360 Degrees Longitude

by John Higham

  “Little one,” I said, “your leg is still broken. You’re not supposed to put any pressure on it whatsoever.”

  “It’s about a 45-minute walk back to our cabin,” Katrina said. “My arms are so tired from walking here on my crutches to meet you and Jordan. I hope I don’t get too tired on the walk back and slip and fall.”

  I couldn’t believe I was being talked into this. That I was on the opposing side of the debate. A thousand arguments ran through my mind in the span of a few seconds.

  “It’s downhill all the way from here,” September added. “She wouldn’t even have to pedal. And it isn’t like we’re loaded down; we’re light with no panniers.”

  “But she can’t even bend her knee far enough to follow the pedal around in its arc. We don’t want to …” I stopped midsentence, then reached for my tool bag. A moment later I was holding Katrina’s left pedal in my hand. “There,” I said. “No pedaling required.”

  With Katrina’s crutches strapped to the rear rack, we rode for the first time in eight weeks. Oh, what a joyous feeling! To be in this beautiful valley and feel the cool mountain air and the wind ruffling my hair, there just isn’t anything like it to lift one’s spirits. Well, maybe one thing …

  Lauterbrunnen literally translates to “loud springs.” The “springs” are actually waterfalls, 72 in total, circling this high mountain valley, but they are anything but loud. The effect is actually quite peaceful. We were returning here to visit our apple tree, the one we’d planted in a precise location three years prior. How we were going to accomplish this with a daughter on crutches we still didn’t know.

  We were also in Lauterbrunnen to send the tandems home. I made a silent commitment to not even think about sending for the bikes again until I saw Katrina run just for the fun of running. Watching her hobble around on crutches, I knew that was still many weeks away.

  While we waited for our tandem cases to be sent from David and Carolyn’s in England, we spent the next few days taking short bike rides along the valley floor, Katrina’s crutches strapped to the back, her left foot dangling unused.

  • • •

  “I wouldn’t touch that if I were you.” We had been out for the day and were picnicking in a place known to us as “Nutella Nirvana.” Jordan’s hand had been transformed into a fighter jet, and it was just about to come in for a landing.

  Jordan looked up and said, “Why not?”

  “It’s an electric fence,” I explained. “It’ll attack you like it’s a rattlesnake.”

  “Dad. I never know when to take you seriously.”

  “I am being serious now.”

  Jordan eyed me with suspicion. He asked, “How can a fence attack you?” and while he was saying it, he brought the fighter jet in for a landing on the wire. For a very brief moment he wore a smug expression on his face, but then he leapt a tall building in a single bound, a primal yell punctuating the feat. Upon landing he started to karate chop the air near the fence.

  He looked at me with a mixture of anger and awe and said, “How did you do that?”

  “I did nothing.” I was trying my best to stifle a laugh. “It’s an electric fence. Farmers use them to keep their animals inside.” I then taught him how to distinguish an electric fence from a normal fence. “See the wires embedded into the weave of this fabric? That’s only the first clue. The thing you really want to look for are these babies,” I said, pointing to the ceramic insulators.

  Nutella Nirvana is known to the world as Gimmelwald, population no more than four or five families. In the summertime a traveler can stay in Nutella Nirvana at the hostel, or in the local “sleep-in-straw.” Farmers all over Switzerland let out their barns during the summer months while their cows are out to pasture. It is a very inexpensive night’s accommodation in a country that isn’t known for anything inexpensive. The barns are far, far cleaner than some places we would stay in months later.

  We came to Nutella Nirvana for the locally made chocolate. “Here, try this,” I said, passing Jordan a rather large piece of confection.

  Jordan eyed me with suspicion. “I never know when to take you seriously.”

  “It’s good. You’ve had them before, you just don’t remember.”

  “It looks like …” Jordan paused. He didn’t want to say what it looked like.

