Into the Darkness

Kendra Atleework | Longreads | March 12, 2026 | 4,107 words (17 minutes)

Afternoon at my grandparents’ house, dusty sun bolts across the old blue carpet, and me sitting on the floor, staring up at a clock on the wall carved from dark wood in the shape of a house. The iron weights that hang below the clock are spruce cones; the tiny roof is delicately shingled. The minute hand seems to drag until, finally, the hour strikes. A door opens, and a bird pops out and chirps dustily. Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo. 

The first cuckoo clock was made in the 1730s in the Black Forest village of Schönwald, which means “beautiful forest.” The bird in question was supposed to be a rooster, but when the clockmaker tested his little leather bellows, the rooster sounded rather anemic, and the cuckoo clock was born. 

From darkness the cuckoo emerges and to darkness she returns. And I—child of desert mountains and blasting sun—am enthralled and a little afraid. I await that bird because she comes from a place I don’t understand, popping into the chatter of our American living room and then retreating to the shadows, leaving me sitting there alone, wondering why I cannot follow.

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Thirty years later, 30 minutes by car from Schönwald, I sit beneath another clock in a room full of naked Germans. Cheek-to-cheek on benches, faces sweaty in the lamplight, they have never been more at ease. The couple who shares my table cheers as a waitress rolls in a beer cart. Cuckoo, cuckoo. 

The Black Forest is a region in southwestern Germany, about the size of the state of Delaware and home to around a million people—practically deserted, by German standards. It is spruce trees with trailing branches, and silver fir whose soft, dark needles seem to swallow sunlight, for which the Romans gave the Black Forest its name. It is high pastures and rivers and mountains with villages tucked into dark valleys. The forest itself is owned by municipalities, the state of Baden-Württemberg, and families, many of whom have lived on the same farms for centuries. It is at once a cohesive region and a patchwork, unified by the evergreens that cover the land like a blanket. 

My first time in the Black Forest, as a tourist on a camping trip, I stood over a mirror of a lake and trailed my fingers in the water. I watched a dark wall of reflected spruce trees tremble and fade. Three years later, for reasons I’m still trying to understand, I returned, moving alone to a country where I knew no one, a country with a strange language and stranger customs. Not even an anything-goes Californian like me could have dreamed up a naked beer tasting, but today I’m integrating. This particular sauna is built to a theme called Heimatstube, which translates roughly to “cozy home living room” and is decorated accordingly. The room sits at 160 degrees Fahrenheit, and while only beer is served here, the interior perfectly emulates the traditional farmhouse dining rooms that dot the Black Forest. The floor, walls, furniture, ceilings: all spruce. The windows: fake, featuring illuminated scenes of flower boxes heaping with red geraniums and, beyond, the wooded mountains. 

“That’s weird,” my friend said. And I thought, That’s something I want to understand. 

At this moment, what I know about the Black Forest can be summed up in the glossy brochures at the tourist information office in my new city of Freiburg. If you’ve only got a weekend to spend here, the Black Forest is chocolate layer cake, white-frosted and topped with cherries. It’s smiling women wearing folk hats piled with giant red pompoms. It’s huge, hulking farmhouses, their dark-shingled roofs reaching almost to the ground.

In the months to come, I’ll stand in the smoke kitchen of one such farmhouse, the walls blackened and still stinking, where women forfeited their lungs and died young. I’ll learn how people hacked out a living farming poor soil in these steep valleys, how the plague and roving soldiers tore through their farms, how they baked bread once a month and then ate it moldy. The forest cut off travel, concealed bandits, blocked the light from crops. 

The descendants of those farmers are now contentedly draining the last of their beer and sweating into their towels. “Does anyone have a joke for us?” the waitress with the beer cart hollers. “No? Don’t be shy: You’re already all naked!” 

The room guffaws. Cheerful folk music oompahs through the Heimatstube. The waitress tells her own joke about drowned stepmothers, which sails right over my head. It’s not just the thick local dialect. I sit on my towel in the warm closeness between these wooden walls and make up my mind to understand, to follow the cuckoo back into the darkness, or at least to try.  

This will be more complicated than I imagine. I’ve wandered into the heart of a fabled forest whose inhabitants both control and are controlled by their landscape, fates entwined. I’ve arrived at a time when ways of life that have dominated here for centuries are being upended, and no one knows quite what is to come.

