Kistenpass
Kim Stanley Robinson
The autobiographical story about author’s time in Switzerland; published in the fenzine Flurb (http://www.flurb.net/4/4robinson.htm).
Kistenpass
by Kim Stanley Robinson
During our last summer in Zürich I tried to get up into the Alps as often as I could. I spent many evenings hovering over a plastic three-D map of Switzerland set flat on our dining room table, getting a helicopter view of the miniaturized mountains. Everything looks possible when the scale is that small. I was searching for likely day trips in the pattern of my Lцtschepass crossing, which meant using the massively overbuilt Swiss transport system of trains, buses and cable cars to get to a high trailhead, hike over a pass to some other high trailhead, and return on public transport that same day.
Evening spent like that, deep in my early version of Google Earth, would send me to bed dreaming of potential hikes, so that I would sleep poorly, and wake at five to call the national weather service for the day’s forecast. Very often the recorded female voice would report rain in every region, but on some lucky mornings she would announce in a cheery tone that it was going to be “schцn” somewhere I wanted to go, and I would throw my windbreaker and a topo map and water bottle into my daypack, and say good-bye to Lisa as she prepared to leave for her lab. I’d hurry down to our tram stop still eating a pastry, and tram down to the Zürich hauptbahnhof to catch the first train leaving in the direction I wanted. I no longer bothered to check train schedules, having learned to trust the Swiss to link all elements of their transport in a dense network of daily movement. On this day as always I barely had time to buy a ticket and a sandwich and chocolate bar before I needed to get on the express for Chur. At the stroke of six A.M., before I even had time to find an empty seat, we were off.
By seven-fifteen we were in Chur. Quickly I found my next train, which was going to take me up the valley called the Vorderrhein, the watershed of the headwaters of the Rhine River. This train proved to be made up of little old cars, set on a narrower track than normal. I didn’t recognize this might represent a problem for my plans, and read with interest what I could of a poster describing the history of the Rhenischer Bahn, a company that had laid its tracks in the 1860s, and only later gotten connected with the larger Swiss system, keeping however its narrow gauge. I boarded one of the little passenger cars and was pleased to see it was a well-preserved antique, with leather seats and hand-painted trim in typical Swiss chalet style.
Rolling westward out of Chur, I quickly learned that the Vorderrhein was an immense glacial valley, with the classic U shape, and a particularly deep post-glacier river gorge scoring the bottom of the U. This was the Rhine itself, snaking from sidewall to sidewall so that the little train had to cross bridges and viaducts, go through tunnels, and struggle up sharp curves. It seldom got up to fifty kilometers an hour, and was often much slower. And it stopped at every one of the tiny stations along the way. So even though my destination, the village of Danis, was just sixty kilometers east of Chur, it was still going to take about twice the time it had to traverse the hundred and twenty kilometers from Zürich to Chur.
Well, nothing to do but sit back and watch the scenery. It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet, so I had some time to spare.
The other passengers in my car were conversing in what I assumed at first was German-except it sounded Italian. It sounded as if they were arbitrarily mixing German and Italian, and eventually I realized it must be Romansch they were speaking, the fourth official language of Switzerland, which I had read about but never heard. The Swiss had made it their fourth official language during the height of Hitler’s talk of Aryan supremacy, and the history of Switzerland I had read was obviously proud of this small rebuke to his racism. About 50,000 Swiss were said to speak it at home, with 200,000 more in Italy and Austria. Despite these small numbers, I had been shown Romansch science fiction novels published (with the help of state subsidies) in handsome hardback editions of five thousand. But I had never heard the language spoken, and now it was a pleasure to listen to it as I looked out the window and tried not to get impatient at the many stops. Just throw German and Italian in a blender, I decided, and you would have the sound of it exactly.
We passed under Flims, the big town of the valley, which was perched over us on a broad bench on the north slope. I had read that the entire bench was the remains of a single immense landslide. This landslide had been dated to about twenty thousand years before, after the most recent Ice Age glacier had retreated upvalley. It was the biggest identifiable landslide in all Switzerland, and clearly the Swiss were pleased to have been able to set an entire town on it.
