Magic Mountain

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June 25th 2019

Published: June 28th 2019

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Dr Jon

Vaporous Entity

Me in my more solid phase.

Vaporous Entities

Travel ghost: A state of mind one enters a few weeks before a big trip. In this state the departure date appears as a cliff the traveler is destined to drop off of. Family and friends make plans for a future clearly visible on the other side of the canyon, but this isn't the traveler's future. His future awaits at the dark bottom of the canyon.

In my case the bottom of the canyon is a cramped hotel room in Zurich. No desk clerk checked me in, no bellhop carried my bag to the room, and no concierge recommended a restaurant. Instead, I punched a code sent by a computer into a machine that looked like a Nevada gas station condom dispenser. The key to my room dropped into a tray. Willkommen in Zurich!

Suitcase Fatigue

I used to love the idea of living out of my suitcase (an official Rick Steves Travel Pack, but with his name blacked out so that people in airports will stop asking me if I'm Rick Steves), but this love seems to have faded. I unpack the same tired crap into yet another cheap hotel room-- the toothpaste-caked

Adele

Intrepid Adele.

toilet kit, the sweat stained Indiana Jones hat, the hopelessly wrinkled shirts. Maybe I need a new suitcase.

Tomorrow begins a procession of friends coming to rescue me from myself.

Adele

I met Adele a few days after 9-11 in the bar of the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo, the capital city of Sri Lanka. She and I were both at the start of Fulbright Fellowships. The world was falling apart and here we were on this little island in the middle of a nasty civil war. We became good friends that year, even though we lived in separate cities. Over the years I would bump into her several more times on subsequent trips to Sri Lanka. After my divorce we attempted a brief romance, but were miscast; we were African Queen Bogart and Hepburn trying to play Romeo and Juliet. A few years ago and totally by chance, we were thrown together again in the mountains of Pakistan, hiding on the floor of a car surrounded by trucks filled with men shooting rifles into the air.

When I heard that she was going to visit the Austrian Alps this summer, I decided to stop over

climbers

Every rock face either had water coming down or climbers going up.

on my way to Armenia to join her for part of her trip. It would be a novelty to be with Adele in a stable First World country. A week before we met, the government of Austria collapsed.

Yowza!

After hours of driving through sublime mountains and hellish traffic we arrived in the little hamlet of Ginzling, Austria. There was a church, of course, several guest houses, and an elementary school. There wasn't room for much else between the steep mountains and rushing river.

My friends Wolf-Dieter and his wife Suse had driven down from Munich and were waiting for me. We barely had time to claim beds before we were back on the road, climbing higher and deeper into the narrow valley. Every rock face either had a waterfall coming down it or climbers going up it. A waterfall pouring over the entrance to a tunnel provided a quick wash for Wolf-Dieter's car. The road ended at a reservoir filled with snowmelt from the dozen peaks surrounding it. The reservoir was held in place by a dizzyingly tall dam equipped with a diving platform for bungee jumpers.

That night our host, Gerhardt (a former national

going down is easier.

This is the route back for bungee jumpers.

mountain biking champion), served trout fresh-caught from the river and cooked according to his grandmother's recipe. We asked him about the seemingly precarious location of Ginzling. Couldn't a slammed car door trigger an avalanche and bury the town? No, he assured us. Not here. Avalanches do occur, he admitted, but these conveniently happen a hundred meters on either side of the village.

There is a surprising amount of downtime when traveling, especially in remote areas where nightlife means quietly sitting in front of a fireplace listening to wolves howl. To fill these hours intellectual Adele brought Thomas Mann's novel, Magic Mountain, a weighty and depressing tome set in a tuberculosis sanatorium in nearby Davos. I read Magic Mountain in my German Lit class years ago. Each page was a beating. I took pity on Adele when I recognized her glazed expression and let her help with the stack of crossword puzzles I brought to fill my quiet hours. When she got sick of these, which in my opinion happened all too quickly, we exchanged tango lessons for Russian lessons.

