Hello!

“Hey, you!” Oh, how I hate this greeting that strikes me like an ambush arrow. Anyone who is addressed in this way (or, in case of difficulty, also with “Hey, you there!”), Definitely did something wrong. This happens to me more often when I am in Switzerland. But now the words are suddenly out of my own lips before I can swallow them at the last moment.

I’m waiting in a short line of cars at the entrance to a small state park. They protect even the most impressive tracts of land from real estate speculators, they keep the Grand Canyon from becoming an adventure park, and they let me walk for hours along California’s densely populated tourist coast. I’ll gladly pay seven dollars per use for it. Some parks have a ranger’s hut at the entrance, where you can also get the news of the day. That ospreys laid eggs or that they saw a humpback whale. I always feel like an insider, even though I can’t tell an osprey from a seagull and often mistook boulders for whales and excitedly photographed them.

Here, however, there is only an old-fashioned vending machine in the driveway, rattling bills and spitting out receipts. It takes a moment, but nature does not run away from us. Suddenly, a black van appears behind me, revs its engine impatiently several times, and then roars past us all with two wheels in the grass. In the television series, there are always at least six special agents in such a vehicle. Did a Chinese reconnaissance balloon land in an osprey nest?

Finally I paid and got to the parking lot. Then I see the black monster again, but no agents crawl out of there, but a lonely, slightly bored woman in an expensive-looking down jacket, who just as friendly holds a mobile phone in front of her lips, as if she wants to bite off a piece of it. And that’s where it happens. My inner plainclothes cop wakes up: “Hey, you there!” wants to call her. “Yes, I mean you! You didn’t pay seven dollars, I saw that, who are you? As I said, I swallow the words at the last moment, but I am shocked. I don’t know myself anymore. Was it the spirit of my late mother, who was often and violently upset because others did not behave in the way she thought was right? Or was Max Frisch right, if it really was Max Frisch? Does a civilian militiawoman, a warden, a controller also live in me? Maybe I’m not as cosmopolitan and tolerant as I would like to think?

“I’m only interested in natural parks that depend on entrance fees,” I try to protect myself from myself. I don’t quite believe it. But after the walk, I stop at the vending machine again and feed seven dollars. For the upkeep of the parks, but more to calm my inner “hey you” demons. Just in case, I also greet the writer’s sky, shrouded in fog. Or maybe it’s pipe smoke.

Source: Blick