Boars, and nudes, and us — Oh my!

This week, a story about a big-bellied white nudist guy chasing a trio of laptop-stealing boars through the forest in Germany while others cheered him on shouldn't have been too surprising, at least to the Germans. 

 Two years ago, Fabienne and I dropped into the German town of Baden-Baden about 45 minutes from Strasbourg, France, and just a few miles east of the Rhine River on the edge of The Black Forest. It's a gorgeous place that even the Romans frequented because of its hot mineral springs. The Romans loved a good hot bath. There's also plenty of hiking, swimming, parasailing, excellent restaurants, beer, and gemütlich or cozy B&Bs. I'd go back.

Away from central Baden-Baden there is plenty of space for hiking and gliding.

 We spent the night before in Strasbourg, where we were a bit defeated by the rain our first night and by the crowds and imagined pick-pockets the next day. I didn't like Strasbourg, but I could probably live there (I can't explain it, but I do live in Fresno).

Tourist gather to admire the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Strasbourg, or Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg. It is worth the visit.

 Strasbourg was the first place we visited that I saw the ultimate in recycling at two different restaurants: the waitstaff tossing the once-served bread rolls back into a basket for the plates of the next customers. Maybe every restaurant does this, but I never saw it out in the open before. Since I saw it at two different places, it might even be part of the city's restaurant code.

We left Strasbourg early-ish in the morning and arrived in Baden-Baden around lunchtime. We took a walk through town, found a Löwenbrau beer garden, and ordered our favorite German foods and favorite beer.  

Unlike American restaurants where your time eating is costing the restaurant money, many European restaurants allow you to take your time. The waitstaff does this by not stopping by the table every 20 minutes, asking, "Are you still working on that?" I think they don't mind if you digest some of your food before hitting the road.  

This is Löwenbrau logo on a coaster.

To be fair, some European restaurants recognize American diners and take their time to annoy you, mainly if you act American. But I have a pretty good grasp of traveling German, and more often than not, my accent and idioms make me fit in so well I get linguistically lost before the Germans realize I am not from there. In my younger days, the Germans thought I was Dutch, which I took as a compliment.

So, after ninety minutes and perhaps a second beer, we continued our walking tour of Baden-Baden. 

Our walk took us by the Stiftskirche or Collegiate Church (pictured above), one of the oldest buildings in Baden-Baden, first mentioned in 987 and burned to the ground in 1689. And rebuilt. Etc. 

Our wandering took us on a path straight to the doors of The Friedrichsbad, an Irish-Roman bath that has been in business for more than 130 years. 

The gateway to Friedrichsbad.

On a whim, we walked through the front door, bought an E-Ticket (kids, ask your grandparents for an explanation), and held on for the ride.

The hostess handed us our electronic keys and sent us up the marble stairs to a locker room. Did we need swimwear? She said, not to worry. The key knew which locker was ours and what part of the ride we were allowed to use. We bought the whole trip (for 20 Euros, it seemed reasonable). 

The lockers were in a clean and very modern room, with no women's area or men's area. Inside each locker, there was a sheet — no Speedo or thong. Just a sheet or toga to anesthetize our feelings of insecurity. We were the only ones in the room. So, we carefully wrapped ourselves, Fabienne making sure my toga fit just right. We walked 20 steps to the shower area where a bemused "helper” dressed in white greeted us.

"First time?"

"Yes." 

"Now! Take that off!" 

I'm sure he didn't mean it that way, but that's how some Germans sound when giving directions in English because that's how they sound in German. That's how my mother sounded, so I took no offense.

We handed him the sheets. He opened the door to the shower area and invited us to enter. 

We stood there naked for a second behind the closed door before we realized what was happening. We were in a room full of ordinary naked people. No sheets anywhere. The ride had begun. 

The front of the The Friedrichsbad, a classic bathhouse, looks more like a bank.

I'm not sure what kept us going. Maybe we should have read the brochure. But we had done karaoke before, so we also knew we would never see these people again.

The next attendant directed us to take a showerhead and a lever. She then led us to pull the lever to allow the water to flow over us.

The first thing that struck me (besides the obvious) was how much water poured on us. It was like standing under Yo Semite falls in the spring (only the water was warm). 

California and Fresno were in the midst of a drought, which meant many of us were showering with a five-gallon bucket to save "gray" water for our gardens. Here, more water dumped on us in 30 seconds than we used in a month of showers back home. It was delightful. And this was the first of 17 stations.

We booked the full-on spa treatment. Almost three hours of nakedness and communion that included a scrub ("Hard or soft brush?" he asked), a sauna (hot and hotter!), a cream massage, and in between lots of floating in different temperature mineral waters from the geothermal wells that are abundant in this area. Hence the name Baden-Baden. The rooms were ornate with towering domed ceilings and tiled walls, not your typical Y pool. 

Fabienne was cracking up as the guy working on my skin with a hard or soft brush wanted to know all about The Beach Boys. When he finished with my back, he slapped my butt and told me to roll over. 

She was two slabs away, and everyone could hear.

