The old man

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There are good times and bad times to be away from home; meeting new people, discovering beautiful landscapes, experiencing new, unfamiliar things… these are the key. Birthdays, Christmas, funerals, getting hit by a bus… always a good time to be with loved ones.

Sometimes everything, well almost everything, seems to fall at once. That’s how I’d describe turning 30. I spent the day working, not a big deal, but isolated in the middle of a week-long trip with a group of international landslide experts. For them the trip was “50% culture, 50% work”, for me it was 100% free - not a bad mix. But for a birthday there wasn’t really anyone round, just a few colleagues, thirty-odd strangers, txt messages, and no net.

A call from Mum at 2am let me know Nanna had passed away. Often it’s pretty obvious what to say, what to offer, what to do at times like this… at 2am in a tiny Suisse mountain village, there was nothing I could do - really, nothing, but wonder at how completely different things were right then under the winter sun on the other side of the world.

By 9am we were at 2100m under a brilliant blue sky looking out across the Matterhorn valley over 1km below us & discussing how this particular skifield was constructing their lifts to allow for movement of the rock glacier on which the run was built. I spoke to Mum and Dad for much longer later that morning while sitting in a forest clearing and watching a lecture on analysing tree rings to date catastrophes. The improbability of the situation was almost tangable, resolving what I was seeing, with the thoughts and feelings associated with a saddening/birthday phonecall was really quite surreal.

Not long after, surreal got even weirder.

As the least important person with a drivers licence - I naturally had the job of getting our group Jeep from place to place while the balance of the excursion travelled on a tour bus. While parked behind the bus at a quiet train station my boss & I noticed the distance between the bus and us was getting smaller. Realising it was reversing toward us I punched for the horn, finding only the steering column airbag, and started the Jeep just in time to see the bonnet of the Jeep crunched up in front of us. “He’ll pay for that” was the comment from the passenger seat. For what it's worth, I'm really glad he was sitting there.. explaining how an accident isn't in the least your fault is just that little bit harder when the other party is a big yellow bus.

We spent the remainder of the day visiting various testaments to Swiss environmental sculpture and meticulous engineering (all very interesting) before heading to Leukerbad. This is one of the big 3 spa resort towns in Suisse, and used to be one of ‘those’ places to take the sick for the waters’ healing properties. Today it seems a hotel has been placed plum on top of each hot spring - no unsightly bubbling mud or awful rotten eggs here daaahling! The hotels are certainly fitting for the business men and their languid wives. Ours was no exception.

The real stunning thing about Leukerbad, however, is that it is surrounded on 3 sides by 1000m high near-vertical dolomite cliffs. Of course a path to the pass has been blasted in older times and is just wide enough for a pack horse, or ailing patient to be ferried across. But today the gondola is the pleasant way to the top, one tower on the crest, one at the bottom, and almost 2km of cable spanning the gap. We had dinner at the restaurant at the top, on the edge of an incredible old glacial landscape, and looking south over the green valley of Leukerbad to Switzerland’s highest 4000+m peaks. Red wine was flowing & the guys responsible for organising the trip were in fine form. I’m not sure anyone had really considered the ride back down until we stepped outside again, this was quite something else.

Picture standing in the dark, in a glass walled box some 600m from earth in any direction, with only the sway of the car to remind you of the connection to the tiny web of lights in the valley below. Watching stars disappear and reappear behind the silhouetted dark grey cliffs towering all around offered an unexpected chance to reflect on the day gone by, what I was doing here, and the many I wish could’ve been with me.

That's really not a bad description of how things have been over the last few months - heaps of fieldwork, a bit lonely at times, but I've been hanging out in some really, really spectacular places. Also lots of up's and downs, but generally things are really cool - apart for the fact that autumn's here, and the river is now too chily to swim in.. but then again, the snows can't be that far away :) Tschuss!! K.

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