by Steph Davis
Mario woke up.
“I don’t know where to bury her,” I said.
He was quiet, then said, “It might be better to have her cremated.”
“I want to bury her. Somewhere. At the Tombstone. We could bury her in the landing area, and then we’ll be there with her all the time, when we jump.”
“Babe,” Mario said gently, “it’s summer. And it’s really hot and the ground is baked hard. It might turn into a bad thing trying to take her down there and dig. I think it might be better to have her cremated.”
“How do you even do that?” I asked, feeling helpless.
“Vets do it. We can take her to Dr. Sorensen’s, and they can do it.”
I got out of bed. Fletch was lying on her side. I took off her diaper. It was still clean. She felt stiff, her muscles rigid under her soft fur. Mario was right. He went into the other room and called the vet’s office.
“They say if we bring her right now, they can do it this morning. We can have her ashes this afternoon.”
“Right now? I’m not ready, we can’t go right now.” Tears rolled down my cheeks.
“Okay, we’ll take our time, but if we can bring her this morning, they will be able to do it today instead of keeping her there. I think it’s the best thing.”
Mario wrapped his arm around my shoulders. I leaned against his chest and cried until I ran out of breath again. My nose was so clogged I couldn’t breathe through it. Mario went out to his car and cleared the floor in the back. I wrapped Fletch in a blanket and carried her out to the car. I sat on the floor, holding her as Mario drove, looking up through the windows, hoping we weren’t there yet. We would get there and then I would have to give her to them. I held Fletch, stroking her ears. I’d wondered if it would be strange holding a dead animal. It was still Fletch. She felt just like Fletch, only a little stiffer. She still smelled warm, like herself. I just wanted to hold her, to keep her. I felt as helpless as a four-year-old, clinging to the toy that mattered more than anything else in life.
Mario pulled into the driveway in front of Dr. Sorensen’s office, which adjoined his house, with horse pastures all around. He opened the door.
Immediately I lost all my courage. “I don’t want to give her to them!” The thought of bringing Fletch inside and giving her up forever was more than I could bear. Sobs racked my chest again.
It didn’t seem possible to hurt this much. Everything that had happened in the last year or two, the emotional pain, the physical injuries, it had been nothing compared with this. “I think we should bury her… .” I trailed off, clutching Fletch to my chest, feeling the solidity of her little body.
“Babe, you might like having her ashes. I think it’s the best thing.”
I knew he was right. I stood in the driveway and forced myself through the office door, pressing her fur against my arms and cheeks. I could hardly bear to give her to them, to the kind people who’d taken such good care of her. I laid her on the metal table, where Dr. Sorensen had scratched her ears and said, “What a good dog,” as she’d patiently allowed him to give her shots or stitches. Sobbing and gasping, I turned away. More than anything else in the world, I just wanted to keep her. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t keep her. I walked out the door, Mario’s arm around my slumped shoulders. She was gone.
The door flung hard, torn by the wind. The trees thrashed, the tears blew from my eyes, my hair whipping wildly. It stung my wet cheeks, snatched ropes of runny liquid out of my nose. I got into the car and slammed the door against it, feeling drained. We drove back slowly, without Fletch. I didn’t know how I was going to do it. How could she be gone? Everything I’d ever thought was important was nothing. I’d give anything to have her back, to have her with me for the rest of my life. There was no way to change it. There would be no getting her back. Ever. It was absolutely final. Fletch was part of me, my alter ego. And she was gone.
I sat in the living room. Mario quietly rolled up the ragged strips of carpet and disappeared outside. I moved around the house uselessly, looking at Fletcher’s beds. It was the worst day of my life. I wondered if I would feel like this every hour of every day forever. I picked up her beds and carried them onto the porch. Mario was stacking wood planks beside the driveway.
“What’s that?”
“I took down her ramp,” he said. “Let me take the beds. I’ll put them in storage.”
