Far more poetic souls than I have tried to capture the majesty of the Alps in words, but until you’ve passed through and over and occasionally under them yourself there’s just no way to get it. The way the rolling countryside swells and swells, fields and forests rising steeper and steeper around you, hoisting up the picturesque towns and country churches and even crumbling castles, the blue and white of the distant peaks freeing themselves from the camouflage of the cloud-streaked sky.
“There’s something I forgot to mention,” Caleb said, when we finally got around the blocky tour-bus that had been cramping our view for the last dozen kilometers of long alpine valley. “Galtür seems especially down on our little hobby, so be sure not to let any locals know that we plan on being out after dark.”
“Yeah?” Over the last couple of decades we had night hiked together on every continent save Antarctica, and, while we’d ended up in some remote locations, we had always established local connections who knew where we were and when to expect us back. Most of said locals tried to talk us out of wandering off into the night, of course, but we always came to an arrangement.
“The frau at the first hoff I was going to book freaked out on me when I started laying some groundwork. Mentioned how I’d heard the trails around here were so well-marked you couldn’t get lost even in the middle of the night, but she cut me off with the riot act. Said Tyrol even passed a law against hiking after dark.”
“They did?” I’d assumed Caleb had chosen Galtür out of convenience, since it was so close to his adopted home, but committing our precious annual holiday to the one place on earth that had actually outlawed night hiking didn’t seem particularly convenient.
Caleb laughed his low little chuckle. “Of course not, I checked it out and she was full of it. But her story was good! She had this whole lecture prepared right down to the thousand euro fines. The fragile alpine ecosystem is apparently under serious threat from tourists stomping all over their precious edelweiss in the dark. I suspect the real reason she tried to scare me off was to minimize the chances of bringing bad press to town—they’ve had a few hikers go missing over the years, and an avalanche back in the Nineties killed something like fifty people, I think. Last thing the local tourism board wants is some dumb American falling into a crevasse on a moonless night. Anyway, I thanked her for the information and booked somewhere else. I didn’t say nichts about nachtwanderen at the next place just in case they’re all in on it.”
“Oh, sure, that all makes perfect sense,” I said. “Just like it makes perfect sense to go night hiking somewhere new without telling anyone what we’re doing.”
I wasn’t actually worried. How could I be, with those beautiful rugged ridges boxing us in? The trails would be clear as day up there above the pines, even by starlight alone. We’d planned this trip for a new moon and so my only concern was that the trails might be crowded with amateur astrologers. The solitude isn’t the only charm of night hiking, but it’s definitely one of them.
Our road carried us alongside a muddy river that coursed through the laurel green meadowland in the belly of the Paznuan valley. As I eyed the deeper, darker shade of the forests that rose up on either side of us, something Caleb had glided over jumped back out at me. “You said people have gone missing out here?”
“Sure, I guess. People go missing everywhere.” We crested a knoll and zipped past a whole family in fluorescent performance gear walking a path that ran parallel to the road. Caleb slowed down before I could ask him to; we were entering another of the pretty little towns built off the only major road through the region.
“People go missing everywhere,” I repeated. “Perfect tagline for our found footage horror movie.”
“You think every single person who starts the PCT or even the Appalachian arrives safe and sound at the other end? And those are the biggies; day hikers disappear, too. Not just a few, either, we’re talking hundreds of people vanishing every year in state parks alone, and some estimates put it even higher—thousands, gone without a trace.”
“You’re taking advantage of the fact that I can’t get a signal to google that,” I said, double-checking my phone and confirming that even in town I wasn’t getting any bars. All these little villages were essentially off-season ski-resorts, but less Aspen Extreme and more Sound of Music—we passed a cheese shop, a bakery, and a butcher, all on the main drag. “Gonna need a source on those numbers, buddy.”
“Claudia,” said Caleb. If I hadn’t known him as well as I did I would have missed the hiccup in his joviality, but there it was, between his wife’s name and what came after. “She’s not crazy about the night hiking, either, and has been inflicting me with all kinds of articles. Backcountry horror stories, you know the type. Little does she know that reading about dummies being dumb only makes me feel smarter.”