  “Horse poop?” I said, finishing his sentence. “These are actually called ‘Horse Shit Balls’ and …”

  “Dad!” Katrina protested. “I can’t believe you said that!”

  “Hey! It’s what they’re called! People here speak German so they probably don’t know that it’s a bad word.” Which of course is not true—the people responsible for the name knew exactly what they were doing. “They’re made to look this way and are yummy. Try one.”

  “See?” I said. “They’re good, aren’t they? You can’t always judge something by the way it looks. Sometimes a fence can attack you. Other times something that appears disgusting can be fantastic. You just need to try it first.”

  As we returned to our campground, Jordan searched for electric fences. When he found one he looked at me with glee and issued a dare, “Touch it, wimp!”

  “Okay,” I said, reaching out and grabbing the fence, holding on to it for dramatic effect.

  Jordan ogled me with awe. Over the next several days, whenever Jordan saw an electric fence he would issue the same dare. On occasion I would casually reply to his dares, “I have touched every fence you dared me to, it’s your turn to do it.” This would always end with a yelp, a leap, and him karate chopping the air.

  What Jordan didn’t understand is that I grew up around electric fences and could guess with about 90 percent accuracy the conditions under which a farmer would actually turn the fence on. So, Jordan didn’t stand a chance. I’ll tell him. Eventually.

  • • •

  During our stay in Lauterbrunnen we had become good friends with a Swiss-American family that owned and operated the local campground. September was celebrating her birthday and over cake, I mentioned to one of the young men of the family that he was lucky to live in such a beautiful place.

  “This place drives me crazy,” he said. “I want to move to Las Vegas.”

  “Trust me; you do not want to move to Las Vegas,” I replied.

  “Why not?”

  A million responses flooded my mind. I looked up toward the end of the valley where the Eiger, Jungfrau, and Mönch stood as sentinels, the sun glistening off their white peaks. September and I had been discussing Lauterbrunnen as an escape from the buzz of our fast-paced lives; it was on a short list of places never to return from. On either side of me waterfalls cascaded over the cliffs onto the lush valley floor. If there was an antithesis of Lauterbrunnen, it would be Vegas. “Las Vegas is dry, brown, plastered with neon signs, and buzzing with people,” I replied, as if that settled the matter.

  “Exactly,” he said enthusiastically. “Nothing ever happens here.”

  I thought about human nature and the tendency to want what we can’t have.

  “I’ve been wondering if we can ride our tandems down from the top of Männlichen,” I said, changing the subject. “We have a spot we visited three years ago that we want to return to, but it’s a bit problematic with Katrina’s leg. I remember a service road that goes to the top. Do you think we could put our tandems on the gondola and ride down?”

  “Sure. I see bicyclists on that service road all the time.”

  The plan to return to the apple tree was set. On the appointed day, we put our bicycles on the cog-wheel train to Wengen. Wengen is situated on the edge of a cliff about eight hundred feet above the Lauterbrunnen Valley, but it is also situated at the base of Männlichen, the peak of World Ski Cup fame. Männlichen is essentially a cliff towering above Wengen; the ski slope is on the far side of the mountain. We would take the tandems to the top via the gondola and ride the service road down the far side into the town of Grindelwald.

  “I’d like four one-way tickets for us
and two for bicycles, please,” I said, reaching for my wallet.

  “Bicycles are not allowed on the gondola,” the woman behind the ticket counter informed me.

  “But I’ve taken them on gondolas before!”

  “Not on this one you haven’t.”

  “We were told we could ride down the service road into Grindelwald.”

  “You can. But in order to ride down, you must first ride up. It is the rule.”

  It was the rule thing again. The Swiss and the Germans can’t function without their rules. “But my daughter has a broken leg!”

  Mrs. Ticket-Lady sneered, “Then she shouldn’t be riding a bike.”

  I pleaded, but to no avail. I left the ticket booth and summed up the situation to September and the kids. “We are screwed. They will not allow the tandems on the gondola, and it’s too far for me to carry Katrina.”