The next day the four of us set out for a hike up a side canyon that led to

Finishing touch

Finishing up with blueberry schnapps.

a 10,000-foot peak. Along the trail we encountered grazing palominos, swathes of trees cut down by winter avalanches, stunning waterfalls, and crude log cabins. The cabins looked like they had been abandoned by pre-Napoleonic shepherds, but huge piles of fresh-cut firewood and solar panels suggested otherwise.

My absolute favorite part of hiking in the Alps is that just as you can't take another step, a restaurant (modestly called a hütte) appears! How there could be a restaurant in the middle of such rugged and remote terrain is beyond my reckoning, but I don't ask why for fear that it might be a mirage too fragile to hold up to close scrutiny. Instead, I take a seat, order a beer, and silently chant "don't wake up, don't wake up ..."

At Steinbockhutte we stopped for a well-deserved Jause. (Jause—pronounced "YOWZA"-- is my new favorite word; it's German for "snack".) After beers and bratwurst the four of us ripped into a kaiserschmarm, which is basically pancakes scrambled in applesauce. Wolf-Dieter and I chased it all down with schnapps. Deeply satisfied, Jause over, and dreading the walk back, Suse looked at Adele and me and triumphantly declared, "The Americans have melted

Krimml Falls

One of a series of 4 falls that make up Krimml Falls.

away!"

Tubby Time

The next day we drove to our next stop, Bruck an der Grossglocknerstrasse. (More on this mouthful later.) We made the mistake of stopping to hike to the top of Krimml Waterfalls with a thousand other people, many of whom were beefy tattooed bikers awaiting the second coming of Hitler. With some hesitation, we approached one of these ubermenschen to ask for help deciphering the confusing payment instructions posted in the parking lot at the base of the falls. I timidly asked if he spoke English. "Bairisch!" he bellowed. Tyrol is a popular destination for tourists from neighboring Bavaria, and Bavarian Nationalism is still a thing, a thing that takes pride in its distinct culture and dialect. It's also a thing with a dark Nazi past. All of these "things" were being asserted by our chest-thumping biker. Unfortunately, I thought he said that he spoke Irish, so I began asking about the hourly parking rate using my best fake Irish brogue. He turned and walked away, probably muttering something about stupid Americans, and how did they ever win the war.

Another mistake was checking out Zell am See which had more in common with

Tauern Spa

A sneak peek at the indoor-outdoor pools.

Arabian Nights than Sound of Music. Everywhere we looked we saw restaurants advertising halal menus, sheiks in white robes, and trailing women wearing silky burqas, We were later told that Zell was popular with wealthy Saudi travelers because it resembled a description of heaven in the Koran.

To make up for our trials, we checked into Tauern Spa the next day. This is one of those giant European Disneyesque spas with aroma and color therapy saunas, indoor-outdoor pools overlooking the mountains, and water slides for kids. My favorite feature is the whirlpool, a large circular enclosure in the middle of the pool that contains a powerful current. Nearby bathers are sucked into the enclosure and spiraled around, helplessly bouncing off of each other like lottery balls. My least favorite feature is the sauna. I feel like I'm sprawled on a bus stop bench in Bakersfield in July at high noon. Adele is at home in the sauna, not because she is from Tucson, which is probably hotter than Bakersfield, but because she spent her student years in Russia, where the curriculum included diving naked into a snowbank after sitting in a sauna being whipped with birch branches.

Grand Prix

Grand Prix 2

Adele initially thought this cop car was there to save us from the reckless racers, then noticed the "Street-gasm" sign on its roof.

The sleepy town of Bruck an der Grossglocknerstrasse is famous as the starting point of the Grossglockner highway, which connects Bruck to the luridly-named town of Heiligenblut by a series of hairpin turns that traverse The Grossglockner, Austria's highest mountain (12, 500'). In 1924 a proposal to build the road was met with howls of ridicule. Austria had been greatly diminished after losing WWI, and there were only a handful of cars in the whole country. But a few years later the Depression hit; inspired by US programs like the WPA, Austria went ahead with the project.

