Yesterday I took three local trains through the German countryside to a quaint little village, Bad Durkheim, that was celebrating the local wine industry. Viticulture has been a principal industry of this part of Germany for a very long time, because this is the 600th-plus time the annual Fall Festival has come around. I’m impressed by that because nothing in America is even close to being that old, if you don’t count the oldest cemeteries on Long Island, where are interred the remains of people contemporaneous with Michelangelo. The “beer” tents were serving mostly year-old white wines from the region, and you had to search for an empty seat. The oom-pah bands would have passed for caractures of themselves had not the Germans been singing along so lustigly. Suddenly it seemed like 1806, not 2006. The streets of the center were deserted, and there was no litter to be seen. Only two pieces of grafitti were in evidence: one a call from some poorly-defined anarchists to end the war in Iraq, and the other, scrawled on the walls of the German Red Cross building, accusing the occupants of being Nazi doppelgangers. Many of the towns around here are named after the native healing waters (“Bad” means spa) or minerals or herbs, so I guess this is a good place for us to have our hospital. Health by proxy, if not proximity. Gotta go.