Day bears moved into an abandoned Covid train station with an electric fire and a telly …
WE SPENT LOCKDOWN IN THE WILD MOUNTAINS OF CENTRAL EUROPE - IT WASN’T A NIGHTMARE, IT WAS A BIT OF A DREAM
Storm clouds were raging all around our penthouse.
There was a snow drift on the balcony, icicles hung from its balustrade like dirty hair.
But when we became covid prisoners, we took to sitting out there, no matter the weather, on old deckchairs. We were wrapped in coats and blankets.
Eventually the snow billowed, filled the sky like two billion feather pillows had burst. Yet, stoically, we sat there day after day, night after night, hour after hour.
There was nothing else to do, nowhere we could go legally.
All our friends were in the same position, some fled to Bratislava hoping things would be a bit easier in the capital city… it wasn’t. They just ended up paying higher rents for their prison cells.
In its own way it was a peaceful way of life - nothing was happening. Poprad where we lived in the Spis region, was dead, apart from the empty
trains on the circle line.
Why they kept them running, we never guessed, but on the hour every hour, the long clanking passenger trains would hammer round the city from the central station and back.
Inexplicably too, the one-man pavement snowplows chuntered by clearing snow from the rickety walkways into the road … later, the road snowplow would come by and throw it all back. Once a day the ice trucks would be filled to over-filling with snow and ice and it was driven away and dumped at the gypsy shanties on the outskirts of town.
There we no people about, we all only went out to go to the supermarket, about quarter of a mile away. There was a schedule, based on age, which designated times for you to go shopping – it was frowned upon if you broke the rules and the armed police would accost you and remonstrate.
Our penthouse apartment was a hundred feet in the air and the storms raged day in day out. Our daily shopping consisted of wine, gin and tobacco and sometimes food.
Often the storms, snow or rain, or thunder and lightning got caught in the mountains and rattled around from one peak to another like a grand giant snow bagatelle. Some days it wouldn’t go away.
Bad bones and a howling like a Baba Yaga mobilising the wildlife of the snowy valleys.
Covid and winter had frozen our small mountain town in its tracks.
Now and again the odd bear would traipse down the abandoned streets and raid the stinking rubbish bins.
One family of bears actually took over Starry Smokavich station, just outside town and set up home. Mummy bear, daddy bear and baby bear.
It was only a small station with a modern glass waiting room warmed by an electric heater activated by the sliding glass doors. There was even a small television screen from them. They were very comfortable in there.
And warm.
The empty trains circling the city didn’t bother stopping at Starry Smokavich anymore.
Once, we watched from our eerie as a big bad wolf stalked the streets with a massive slathering head and red eyes…
#slovakia #poprad #bratislava #brownbears #covid #lockdown