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Ludwig Weis—Tatjana, his wife, calls him Ludi—has bright eyes and plug earrings. Mid-40s, slim and athletic, his corduroy pants are no longer the scourge of rural German childhood that they were in the ‘80s. Now they’re a vibe, especially coupled with Ludwig’s vest and rolled shirtsleeves. 

I sit with Ludwig and Tatjana at a dark wooden table in the dining room of Landgasthaus Grüner Baum: the Green Tree country inn, a 477-year-old farmstead in the quiet Black Forest valley of Simonswald. The Grüner Baum is a real Heimatstube, complete with red geraniums in the window boxes and low-hanging lamps. When she met Ludwig, Tatjana was only a guest here, fleeing the city for Black Forest calm. Ludwig is the great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandson of the Grüner Baum’s first farmer. 

The restaurant isn’t open yet, and the dining room is dark and quiet. Out the window, mist pours over the mountains. I’ve asked to talk to Tatjana and Ludwig because of two portraits hanging in the shadows on the wall. 

I’d seen the portraits once before, on an earlier, unplanned visit, just a few months after arriving in Germany. I took a friend from out of town into the forest, where we spent the day getting lost and getting rained on. We missed our bus. Warm light shone from the windows of the Grüner Baum. 

I didn’t know how to eat the trout I ordered, which arrived beautiful and intact. 

“May I?” The waiter stooped, took the knife from my hand, leaned close, and cut a delicate line down the spine. With flourish he parted the silver skin and lifted the vertebrae, the lacy ribs. The white flesh steamed. My friend ordered brandy made from apples and pears, and we doused our potatoes in melted butter. The dark wooden clock on the wall struck the hour. When I looked up, I saw the portraits: a woman in a black vest and, beside her, the man who had just carved my trout. 

The couple in the portraits wear traditional folk costumes, down to the woman’s puffed white sleeves and the daisies embroidered on the straps of the man’s suspenders. They resemble the subjects of the folk portraits that hang all over the Black Forest, with some exceptions: At the Grüner Baum, the woman wears a skull painted over her face, and the man is shirtless, tattooed shoulders exposed. 

“That’s weird,” my friend said. And I thought: That’s something I want to understand. 

Now, Ludwig and Tatjana regard their likenesses. 

“We wanted something that reflected the fact that we’re not necessarily the most traditional people,” Tatjana says. Her hair is shaved short on the sides and she wears a fleece pullover against the November chill. 

“Those are traditional Simonswald folk costumes,” Ludwig says, his German a-swish with a touch of the regional Alemannic dialect. “But whether the two of us are traditional in our minds . . .”

“We thought, it should be a mixture,” Tatjana says. “Just as everything here is somehow a mixture of tradition and nontradition.”

The shoot was an experiment, Ludwig says. “We had several different setups—without a hat, with a hat, with a shirt. And then the photographer asked, ‘Are you tattooed?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’” And so the heir to the long, long legacy of the Grüner Baum stands bare on the dining room wall. 

On my first fateful trip through the Black Forest years ago, I saw countless dark farmhouses like the Grüner Baum, firewood heaped beneath the overhanging roofs and wooden exteriors time-blackened, so ubiquitous they were part of the landscape. Never had I seen such buildings before. I wondered, why are they so huge? And whatever do they do with them now? Now I know: In these farmhouses, all generations of two or more families, plus farmhands paid in room and board, plus livestock, lived together, the people sleeping one story above the stables so that in winter steamy animal heat rose to them through the floorboards. They stitched folk costumes and hung ox heads in attic rafters to ward away evil.

Above the portraits in the Grüner Baum, the ceiling is patched and crisscrossed with beams. Ludwig follows my gaze. “The ceiling reigns supreme,” he says. “It’s crooked, it’s bent. It should be left alone. Everything that happens underneath it can change. But the ceiling stays.” 

The Grüner Baum, first documented under this name in 1548, began as a farm. “Until the 1980s—1982, 1983, you could actually survive on agriculture,” Ludwig says. “Of course, children never had new clothes. We always wore our siblings’ old clothes. But even if it wasn’t much, it was enough.” Guests counted as extra income—locals stopping by for schnapps, ham, beer, fish sandwiches. 