The next stop was the sauna. Unlike the sauna's at our gyms, this sauna held maybe 40 people. We sat next to each other on a pyramid of ceramic seats about 8 feet high. The higher you sat, the hotter it got. 

Once you had enough, you followed the sign to the first of several pools of warm, warmer, and finally hot water. The Irish part is a cold plunge at the end of the trip. We didn't partake. We have our limits. 

The experience ended with a pleasant cup of hot herbal tea in the relaxing room. We got our togas back, and I wondered why. I had a cup of tea and fell asleep under my toga on a lounge chair.

Fabienne stands near one of 12 historic springs in Baden-Baden. This one is called The Fettquelle just outside the Friedrichsbad. The grotto was built around the spring in the 1870s. The water temperature is about 145 degrees Fahrenheit.

As it turned out, we blended in well in the land of the nude. 

Old and young nude. Man and woman together-in-the-same-room-shower-pool nude. Lots of butts, boobs, and Johnsons nude. Or, as we read later in the brochure, "traditionally garment free" nude. 

In hindsight, I suppose we could have asked more questions, or read the brochure, or checked with Rick Steves. But I'm glad we didn't because we know what we look like, and the world may not be ready for our kind of beauty. As it turned out, the world — this German world — was ready and that everyone looked pretty much equal without clothes.

As Fabienne pointed out, "some more equal than others." 

I had to agree.

Damn you, Kodachrome!

Getting the measure of one's family by going through dozens of shoeboxes full of slides (mounted transparencies for you pros) is about as daunting as measuring the length of California's coast by counting the grains of beach sand at the water's edge. But like a guy in his baggy-ass Bermuda shorts combing the beach with a metal detector, I occasionally come across a gem or two. So I continue.

Don't get me wrong. Kodachrome is a great film.

"They give us those nice bright colors

They give us the greens of summers

Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah"

But it made it too easy for my dad and myself to store thousands of useless family photographs. Useless, because they were only looked at once or twice in a darkened room and rarely were they marked as to why they exist in the first place. Those boxes full of memories are kind of like your phone's photo library, but not as well organized and a lot heavier.

Taken in 1972, shortly after graduating from high school. Not a great shot, but I was attracted to the evening colors.

I remember projecting some of my early shots in front of my parent's friends. I knew I was doing something right when one of them would ask, "what kind of camera are you using?" While I accepted the compliment, it’s the kind of question most photographers hate. Why? Let me put it another way. Would you wander into the the kitchen of a fancy French restaurant to ask the chef what brand pots were used to make your sublime Soupe à l'oignon? I think not, I hope. But if you must know, it was my dad’s Mamiya Sekor. Too much information?

I know why I used Kodachrome slide film. The quality was excellent, the reproduction was true-to-life, and it was relatively cheaper than having prints made, though I am paying for it now. For my dad, reasonably priced was his priority, which is sad, because he had a "good eye," as they say. Some of his slides are on film that stopped being manufactured back in the '70s, long before Kodak bit the dust. Ever hear of Pavelle Color? I had to look it up. Its first reference via Google was The National Museum of American History. It was a New York City-based film processing company that eventually was bought by Technicolor and finally put out of its misery.

My dad also bought his film from Costco's forerunner, Fedco, a warehouse/membership store founded by postal workers (no, it wasn't full of angry people). It had a store in Pasadena. The film was iffy, and most of it has been changing colors over the years. I've also come across Sears-brand film. Sadly, it's not Craftsman quality.

So, I sit at my desk with a Loupe or magnifying glass for a few hours almost every day, sorting slides over a small light table I purchased 30 years ago. For every box of 36 slides I study, I throw more than half of them away without running them through my film scanner. Of the others, I run them through my scanner in preview mode to see if they are worth further work.

What am I throwing out? Pictures of the sky, car doors, the ground, as well as fuzzy shots of blossoms, birds, cars, and scenery. The images that get a closer look have people, pets, or places I recognize in the frame. If not, it goes into the bin.

What could happen? Would it be that Aunt Nina's best hair-do gets overlooked because the photographer was stung by a bee when the shutter was released?

And what about the discards? Will I miss them? Did I accidentally throw out the only known photo of JFK eating a jelly donut? Possibly. Ich bin ein photo editor.

But one person’s discards could be another’s treasure. So, I prefer to believe that in a thousand years, some guy in Bermuda shorts toting a debris detector will scan a beach along the Fresno Sea and find a perfectly preserved Kodachrome image of a Buick Century's rearview mirror. He'll smile. He’ll pick it up. He’ll blow the sand from the emulsion before holding it up to the sky to get a better look, and say to himself, "Eureka! I’m adding this beaut to my collection!"

Quarantine Chronicles: Four-eyes

In May 2019, Fabienne and I headed east to see The West. The target: Yellowstone National Park. The plan was to get there before school let out to avoid the crowds, and by crowds, I mean other people’s children. The plan worked. It was the first time we were able to take such a trip since Fab quit being a teacher. 

Fabienne dressed for Yellowstone geysers where hot water met cold air.

