Cochem's High Water Marks

Last week in Southern California, the skies burst open to finally give us some relief from our latest drought. 

We mumbled complaints about the less than sunny weather, sat in traffic jams due to accidents on rainslick freeways and, for an unfortunate few, dealt with mudslides. 

Speaking on the phone with a Norwegian Cruise Lines representative located in Arizona, I had to explain that Los Angeles had not been destroyed by flood, as her local TV news seemed to indicate.  In fact, we had only a few sprinkles in Redondo Beach and something like 1 to 5 inches in Los Angeles County.

It wasn't even enough to stimulate the usual warnings by climate alarmists of another apocolypse related to man-made global warming, although of course the drought itself is often blamed on modern man, even if tree rings indicate intermittent droughts hundreds of years before the industrial age.

The high water marks in the villages along the Rhine and Moselle reveal a similar story of the power of nature's cycles. 

The marked buildings we saw were usually well over a hundred yards from the river and elevated at least another twenty to fifty feet, but the markings often towered twice as tall as the humans who marked them. 

That same rain that produces delicious wine grapes on the steep hillsides can, especially when bolstered by ice melt-off from the Alps, obviously create major problems for these beautiful river villages.

While some high marks, including several in Cochem, occurred more recently, many occurred in the 1600s and 1700s in other villages, and who knows how many high water marks were washed away with older buildings before the "new" construction? 

I'm not saying this disproves manmade global warming theories, but it is once again a reminder that climates have changed throughout the history of the earth.

The late Robert Crichton called global warming theory a religion, not unlike the druidism practiced by ancient Celtics who lived in this area before the Romans.

By the way, you may wonder what river cruises do if the water gets too high for them to cross under the bridges on rare occasions. 

Like humanity has through the centuries, the captains, crews and land-based cruise planners adapt.  Sometimes they're forced to cancel cruises entirely, turn the ships around to backtrack to the home port or move onto buses to continue the trek. It's not unlike how cruise lines react to hurricanes.

Viking River Cruises, which has by far the most ships including twins traveling in opposite directions on the same river, has been known to change passengers and their luggage from one ship to an identical room on the other previously going the opposite direction.  And the crew goes with them too, making it feel very much like they're on the same ship.  In any case, just as with ocean cruise ships, passenger safety is of primary concern, and cruise lines also aren't going to risk damaging their beautiful ships needlessly.

However, like on most river cruises, the river water levels were not unusually high or low for our trip, and the river wasn't flooding the village streets when we took a morning tour of scenic Cochem before heading up to Reichsburg Castle.

Our guide shared interesting information, including the story of the refurbishment of a timbered building by a successful optometrist.

According to our guide, there was some sort of subsidy for restoring old buildings that the city officials would not allow for the Brillen Müller building, because it belonged to a successful optometrist.  As amusing revenge, the businessman commissioned a sculptor to carve faces on the ends of four beams above his ground floor storefront. 

The faces represent the bureaucratic lunacy he encountered, so that anyone entering beneath will see his architectural taunt.  If you want to know what each face represents, you'll have to go to Cochem and ask for yourself. 

The beautiful wine village filled with historic timbered houses and surrounded by hillside vineyards could be a vacation highlight by itself, but it served primarily as a scenic introduction to the area, which in addition to our castle visit would include a unique afternoon experience in nearby Ediger-Eller.