“Life was simpler and less demanding,” says Ludwig. “And people were just happy, they were just satisfied.” 

“As soon as nothing changes anymore, there is stagnation. And stagnation is death.”

Things change. Of agriculture, at least at the Grüner Baum, Ludwig says, “There’s nothing left. From April to October, especially in this valley, we all live off tourism.” People come from the Netherlands and Italy and Switzerland and France. Spaniards come north in the summer to cool off. 

“Biker groups,” Tajana says. “Sometimes a Korean tour group, when you have to wonder, where did they hear about us?”

“It started with a film,” Ludwig says, “in the 1950s. A famous film called Schwarzwaldmädel. A German production, and in color—completely new for people.” The film, whose title translates to “Black Forest Gal,” tells the story of a young artist fleeing urban drear to an idyllic, fictional village. Schwarzwaldmädel launched the region to fame and solidified its iconic, if partly made-up, attributes in the public imagination: a mythic forest, a daydream for beleaguered post-war workers. 

“The first vacationers who came here didn’t even know where they were going,” Ludwig says. And what drew all of them here? What drew a Californian after a camping trip to uproot her whole life and cross the Atlantic?

Outside, fog pools in the patches where the forest is bare. 

“The last few years have been a bit stressful again, due to the heat,” Ludwig says. “But this has been a good year for the forest.”

“Right now there’s a huge area of forest up there where there are no trees anymore,” says Tatjana. “The price of wood is supposed to be good, so a lot is being harvested.”

We all look out the window for a moment. 

“For sale, for sale,” Ludwig murmurs. “It’s all commercial forest here.” The word he uses is Nutzwald: use-forest. “And when you harvest, you have to replant accordingly. It’s always a cycle.” 

“Still,” Tatjana says. “I love the forest.”

The first forest to surround farmers like Ludwig’s ancestors was old growth: beech, oak, and, higher up, fir. The farmers took that forest and they turned it into clocks and coal and patches of sunlight, the things they needed to survive. They taught their descendants to do the same. 

Isn’t it dangerous? I ask Tatjana. Is it dangerous to love something, if you can wake up and find it gone?

“That happens all the time,” she says. “Just there,” she gestures toward the mountain out the window. “But it doesn’t disappear completely. There’s an open area where there was no open area before, yes. But now you can see into the valley, and that’s beautiful too. And the trees are growing again.” She pauses. “And I always think that life is change. As soon as nothing changes anymore, there is stagnation. And stagnation is death.”

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It’s the winter solstice at the end of a quarter century, early in the morning, and the forest is once more cloaked in fog. I’m in the car with my friend Rebecca, who herself moved to Germany from the redwoods of the California coast. Ninety-five percent of our time together has been spent in the forest; it turns out one can build quite a friendship in the liminal darkness. 

Rebecca drives us up and up, through villages of half-timbered houses. Then we pierce the fog, and a person could forget she is in one of the most densely populated countries in Europe: range upon range of ridges thick with evergreens float in a white sea, the sprawl of cities magicked away. We park in an empty lot beneath dangling chairlifts on a mountain bare of snow and walk into the Bannwald. 

Bann means spell: a magical hold, a fascination or a curse. The first time I came across a sign reading Bannwald on a hiking trail, I assumed I was in an enchanted forest, helpfully designated as such by the local municipality—until I learned that Bann means “ban” in this context, and a Bannwald is a forest in which commercial activity is banned. 

A Bannwald, then, enjoys a spell of protection cast upon it by the powers that be. Such areas, comprising less than 1 percent of the Black Forest, were mostly established in the 1970s, when acid rain falling over Germany made life unpleasant enough to spur new environmental protections. But the particular Bannwald into which Rebecca and I wander has been left alone since 1911. That makes it 114 years old—admittedly 800 years younger than the cobbled streets that wind through Freiburg, but still one of the first protected forests in the country and intended to serve as a reference ecosystem. 

But why would a place as fabled as the Black Forest need a reference ecosystem?  

When the world looks to the Black Forest, the world sees spruce.

“Vast tracts of the Black Forest landscape were once bare,” Dr. Jürgen Bauhus, professor and chair of Silviculture at the University of Freiburg, told me one rainy night in his office, where we sat beneath a minimalist cuckoo clock painted in green. “In the 18th and 19th centuries, a lot of the forest was cleared for agricultural purposes and to feed the early industries that moved in.” 

