I walk through the cemetery, and then I go to a bakery and buy a loaf of Gersterbrot, the bread that we eat in this region. I put it on the Caboose, and I walk up the street, through the pedestrian zone and through the spa park, and then down to the last traffic light that I will ever cross on The Longest Way.

I know this particular traffic light by heart. I can anticipate the amount of time it takes for it to jump to green after you’ve pressed the button. How many times have I crossed here with our family dog Puki, and how many times was our family cat Nase following us?

The street down to my home isn’t long. My father is waiting, and my sister is there, too. I pass the church where I once got a laughing fit during a Christmas service. I pass the feminist graffito that appeared out of nowhere a few years earlier and has never been removed.

I’m glad it’s still there.

And then, just like that, seemingly in an instant, as if the whole day hadn’t happened, as if the years on the road were mere glitches in a video, as if I had never walked through the deserts and the mountains and along the seas, as if I didn’t have the beard and the hair and the scars to prove it, as if I hadn’t cried and laughed and screamed my heart out, as if I hadn’t seen the blackness of the Black Sea and the lights of the galaxy, as if I hadn’t left my soul somewhere behind me in the forest, as if none of these things were even remotely real, as if I had just gone out to buy a loaf of bread – I was home.

the walk from Kreuzbuche to Bad Nenndorf

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