Ups & Downs

Chapter 15: Grosse What?

David, July 3-4

We spent the next day climbing from Meiringen to Grosse Scheidegg – a 5 hour journey that actually took us just about 5 hours, cause for celebration considering the hell we’d gone through clawing our way over the Foopass 2 weeks earlier.

Along the way we had another run-in with overly-affectionate cattle.  No sooner had we walked through a gate before an entire herd of calves stampeded toward us and began licking our backpacks with every step.  Every so often I’d stop and turn around to pet one, and it would lick my hand or my arm or my crotch or whatever else it could get close to, always with a disappointed look on its face.  That experience taught me that it doesn’t matter what species it is, when someone looks disappointed with your crotch, it still deals a serious blow to your self-esteem.

After about 15 minutes of this, we crossed paths with a pair of farmers, and all was revealed.  Obviously bemused by our situation at the center of the herd, they reached into little sacks on their belts and started throwing handfuls of salt onto the ground.  The calves, who had apparently mistaken us for their daily salt truck, suddenly lost interest in us completely and began crowding around the two men who obviously had what they wanted and began licking the salted ground furiously.  Now I’ll know to carry salt with me for the next time I get propositioned by an eligible young bovine.

Inspired by a sign for the Rösti[1] special, we stopped at a roadside restaurant for lunch, where Dad, exhausted and not thinking straight, made a rather inappropriate slip of the tongue.[2] We were talking about how Mom grew up cooking for her family of six, so when she and Dad first got married (and she continued cooking for six) he gained 25 lbs, which he never lost, but “grew into.”  I told Angela, “That’s the trick,” meaning, if she wants to fatten me up, to cook for 6, but Dad’s ill-thought-out reply to her was “That’s right, you’d be the perfect weight if you were 6’4″.

The table fell silent.  I’m not an expert in the female mind, but I had a feeling that this was not a bright thing for him to have said.  I made a joke of the situation, but in reality, there are only two things you can do in a situation like this: (1) run away, or (2) act like you just got caught with your pants down, pretend nothing happened, and ultimately suffer the impact of a well-planned and highly humiliating revenge attack.  (Feeble attempt at defense by Don:  I thought they were making similar cracks and it just slipped out.  I knew immediately that it was a relationship-terminating comment.  Mea culpa.)

Angela, to her credit, never mentioned the event again.  Dad recently asked me whether that means she’s forgiven him, but I think it’s more likely that she’s just repressed the memory and is still plotting her revenge.  In fact, only a couple of hours later as we passed an incredibly scenic rock bluff surrounded by clouds on all sides, Angela and I discussed what we could do to thank him for making this entire trip possible.  We both became very emotional, realizing that this is the stuff Thanksgivings are made of.  Okay, I became very emotional.  Angela laughed at me for crying like a little girl.  (Note from Angela: (a) I will never forget, and am still plotting my revenge, and (b) David teared up at a mountain! What on earth was I marrying into?!)

By the time we reached the top of the pass the clouds were so thick we could barely see the hotel a few yards in front of us.  As we ate dinner that evening, the hotel was completely shrouded in white on all sides – we couldn’t even see the garden furniture 3 feet outside our window.  This provided for some rather chummy exchanges with our waitress (we jokingly asked her if we could sit outside to eat, and she just laughed and laughed and laughed), but things got sour a little while later.  Angela and Dad tried letting me order dessert in German, ein Apfelstrudel mit drei Gabel (an apple strudel with three forks).  They thought I did very well, but when the waitress brought us three coffees (apparently Gabel sounded to her like Café) we wondered if maybe my ordering hadn’t been such a good idea.  We sent the coffees back, so to get back at us she charged us a dollar a glass for our tap water.

Of course, charging for tap water is a common practice in much of Europe, and all three of us knew that.  But this was the first, and would prove to be the only time in the entire trip that this happened.  When we complained to our waitress, she argued with us: “This is very common practice in Europe; I used to wait tables in Brussels and we did it there.”  Dad spent 5 days a week in Brussels for a year and a half, and knew perfectly well that you get charged for tap water there, but as he so accurately pointed out to our waitress, we weren’t in Brussels just at the moment.

No matter.  We slept in a Massenlager that night, but this time it was just the three of us in a room with 11 beds in it.  A storm pounded on our roof all night, and as we drifted to sleep, thunder rolled in the distance, and the force of the wind made the windows clatter and the building creak like a ship.

In the morning we bundled up, grabbed our equipment, and stood by the entrance, psyching ourselves up for the day.  By the time we stepped outside the wind must have been 40 mph and it was sleeting sideways.  As Dad started toward the trail, Angela and I made a beeline for a tour bus that had serendipitously arrived just as we were leaving.  When Dad turned around and realized we were nowhere to be found, he put two and two together very quickly and followed us to the bus, where we agreed to the extortionate 20 francs per person fare to take us the 20-minute ride down to Grindelwald.

As we sat there, our backpacks in our laps, sharing a bus with a large group of Japanese tourists, a part of me felt some regret at having missed the adventure and dropping that kind of money for a trip down the mountain, particularly when the weather cleared up almost immediately once we descended a few feet.  But as miserable as those long, steep downhill climbs are – especially when your toe is sore (and mine was – I’d had blisters on both pinky toes ever since Altdorf) – I quickly got over my lament.