After the clear-cutting came mudslides and wood shortages, a volcanic winter, a famine, an exodus of half-starved farmers to the New World. Those who remained, like Ludwig’s ancestors, looked around at the barren mountains that had once been the Black Forest and began the job of replanting. For this they chose the spruce: fast and straight-growing, its wood boasting a versatile springiness. The spruce is also frost tolerant, a quality crucial to its survival during the mini ice age of the 1800s. In the centuries that followed, generations passed down the art of spruce cultivation. 

Spruce, then, with its draping branches, its dangling cones, its pointed leader, is the tree whose wood is carved into cuckoo clocks, whose cones of cast iron hung as clock weights on my grandparents’ wall—the tree upon which, even now, entire industries, building practices, and an economy are based. When the world looks to the Black Forest, the world sees spruce. 

Here in the Bannwald, Rebecca and I find a tiny spruce sapling straining hopefully toward a beam of light. At this elevation, around 3,000 feet, the solstice air is clear and cold. We walk deeper, and we find something that we have been missing in the Black Forest. 

We have been missing death. And here death appears, a form of life on the forest floor. Across most of the Black Forest, as in other parts of Germany, the understory feels conspicuously empty. In many places, the forest is a spruce monoculture, trees all about the same age, standing above near-bare ground and not nurtured by the previous generation. The previous generation, after all, has gone for paper, parquet, chairs, musical instruments—all the things found in my Freiburg apartment. 

In Germany, spruce trees are harvested by the age of 80 or 100 years old. In its true home, a spruce can live to be 1000, a silver fir 600, a beech 500. After that, in the twilight realm of the understory, the goings-on are handed over to fungi far older than the tree species themselves. Here in this relatively old patch of Black Forest we can see the cycle in its riotous beginnings. We walk, reveling in root balls thrust into the light and robed in spiderwebs. Crackle of dry winter ferns underfoot, the wet and glistening fallen trunks melting into loam—a beautiful chaos; the oldest kind of order. When a forest regenerates naturally, fallen trunks protect saplings from wind and grazing and the forest comes back faster and stronger. Deliciously dead, Rebecca calls it. We marvel at a nursery tree swaddled in moss, a row of saplings rising from its trunk.

We’re halfway done with our loop, the thin sun fighting its way through the canopy from time to time, and we say to each other: This feels like some kind of hope. This Bannwald is early in its journey toward old growth. Perhaps great heights lie ahead for that little spruce sapling reaching toward sunlight at the side of the trail. And now we come upon a pile of trunks tossed across each other, broken like bones. And here another—and on it goes. Wow! we say. How we’ve missed this. If only the forests around Freiburg were this way. And here another, swathes and swathes. It is as if a flood tore across this mountain, where no flood has been. 

After a while Rebecca says, “It’s actually kind of a lot, isn’t it?” 

We notice an odd pattern on the regal stumps: pits peppering the wood, like bullet holes in a metal sign in the desert. And now here’s a clearing of pitted silver trunks, dead where they stand, pale branches reaching. I peer inside a hole and think of the cuckoo. And then I remember something else Jürgen Bauhus told me: trace of sawdust and bore holes. Beetles have stripped these trees of their bark. 

Not every tree. A couple of slender evergreens appear untouched. I clamber up on the pile of trunks to get a better look. And then I realize: The living trees are fir. Every fallen tree beneath my feet—every tree standing dead—is a spruce. 

There in the Bannwald, where the evidence is left to lie, we see what is otherwise more difficult to make out. Such “massive mortality,” as Bauhus called it, happens because warming temperatures pitch old neighbors into an unfair fight. Spruce sick and weak from drought and heat stress succumb while beetle numbers explode. No mystery waits inside the darkness of these bore holes, only dead wood. 

All the cuckoo clocks bought by tourists and carried home and hung on walls all over the world are now counting down the hours.

Like the bark beetle, the spruce is indigenous to the Black Forest, but it has only one true home. So said soil ecologist Kenton Stutz, himself a Californian come east, some weeks ago as we drove through the forest in his orange research van. Shallow-rooted spruce lack a tap root anchoring them to the earth and thus need special conditions. “Wet, cold, protected northern slopes. Places that get a lot of cold air drainage,” Kenton said. “And basically nowhere else.” 