Being a teacher was fine, but it meant always taking vacations during high season or taking vacations with someone else’s kids in tow. We had taken several trips to Europe the past 15 years with our own kids while chaperoning students from Clovis High School. I had a blast. Fab, not so much.

Our trip to Yellowstone was to be a classic American road trip. Fabienne hadn’t seen much of the U.S. by car, though I had been in this neck of the woods a few times since I was 9. I looked forward to showing her around. I even romanticized this kind of family tradition, but looking back on it, I don’t know why. 

The ghost of George Patton haunted Funk family vacations. My dad usually had only two weeks of leave, and I mean vacation time. We were going to beat the Russians to Berlin! Except, Berlin was a campground in Zion National Park. My mom was his navigator. My brother and I were his troops. Our 10-year-old Ford was his Jeep. We were going to cram as much fun as possible into that time or help us, god.

Dad loaded up the old red-and-white two-tone with all the gear that would fit and placed the borrowed 12x12, 50-pound canvas tent in the back seat between my brother, Kevin, and me so we wouldn’t annoy each other during the march to victory. It didn’t work, but it was worth a try – “He touched me!” My dad and I could put that tent up in less than 10 minutes. He clocked it.

The Funks hit the road at five in the morning, taking Route 66 from Pasadena east toward San Bernardino. We passed through the Sunkist orange groves just east of Sierra Madre on a road that my mom referred to as having “the whoopsie-daisies,” a series of undulations in the road that made our stomachs rise and fall. Each fall was punctuated by us, screaming, “whoopsie daisy!” The car had no seat belts, so each drop would make us float off the seats. A good day was when our heads would touch the headliner. I think that only happened when my mom was driving. 

At some point, we cut north over the Cajon Pass toward Barstow and onward toward Las Vegas. We always knew when my dad managed to push the car to 60 mph by the harmonic humming noise it made only at that speed. Maybe it was a feature, not a bug. 

Back in the ’60s, the trip to Vegas was somewhat arduous. By today’s standards, we might as well have been driving a covered wagon. The car had no air conditioning, no power steering, no automatic transmission. If you were wearing shorts or a skirt, your thighs stuck to the plastic seat covers. For this reason, my mom packed towels or blankets, and my dad always wore long pants with cuffs. He hated jeans. 

One of the many road-side stands along the way sold an air conditioner of sorts that would clip to a rolled-up car window — a cardboard box loaded with ice. It worked, kind of, but only for a few miles. Then it would just fly away.

So, we relied mostly on our car’s four–55 air conditioning system: all windows rolled down at 55 mph. If you sweated adequately, it worked. My mom didn’t. 

In Baker, we stopped at a stand for some cold drinks. I remember the thermometer reading 114. We three guys ordered iced teas while my mother asked for water. 

“You have to order a drink,” the counter attendant told her. 

“What?”

“We don’t sell water.”

My brother and I felt the temperature rise another five degrees and believed mom was about to blow. She hadn’t seen the film “Easy Rider” so she didn’t know the proper “hippy” etiquette in getting what you want from the waitstaff. But, maybe she did the film one better. 

She ordered three iced teas. She poured the first over her head. The guy behind the counter looked at her slack-jawed. The second she poured over a towel and used the dripping cloth to cover her head and shoulders. The third she drank. 

It was the first time I knew that my mother didn’t sweat. She was suffering from heatstroke and was too sick to complain about not being served water. 

We reached Vegas a few hours later. It was early afternoon. It was so hot, some of the temperature signs were blinking instead of showing the temperature. 

My dad searched for a place where we could cool off. Every place my parents could go, my brother and I couldn’t. Vegas was just for gambling, drinking, and mobstering back then. There were no casinos with lazy river pools or indoor mega shopping centers with talking Greek statues or Venice gondolas to ride. It would still be a few years before Circus Circus debuted.

Fun fact: If you have Amazon Prime, you can rent or watch the first episode of “The Rockford Files.” The second part of that episode has a Vegas flyover to set the scene. Between today’s strip and Circus Circus, there’s nothing but desert. Watch with sound off. The dialog would make your skin crawl if you didn’t grow up during those times. It did mine, and I did. 

We ended up in a movie theater and watched “Call Me Bwana,” twice. I remember it had Bob Hope and quicksand. I don’t remember Anita Ekberg.

By the time we got out, it was early evening, but still hot. We ate somewhere and got back into the car. We had to get to Zion. Patton’s orders. My parents didn’t spend money on rooms back then. 

Fun fact: Did you know that Motel 6 got its name because the rooms were $6? That’s about $51 in 2020 money. 

The rest of the drive was uneventful. After we arrived at our campsite in Zion, my dad and I set up the tent (I handed him the poles). He rolled out the sleeping bags and my mom went immediately to sleep. The three guys ate dinner, then sat around a campfire before calling it a day. 

That’s when I looked into my dad’s eyes and said, “Dad. I think I left my glasses back in Altadena.”

That was another reason I was looking forward to this 2019 spring trip with Fabienne. In a way, it was to be my first time, too.