  “We could get a wheelchair and try again another day,” September offered.

  “We could,” I said. “But the forecast is for rain. If we try to outlast the weather, we may not see much of Italy or Turkey before we have to catch our flight out of Istanbul.”

  “I’ll hike it!” Katrina said, weighing in on the conversation. “I’ll hike the entire trail by myself on crutches if I have to. I want to see the apple tree!”

  Determined. Or stubborn. Or both. I had been carrying Katrina around Europe for the last eight weeks only to find now that sufficiently motivated, she could hike three hours down a mountain.

  We took the gondola to the top of the mountain and Katrina doggedly hobbled down the long, curvy road until we reached the place where we’d had our picnic three years ago. And in the exact location where the kids had planted their apple seeds was… a tree! It was about twelve inches high, and, well, it sort of looked apple-ish. So, it’s an apple tree. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

  Of course now the kids want to visit it again in a few years to watch it grow. And they want to bring their kids to it and eat its apples, once it starts bearing fruit. Sounds like a great plan! I don’t have the heart to tell the kids this is a world famous ski course and as soon as this tree gets very large it will be firewood for Heidi’s great-great-grandkids.

  When we returned to our campground in Lauterbrunnen, there was a package waiting for us. “I see UPS came while we were gone,” September said.

  All I could manage to get out was a feeble “Yeah” in response. David had sent the tandems’ cases from England. I looked from the tandems back to their shipping cases. It wasn’t as though the cases had arrived unexpectedly, but seeing them made what was about to happen real.

  Feeling the tension in the silence as I gazed at the cases, Katrina asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m grateful that all that happened when you fell was a broken leg,” I said. “If that rope had snapped when you were higher, the result could have been much worse.” There was a long pause, then I continued, “In a few weeks the broken leg will just be a memory, but the tandems need to go home. To resume cycling fully loaded, Mom needs your full pedal power, not just with one leg. That’s still weeks away. There could be snow on the ground by that time.”

  Katrina gave me a hurt look. I knew what she was thinking. It was the same thing I was thinking, the same thing we had all been thinking for the last eight weeks; that accomplishing our goal of cycling across Europe had been stolen from us by a rope that had been sitting in the sun too long. But the pain of it was too fresh to vocalize. No one dared speak those words.

  September broke the silence. “We have had an eventful summer. But we knew before we left there would be setbacks. Things rarely work out as we plan, but they often work out for the best. They key is to be flexible.”

  “Right!” I agreed. “Highams, one: fate, zero.”

  • • •

  Autumn was firmly entrenched in the Swiss Alps. The air was crisp in the mornings and the mist from our breath sparkled in the sunshine. Coming back to this place had been very therapeutic in helping me, if not the rest of the family, put the broken leg behind us.

  The locals say that when it is raining, God is merely washing the mountains. The morning we made our way to the Lauterbrunnen train station the sunshine had gone away and the mountains were being washed thoroughly. The tandems were already on their way back to California, and we were on our way to Italy.

  www.360degreeslongitude.com/concept3d/360degreeslongitude.kmz

  Wengen has the dubious honor of being the location where I did the second stupidest thing I have ever done. Use Google Earth and the 360 Degrees Longitude layer to see how we fared.

  9.

  The Incredible Disappearing Force Field

  September 17–September 24

  Italy

  Jordan eyed me with suspicion.

  “I am being totally serious. If you don’t believe me, ask Mom.” So he did. “Dad says that we have force fields around us and they get smaller the further south we go.”

  “Well, in this case, he’s correct,” September replied casually. “In Sweden your force field was about three feet, and people couldn’t get closer to you than that. Your force field shrinks as we travel south and by the time we cross the border to Italy it will only be about six inches. Remember our campground in Denmark? The manager there complained about the ‘loud Italians’ and when he talked to them he was always backing away? That’s because the Italians were always bumping into his force field.”