“That makes one of us.” Then we were out of town again, climbing up and up the valley. We passed a kilometer marker for Galtür. “But whether or not she loves it, Claudia knows where we are, right? You guys have your daily calls or whatever planned?”
He hesitated, a mischievous smile quirking the corner of his mouth, and we both fell into that immature giggling that only best friends can draw from one another, and usually when they’re both off their heads. In our teens it would’ve been from pot and bad jokes, in our twenties from booze and worse ones, and now at forty it had come full circle, to the same pure source we had first discovered as kids—sleep deprivation.
We’d made good time from the airport, so after lunch we could nap until dinner. A lot of hikers apparently take a day or two for their bodies to recalibrate after skipping over that many time zones before hitting the trail, but Caleb and I always jumped right into it—partially because weather can be such an issue. Dense cloud cover alone can put the kibosh on a night hike, so you have to take every opportunity, in case you don’t get another one. The other reason we didn’t waste any time was not something we have ever articulated to one another, but which I was sure Caleb felt as keenly as I did. Night hiking was the only time I really felt fully awake anymore.
Rain had drilled the Langtang region all day, but by midnight the moon had dried out the clouds, cracking them apart into a mosaic of ghostly blue light. We made the slippery trek away from the holy village of Gosaikunda, alive in a way that only summiting a nearly 15,000-foot Himalayan pass in the middle of the night can make you feel. A lone hut sprouted like a mushroom on the side of the flinty trail, its roof sparkling—the salvaged wing of an airplane that had crashed into the side of a peak. We took extra care to mind our step passing by the tarp-hooded doorway of the hovel, just as we did whenever we slipped through sleeping villages, alongside dark barns, or neared silent temples.
Night hiking transforms you. You are invisible. A spirit. So long as you obey the covenants, you preserve the spell.
It also transports you. This is someplace else. This is always someplace else. The night is an open door to another world.
Down in the terraced fields, gazing across the open valley just as a quarter mile expanse of the far hillside gave way. A black wound erupting on the face of the countryside, shimmering like blood as it rushed down the slope and erased the trail we would have been climbing at that very moment, if we hadn’t lost the trail back in the misty pines for over an hour.
I thought the mudslide sounded like rain. Caleb told me it sounded to him like a crackling fire. We had talked about it over and over again, confirming and reaffirming for the other that the nighttime trail had indeed been empty, at least as far as we could see. But now, that far path was crowded with figures when the mudslide came crashing down over it. I know two of those doomed silhouettes must have been our possible selves, the ones who hadn’t been too stubborn to use flashlights after getting lost in a Himalayan forest and thus made better time reaching the valley floor—but who were all the others?
Behind us, above us, came a noise like rain, like crackling fire, figures scrambling up the muddy steps of the tra
il that wound down through the terraced fields, but before I could look back to see the chthonic tidal wave falling over us Caleb knocked again, waking me up.
I blinked in the twilight of my room. We had checked in, but I couldn’t remember anything about the interaction. Nothing unusual about that; such elisions in time, in detail, were a mildly bothersome bug in my daily routine—the inevitable consequence of not getting enough rest. I hauled myself up from the bed. Staring out the rustic framed window at the bluish mountains in the gloaming, it felt like my whole life had been spent trying to catch up on missing sleep.
I rubbed my eyes and called out to Caleb to quit with the knocking. I was awake. Or getting there. The mountains grew darker as I watched.
The dining room at the Gampeler-Hof was cozy, brightly lit, and crowded with strangers speaking foreign tongues. A dark-haired woman in an honest-to-god dirndl seated us against a back wall. After she bustled off to bring us beer, Caleb informed me she was none other than the landlady herself. The pension offered three choices for dinner every night, none of them vegetarian. Caleb had apparently worked something out in advance, though, because when I eventually received my schnitzel our hostess brought him a platter of pasta drowned in vibrant yellow cheese sauce.
