Ups & Downs

David, June 30

And the earth becomes my throne

I adapt to the unknown
Under wandering stars I’ve grown
By myself but not alone
I ask no one

Rover, wanderer, nomad, vagabond
Call me what you will

- Metallica

There’s an old joke in Texas: if your house is on wheels and your car is on bricks, you might be a redneck.  Describing the trailers on permanent foundations could evoke a not too dissimilar image – one might imagine broken down pickup trucks, old tires being used as planters, and nonfunctioning washing machines in the front yard for the children to play with.

Rest assured, this trailer park was nothing like that.  Later on in the trip we would become quite familiar with weekend campers, families “roughing it up” in their RVs with built-in showers, electric stoves, and DVD players.  All these residents fell into that category, except they’d leave the RV there permanently and just drive down from the city for their weekend in the country.

In the morning we left Altdorf and headed up toward the Surenenpass on our way to Engleberg.  My mind had definitely made the shift out of city mode.  I realized that morning I hadn’t seen a newspaper in over a week, so the Western Hemisphere could have fallen off the face of the earth and I wouldn’t have known.  Nor would I have cared.

I spent the entire day thinking about what it would be like to live my entire life here, a nomad wandering through the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Rhine, the Rhone, and camping day to day, night to night, spending maybe $10 a day on food as I hung out in the middle of nowhere and just … lived!

In the winters maybe I’d walk to a warmer climate and get a job for a few months, just so I could save up enough money to spend my summers in the absolute freedom of the trees, the mountains, the grass, and the sky.  Each year I’d take the time to learn another language, and then live immersed in that language and its culture:  French, German, Italian, Dutch, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, Norwegian … . Work one year on a farm, the next as a translator or in the business world, making use of my knowledge of the American language, culture, or industry, and of my experience there and throughout Europe.

There would be women.  Likely, they would fall in love with me, and there would be the temptation to stay … to be with them, to make them happy, to live my life for them.  But always, it would come back to this – staring at a backdrop of green fields, mile after mile of knolls and hills, curving upward to insurmountable peaks, or down into snow, which turns into a stream, into a creek, into a river, into a lake; trails cutting through the mountainside, clouds obscuring the view momentarily as they grow, stop, change form, and move on.  Always a gentle haze, painting the backdrop like a canvas, making the view look almost fake, like any minute we might turn and run straight into a wall that makes the background on a film set.  Off in the distance, peaks cloaked in snow, even now, at the end of June, with the odd glimpse of brown, gray, or green sneaking out from under the white blanket.

(Note from Don: Before we sent this to be published, I begged David to put something in here to make it evident that he knows how ridiculous this all is.  “There would be women?”  Come on … .  He refused, claiming to be a sex magnet and arguing that this was a totally realistic vision.)

When we reached the top of the Surenenpass, the fog on the side from which we’d come was so thick we saw nothing but white.  Turn around and face west, and the sky was completely clear and the view was perfect for miles and miles.

We sat at the top of the pass for a good half hour, basking in the joy of having reached the top.  Some cyclists, lying in the grass next to their mountain bikes, greeted us as we reached the summit and were still there when we left.  Again, we were miles from anything we considered remotely cyclable, so perhaps they’d just been dropped in by helicopter to psych people out.

As we sat munching trail mix and staring out at the view, a man arrived with a dog that looked like a mix between a German Shepherd and a fox.  The dog walked on a few feet to a snow bank, lay down and started rolling around, chomping on the snow as he crawled through it to cool off, all the while smiling at the joy of this life.

Shortly after we started our descent, we came to a gate where we found awaiting us a cow, which, according to Angela, had been mooing in a distressed tone.  The cow had spent the last half hour trying to follow hikers up the trail, but kept getting stopped at the gate, which presumably had been put there for precisely that purpose.  Seeing her brethren (and sistren) grazing in the valley half a mile below, we decided to usher her down the trail to join them.

At first it was easy.  She followed Dad down toward a small hut, licking every bit of exposed skin she could find.  When Dad made it clear that he was not interested in a lasting relationship, the cow switched its attentions to me and started licking all over my groin area.  (I told you there would be women!)  While we all conceded that it was an interesting proposition, Angela is not into threesomes, so I had to put a stop to it.

We tried to convince the cow to continue with us down the path to join her colleagues, but she decided she’d rather be a mountain walker and stayed by the hut to graze.  Angela tried desperately to lure her on, but to no avail.  We eventually decided she knew where all the other cows were and how to get to them, but had been ostracized for some reason and wasn’t allowed to go back.  We named her Jar-Jar, and as we left her behind, she mooed after us longingly, but refused to follow.  A few minutes after continuing our descent, we heard her mooing and looked back to see her once again standing at the gate, staring longingly at the top of the pass.