An hour after passing under Flims we stopped in yet another tiny station, and this time everyone got off the train. I didn’t understand until a conductor came through and conveyed to me, in German I could barely understand, that I too had to get off. Some kind of problem, it was clear-Erdrutch, I heard him say, which sounded like earth rush. Another landslide!
The conductor nodded at my look of comprehension. He then seemed to be telling me that a postal bus would carry all passengers past the blockage to the village of Trun, where another train awaited us.
But I didn’t want to go as far as Trun, I told him awkwardly. I wanted to go to Danis, and then up the valley wall to Breil, where a cable car would take me up to the alps below Kistenpass.
The conductor nodded and led me off the train to a schedule posted on the station wall. Apparently I was in Tavanasa, right next to Danis, and a bus would be leaving here for Breil at noon.
While I was still deciphering all this the conductor got on one of the postal buses carrying the train’s passengers, and they all drove off. The train itself backed down the valley and disappeared around a bend. I stood alone in the empty station of Tavanasa, five hundred meters below Breil, and two thousand meters below Kistenpass itself. It was now ten A.M., and I had thought I would be in Breil by nine. And the noon bus wouldn’t make it there till one.
I decided to run up the road to Breil. I was only carrying my daypack, and running would be my only chance to get anything like back on schedule. So I began to jog.
Up the road I ran. Quickly I broke a sweat.
Very soon I saw that in this part of the great valley the northern wall of the Vorderrhein was steep but smooth, and on such slopes the Swiss like to grade their roads very gently, in long traverses and tight hairpin turns. At every switchback I could look down on the one below and see that a run of perhaps half a kilometer had netted me a vertical gain of about twenty-five meters. A quick calculation suggested that although as the crow flies it was only two kilometers from Tavanasa to Breil, as the Stan ran it might be more like fifteen kilometers, maybe twenty.
I began to hitchhike
I continued to walk uphill, and jogged from time to time, but whenever I saw a car coming up the road I turned around and stuck out the old thumb. I had hitched a lot in my twenties, but never in Switzerland, and trying it felt a little crazy. Most of the cars that passed me were filled with guys in their Swiss Army uniforms, and they stared at me in a way that made it clear I was right to feel that way. Their looks made me wonder if there was a regulation forbidding Swiss men on Army duty from picking up hitchhikers. If there were, I was out of luck; compliance with regulation was a fundamental part of the Swiss character, as I had learned on many occasions. One time, for instance, I was playing American football with my Swiss baseball teammates and three or four Americans, a pick-up game at the big Zürich sportsplatz where we played baseball, and the Americans were gathering the huddles and calling plays that degenerated into chaos the moment the ball was snapped, lots of mayhem that was never allowed in soccer, so that everyone having a blast,
except suddenly all the Swiss quit the game and started walking off the field. When asked what was up, they explained that it was six P.M. and the sportsplatz closed at six, every day, even in the summer when the sun was still halfway up the sky. We Americans were amazed at this, and suggested we continue to play anyway, as it was a stupid rule and there was no one there to close the park, or even notice it was being used. But this was inconceivable to the Swiss guys, they just shook their heads and kept on walking, until one particularly rowdy American named Richard started shouting,”What? What? What is this? What kind of Nazi shit is this?” I thought the Swiss guys might get angry at that, but they only gave him the same cold look that I was getting now from the guys in the cars zooming by, a look immensely distant, as if from a world no non-Swiss could ever understand.
As I trudged up the road I recalled a Swiss friend trying to explain that world to us, one night after dinner. Every year on the night before Christmas, she told us, Sami Claus came to the door of every home in Switzerland, accompanied by his sidekick the Bццgen, a tall creature draped in a big black bag and carrying another black bag in his hands. Sami Claus would then consult with the parents about their children’s behavior in the previous year, and the parents would produce an account book they had supposedly been keeping to record their kids’ behavior. If the children were reported as being good, then they would get a gift from Sami Claus; if they had been bad, the Bццgen would snatch them into his bag and take them off never to be seen again. The children were brought to the door to witness all this, and the youngest ones believed it was real. “And that,” our Swiss friend concluded, “is why I hate Switzerland forever.”