“Nothing like authentic Tyrolian cuisine,” Caleb said, spearing a goopy forkful. “Here comes Magnus. Remember not to say anything about what we’re doing tonight.”
“Magnus?” I glanced over my shoulder just as a tall mustachioed man in lederhosen bore down on me from the direction of the kitchen. I don’t think I had ever seen a real person in lederhosen before. He clapped me on the back as if we were old friends, releasing a torrent of German so swift I was instantly washed away and doubted even Caleb could find footing in the flow. He finally managed to get in a few words edgewise, though, and I hoped to Christ that kaffee was indeed what it sounded like.
“Grüss Gott!” Magnus said as last, giving me another hardy slap on the back as he charged away toward the kitchen.
“Grüss Gott!” Caleb called after him.
“Grüss Gott,” I parroted. “That’s the regional auf weidersen, I take it?”
“Not really,” said Caleb. “It’s more of a catch-all hello/goodbye around here—what you tell people when you pass them on the trail.”
“Something about God?” I guessed.
“Yeah, God greet you, go with God, something like that. It’s a country thing—if you try that on someone in Dresden they’ll say something smartass about not being in a hurry to meet God.” Caleb grinned. “My people!”
“Are they really that religious down here?” I hadn’t noticed an overabundance of crucifixes or other iconography in the quaint, family-run hotel.
“Compared to most Germans I’ve met, sure, but they’re not exactly Southern Baptists,” said Caleb. “You get the feeling that the Reformation never quite found the right path into these little mountain towns. Probably not amenable enough to incorporating the old ways.”
“Ah yes,” I said. “Catholicism gobbling up paganism, a tale as old as time.”
“Who can say who gobbled whom,” said Caleb, and then lowered his voice, though as far as I could tell we were the only English speakers in the noisy dining room. “I didn’t say one word about night hiking, but Magnus brought up that same bogus law against walking the trails after dark. I don’t know how, but I think he’s onto us. I’m one step ahead of him, though—I moved my car down in front of the church while you were napping, so we can sneak out later and walk back to it without anyone in the hoff realizing we’re gone.”
“Very smart,” I said, smiling at how silly—and familiar—this all was. My parents were far less amenable to their teenage son and his friend haunting the neighborhood than Caleb’s folks, so we’d always had to sneak out when he spent the night at my place.
The hubbub of the dining room grew louder, making me ache for quiet paths through dark woods. As if sensing my dismay, the landlady appeared and refilled my stein. A relief—alcohol was about the only thing that made me capable of acting like a human, the cold beer rich and malty on my schnitzel-scoured tongue.
Magnus burst out of the kitchen, singing a boisterous song as he delivered a carafe of coffee to our table. The conversations died down and all focus turned to our host as he serenaded the dining hall. Extending a hand to a keg-shaped matron seated with her equally stout family, he drew her off the bench and they began to dance. Clapping spread around the room as they found the rhythm of his ballad. I looked at Caleb, barely able to believe the provincial scene unfolding before us, but his eyes were on Magnus and the crone, his hands clapping in time with all the others, his lips moving as if he knew every word of the bewildering song.
By day there had been a fair amount of traffic on the valley road, but now ours were the only headlights drilling through the darkness. I kept my eyes on the grassy curb, as I always did when driving in the country. When Caleb and I night walked at my place as kids, we would always hide when cars approached, throwing ourselves facedown in the ditch if there were no trees to skulk behind. Nobody ever stopped, which I used to think meant nobody ever saw us. Granted, when you’re driving you’re often on autopilot, and the human eye is good at skipping over things it doesn’t expect to see… like a prone figure in the tall grass on the side of a road. But considering how many cars must have passed right by us over the years I have to wonder: how many people did catch a glimpse of us lying there, but elected to keep going. How many of them sped up?
“Do you remember our plan after we watched Near Dark?” Caleb asked as we wound up the valley road, high beams shining off rocks and scrub.