“Wait.” I went inside and picked up Fletcher’s food bowls and the stand to keep her from leaning down to eat, all of her colorful harnesses with her name and phone number written in Sharpie, her travel food bag that had gone everywhere with us. “Can you take these too?” When he was gone, I looked around. My house was cozy but minimalistic, decorated sparingly. A framed photo of Fletch was in every room. Those would stay.
The day dragged on, hours to be got through, the wind scraping branches on the roof. Mario came back and drove me to the vet’s office. Dr. Sorensen’s wife handed me a grapefruit-size plastic bag full of light gray ash, and a card. I’d given them my heart, and I was getting back a plastic bag of dust. Tears blurred my eyes.
“I’m really sorry,” she said sincerely. “We all loved Fletch. She was a sweet girl and you took very good care of her.”
It was so easy to believe in non-attachment, embracing loss. It was so much harder to live it. As usual. Everything had changed, and nothing would ever be the same again. Somehow there must be good in it. There had to be.
I smiled painfully as tears ran down my cheeks and dropped into the neck of my shirt. “Thank you.”
I sat in the passenger seat, the plastic bag on my lap, as Mario drove home.
The next morning, I woke up and Fletch wasn’t in her bed. She was gone. I didn’t move, feeling. The dawn light was soft, the leaves of the mulberry tree green and shiny outside the window. A tear trickled down the side of my cheek and rolled into my ear. I was dehydrated, my stomach sharp and empty. The grief was softer. No day to come would ever be as bad as yesterday, as the day Fletch died, I thought. It just couldn’t be. That was good to know. I looked over at her ashes, sitting near the foot of the bed, near her spot. A small shape moved, startling me. A black cat jumped onto the covers, purring. It strode up beside my legs and stood above my shoulder, jauntily. It was real. It must have come in through Fletch’s door on the kitchen porch and ventured down the hall, right up onto a bed full of large creatures. That took some nerve.
I rubbed its tiny pointed ear and stroked its high cheek, in the spot cats like. It rubbed against my hand, purring, winding against the comforter tucked around my body, then abruptly curled into a tight ball beside my hip.
“Mario,” I said, turning toward his shoulder, knowing he was still asleep. He too was solid and warm, breathing smoothly. “There’s a cat. A little cat.”
He says his name is Mao
Chapter Fifteen
Learning to Fly
Lauterbrunnen Valley, Switzerland
Without Fletch, I had a surprising amount of time. The tiny black cat meowed so loudly and frequently to be petted that I finally named him Mao. He didn’t seem to require much other service aside from a bowl of dry cat food that he delicately nibbled at when he wasn’t devouring sparrows and mice.
After a few days of wandering aimlessly around the house, I’d started checking flights to Europe. Summer was over, but fall wasn’t quite in, and ticket prices had dipped with the end of the official high season. Mario found a pilot to cover for him at the drop zone. We decided to go.
To climbers, Yosemite is simply “the Valley.” For base jumpers, “the Valley” is Lauterbrunnen, a fantastically picturesque mountain pastoral of green fields and Swiss farm chalets. The limestone walls of the valley lead higher to the snowy glaciers and rugged faces of the Eiger, the Mönch, the Jungfrau, and the Schilthorn. With cliffs ranging from fifteen hundred to five thousand feet and trains and cable cars running up the sides of the mountains like Swiss clockwork, Lauterbrunnen is quite simply a base-jumping mecca.
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In Yosemite Valley, park rangers taser base jumpers and throw them in jail for flying from the big granite cliffs; in the Swiss Valley, jumpers are just tourists and mountain athletes along with everyone else.
For as long as I could remember, for better or for worse, Yosemite had been the Valley. Lauterbrunnen, the Valley of the flip side, was another world: a magical paradise, the promised land, a place almost too good to be real.
My trips to Lauterbrunnen had been in the late fall or early spring, piggybacked onto speaking invitations at mountain festivals in Italy, Britain, or France. It was nearly always possible to jump from the “small,” eighteen-hundred-foot walls of the Valley year-round, but it had always been too snowy to climb up to the most enticing, high peaks when my trips had presented themselves. I’d hoped to finally travel to Europe this summer in the high season, but when Fletch started deteriorating in the spring, my world had shrunk and there was no thought of leaving her. Suddenly, now she was gone.
