BY ALEX STORY
Standing at the top of Salzburg’s thousand‑year‑old fortress on a sunny day, facing south into the heart of the Alps, one sees the Nonntal below, nearly at one’s feet. In spring, it is lusciously green. There, in fact, sang the nuns of The Sound of Music, their chanting still echoing enchantingly across the landscape.
The Nonntal is split in two by the AlmKanal, a masterpiece of medieval hydraulic engineering and one of the oldest canal systems in Central Europe. Work on it, they say, began in the 9th century. The canal, only a few feet wide, originates from the Königsee, near Berchtesgaden, eight miles away. The water is crystalline, fresh and wholesome. When the sun is out, hundreds of people sit, lie and play on either side of it. Traffic passes by a few feet below, though little can be seen from the road. Cyclists, on the other hand, can pedal along the canal itself and choose, if they so wish, a good spot to melt into the inviting environment. These athletes will see a multitude enjoying themselves in their natural habitat.
Attentive observers—perhaps longer in the tooth—will notice an unavoidable yet important change. Sitting or lying in the sun, you see, is not done in the same way now as it was in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, ladies no longer frolic topless. The mass exercise of expressing one’s quest for systemic freedom, so common a few decades ago, is now extinct. Perhaps all the freedoms sought were found in the meantime.
In its heyday, the habit, like smoking, was as widespread as it was “natural.” While enticing in theory, it caused complications in practice. To pick one example among many: in the late spring of 1989, a 15‑year‑old boy went to pick up his friend at home to go to the neighbouring open‑air pool. His friend’s 18-year-old sister, hearing this, asked to join. They agreed. As all three walked out of the house, the mother asked whether she too could come along. The boys looked at each other and nodded in the affirmative, melancholically—praying, some suspect, not to bump into the father on the way out.
When they arrived, they looked for a spot on the lawn. The pool was packed, but the atmosphere was good. As the young teenager snapped his towel open to spread it neatly on the lush grass, both the 18‑year‑old sister and the over‑50s mother took their tops off simultaneously, leaving nothing to the imagination, before crouching to lay their towels down. Inadvertently, the scenery in front of him forced him to ask key questions of himself.
In short, looking at the daughter gave what looking at the mother took away. Caught between a rock and a hard place, he walked the plank and jumped into the pool—only, much to his chagrin, to find more of the same. Everywhere he looked, he faced the same conundrum: where to look? The sky, the grass, or somewhere far into the distance?
Pools a few decades ago were then an integral part of one’s philosophical education. In no time, it seems, the practice, so prevalent, disappeared without a trace, leaving many a young boy with fewer questions answered. The rise of the mobile phone and all it brings, as well as the inconceivably large population and cultural change, must both rank high as suspects in the killing off of what was a near‑integral part of one’s learning—and often a curate’s egg of an experience. The young boy, much older now, would, one assumes, look more kindly on the riper pair he tried to avoid back in the spring of ’89, seeing in both young and old as much beauty, though of different kinds.
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.