After paying a hefty toll, Adele and I began our ascent. As far as I could tell the road was made entirely out of hairpin turns. I was happy that Budget was out of anemic Fiats the day I arrived and gave me a more full-blooded BMW instead. As our car skirted the edge of an abyss that overlooked an ecstatic jumble of snowy mountains, I felt thrill mixed with fear and wondered if this was the same feeling sought by people who like to be strangled during sex.

While gripping the steering wheel with sweaty palms and contemplating

Heilegenblut

End of the Grossglockner highway.

my new-found insignificance, I sensed a whining impatience in the collective unconscious. I glanced in the rearview mirror and discovered its source. A foot behind my rear bumper was a Ferrari Spider covered with racing decals. Before I could blink it passed me. It was so fast that it didn't matter that we were on a hairpin curve. He was in front of me before the vehicle coming the other way had time to think about braking. The Ferrari wasn't alone. Next, a souped-up Porsche 911 zipped by me followed by a Lamborghini Diablo.

$500K racing cars covered with decals continued to rocket by us. Had we stumbled into a Grand Prix or the filming of the next Bond movie? Adele became angry at the recklessness of the speeding cars. I nodded my head in agreement, but deep-down I began to understand the real reason Grossglocknerstrasse was built and surreptitiously toggled the BMW from Eco Mode to Sports Mode.

San Cassiano

Piggy-backing on Adele's itinerary was a great idea. On route to each new destination we would drive through charmless ski towns crowded with tourists. An hour from our destination these towns would disappear, the road would

Dog Teeth

The Dolomites look like dogteeth.

narrow and climb, time would reverse, and we would invariably arrive in some authentically quaint mountain village. This was especially the case with San Cassiano, population 855. Founded in 1500 as Armuntorora ("Place of the Armenians"), it changed its name to San Cassiano as thanks to God for sparing them from a plague. One of Cassiano's arm bones is in the church reliquary and is paraded around town on feast days. The church also features a glass casket where one may view the horrific rotting corpse of St. Zeno. (Probably not the Zeno of paradox fame, but there's certainly a joke in here somewhere.)

San Cassiano sits in a valley surrounded by the Dolomites—famously jagged mountains reminiscent of dog teeth. As an added bonus, we were now in the Southern Tyrol, which is technically Italy (although the area is politically autonomous and populated by an obscure ethnic group who speak a language called Ladin). Weary of our steady diet of schnitzel and potatoes, we looked forward to pasta, gelato, and Chianti. We arrived minutes after my friend Cay arrived. He had flown from Berlin to join us.

Cliffhanger

The next day Cay and Adele identified a doable

Via Ferrata

Emerging from a WWI tunnel to the climb ahead.

hike in Adele's guide book. We drove 45 minutes out of town to a trailhead at the base of a mountain called Tofana di Rozes. From there we began our uphill trudge.

At the start of WWI Southern Tyrol was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many ferocious battles were fought against the Italians in the Dolomites. To aid the soldiers scrambling across the cliffs, tunnels were bored, trenches were dug, and iron ladders and rope rings were drilled into the rock. The network of these installations became known as the Via Ferrata. The remnants are still visible. Our trail took us through one of the old tunnels and past the ruins of an army hospital. High in the cliffs above we could see more ladders and tunnels.

