The Dragon of the Wutach Gorge: Why Change Is What Life Is Really About
There are days when you plan a perfectly normal hike through the Black Forest. Sturdy boots, a packed lunch in your backpack, the usual dose of optimism. And then there are days when you stand deep in the damp thicket of the Wutach Gorge, arguing about the meaning of human existence with a hand-sized, yellow-and-black spotted relic from prehistoric times.
On this day, the Wutach Gorge was showing its most stereotypical side: moss-covered rock faces, the constant rush of water, cool, slightly clammy air, and steps—countless steps made of damp wood and slippery stone. I was in the rhythm of a perfect hiking groove, devouring elevation meter by elevation meter, when my foot froze mid-air.
There he sat, right on the edge of a wooden step. A fire salamander. Or rather: a pygmy dragon with terrible posture. He had the build of a slightly overstuffed bratwurst, gleamed like he’d been freshly varnished, and didn’t honor me with a single glance.
I balanced on one leg to avoid sending the little creature to the kingdom come with my treaded soles, waved my trekking poles around for balance, and finally sat down on the step above him.
“Hey, little fire dragon,” I said, slightly out of breath. “Aren’t you a bit worried I might just trip over you if you take a break right in the middle of the trail?”
The little guy turned his head very, very slowly. If looks could kill, I would have turned to ash on the spot—and my performance fleece wouldn’t have helped me one bit. He blinked twice with the serenity of a creature that had already survived the Ice Age and really had no desire for small talk with a tourist.
“I am not sitting on your trail,” he replied. His voice sounded like two cool pebbles being rubbed together underwater, seasoned with a healthy dose of grumpy local hostility. “I am sitting in front of my house. And if it weren’t so cursed cold out here and my limbs were a bit warmer, I would have been over the hills long ago. But right now, I just need a little longer. And with those spindly, endless legs of yours, I’m sure you can manage to walk around me, can’t you?”
I couldn’t help but grin. An amphibian with an ego problem.
“Yeah, yeah, fair enough,” I said to pacify the mini-dragon. “Don’t be so cranky. Since you’re stuck here anyway waiting to reach operating temperature, why don’t you tell me a bit about the Wutach Gorge instead?”
The salamander snorted. A tiny wisp of mist escaped his snout—probably my imagination, but it suited his dragon persona.
“That’s what you humans call it,” he said, shaking his head disapprovingly. “‘Wutach Gorge.’ To us, the river has no name. Why should it? It doesn’t listen when you call it anyway. My ancestors and I have been here forever. But the river was here before that. And the mountain, too. They play together. The exact same game, over and over again.”
He paused briefly to execute a microscopically small climbing motion with one front paw, which advanced him approximately three millimeters.
“The mountain blocks the river’s path,” he continued, “and the river stubbornly finds a new one. Then it digs and gnaws at the foot of the mountain until the mountain loses its patience and crashes a few tennis-court-sized boulders down into the riverbed. And bam—the whole thing starts all over again. It’s wonderful! Thanks to this constant change, a completely new landscape is created time after time. We never get bored here.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Well,” I interjected, “that sounds romantic, but landslides just like that have caused houses to collapse here in the past. And flash floods have washed away bridges. We humans find that rather less than ideal.”
The fire salamander made a sound that was unmistakably meant to be a laugh. It sounded like rustling dry leaves.
“Oh, humans!” he exclaimed, looking up at the sky. “The two of them—the mountain and the river—simply love change. They probably even thought they were doing you a favor with all this dynamic energy! But you don’t like change, do you? You’re terrified of it! You build a wooden house on a landslide zone, give every tree, every stone, and every stream a name, and then claim with a straight face that the whole lot belongs to you!”
He shook his head again, this time with genuine pity.
“You ought to hear how that sounds from a bird’s-eye view. That’s just like that little green beetle over there claiming he owns the three-hundred-year-old oak tree he’s been crawling up since this morning!”
He pointed his snout toward a tree root, where a small dung beetle was indeed busily making its way up. I scratched the back of my head. The little guy wasn’t entirely wrong. But I had to defend my species’ honor just a little bit.
“Now hold on,” I said. “You wouldn’t want someone coming along and destroying your cave either, would you?”
“Pfft!” the dragon scoffed, waving off the thought. “Then I’ll just build a new one! Change is part of life. Next time the river shifts direction and tears away the bank, there’ll be wonderful, soft earth right over there for me to dig perfect new tunnels into. It’s just you masterminds who don’t get it. Typical humans! With your giant plastic boots, you trample everything that isn’t hidden in the moss by the count of three, and you throw your garbage everywhere, too.”
I raised my hands defensively. “Hey, hey! I don’t leave any garbage! You really have a terrible attitude today, you little fire dragon.”
The salamander drew himself up as far as his short little legs allowed. He puffed out his chest, making his yellow warning stripes look even brighter.
“You just be glad I’m not any bigger!” he threatened, glaring at me with his black button eyes. “If I were the size of one of your fitted kitchens, I’d eat you on the spot! Like a crunchy, juicy beetle for breakfast! Now get out of here, I don’t have time for your philosophical questions anymore. I need to find a patch of sunlight to get my muscles up to operating temperature.”
With that, he turned around with the majestic speed of a snail in rush-hour traffic. Jerkily, step by step, he waddled down the wooden stair and pushed himself slowly but surely toward the protective underbrush.
I sat on the steps for a long time, staring at the empty spot where the Black Forest’s smallest, yet loudest predator had just been sitting. The rushing of the Wutach suddenly sounded a little different. No longer like a wild river, but more like the quiet chuckling of two old playmates tossing a boulder back and forth once again.
Slowly, I stood up. I brushed the dirt off my trousers, grabbed my trekking poles firmly, and continued on my way.
From then on, however, I walked much more attentively. My steps were deliberate, my eyes glued to the ground. I scanned every stone, every root, and every wooden step.
Not just because I now saw nature through different eyes and wanted to respect the gorge’s fragile ecosystem—but mostly out of pure self-preservation. You never knew if one of that dragon’s cousins was waiting behind the next fern leaf. And I had absolutely no desire to end up as a snack for a bad-tempered dinosaur imitation.