Beat and I have separately been a mess since we parted ways near the Zurich airport just over a week ago. Beat traveled by car with his father and stepmother to Berlin, Germany, where he promptly caught his first case of Covid-19. Dad, age 85, and his wife, age 75, managed to avoid the contagion, but Dad took a bad spill off the stairs and sprained his ankle. Beat ran a fever of 102 and wallowed in misery for days. He’s only starting to emerge from it.
I flew home from Zurich just days before Beat started showing symptoms. While my travels home were slightly smoother than when I returned from France in June, that’s not saying much. I decided to spend Friday night at an airport hotel before my 7 am flight to Frankfurt. The hotel advertised an easy-to-use tram. I bought my train ticket the night before and waddled outside at 4:45 a.m. to catch the first train of the day at 4:55. Nearly 20 people amassed at the stop as 5 a.m. came, then 5:05, then 5:10. Just as I was thinking, “This is very un-Swiss-like for the train to be so late,” the people around me started making calls and scrolling phones. There were many “Scheisses” uttered as the crowd peeled off in all directions. While I didn’t know why, it was clear the train wasn’t coming. Panic set in. I pulled up directions on my phone, and seeing the terminal was 2.9 kilometers away, I hooked my suitcase around my good arm and started running.
Did I mention I have a bad arm? I’m injured. Yes, I took a hard fall on a steep gravel road in the rain two days earlier, spraining my left elbow and badly bruising my backside — namely the sensitive area surrounding the coccyx. Anyway, I jogged toward the airport until the muscles in my good arm failed and my bad arm was forced to take up the slack, screaming in pain as I was reduced to a stiff waddle by my angry butt bruise. My hurrying was all for naught as my flight to Frankfurt was 2 hours delayed, which necessitated more panicked running from the A gates to the Z gates of an overwhelmingly large airport. For what felt like a mile of flat-out running, I shadowed a young black man who had been on my flight from Zurich. With a sprinter’s stride and a football player’s physique, the man deftly cleared the crowds to make his flight to Atlanta. (Sadly, we both got stuck in a long customs line, and he didn’t make his flight. But I had a chance to thank him for his efforts. He good-naturedly replied, “Can’t win ‘em all. I guess I’m spending a night in Germany.”)
Happily, I made it home. And just as I promised myself after too many days of hiking all day and working through the night, I subsequently slept for a week. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so jet-lagged or ruined after a trip. I even tested myself for Covid-19 twice, but both tests were negative and I’ve not had symptoms besides this deep, prevailing fatigue. My breathing has been pinched and raspy, probably due to smoke from California wildfires. The inflammation in my sprained elbow is hitting my ulnar nerve, causing unsettling shocks of electric pain. My arm mobility is limited, my butt hurts, my breathing sucks, I’m too tired to get out of bed, and the news cycle ahead of the 2024 election is becoming too painful to bear.
Like I said — I’m a mess.
But there was a time, for a few days before all of that went down, when Beat and I lived in the dream that is a life of leisure in Switzerland. Imagine living in a small mountain town far from the influence of American politics, with endless adventure out the back door, trails that link to France, Italy, Austria, and beyond, and an overabundance of delicious dairy products to ensure a lifetime of being fat and happy.
Beat and I have dreamed of retirement in Switzerland, either as snowbirds (meaning we spend summer and autumn there and ideally rent out our house during the ski-tourism months so we can go play in Alaska or travel) or as full-time residents if US politics bring us to that. In recent years, the daydream has become more real as Beat more seriously considers early retirement and I inch closer to qualifying for Swiss citizenship by marriage (although I still need to learn enough French to pass the language test.) We had a few days to spare after PTL, so we traveled to two areas in Switzerland that we’d never visited, and that might be ideal retirement locations. (Both are located in German-speaking parts of Switzerland, which truthfully, I’d rather learn. I have yet to master the correct pronunciation of a single French word.)
The first place we visited was a town called Laax, not far from the Austrian border and clear on the other side of the country from the border near Chamonix. It’s 150 miles away, which in Swiss distance equates to at least 400 US Interstate miles, and that’s if you’re on a frustrating Interstate like I-70 in Colorado. The drive took more than five hours, and all were strenuous miles: Endless roundabouts, constantly changing speed limits, narrow roads, and hairpin curves over sphincter-clenching drops as we climbed mountain after mountain across the wrinkled nation.
Since it was Monday and Beat had just emerged from a week of sleep deprivation in PTL, I understood that I would need to do the driving. I stressed about it all week. Driving in Switzerland makes me anxious enough, and Beat is a terrible backseat driver. He will deny this, but despite his exhaustion, he remained alert for the full five hours and lodged at least one stern critique or expression of fear every ten minutes. By the time we arrived in Laax, my nerves were so frayed that I crawled into bed at 5 p.m. and didn’t emerge until 7:30.
But it was worth it to reach Laax. As I rose from my groggy stupor, I looked out the window this scene from the bedroom balcony. Scenery like this is a dime a dozen in Switzerland, as Beat likes to say. You don’t even have to pay extra. I sat on the balcony with my laptop and watched the sunset. All was forgiven.
Beat surprised me by rallying for a hike on Tuesday. He’d finished the PTL on Sunday morning, 206 hard miles with 82,000 feet of climbing on less than eight hours of sleep in six days. It was barely 48 hours later, and he was raring for an adventure that he had planned — 22 miles with more than 7,000 feet of climbing. Our destinations were Segnespass and Fil de Cassons.
The hiking was sublime — a nontechnical but efficient ascent into a gorgeous glacial cirque where a high alpine farmer sold his wares from what a friend calls “trailside vending machines.” This farmer sold honey — you can see the active hives in the background. We purchased the largest jar for 20 CHF.
