As they say, the middle of nowhere is in fact somewhere—most people just don’t know where. And by they, I mean I, because I’m pretty sure no one has ever said that. But let me back up a step—a title of Country Roads, Germany, and Me requires some explaining.
The story starts in 1997.
That year, I met a girl, one with a little tint to her skin. I was intrigued, because where I had gone to high school, such girls didn’t exist.
This one, it turns out, was a closet hillbilly—in order to meet her mountain momma, I first had to tour West Virginia coal country.
A few country roads later—not horrendously far from the Shenandoah River—I starting laying the groundwork for the title of son-in-law.
A year or so after that, upon graduating from college, I did what kids that age do: I bought a backpack and Eurail Pass, eager to show the Old World that, yes, Americans do eat a lot.
Somewhere along the way, I briefly ended up in Berlin. The entire city, it could be said, was under construction. While Communism was (and is) a dirty word, the egalitarian housing of the former East Berlin did catch my eye for a moment.
As a sort of eyewash, I moved on to Munich, joining throngs of other tourists at a hall full of malt, hops, and steins.
Once back in the US, I felt worldly for a month—maybe even two.
But eventually, I slipped back into my American ways. In other words, the most important thing in my life was the National Football League (NFL).
By 2004, the NFL was forcibly downgraded to the number two spot, just behind the West Virginia girl who, by legal agreement, had been upgraded to the position of spouse.
Three years later, in New Haven, Connecticut, I met an interesting German fellow. He and I were colleagues in training, together learning how to take care of patients with kidney failure. More exciting than that, however, were our daily visits to the food trucks, where he proved to me that people from the Old World can eat a lot, too.
He expressed disappointment when my wife and I opted to leave the area for a more rural setting near the Canadian border. Rochester, New York, I learned, had an abundance of country roads, which German immigrants—like Bausch + Lomb—had long ago made their own.
Meanwhile, my German buddy moved back to Berlin, opting to pursue the whole wife and kid thing in his motherland. Years later, he would change course and himself end up in a Rochester—the one in Minnesota.
Just prior to his move back stateside, I took a quick trip to Barcelona, site of my sister-in-law’s 40th birthday party. There, in a random bar, I heard John Denver’s voice. Better said, I heard the voices of a bunch of female West Virginians singing along:
Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain momma
Take me home, country roads
John Denver, aka Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr., the part-German American. At the time, I was more familiar with his song “Leaving on a Jet Plane”, the one that eerily predicted his own death in a plane crash decades later.
About 15 months after this slice of European Americana, I opted to take my life in a different direction, one with a lower dose of kidney failure. Initially, the decision landed me a remote job with an Austrian company, whose emails contained a healthy dose of German.
I took a deep dive into the German language—Duolingo style—though it would be short-lived. After learning to say Ich bin ein Mann, I chose to leave the company in favor of writing meandering blog posts that may or may not have a point (you can decide in a minute if you haven’t already).
Then, on the morning of November 13, 2022, like a good American, I turned on the first ever NFL regular season game in Germany—Munich, to be exact. At some point during the match, the packed stadium started belting out “Take Me Home, Country Roads” in unison.
I could hear the question that everyone would ask: Why, of all songs, are the Germans obsessed with this one?
I sat back and smirked. Country roads, Germany, and me.
And, somehow, it all made perfect sense.
