This scenic house is normally a quiet place by the river. The gardens well tended keep the bees busy at their work. The wide balcony must be the scene of many a brilliantly lit sunset party, whether only two lovers or a half dozen friends or an elderly couple who sit holding hands. In this scene however, the house is the backdrop of the enraged river, that seems to be trying to reach up from its bed to disturb the calm of the home.

These two women in their traditional Bavarian dress are passing a tree – complete with birds – that gives no shade and that does not wave in the summer breeze. It grows from the concrete and spreads its few branches out toward the street as if to join the foot traffic there, or the women in their happy chatter. But it is forever halted as if captured in a photograph. I wonder, in ten or twenty years, will the artist return and let it “grow” more branches?

As we look up the street, we can see the shops and buildings, the commercial section of the old town with its new street of cement “cobblestones” oddly modern and patterned in the view.

The normally docile Partnach stream had grown to a barely contained or tamed beast. The roar of the water was punctuated often with a rolling thunderous grinding and punctuated with a CLACK! CLACK! noise. The sounds of large submerged boulders rolling and being smashed invisibly beneath the churning mud brown waters, the gnashing of this aquatic serpent dragon’s teeth.

The dragon had come to life during the rains and had brought with it the soil from the hills and mountains above, and now it roars through the town and gives the tourists a rare glimpse at barely contained mountain fury. Lashing against the man-made banks and walls as it courses through the town on its way at full speed to the floodplains below, but seemingly stationary in some odd way, I felt as though the river had become something that could not be flowing – where would this much water come from in just a few days of rain? Surely this water could not all come from the sky! How wide and deep, the power of it bringing entire trees at times by our eyes, the children calling out “look – a tree, how big!” but the tree moves on in a flash, faster than the children can run to the other side of the bridge and it is carried on down stream and around a bend out of sight.