Mario and I flew to Zurich and then switched from a double-decker, high-speed train in Interlaken to the small, toylike train for the last few kilometers up to Lauterbrunnen. We each had a bag full of warm clothes and our base jumping packs filled tight with base rigs, wingsuits, and helmets, wearing our boots to keep the bags within the luggage limit.
The train rolled slowly up to Lauterbrunnen, curving beside the dusty gray-blue stream. Trees and steep ridges stretched above the windows, the glaciers starting to come into view as we gained elevation. I felt tired and jet-lagged, but happy as the familiar landscape moved past the windows, feeling the pleasant anticipation of returning to a familiar place. It was morning, and in just a couple of hours we’d be settled into Lauterbrunnen and riding up the cable car to make a jump off the classic High Nose exit point, just as I always did as soon as I arrived in the valley.
I leaned against Mario’s shoulder, and he put his arm around me. It felt good to be sharing the odd limbo space, of being neither in the place we’d left nor the place we were going to. This space had become familiar too. I was always riding on a train, passing things and being passed by things, steadily moving forward, sometimes to new places, sometimes to places I’d been before. People changed, seasons changed, and the outside world just kept moving slowly past the windows. I thought about Fletch. Somehow I’d never truly understood permanence before, in much the same way as I’d never fully understood change. Most of the things that had disappeared from my life had just gone in different directions. They still existed, but their trains were going down different tracks, traveling away from mine. I wasn’t expecting them to come back my way, but I also knew they were out there, moving. You never knew when the tracks might meet in some future place. Fletch hadn’t chosen a different route or a different journey. She wasn’t riding down a different track. She was gone. Life was entirely new, never to be the same again.
The train curved slightly, and sun hit my eyes just as the tullelike waterfall appeared, filmy against pale gray walls. Beyond it, a bulge of rock jutted out from the top of the eighteen-hundred-foot limestone cliff, the High Nose, a specific point that jumpers had named, just as climbers named the sections of walls they climbed. The scene opened up like a painting before us, almost too beautiful to be real. “We’re here, babe,” Mario said, leaning down by my ear, his voice full of the birthday-morning promise I’d come to rely on. “It’s the Valley.”
Lauterbrunnen is a little valley below enormous mountains, with an age-old tradition of farming and mountaineering. The handful of farmers who have lived here for generations keep perfect green fields, healthy and happy cows, sheep, pigs, goats, and chickens. They make big, hard wheels of cheese, alpkäse, which they keep in dark storage on shelves in their barns, and ride vintage tractors around the narrow road that loops up and down the valley.
The Swiss engineers have built an astonishing network of via ferratas, cable cars, trains, and buses around, onto, and actually through the mountains. They drilled a train tunnel through the top of the Eiger. They built an enormous round restaurant on top of the Schilthorn, rising out of snow. Everything runs on a perfectly regulated schedule, to the second.
Spending a day in Lauterbrunnen provides instant insight into how this tiny country, bordered by nations that have feuded over land, religion, and money for centuries, has been able to maintain untouchable neutrality and fiscal command. These people are capable of anything. Who would even try to mess with them?
The Swiss smoothly integrate new uses of the place as they arise: skiing, helicopter transport, paragliding, downhill mountain biking, base jumping, wingsuit base, skydiving, and Swiss-army target practice. Everything is managed beautifully, tidily, and profitably. Of course. It’s Switzerland.
In the States, most of the spectacular, accessible high cliffs are illegal for base jumping, for no reason I could ever uncover other than that national park administrators think jumping is scary and, admittedly, just don’t like base jumpers. For the ultimately pragmatic Swiss, who can make miracles from manure and carve train tunnels through the Eiger, human flight seems to be just par for the course, hardly something to be perturbed about.