“Probably best we never actually tried that,” I said, smiling at the memory. We’d decided that after we graduated high school we would go on a vampire road trip: tape tinfoil over the car windows and see how long and how far we could go without ever being in the sunlight. “We were such weirdos.”
“Was that the same night you climbed the tree outside Mrs. Beck’s? And almost fell out of it when the lights came on?” Caleb flicked on his turn signal even though we hadn’t seen another car since slipping out of the quiet hamlet. We left the main road, climbing the northern slope of the valley.
“You know I don’t even think that was her house?” That memory brought a grimace instead of a grin. Mrs. Beck was our 8th grade English teacher. We liked her, and when we discovered she apparently lived somewhere in my neighborhood set out to find where. I’m not exactly sure what our motivations were, other than it gave a purpose to our night wandering. In retrospect, scaling the elm to try and peek through a darkened upstairs window was just about the creepiest possible way of confirming it, and I made enough noise hauling myself up into the branches that I woke up the house. We fled into the night before the front door could open to reveal Mrs. Beck, a shotgun-wielding stranger, or a shotgun-wielding Mrs. Beck.
“What’s her line at the beginning?” asked Caleb as we flitted through another stand of dark trees, back out into the stunted scrubland of the high country.
“Mrs. Beck?”
“No, the girl in Near Dark. When she takes Caleb out into the fields.”
“I forgot he was Caleb.” I never forget Lance Henriksen’s character’s name, though. “Oh, I know what you mean. About the night being blinding.”
“No, right, it’s deafening.” Caleb slapped the steering wheel as our headlights caught the vast gleaming surface of a lake up ahead. “They get out of his truck in the middle of nowhere, and she asks him if he can hear it, and he asks what, and she says the night. It’s deafening.”
“Yeah,” I said, “it’s that, too.”
As we followed the curve of the shore I made out a cluster of dark buildings on the opposite bank, but didn’t call Caleb’s attention to them lest he get paranoid about being observed by the locals and kill the lights. Night hiking was one thing, night driving was another thing entirely. The road crossed a land bridge between this first lake and a far larger bod
y of water that opened up before us. We climbed again, skirting the northern bank of what Caleb informed me was a reservoir. The inky expanse filled the bowl of this final valley nestled amidst the bald ridges and peaks that loomed to the north and south.
There was a parking lot up ahead, but before we could reach it a metal gate jumped into our headlights, blocking off the access road. Caleb stopped the car. “Here we are!”
“It’s safe to just leave it here?” Now that we had made it I was finally waking up for what felt like the first time in months. “What if we get towed?”
“By who? Magnus?” Caleb laughed. “This is only a little thirteen kilometer warm up anyway. We’ll be out of here hours before dawn. Tomorrow night we start the real trek—I found a circuit over the mountains where we’ll hit over twenty kilometers a night, with alm huts to crash in during the day. It’ll be like that summer on the Kungsleden, only with more cheese, better beer, and real beds.”
That sounded an awful lot like heaven. By the glow of the domelight we settled our packs onto our backs. Then the doors of the car clicked shut, the light went out, and we were alone on an empty mountain road just before midnight. I closed my eyes, the only sound the cool wind rustling my Marmot.
We helped each other scale the metal barrier and tromped across the wide, empty parking lot. There was a little ranger station or something at the edge of the reservoir, and passing the dark building, I pulled my hood down to cover my face in case they had cameras trained on the concrete walkway that spanned the wall of the reservoir. Night hiking. See everything, but don’t be seen.
Part of what makes being out in the wilds after dark so satisfying: the cognitive transformations you undergo as your eyes adjust, your ears prick up. Walking along the reservoir, toward the wooded far shore and the muscular ridge that blocked off the southern horizon, I felt the familiar change come over me. No moon, no clouds. Stars so thick you’d think the sequined cloak of night was on loan from the Liberace estate.
The Outcast Hours Page 33
