oloriel | The mystery of the runaway excavator

Well, the carriage has been lying in the woods for a long time, but last weekend, it got very new company. And we, once again, didn't notice a thing (aside from Jörg recalling that he heard a strange motor sound at night, but not strange enough to investigate, and then he fell asleep again) until the police appeared in our driveway.

In true German police fashion, they didn't do much. They did some walking around and some talking on the phone and a lot of waiting. They did not say why they were there, or, like, talk to the neighbours to find out if anybody had heard or seen anything. So I, in my turn, completely ignored them. Jörg, slightly miffed that they were parking in our driveway for no apparent reason, politely went to ask whether he could help in any way.
"No," was the answer, "unless you know anything about the excavator."
We knew nothing about any excavator, so the police went back to ignoring us.

But apparently, an excavator had mysteriously materialised on a meadow in the forest (there are lots of meadows and paddocks in the woods around here, it's a typical feature of the local traditional agricultural landscape). Well, it had not actually materialised. To judge by the tracks, it had gone up the path next to our uphill neighbours' garden, shifted a little, braked a lot, felled some smallish trees, and then apparently misjudged the slope of the meadow and toppled over into the ditch carved by the little brook that runs through the middle of the meadow. (Another typical feature of this particular region, because everything is narrow and sloped and we get all the rain that doesn't make it to Cologne.)
And there it lay, all hard angles and bright orange in the middle of the forest meadow.

Neighbourhood consent quickly had it that it was "probably teenagers". The day before happened to be the day that high school graduates celebrated the end of lessons. In order to show their maturity and good sense, they generally get drunk and do all kinds of stupid shit, mostly on the school grounds or on the grounds of a rival school but sometimes around the city. (It got really bad in Cologne last year.) So it stood to reason that one of them had seen the excavator stand around up in the settlement that's springing up at the top of the hill, and had decided to take it for a ride. A miracle, really, that there was no body lying underneath the excavator. Later, we learned that the excavator had actually been taken from a site in Solingen-Grunewald, quite a distance from here, and may have been stolen there as early as last Tuesday, when it was last used. By whom and why and what they were doing in our backwater neighbourhood remains anyone's guess.

An attempt was made to pull the poor thing out of the ditch with a tractor, without success. A new attempt with stronger equipment was scheduled for Monday. In the course of the weekend, it became a bit of a modest tourist attraction. The most frequently heard description? "Looks like somebody shot down a dinosaur in the ditch." (People in our neighbourhood feel like they know what that would look like. THAT'S HOW BACKWATER WE ARE.)

Well, on Monday, an official from the water protection board (because brook! and nature reserve!) and some heavy machinery showed up, and the owner of the meadow, who also happens to be the local fire station manager, donned his full firefighter outfit just in case (not in case of fire, but in case the water official wanted to play a game of AUTHORITEH, which indeed he did), and a couple of neighbours watched as steel cables were fixed to the shot-down dinosaur, and then the officials and the workers talked for an hour. The new owner of the riding stable endeared himself to the neighbourhood by bringing a crate of beer. And then they finally winched the excavator back upright, which was surprisingly easy. Water official yelled at meadow owner to spread lime in the ditch in case the excavator had leaked. ("I have already looked it over thoroughly in the past three days. It has not leaked." - "YOU WILL PUT THIS LIME IN THE DITCH!") Then he yelled at the constructor from whose site the excavator had been stolen to pick up the glass shards from the meadow TO PROTECT THE ANIMALS. The people working at the water protection board are a VERY special breed.

And with that, the dinosaur was dragged away. I wonder whether we'll eventually find out the full story. The last major incident in the neighbourhood was never resolved properly. At least nobody died this time.

So that was an exciting weekend, and now we will sink back into obscurity!