Austria, 1923

“Hey, is there a time machine back there or something?”

Yes, I was being a smartass, as usual. But the people coming from that side of the alley had nothing modern about them. The hunter with the heavy wood-stocked rifle hanging over his shoulder. The woman in the elaborate headdress and shiny purple dirndl. The little girls in local costume, the teenage boys in lederhosen.

It was the harvest festival, the “erntedankfest.” It’s a lot like those exhibits at the county fair where you can see how things were done in pioneer days and then, compare them to how they’re done in modern times. Only instead of walking from booth to booth and display to display, the stuff comes to you in float form pulled by a tractor. Threshing hay and sorting leaves from the berries and yes, even distilling schnapps, all roll by you at a slow enough pace for the fresh faced lasses and laddies to hand you a plastic cup of local beer or to pour you a shot of something much, much, stronger.

Honestly, I was a little bored by the time the guy on the penny-farthing rolled through, but the participants seemed to be enjoying themselves more than enough for all of us. It could be the schnapps, though I have to question the wisdom of filling 17 year old boys with schnapps and then setting them at exhibition wood chopping.

It seems like the weather was waiting for this festival to pass. This morning it was raining and the sky is low. The clouds are draping the peaks and the cows are huddled close together under sheltering trees. Weather like this turns my thoughts to Seattle and the idea of eating soup with friends in various kitchens throughout the city. I woke up with the first pangs of homesickness this morning. l long not just for my place, but my time.

Pictures from the Erntedankfest in Schladming are here.

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I would be remiss if I didn’t mention yesterday’s election here in Austria. I was surprised to learn this morning that the Social Party took the lead – shocking to me given their involvement in a massive banking scandal last spring. The far right Freedom Party took just over 10 percent of the vote. They ran an ugly, openly racist campaign that infuriated me whenever I saw the posters. The other right wing party was just as offensive, calling for a deportation of 30% of Austria’s immigrants as part of their platform – I loudly offered to be the first deportee in line whenever I heard the party leader on the news.

In my head it went something like this:

“Oh, we didn’t mean YOU,” they’d say at the BZOe HQ when I went down to volunteer to be deported.

“Then who, pray tell, DID you mean?” I would ask, pointedly, while the camera crew zoomed in on the hapless party employee’s face.

Given that the Social Party and the People’s Party took the lion’s share of the vote and that talk is of a grand coalition between those two, I hold hope that the new government will crush the far right’s participation in Austrian politics once and for all. But I also hope that the reason the Greens did so poorly is because green policy has become mainstream here in Austria. Hope springs eternal, and hey, in Schladming, little Indian girls dance to tuba music and hitch rides on hay covered floats, staining their brown hands with juice from wild blueberries.

If nothing else, now that the election is over, those awful posters will come down. I had to physically restrain myself from going on a propaganda remix campaign – though if you have pictures of “revised” posters, I’d love to see them.