“People accuse foresters in the past of planting the wrong trees,” said Dr. Johann Goldammer, fire ecologist and leader of the Global Fire Monitoring Center, when I met with him in his Freiburg office. “But in the previous climate, which prevailed until the early 2000s, the spruce was a success story. Now that story has come to an end.”

All the cuckoo clocks bought by tourists and carried home and hung on walls all over the world are now counting down the hours. According to Bauhus’s research, climate change has rendered the Black Forest largely uninhabitable to spruce. 

There is some hope in the native silver fir and the Douglas fir brought over from North America. Both firs survive drought better than spruce. But even these hardier trees are no longer able to thrive at elevations under 2,300 feet, meaning the range of evergreens will be limited to the highlands of the Black Forest. Everywhere else, only deciduous trees will grow.

And when you harvest, you have to replant accordingly, Ludwig said—but replanting accordingly no longer means what it once did; replanting in Simonswald where the Grüner Baum stands at 1,200 feet means something completely different now than it did to Ludwig’s ancestors. And a hardwood forest is beautiful, too. But a hardwood forest is not black; the leaves do not absorb all light on a bright and hot afternoon. A hardwood forest does not sequester carbon all winter long. 

How long before the spruce are gone? I asked Bauhus. 

“God knows,” he replied. 

“There was a drought,” Kenton Stutz told me in the van. “From 2018 until 2022. Or arguably 2023.” He told me of the Harz Mountains in Germany, a densely forested region to the north that was once entirely covered in spruce. “After that drought, essentially, there were no more spruce still standing in those mountains.” 

A friend took a trip through that northern forest and came back talking of Mordor. 

Could something like that hit the Black Forest? I had asked Kenton. Could everything change, just like that? 

“Quite possibly,” he said. 

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In his office, beneath the green cuckoo clock, Jürgen Bauhus told me of farms not unlike the Grüner Baum, farms that have existed on the same land for 30 generations, a thousand years. 

“Their greatest asset, their experiential knowledge, is eroding so quickly,” he said. “Whatever they have learned now from their fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, is of little value.”

Rebecca and I walk through the death groves, and she remembers the drought of 2018: the way the city begged residents to water the urban trees; the way the spruce along her favorite hiking path died before her eyes. 

“What we have to tell them,” Bauhus said of the people on the old farms, “is that many of these species that we have cultivated in the past are simply not possible in the future. And we don’t necessarily have alternatives.” 

Is there resistance? I asked. On the old farms, is there grief? 

“There is all of that,” he said. “But they have seen many changes in the landscape and they are aware that the forest is a dynamic thing.” 

“What would he miss?” Ludwig murmured, the mist outside the window mostly covering the mountain. “What would he miss if he found it dark now, if he had to move away now?”

I remind myself that today’s Black Forest of spruce is not the Black Forest of fir that the Romans named; that the forest of fir is returning, at least partially.  

“Life is change,” Tatjana said. “The moment nothing changes anymore, I’m dead.”

But that doesn’t make it easy. 

Back at the Grüner Baum, I asked a final question. If you had to leave your home, I said, what would you miss the most?

A silence fell. 

“What would he miss?” Ludwig murmured, the mist outside the window mostly covering the mountain. “What would he miss if he found it dark now, if he had to move away now?”

He looked around him at the room empty of guests. “Just . . . this,” he said, and raised a hand. “Yes. Yes, only this.” The mist caught in the tops of the spruce and spilled over into the village streets. “Just this, the farm where I grew up. I would miss this. Even though I sometimes curse it. I would miss it the most.”

There in Bauhus’s office, a cuckoo springs out of the little house on the wall—that sleek, modern clock, missing the detail of tradition but still gesturing at something. Bauhus apologizes for the interruption. “It is, well, the Black Forest,” he says, and chuckles.

Sitting beneath the cuckoo, listening to the rain roll off the mountains, I wonder. Maybe not too long from now the Black Forest that yielded these clocks, their design and function, will again exist only in the space to which the cuckoo retreats. Or maybe it only ever did.

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Kendra Atleework is the author of Miracle Country, which won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award and was highlighted by The New York Times’“Books that Explain California.” Her writing has appeared in Best American Essays, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She lives in Germany, where she and her harp can often be found in the forest.

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands