The Tale Of The Car That Disappeared In The Woods

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Many years ago I used to go with a friend to a nearby wood to pick blackberries. We did that always in September. My husband's birthday is in September and he always got a cake with fresh blackberries. From the rest I made jam. As everybody knows who's had the opportunity of comparing cultivated garden blackberries with wild ones, the latter are smaller, but tastier. Picking wild blackberries doesn't go without a lot of scratches but we always accepted this as part of the adventure. Once we went to our special place by her car. She parked it at the side of the small country road running beside the wood and we started off with our containers. When they were full, we went back to the road. But there was no car! Where was it? The idea that someone had stolen it was absurd. It's a lonely spot outside a small village. We hadn't heard anything, seen no movement. Hmm. Mysterious. We walked along the edge of the wood dumbfounded because we didn't know what else to do and then suddenly spotted the car! My friend hadn't properly pulled the handbrake and the car had rolled down a slope into the wood and stopped at a tree. Luckily the slope wasn't steep and there was a slight berm covered with grass directly in front of the tree which had stopped the car so that its front wasn't damaged. Good, but what now? This was before mobile phones were invented. My friend stopped a car, went to the village, called a towing-service and had the car pulled out of the forest. This made the blackberries we had picked free of charge absurdly expensive! This was the last time we went a-picking. The reason wasn't the incident with the car, however, but the information about the fox tapeworm (scientific name: Echinococcus multilocularis) in the local newspaper. For reasons unknown it likes the area in the south of Germany where we live. It's not very widespread. Our area and Japan were always mentioned in the paper. I won't describe the life cycle of this animal. Suffice it to say that the authorities warn lumbermen and berry pickers to get into close contact with the lower parts of bushes up to the height a fox can sh*t. Once a human being has caught a fox tapeworm nothing happens for a period of about six years. It lives in the liver without giving trouble until it's too late. When it becomes active, the host of the fox tapeworm can die. We now buy cultivated blackberries at the local farmers' market. ----- Photo: pixabay (not our car!)