So I had given up all hope of catching a ride, and wasn’t even turning around to face the passing cars, when a Mercedes slowed ahead of me and came to a stop. I ran up to it; the driver was a woman, and she had two kids in the back seat. I thanked her as I got in, wishing I weren’t so sweaty, but she didn’t seem to notice. Off we went.
My Swiss benefactor was blond and good-looking, and seemed capable and sympathetic. In my hitchhiking days whenever women picked me up I pretty much fell in love with them immediately. Now I was remembering how that felt, and kind of feeling it again. She was saving my day. She asked me politely where I was going, and in my broken German I told her about my disrupted morning, and my plan for the afternoon.
“Kistenpass!” she repeated, surprised. (“Keesh-tee-pahsss!”) But, she said, glancing at me as she drove, the cable car above Breil was a ski lift only. In the summer it was closed. Very few people ever hiked over Kistenpass.
That is bad news, I replied.
I began to think I had under-researched the trip. Maybe my method of going out with only a topo and the information I could glean from my plastic three-D map wasn’t such a cool thing after all
The kindly Swiss woman turned off on a side road by a small building called the Hotel Alcetta, still well below Breil. She told me there was a PTT phone booth in the hotel’s entry, and suggested I use it to call a taxi that ran out of Breil, and ask it to come down and give me a ride. I thanked her again, and went into the hotel and made the call, and told the man who answered where I was and where I wanted to go. Then I went back outside and started walking up the road again, figuring I would see the taxi coming down for me.
But no taxi ever passed. In desperation I started hitching again. Too bad that woman had not been going to Breil, or hadn’t been even more of an angel than she had, and given me a ride all the way.
Then another farm wife stopped for me. I got in her Jeep feeling really fond of the women of the Vorderrhein. I repeated my story, and she too exclaimed “Keee-stee-pahsss!”
By the time I was done describing my day we were in Breil’s town square, and she was dropping me off at the door of the tourist office. It looked like a village more devoted to farming than tourism, and the office appeared closed. But the door opened when I tried it, and a surprised young woman looked up from the book she was reading . She too heard out my story. Her English was almost as bad as my German, but between us we confirmed that I had wanted to take the cable car up toward Kistenpass, but that I had learned already it was closed for the summer.
She suggested I call the village’s taxi service and ask him to take me up the farm roads above the village-these went all the way up to a dairy that was actually a little higher than the cable car’s upper station. The dairy was in fact the real trailhead for the Kistsenpass trail. The taxi fare would be about thiry francs, she guessed, meaning about twenty dollars, and the vertical gain, I saw on my map, would be about eight hundred meters. Such a deal! Cheap at the price, in fact, as it would put me back on something like my schedule.
I conveyed this to the young woman, and she called the taxi for me. A few minutes later it rumbled into the square: a big black pick-up truck, with huge snow tires and radio gear sticking out all over it-a truck that had in fact passed me going downhill as I was walking up from the restaurant. I had been expecting something more cablike, although now that was obviously a silly expectation.
The driver got out and shook my hand. He was a big man wearing blue jeans and a plaid shirt, with thick black hair, a round face, and a cheery manner. He spoke no English at all. I explained in German where I wanted to go, and he nodded and made a gesture: in you go! And off we went.
