30 Mai-On Top of Old Rainy

I thought that I’d never be warm again.

The morning weather report from the twice-blessed Maison de Tourisme  said “partial sun”–better than partial clouds, I quipped to Udo, as he gazed uncertainly at the sky–but we sallied forth to the village of Solalex, at the base of the Alp we hoped to climb.

Eri had urged us, when we were packing for Europe, to include lots of sundresses and tank tops; my mother had insisted that I throw in a sweatshirt and a few pairs of pants. Apparently the other girls’ mothers hadn’t been a part of their packing processes, and they sat on wooden benches in a lodge, shivering in shorts and meager hoodies and sipping expensive coffee as we waited for a second carload of our team to arrive so we could begin the hike.

A few of our number owe our survival to Deborah, who threw a bag of heavy gore-tex jackets and a pair or two of sweats into the back of her minivan. But when the flurry of grabbing garments and layering them on subided, Eri still stood in her fashionably brief summer shorts. And so Deborah made the ultimate sacrifice and offered to trade her sensible dark cotton pants for Eri’s flimsy gear. They disappeared into a nearby restroom and emerged a few moments later, Eri with a look of relief on her face, and Deborah with a blush of embarrassment. Soon after, she began the drive back to the chalet to change into something more decent, and the rest of us started up the mountain.

The first part of the hike was truly beautiful. We were panting and damp after just a few minutes of the uphill climb, and rolled up our sleeves to back in the mountain air. Soon, we could see nothing around us but mountains on every side, vast and lushly green.

In places, as we climbed higher and the greenery diminished, we saw a rusty-colored line streaking horizontally across the peaks, like nothing so much as a gargantuan bathtub ring. All that we saw had once been underwater, Udo said, but only that russet ring persuaded me to believe it. Further on, we passed a road leading to a town that had been utterly buried by a landslide in 1760, leaving no survivors. Udo kept reminding us how cruel the mountains were when untamed by human enterprise, and how fragile life up here could be when faced with nature in its purer forms. Only, the words he said were softened by the sun on our faces. For me, all I lacked was a goodly supply of lembas bread and a sturdy hobbit-cloak before you could leave me, contented, in these mountains forever.

Our first stop was at a cozy little restaurant-lodge where we could eat a packed picnic lunch indoors if we ordered a hot drink. So we asked for hot chocolates and unloaded a feast of crusty bread, gruyere cheese, salami-like sausage called “shepherd’s stick,” pickles, and cucumbers. The lodge felt toasty as we sat down and began to demolish the piles of food one broken-off hunk at a time, us still a little warm from our climb and warmer still from the cocoa in front of us. As we talked about Swiss history and World War II, this glow began to abate and we sipped our hot drinks a little more eagerly. Half an hour later, we realized that hiking in the cold was highly preferable to sitting still in it, and the roof over our heads gave little protection from the growing chill in the air.

The sun had disappeared as we geared up to begin again, still moving uphill. We jogged a bit to keep warm, till the hard work of climbing thawed us out a little. And then, strangely, it began to hail, little pebbles of ice that were novel at first, but quickly began annoying as they whipped across our faces and pelted the crevices between our sweatshirt hoods and our necks. Eri said that Albanians had a tradition that hail would stop if firstborn children caught it on their tongues as it fell. Rachel and I gamely gave this a shot, but the pellets only slowed for a moment before resuming, larger, wetter, and more insistent than before.

We were up high enough–2000 meters at this point– that we saw snowbanks alongside the path, some of them pink with dust that had blown North from the Sahara desert. Hail was now swirling around us so that we could barely see, and every Reader’s Digest “true story” I had ever read returned to memory with vivid special effects.

It was a fair day when the nine young hikers began their Alpine excursion. Young and adventurous, none of them suspected that by the end of that day, four of them would be dead and the others would be frostbitten beyond recognition, crippled for life, and turned feral, viciously trying to eat each other for survival.

Mmmm. I always loved those stories.

And then we reached the crest of the trail. Above us, we could see a bulbous peak called the Lion’s Head. Further off, we spied Le Mirroir, a nearly smooth rock face that required experts and grappling equipment to scale. We would not reach a summit today, but we felt pleased with our progress nonetheless.

