Back on 9 March I was just in the midst of checking the current state of Zone III which repeatedly needed to be delayed due to muddy conditions. I was surprised by Odrich Jr. who came all the way from his home in Southern Germany to plant a few cherry trees he raised himself and cut some branches to offer a more accessible path to me.
Given that we never spoke directly with each other prior to this day and Odrich Jr. only learned about my endeavors through chats with my mother, it was quite baffling to hear that he cleared a narrow path just so I can continue to observe his private property. It was just as surprising to see a 50+ years old man getting all giddy at the sight of me by instantly starting to talk about the newly-arrived common woodpeckers that were using spruce cones not just to feed on them but as quasi-doors to their holes in the dying spruces west to the pond. Because the cones at the very top of the spruces that have survived the past droughts are notoriously stuck at the crowns, Odrich said that he'll grab a ladder to pick them and scatter them around the area. He also mentioned that toads were using his pond as a hatchery.
He then went on to point at his new cherry trees. He assumes they will be more robust to withstand climate change as his home in the south differs little from my village climate-wise. "Those that will make it will grow straight and fast, those that won't come won't come", he cheerfully explained, hinting at his realistic outlook on his own creation which was refreshing to hear. Normally all protection measures suffer from being horribly over-planned and an initial "my way or the highway" attitude that quickly descends into the complete abandonment of a project once the initial excitement of the project planners starts to wear off – Odrich Jr., just like his deceased father, is nothing like that and for reason you won't hear from for average conservation activist: The Odrich's have been doing this out of the sheer spite since the 1990's.
It didn't take long until Odrich Jr. would start to ramble and slide into a fit of rage upon inspection of the areas surrounding his property. My mother already warned me of it, stating that he has an incredibly low opinion on the people of my village, but I wasn't expecting him to get this loud and spit while he complains about the very farmer that is responsible for the current state of "! Main Street Bridge !" and the bike path bridge connecting Z II and Z III. Odrich exclaimed that if he wouldn't be owning this part of Z III, this farmer would have cleared it all and converted it into another monoculture. "Those oligarchs", he went on, "they all are so deep up this guy's ass that their heads are brown!" By "them" he was referring to this farmer's friends and colleagues at out local "Stadtrat" and "Bauhof". Speaking of "Bauhof", the men directly carrying out the somewhat-regular mowing work in and around my village are so incompetent that a guy who visits his old home maybe three times per year notice that they repeatedly damage the trees they planted themselves whilst sitting on their mowing tractors.
(Sadly I forgot the mention that one time where one such guy on his mowing tractor first hit a lantern twice and then my street's breaker box but Odrich already was exhausted after hearing about how those guys constantly cut and damage the roots of the lime trees in front of my house.)
While he continued to monologue about the cut Salix sp. at the main street bridge, he was reminded of the cut oak trees next to the church, to which he responded that "they don't know why they cut them either", implying that whoever was responsible for it did out of sheer boredom (at the time of writing this they still are lying next to the church). It certainly wouldn't be the first case of such vandalism as a tiny area in front of the former "Dorfschule" first was randomly covered in freshly-planted wild plants and datura, only for some still-unknown villager removing everything and outright cutting through the roots of the datura during some late-night vandalism. The town later cleared the rest, with only the solitary lime tree and a single group of meadow sage remaining.
My head was already struggling to properly process this amount of new information but one sentence spit by Odrich became stuck in my head:
"Here, the way they treat their fields – that's how they treat people!"
I would partially blame this very sentence on my procrastination which made me delay this post until now. It reminded me how this farmer with his "hobbyist" car shop treated my dad, one of my dad's old friends (now a former police officer, by the way), and later me and my mother. The very same asshole that nearly made my Audi 80 suffer from an engine failure in the midst of a traffic jam on an Autobahn just because he put the wrong cooling in. His reason for this was that he doesn't buy anything but "Red Plus" anymore because, well, he can't be arsed – he knows what it does to aluminum engines, yet did not care at all that it could've blown into my face if I wouldn't have been lucky enough to just see a plug flying away and all cooling flowing out of my car (the shop I ended up at right after this said that law enforcement should get involved because this could've ended MUCH worse for me). But I didn't just dwell on this guy; his wife, my former elementary school teacher[1], has become just like him since she got married to him. Once a teacher that, for a while, focused on special needs kids, she became distant and cynical right after her position was abolished. She didn't complain about no longer being able to help those kids with issues, no, she merely complained about earning less now. She cared more about her pay, despite legally owning her husband's agricultural enterprise and thus profiting off subsidies and tax benefits, rather than about children who need a hand.
I couldn't really process any of this during my chat with Odrich because he switched the topic to another farmer that is just as much of an insufferable asshole. I'm not getting into his hatred towards cats but he also doesn't feed his own sheep and lets his grandfather and "David", the owner of the tiny fields in Z II, do that job while he spends his time at his computer to play "Farm Simulator" – and eat, a lot. He's three yars younger than me, just 23 at the time this post goes live. He obtained our old garden which we no longer rent due to the rising costs and he turned it into a large mud pit, with sheep regularily running towards us and begging for food. What once was a "wild garden" that offered at least some species an environment they could live in now is... this; my mother now regrets her decision to give up our old garden.
My brain was completely fried at this point and Odrich needed to get some more things done, so we finished our chat with Odrich threatening that he would fire everyone that plants trees and then lazily sits on their mowing tractor to cut them if he were in charge of things. He also explained that if he ever sees any of those "oligarchs" damage one of his own trees even just a tiny bit, all hell will break loose.
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[1] Just to clarify, I wasn't one of those kids with special needs. Each grade 1 class had an equal amount of kids with varying demands until the classes were remixed and divided into "levels". Class a were for the future smartasses, class b for the regulars, class c (later d and set back by a whole grade) for those with special needs. While I got sent to the class for smartasses, there was one mother in particular who first was jealous of me that I ended up in this woman's class but later tried to spread the myth that I was "retarded" for having been taught under this teacher for two months. That occurred around the same time she married that farmer.