  Jordan narrowed his eyes to slits and clenched his jaw tightly shut as if a stranger had the nerve to actually talk to him, or perhaps ask him a question, such as, “Where did you get those beautiful blue eyes?” We thought it important to prep him as we ventured south.

  The morning we left Switzerland’s green, idyllic Lauterbrunnen Valley, Katrina decided that she was ready to try to walk using only one crutch. “Katrina, there’s no reason to rush things. You don’t want to put too much weight on your leg too soon because then …”

  She cut me off: “Da-ad!” When my name gets extended to two syllables I’m in trouble. “You’ve told me a hundred times! I am not trying to rush it” (adding weakly) “very much. I just hate these crutches and I can tell that my leg is going to be okay. I can just tell.”

  I thought of her series of X-rays continuing to show a 5-mm gap in the bone. The last X-ray hadn’t been that long ago.

  “The doctor said I would know when it was time.”

  I let out a long, slow breath.

  And so it was that Katrina started to walk with only one crutch. The funny thing was Jordan was now gleefully on the other crutch. The two of them really looked pathetic dragging their suitcases in one hand, and limping along with a crutch in the other.

  “People are going to talk,” I said to September, motioning to Katrina and Jordan limping along the train platform, each with one crutch. “Have you noticed people’s gazes darting from Katrina, to Jordan, and then to us?”

  “Yeah. Maybe we could get Katrina and Jordan some tin cups.”

  Jordan couldn’t cover ground as quickly with a crutch as Katrina. As a result, he would fall behind. Suddenly, when he decided the gap between them had grown too large, he would realize that he didn’t need a crutch, and would run to catch up with his big sister.

  We were off to Milan—we picked Milan merely based on the train arrival time, figuring that was about as far as we wanted to travel in one day. After our first connection on the Italian side of the border we saw a family with three children traveling together. September said, “Hmm… those people look American.”

  “How do people look American?” I asked. Ever since I’d decided that Europeans have an underdeveloped sense of liability, I had spent a lot of time thinking about how the world perceives Americans. The United States is such a melting pot I had never considered it possible that someone could “look” American. When we lived in Japan, there was no question that we stood out. Conversely as we traveled through Europe I felt we blended in. But September was right�
�the people she was referring to did ‘look’ American somehow.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” September replied. “Gregarious. Kinda swagger when they walk, thunder when they talk, slouch in their seats and put their feet up. In general act like they own the place.”

  “Like us?”

  “Yeah. Their kids should be in school.”

  “Our kids should be in school.”

  “That’s my point. I’m going to check it out.”

  I said, “Don’t…” but it was too late. September was on her way down the aisle.

  Katrina looked up from her book. “Where’s Mom going?”

  “She is going to go get those people’s life story. I’ll give her twenty minutes and if she hasn’t returned, we’ll need to send out a rescue party.”

  Twenty minutes later I made my way down the aisle. September was chatting with a pleasant woman as if they had been friends for years. “I’m here to rescue you from my wife,” I said to the woman, although it was clear she didn’t want to be rescued.

  “This is Anne from the D.C. area,” September said with an I-told-you-they-were-Americans sort of wink. “They are in Italy for six weeks as part of their homeschooling.”

  I smiled at the two American ladies as they traded embarrassing anecdotes about their spouses and in general acted like they owned the place.

  • • •

  It was ironic how we had spent weeks agonizing over bicycle panniers, purchasing the highest-quality panniers money could buy. Yet, when it came to buying luggage, without a thought we had asked Mrs. Happy to take us to the nearest Wal-Mart in Friedrichshafen.

  The rain was coming down in biblical proportions in Milan and by the time we reached our campsite it was clear that our new luggage was not as waterproof as the panniers had been.

  The next morning we were awakened by the sound of farm animals and loud noises. “What is that banging?” September croaked, trying to get her head off of the pillow.