I had vaguely remembered Udo saying that our hike was mostly downhill, and here we were, four hours in and yet to take the first step downward. Descent is less strenuous, but a little more scary, because a misplaced foot can send you tumbling down the mountainside. And, to keep us challenged, as soon as we had passed the crest and addressed ourselves to the declining slope, the hail turned smoothly into a drenching rain.

What followed came in stages. First, finding we no longer were panting for breath as we hiked, we pulled our sweatshirt hoods further over our faces and sang “Climb Every Mountain” as we plodded along, ignoring the downpour as well as we could. Then the wind shifted, and the rain began to come at us more strategically, soaking the backs of our legs and dripping into our socks. And now the path was zig-zagging, so as we turned the first corner, the rain began to target our shins and unprotected faces. All this while, Udo, spry at 69, strode on ahead, picking his way among the rocks and mud and carrying an umbrella aloft as if this were a rainy jaunt down 34th Street.

Soon, every inch of us was soaked and we could barely distinguish the wet from the cold. There was another lodge restaurant about an hour away, Udo told us, and so we kept blindly on, clutching the precious hope of a hot drink before a roaring fireplace, where we could dry off and bask in self-congratulation, feeling tough, traveled, and eminently Alpsy. Aside from the constant struggle to stay upright, my mind soon tuned out every thought but this one.

Forty minutes later, as the cold rain continued to fall, Udo turned to us with a little smile. “It hasn’t been pure pleasure here for some time now, has it?”

We looked at him in curiosity, teeth chattering. Then, wordless, we continued on. And just as we caught a distant glimpse of the warm, cheery-looking lodge, the clouds broke and the rain cleared. At the base of the trail, at a place called Pont de Nant, Udo left us so that he could hitchike back to town (hitchiking being, I’m told, a very effective method of transport in Switzerland) and bring back his van to get us.

Rachel and I tumbled giddily into the clearing as visions of sugarplums danced in our heads. The rest of the group had fallen behind a little ways, but by a process of effective mountain communication (us: “WHO PUT THE OVERALLS IN MRS. MURPHY’S CHOWDER?” Them: (waving of arms and legs) ) we knew that they were still alive and all right, and that they wanted us to go on ahead and save them a spot at the lodge, order some cafe au lait and perhaps warm up their seats for them by the fire. It was the least we could do.

Did you guess, on this day of days, that the restaurant was closed until June? Neither did we.

This establishment, I stress, was a solo operation, not a small village, station, or strip mall. There was, thank God, a public WC, but apart from that, all we had at our disposal was a jutting doorstep at the entrance of a lodge restaurant gutted and filled with raw timber. And a herd of cows that might serve us for warmth if we became desperate enough to kill them and lie amongst their innards. And–can you guess it?–it once more began to rain.

We were all together now, and an unnamed number of our party began to build what I imagine was a very illegal fire from the timber that was lying around. The rest of us rummaged through Udo’s leather knapsack and made short work of what remained for lunch, which amounted to a sausage stick, some hunks of bread, and a few bars of chocolate that we found hidden in the bag’s inner pockets. We wouldn’t have to draw lots and eat each other for some time now.

A sweet Swiss woman who caught the opening strains of my broken French and told me gently but firmly, “I speak English,” told us that theere was a village five minutes’ drive farther down the mountain, where we might find provisions and warmth. Eri, Jill, Tim, Rachel, and I volunteered for the journey, while the rest remained huddled on the stoop to stand watch for Udo. Our way down was now paved with asphalt, so we forced our beaten and waterlogged bodies to jog it.

And there, a ways down, was where we bumped into Udo, as he returned triumphantly in his van. We looked like hurricane survivors, and our bodies at this point only obeyed us because they hadn’t the strength to rebel. But as we ascended the hill in the van to collect the others and our soggy things, we were shocked to realize that we had run almost a mile in our miserable state.

And that brings me to the cabin where I sat shivering and wondering if warmth would ever again be mine. I’ll keep you posted on my thermal state.