The steep one-lane road we ascended ran in switchbacks past several of the characteristic farmhouses one sees in the high alps. The taxi driver, whose name was Mario, talked about these houses as we drove by them. His German was amazingly clear to me, probably because he was from Ticino and his first language was Italian. The farmhouses, all enormous, were usually attached to even larger barns, and together they housed both the herders and their herds. Dairy farming at such altitudes was hard, Mario said, but they had been doing it for many generations, and had their system perfected. The green alps themselves were creations of the herders-huge lawns, in effect, cleared of their original load of forest and rock. The centuries of labor necessary to achieve that kind of a transformation was mind-boggling to contemplate. We agreed that it was part of what made the Alps feel strange-both safe and dangerous, domestic and wild-a pretty park that in half an hour could turn nasty and kill you. I mentioned Muir’s famous description of California’s Sierra Nevada, as gentle wilderness; we agreed that the Swiss Alps could well be called savage civilization.
Passing one of the big barns, I mentioned that I had once hiked by one just as it was being opened up for the spring, and how struck I had been by the sight of the astonished new calves staggering in the sunlight . Mario laughed and said that was one of his favorite sights of spring. They see the sky! he said. For the first time they see the sky, and it blows their mind!
At these altitudes, Mario went on, dairy farming was unprofitable. The government subsidized it, paying more the higher the farm. But it wasn’t enough to keep the young people at home. The houses had been built to hold extended families of three or four generations; now they were mostly empty, kept going by husband-and-wife teams and maybe a couple of kids. The homes had become like millionaire’s mansions, much too large for their occupants. People thought that would be great, but it wasn’t so. It would be sad.
Too much money makes you sad, I ventured.
I wouldn’t know, he said with a laugh. I’m very happy myself! I live in a suitcase! I live in this taxi!
He had lived in many places since leaving Ticino, including Zürich. His German was fluent, but he didn’t appear to care about or even to notice my grammatical blunders, which were many. As he said when we discussed it, if you get your meaning across, the rest doesn’t matter. This thought made me even more comfortable, and I damned the torpedoes and sped full ahead. And I suppose it is also true that I had finally crossed some threshold in my miserable German. Lisa and I had been going to night classes twice a week for nearly two years, and they were finally beginning to have an effect: I seemed could hold up my end of the conversation. As we continued up th
e narrow gravel track we talked about Zürich, about what I was doing in Switzerland, about our wives’ work, about where he had lived, about Ticino and the Vorderrhein, about the German Swiss as opposed to the Italian and French Swiss. I confessed that I had been the one to call him from the restaurant below Breil, but had failed to flag him down because I had been looking for a cab like one from Manhattan or London. He laughed at that, said it didn’t matter, as we had finally met in the end.
That was the best conversation in German I ever had, and when Mario dropped me off at the dairy barn at the upper end of the road, shaking my hand and taking off with a wave, I was really happy. All those dull classroom hours had finally been put to use!
Not only that, but it was only noon! Between the kindness of the Swiss farm women, and the professional help of the tourist gal and Mario, I was not all that far behind my original schedule. Although looking at my map and the slope above me, it did seem that I was going to have to hurry.
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I took off up the trail, and immediately lost it. That’s hard to do in Switzerland, where most trails are obnoxiously over-signed and as obvious as freeways, especially across the alps, where they are brown trenches in the grass. But this alp was contoured by many narrow dirt runnels, either cow trails or the erosion patterns left by solifluction, and I had apparently taken off on one of these false trails, until it petered out and disappeared.
Probably I had headed out too low. But it was an easy enough slope, so I traversed up the grass, assuming I would soon intercept the real trail.
It didn’t. My traverse began to steepen, and I had to work a little. And apparently it was fly season here. There was only one kind of wildflower to be seen, a yellow thing like a daffodil; and this flower apparently attracted flies. There were hundreds of them, even thousands, even tens of thousands, all buzzing in the air. I had never seen flies in the Swiss Alps before, and these were big ones that liked to land on you and then bite, or maybe it was only an exploratory pinch, but it hurt. I hiked along slapping at my legs and cursing, and cutting a higher and higher line in hopes of intercepting the trail and then running to escape them. Eventually I turned and hiked straight up the slope, intent on finding the trail as soon as possible. The slope steepened again and I ended up climbing a grassy wall, using my hands to pull myself up from clump to tuft to clump-and here I was only ten minutes into my hike!
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