Industrial and Lakeside Landscape: The Quarry Pond

I grew up on the Upper Rhine. There in the Rhine plain, between the Black Forest and the Vosges, the river has washed up and deposited gravel and sand over thousands of years. Due to high demand from the construction industry, these materials are mined, creating numerous quarry ponds across the vast river landscape, alongside remaining alluvial forests and the straightened Rhine behind its high embankments.

In the 1980s, a quarry pond was the trendy place for teenagers to go swimming. Swimming pools were seen as just paddling pools for children or stuffy families. Swimming at the quarry pond therefore offered many attractions. On the one hand, it was the supposedly forbidden nature of it – after all, you were entering private industrial premises and were only tolerated. On the other hand, you’d encounter reckless bathers who presented themselves more or less separately, topless or completely naked, satisfying our adolescent voyeuristic desires. The prettiest girls were always to be found there anyway.

There were cosy, shady spots on the grass under poplar trees. However, their abundant seeds drifted through the air like snowflakes, covering the ground with white fluff and finding their way into every bag, food item, and drink. We tended to prefer the sandy spots that gave the feeling of being at a beach. I often lay on a spot on one of the sand hills piled up by grain size for storage, because you could observe the lively hustle and bustle even better from up there. However, the ground couldn’t be too coarse, as larger or sharp stones would press uncomfortably through the towel and you could hardly walk on them barefoot. In the midday sweltering heat, smothered in milking grease, I roasted like a breaded schnitzel on the dusty, glaringly reflective sand. As a result, I often got painful sunburns. We weren’t aware of the risk of skin cancer back then, and peeling the layers of skin off each other’s backs was a popular pastime, perhaps comparable to monkeys grooming each other from a social perspective.

At the age of 13, I rode to a quarry pond for the first time, back then still on my orange Bonanza bike. Air mattress, pump, and swimwear were artfully tied to the handlebars, frame, and under the banana seat. Naive as I was, I set off on the roughly 15 km journey, initially through the morning freshness. The return journey in the afternoon, however, led through the scorching heat on long, shadeless asphalt roads and sucked the last bit of strength from my parched body. At 15, the bicycle was replaced by a moped, making the trip less exhausting. I certainly had my grandmother’s warnings in my ear – about cold currents that pull even experienced swimmers under or lead to cramps, or the danger of injury when jumping into the murky, unknown water. That was no myth; unfortunately, we occasionally read about such accidents involving spinal fractures and paralysis in the newspaper.

At the quarry pond, I was surrounded by a metallic, rusty industrial landscape of towers and bridges: the bucket dredgers, the extensive conveyor belts on stilts, or concrete loading facilities for the heavy gravel lorries. The ultimate test of courage was jumping into the water from one of the floating dredgers. Not just because of the height of 10 to 12 metres; the danger also included invisible cables, metal parts, or pipes beneath the water’s surface. On the way up, the perforated metal walkways and the thin rungs of the ladders pressed deep and painfully into the soles of our feet as we climbed barefoot to the platform at the top of the floating dredger. Climbing back down was not an option. When jumping, the trick was to tuck your arms in just before hitting the water. More than once I didn’t manage it in time and ended up with bruises on my upper arms.