As we climbed above the tree line the temperature dropped and the wind picked up. I gave Adele my down jacket in exchange for her fleece vest. We sheltered between rocks to rest and eat granola bars. Our hike continued along the base of a massive wall that rose thousands of feet above us. Across the valley we could see many more peaks and beyond them, in the blue distance, still

cliffhanger

Adele slips from my grip and plunges into the crevasse. (But she managed to crawl home.)

more. Storm clouds passing overhead snagged on the peak above us and began to pile up. The sky darkened and I began to worry about getting caught in a mountain storm. We were now walking through snowfields, occasionally sinking to our thighs. In two places sheets of ice covered the trail. Walking on the ice without crampons was out of the question. Any slip would result in a fatal thousand-foot slide, so we were forced to scramble through mud and gravel to climb up and around these patches. This was extremely slow and tiring in the thin air. Adele began to complain. She had reached her limit, as she would later admit. As an experienced viewer of mountaineering movies, it was easy for me to envision a potential plot outline: an emotional final cell phone call to her son in Tucson; I give her my remaining granola bars; through tears we say our last goodbye; months later I learn that she managed to crawl home through the mud and snow; I am subsequently denounced in mountaineering magazines. To avoid this embarrassing scenario, Cay and I decided to turn back while Adele was still mobile. Many exhausting hours later we sat

Chianti Time!

Cay and I search for an easier hike.

on our balcony drinking grappa and searching the guidebook for easier hikes.

Pilgrims' Progress

The next day we decided to follow the pilgrims' trail to San Croce, an old church at the base of an imposing cliff. (One legend has it that San Croce was built to commemorate a knight who slew a pesky local dragon.) The trail conveniently started in San Cassiano but was steep in places. Thankfully, most of it was in forest shade. Many of the trees had crucifixes nailed to them. The trail passed through clusters of old but functioning farms called viles, an arrangement that dates back to the middle ages. The buildings were coarse wooden structures that may also have dated back centuries. Goats, dogs, and donkeys trotted out to greet us at each vile. In the Van Gogh-fields beyond we could see farmers threshing grain with scythes. Some of the farms produced cheese. One even had a cheese vending machine!

Along the trail we drank from clear cold streams and made friends with other "pilgrims". As we drew closer to San Croce we passed carvings on poles depicting the stations of the cross. Real pilgrims had left pebbles on top

San Croce

Calgary under the cliffs

of the carvings. At the 14th station, the white church steeple of San Croce came into view. Next to the church was a refugio, the Italian equivalent of the Austrian hüttes, except serving spaghetti instead of potatoes. A few kilometers beyond the church we found an operating ski lift that took us all the way down to a village where we could catch a bus back to San Cassiano.

Midnight Run

The next day we decamped an hour west to the town of Campitello Di Fassa, which featured a spa that I reasoned would provide a well-deserved ending to the trip. Our route took us through Valle de Gardena by a series of hairpin curves that we had to negotiate with trucks, buses, and bicycles. At one point a truck failed to get around one of the sharp turns and had to back up. I couldn't get the BMW into reverse. I don't know why; the BMW user interface is no more complicated than the space shuttle (sarcasm). I frantically honked the horn as the rear bumper of the truck got closer and closer. I had to "reboot" the car's operating system to get it to back up.

Mired

Adele mired in a snowfield.

When we reached Campitello Di Fassa I rewarded myself with a relaxing soak in the Jacuzzi. Afterward, as I was dressing, I noticed a peculiar message on my phone: "Professor Pearce, we are waiting for you at the restaurant. When are you coming?" Several weeks earlier I made an arrangement with Bastian and Raphael, two of my favorite students from Switzerland, where I spent several summers teaching. The plan was for them to travel from Lausanne to Zurich where we would get together for dinner the night before I left for Armenia. I was confused. It was Friday night, but I wasn't supposed to leave Zurich until Sunday. Right? Right? Wrong!

In a panic, I looked up my itinerary. My flight was scheduled to take off in 16 hours and I was still in Italy! Somehow my mind had wishfully added another day to my vacation! Worse, I had stood up Bastian and Raphael.

Adele and I left for Zurich at 4 AM, in the rain and darkness, driving down the wet, winding roads. At the airport we hastily said goodbye to each other as I headed for the gate and she for the train that would