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National Geographic : 2002 Mar
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HIGHWAY FOR COMMERCE A saluteto the rivertakes place every April in Spitz, Austria,when local bands herald the opening of the shippingseason. Upriver at Linz workers clean a barge(right) thatdeliv ered iron orefrom South Africa. Cargoesof ocean vessels are loaded onto such barges,which are small enough to transit river locks. SOMETIMES IT'S hard to tell where a river begins. It's doubly difficult with the Danube, born of two rival sources, both trickling down the slopes of Germany's Black Forest. But such ambiguity seems fitting, for the Danube is hard to pin down. Its name conjures grace ful couples waltzing the night away in 19th century Vienna, and for the first third of its nearly 1,800-mile journey to the Black Sea it plies an idyllic course beside tidy villages and storybook castles. But there is another Danube River, mainly in eastern Europe, one damaged by pollution and war. A NATO bombing cam paign against Yugoslavia in 1999 destroyed industrial facilities, releasing contaminants into the water, and blew up three main bridges, which halted or diverted as much as a billion dollars in business. But the Danube had a dual personality even before the bombing. The river is a playground for swimming and boating; it's also very much a working river of fishermen, barges, power plants, and shipyards. The working river is part of a busy transportation corridor connecting the North Sea with the Black Sea through the Main-Danube Canal, but it also feeds wetlands and valuable wildlife habitat. Today people along the river are striving to reconcile these competing demands and are beginning to undo years of environmental and war damage. When I sought the river's source, an April snow shower greeted me on the farm of Hans jorg and Beate Heinzmann in the mountains of the Black Forest. Tapping the headwaters of the Brigach River, Frau Heinzmann held a blue flowered pitcher below an opening in a stone slab near the farmhouse and then filled my glass. Downriver I would taste the wines of Austria. Here I swirled this cold, fresh vintage in my mouth. With just a hint of mineral tang, it was absolutely refreshing. The Brigach has become a shrine for people from the ten countries through which the Danube flows. "We get a lot of visitors, mostly drop-ins," said Frau Heinzmann. When I stopped by at 11 a.m., 65 people had already visited that day. Drawing on the flow of trav elers, the Heinzmanns have built a bed-and breakfast on their farm. A rival source lies near the city of Furt wangen, where waters of the Breg River flow through another stone marker next to a resort hotel. That stream has a stronger claim since it begins farther from the Danube's mouth. Underground streams from the Breg and Brigach meet in an ornate stone and concrete pool next to Fiirstenberg Palace in the city of Donaueschingen. Only there does the river Europe's second longest, after the Volga-take the name Danube. I began following its course at Ulm, the first navigable point on the river, here patrolled by graceful swans. The world's tallest cathedral spire crowns Ulm's Gothic structure. From the top you can survey what was the medieval duchy of Swabia, one of a procession of powers -Celts, Romans, the Holy Roman Empire, Ottoman Turks, the Habsburgs, the Austro Hungarian Empire, Nazi Germany-that has NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, MARCH 2002
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