It was barely drizzling by the time we got off the bus in Grindelwald, so we removed all our raingear, only to have the rain start up again a few minutes later.  We held off as long as we could – taking shelter, walking through it, trying to bend over so our backpacks would protect our legs and torsos from getting wet.  But soon we had to relent, and put on all our rain gear for the walk to Lauterbrunnen.

We had discovered that morning that the Via Alpina actually took a long and difficult route in the shadows of the Eiger and the Jungfrau over the pass to Kleine Scheidegg, a 4½-hour trek in its own right, followed by 2-2½ hours down into Lauterbrunnen.  But with the weather as threatening as it was, and as much climbing as we’d already done, we were much happier taking the valley around, which was a mere 4 hours of more or less level terrain along two rivers.

As we walked toward Lütschintal en route to the valley intersection of Zweilütschinen, the rain stopped.  By this time we were extremely superstitious, convinced that any attempt we made at removing our rain gear would be a direct affront to the weather gods, and that they’d smite us with thunder almost immediately.  We spent the rest of the morning playing games and trying to outsmart them.  Dad took his rain pants off, but left his jacket on.  I removed my jacket and my fleece, but kept my rain pants on, “taking one for the team.”

A glimmer of blue sky opened up in the narrow valley before us and started to shine down on us just a little stronger.  We stopped to apply sunscreen – Dad and I only to the back of our necks and ears, since the sun couldn’t possibly last long enough for us to need sunscreen anywhere else.

We passed a “Self-service Alpkäse and Bier” barn – a little fridge where you could grab a beer, some cheese, mineral water, or butter, and drop the requisite money into the coin slot below, all on the honor system.  Dad said, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”  I allowed as how you could probably do the same thing in Kansas, although perhaps without the beer.  Or, for that matter, the mountains.

We happened upon a British couple who walked with us a little way.  They had stopped to look at a bird they’d spotted, and since we were walking in the same direction, we continued on together and chatted about life in England and our various experiences.  I got the impression they wanted to be by themselves, and after a few moments they found an excuse to break off the path from us, and we continued on our way.

With the sky continuing to clear up in front of us, I took off my rain pants (bad move) and the bottom half of my pants (the legs had zippers on them so they could be converted into shorts) and tied them onto my backpack as we continued on.

Finally, around 1:00 we stopped for lunch.  Included on the menu was some extra cheese we’d picked up at breakfast that morning. (The chef had come to our table and asked us if we wanted anything else, and though we were full, he looked us with an expression of such anxiety and expectation, we couldn’t bear the thought of hurting his feelings.)

And then, from out of nowhere, the temperature dropped, the wind began screaming, and the sky turned black.  A few minutes later, it felt like the sky was falling in.  The rain poured down for mile after mile, dripping off our clothes and our packs and soaking through both.  I drew my hood in tight and trudged on, hunched over, with my hands in my pockets, looking up every now and then to make sure I could still see Dad off in the distance ahead of us.

By the time we made it to Zweilütschinen, I was so fed up with the rain I was about ready to hop on the next train to Geneva or Zurich or Rome or New York or somewhere else where I wouldn’t have to put up with the miserable [expletive deleted] weather.

Incidentally, Lütschen is German for “to suck,” which means that presumably Zweilütschinen means “two sucky places.”  Later, when we asked Elena and Tomas about it, they told us that Lütschin is the name of a pair of rivers – that there is a Black Lütschin and a White Lütschin, and that Lütschintal is “Valley of the Lütschin,” and Zweilütschinen is where the two Lütschins come together.

I like our explanation better – as  we walked from one to the other, the whole thing sucked pretty badly.  I was thoroughly pissed off, shuffling my feet, kicking pebbles, picking up large rocks and throwing them into the river, which was now galloping in the opposite direction from our travel.

About half an hour outside Lauterbrunnen we came to a Feuerstelle next to a small cave-like tower where we decided to take shelter for a few moments.  Looking up at the dripping ceiling a few inches above our heads we could see the tiny settlings of mineral deposits beginning to form, a few millimeters to a few inches in length.  It was cool to realize we were witnessing the formation of stalactites – a few hundred years in the making, rather than hundreds of thousands.

A few minutes later we left our shelter, the rained slowed to a drizzle, and we climbed up the hill and into Lauterbrunnen.

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[1] Rösti is one of the Swiss national dishes.  A big hash brown patty with bacon or ham, covered with cheese, baked in a casserole with an egg on top.

[2] That reminds me of one of my favorite jokes: Two guys are sitting next to each other on a flight to Pittsburgh, each with a black eye.  One asks the other how he got his black eye, to which the response was: “Oh, it was a slip of the tongue.  This morning when I got to the airport the lady at the ticket counter was very busty, and I meant to say, ‘Can I have a ticket to Pittsburgh?’ but what came out is ‘Can I have a picket to Titsburgh?’  And she socked me one right in the eye.”  The other guy replied, “Oh, mine was a slip of the tongue, too.  This morning as I was walking into the kitchen I meant to say to my wife, “Hi, honey, what’s for breakfast?” and instead what came out was, “You ruined my life, you bitch!”