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Fasnacht: Basel's "three most beautiful days"

Pursuing atmospheric longings to Basel’s “three most beautiful days”

For most of the year, Edwin was chief puppeteer of the Solstice—our town’s largest parade where papier-mâché sun gods strode on stilts through our Spanish Colonial downtown—but during the summer, his wire-frame glasses and doe-like features were confined to the shadows of a portable trailer, praising us softly as we coaxed sheets of cardboard and reels of thin-gauge wire into unstable life. We would return to the apartment to nap as needed, mostly in the late afternoon; otherwise we rode new currents, aware of the hallucinatory transition from the spare and haunting Morgestraich to the brash Guggenmusik, that completely separate hell that emerged on the nights known as Cortege, where parades ran in two frantic concentric rings in opposing directions around the city’s modern center, with farm trucks loaded with nightmarish Alasatian Waggis hurling oranges into the crowd, their children dumping confetti on anyone not wearing a small enameled Blaggede. We stole a bag of groceries from Migros, walked to a truck stop at the edge of the city, and there, as a light rain settled over the highway, silenced somehow by the immensity of what we had seen, we took spluttering drags from a wet cigarette under a cardboard sign labeled Krakau and, like exiles of a dark dream, cast weary eyes to the northeast.

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