We enjoyed the splashes of color from late summer wildflowers before ascending to the barren rocks above 2,500 meters. This canyon featured a natural arch, a relative rarity in the Alps. There’s also a gorge nearby known as the “Swiss Grand Canyon,” which makes it seem like my kind of place. Beat was less excited about this ski resort town, as it felt more touristy than he preferred.
The route crossed steep talus slopes and Beat moved with the grace of the mountain goat he’s become. He didn’t show a hint of tiredness post-PTL.
It was my fault we didn’t have time to stop for panaché and apfelschorle at the “Mountain Lodge” on Segnespass. I’d set a hard return time of 6 p.m. to start my Tuesday workday, and we were running late due to my slowness. It was a shame, as I wanted to check out that “loo with a view” in the background. (Full disclosure: I did not, in fact, want to check it out. That exposed trail looked terrifying enough, and the outhouse was clinging to the mountain with cables. The whole setup looked precarious at best.)
Despite my tight schedule, I still insisted on taking the long way back to the honey farm. We veered onto a lesser-used trail littered with broken bridges and other signs of neglect. But the route took us around a beautiful cirque with a widely braided steam flowing through the glacier moraine. It felt wild and remote. The valley reminded me of the gravelly mountains on the eastern edge of the Alaska Range.
The following day, it was already time to leave again. This time Beat did the driving. I gaped at the scenery. The views from Swiss highways are endlessly stupefying. They’re a dime a dozen, and yet I can’t look away. The above photo was taken from the passenger window of a moving vehicle, as are the next two:
This is somewhere along the descent from Klausenpass.
A village below Klausenpass. “I want to live there!” I exclaimed as Beat reminded me that it would be shadowed, dark, and cold in the winter, and was small and rural enough to be filled with xenophobic people who might not readily accept a clueless American into their community. Gee, is it hard to be an immigrant?
We landed in Flüelen, a lovely and more tourist-friendly village on the southern end of Lake Lucern. It may be more tourist-friendly but it’s not a well-known destination. It’s just that practically everywhere in Switzerland looks like this.
I did a short(ish) hike on Wednesday while Beat feigned rest, and then we headed out for another grind on Thursday.
The weather was marginal — foggy and drizzly, but not as bad as we’d expected. We aimed for a humble peak called Siwfass (which I couldn’t help but pronounce “Zwift Ass” even though it’s closer to “Swee-fass.”) This peak was a mere 6,100-foot climb.
Climbing to a humble peak from a humble village on a rainy September afternoon meant we saw almost no one but the cows. However, we did pass by another trailside vending machine.
This one sold yogurt and cheese. The cheese was among the best I’d ever tasted, and the yogurt was like a gourmet product you’d spend $15 for at Whole Foods. Both were sourced from cows that lived on this mountainside and homemade by the family of this small alpine farm.
After descending from that farm, probably less than two miles later, I took my fall. The rain had started to come down more heavily. Beat and I were descending a gravel road littered with loose “ball-bearing” rocks that pitched downward at a 25-30% grade. Walking on the rocks already felt like wearing roller skates and I tried to be careful. But Beat walked so fast that I started jogging to keep up, and that’s when my shoe caught a loose rock and jolted forward. My fall was like you might imagine if you’ve ever seen a cartoon with a character who slips on a banana peel. Both legs pitched upward and I slammed hard on the ground, left elbow and upper backside taking the landing. The impact was hard enough that it set off the incident detection alarm on my watch, which has only happened twice before — and in both of those incidents, I ended up being more substantially injured. Beat turned and started running toward me, so I clambered to my feet as quickly as possible, only to become dizzy and faint and forced to sit back down. Happily, there was a gondola from the upper mountain town of Eggeberg, so I only had to walk another mile before catching a ride down.
I was in pain, although the fear of a more lasting injury in my elbow wouldn’t come until I visited an orthopedic specialist the following Tuesday. I also had a massive bruise on my butt, impressive in its coloring and size, that unfortunately couldn’t be documented in a safe-for-work photo. But I didn’t want to let this ruin my last day in Switzerland. So on Friday, Beat and I planned a mere 5,400-foot climb to Pilatus, a popular destination on the western arm of Lake Lucerne. Beat promised we could take the train down, and I was more excited about this than I was about the hike. I’d never ridden a funicular. This one boasted grades up to 48%, the steepest cogwheel railway in the world.
The climb was as fun as always, but I was not feeling strong. My relentless work schedule exhausted me, my 50,000+ feet of mountain ascent in a mere two weeks exhausted me, my injuries exhausted me, and life exhausted me. Beat was finally willing to admit that he, too, was exhausted and was looking forward to getting some real rest while visiting his folks. (Sadly, forced Covid-19 rest was not what he had in mind.)
Still, for a few days, it was a beautiful dream. A dream where I had all the time and energy I could desire and endless mountains to explore. That it only took until Thursday to come crashing down in a shock of mud and gravel proves that reality is never far away. But the beauty is worth the pain.
I'm glad Beat is thinking in terms of people's mindset as a qualifier for places live. I made the mistake back In the 90's of moving to a place for scenery and outdoor access not quite realizing that I probably wasn't going to fit in all that well (I had a hunch, but ignored my gut. Will never do that again.) A friend's husband had a saying, "It's not the place, it's the people" and he was right. You can live in a beautiful place but if people are not friendly to you, it will never feel like home.
I got a bruise on my hind from a fall just like yours (feet flying up in the air). It actually got uglier over a couple weeks as it was a deep bruise. Very memorable even over 20 years later.
I’m sorry but, international travel sucks.
That said, what is the obsession with American politics ?