In Lauterbrunnen, as in all Europe, flying is just another form of tourism and mountain adventure, accepted and respected. For base jumpers, Lauterbrunnen is kind of like Disneyland, but with the real Eiger and the Jungfrau staring you in the face as you ride the small, beautifully maintained cars along the edges of sheer cliffs and mountains. To stand at the edge and launch into the open air, to feel your wings inflate as you begin to take flight, is a surreal experience for the human body and mind, no matter how many times you do it. It’s hard not to fall into the grip of strung-out, addict-style frenzy, rushing from bottom to top until dark falls, especially for an American who can’t quite believe the place is real and that people are actually allowed to fly. Thanks to the trains and cable cars traveling from the valley floor up to the cliff tops, a motivated jumper can make at least five jumps in a day in the Valley, slowed down only by the time it takes to repack a parachute and run back to the train station. A lazy jumper can easily make three jumps, without even rushing.
Exiting from the via ferrata jump, Lauterbrunnen
The Valley jumps, though undeniably some of the most user-friendly on earth, feel a bit intimidating at first for wingsuit flight. Ranging from fifteen hundred to two thousand feet, they are not the tallest cliffs, and the low-ish height requires you to be totally on, with good exits and reactions for pull-time. But it would be hard to find nicer landing areas, even at a skydiving drop zone. The valley floor is a patchwork of lush grass divided into green pastures. The locals have even installed windsocks in the fields below the most popular jump spots.
If you are a base jumper and you follow a few simple rules, you can leap off the cliffs in Lauterbrunnen until the cows come home and land next to them in their pastures. The Swiss impress me for many reasons, but above all because they seem to regard the world as full of puzzles to be solved, rather than calamities to be battled. For an American jumper, arriving in Lauterbrunnen for the first time, this approach to life can create severe culture shock. When you come from a place where base jumping is often outlawed simply because someone might not like it, it’s almost mind-bending to watch how the Swiss effortlessly reconcile all user groups with no fuss whatsoever.
In the middle of Lauterbrunnen is a helicopter base, for air rescues and construction. The choppers fly all day long. When base jumping became popular in the Valley, the helicopter pilots expressed concern because they didn’t want to be surprised by suddenly appearing parachutes when they were coming in to land or take off. Rather than pointing to this potential airspace conflict as grounds for outlawing jumping, the heli base requested that base jumpers make a phone call to the helicopter office before jumping, to make sure the air is clear.
The Swiss army requires frequent target practice, since all Swiss men over the age of eighteen may be called to service at any time. The shooting range is close
to one of the common landing areas for base jumpers. Yet it wouldn’t occur to the Swiss to outlaw a user group because it conflicts with another, even in the name of national military service. Instead, the target practice times are scheduled and posted in the local pub, and jumpers just don’t jump in that spot during target practice.
A local paragliding company offers tandem paragliding rides to tourists. The cliff under their launch site became a popular spot for base jumping. The paragliders were concerned about the safety of their customers because they could possibly hit base jumpers in the air when they appeared off the cliff. The problem was solved by requesting base jumpers to wait until 4:00 p.m. to jump at that site, when the tandem business is done for the day and only experienced paragliders will be in the airspace.
There is no fuss, no disagreement, no cry for outlawing anything, no targeting certain user groups as being different or “crazy” or risky, no exclusionary rules that cost time and money to enforce. The Swiss simply evaluate potential conflicts, propose a simple solution, and all carry on with what they were doing.
Compared to the way I’d seen base jumping handled in the States, this kind of practical, conflict-free management seemed kind of weird. It certainly wasn’t exciting. It was all so … reasonable.
This feeling of freedom and levelheadedness was just one of the reasons that Lauterbrunnen had quickly become one of my favorite places in the world, right up there with the Diamond or Rifle or Moab. Added to the staggering beauty, the jumpable cliffs in every direction, and that I could show up there alone without a car and fly all day every day, Lauterbrunnen could hardly get much better. Unless the Swiss franc crashed.
