Stories from Bad Kleinkirchheim

Author: Ed Wohlfahrt

“You’ll see my car when you come up the Nockalm street”, Peter Schmölzer tells me. “I hope I don’t sound too ‘Klagenfurt-ish’”, I think on the other end of the line. But Peter was right. Not far from the legendary Reidn 49 (you can get to the Brubenbauer-Alp from there) I see his forest-green SUV. And as I see the telltale fuel canister (for the chain saw) standing next to the car, I’m not sure of myself anymore. I would meet Peter not far from here, the one who has promised to show me the secrets of the Pine Forest. I don’t have to be all that quiet – Peter is eyeing a giant pine and his chain saw is so loud that he can’t hear anything happening around him. It takes him a while to notice me and he puts his ‘pine-moped’ into neutral and pushes his visor up. He smiles unbelievingly that I’ve just driven into the woods like that.

Working in the forest is dangerous. The trees don’t always fall the way they’re supposed to. Or they can get stuck in the difficult terrain or even start rolling. I know that because I do read the newspaper. But to really be there when a tree is felled is another thing altogether. “Be careful”, Peter says before he makes the fatal cut. Nothing bad happens, the forest-farmer has too much experience for that. “Twenty years or more”, he says with a smile. Every cut sits, so to speak. But before it gets that far, the Larch has to be carefully chosen, the fall direction has to be calculated and it must be decided which side of the tree one should best be standing on. After all, it’s steep here in the woods.

And during the few breaks, during which the chain saw is hardly ever turned off, the astonished city dweller learns a bunch about pine wood and about the region. For example, that it’s in the Valley of Roses. That’s not just the name of a whole valley in Southern Carinthia, no, it’s also the name of a piece of forest along the Nockalm street. One in which, by the way, you can find the largest number of Austrian Pine trees in all of middle Europe – in the middle of the Nock Mountain national park. You just have to know all of this!

But there’s not much time – the Pine can only be cut for a few more days, otherwise they will be ‘in sap’. This, I’ve been told, means that they’re growing. And during this growth period – usually during the summer - the Pines have ‘off season’, just like the fish of Siegfried Gruber, who doesn’t live far from here. If felled during this time, the otherwise red wood of the pine will become slightly blue. The tree would become worthless. On the way home I’m focused in a special way. Wood, everywhere I see wood! Next to the city sign of Ebene Reichenau a huge pile of wood, in the village numerous homes with wood paneling, a few kilometers farther the wood processing company Leeb. I won’t even mention all the wood mills you pass along the way. It’s nice to know where a part of the wood used and processed here comes from.

Image and text courtesy of Ed Wohlfahrt for the editorial team of the website www.badkleinkirchheim.at