Schlepping Through the Alps

by Sam Apple

  Every minute or two Fritz would stop, pick up some freshly cut grass, and run it along the blade. Then he'd take out his whetstone, which he now kept in a little red holder on his back, and smooth the blade down. It seemed as though clearing the entire hill would have taken him all year, but Fritz was clearly much more interested in the sharpness of his scythe than in actually removing the grass.

  I gestured to myself, as in, How about I give it a try? fully expecting the always jovial Fritz to let out a good laugh. But Fritz looked concerned as he handed me his tool. The scythe was heavy, and pulling it along the grass wasn't as easy as I had anticipated. Worried that I would hurt my back, I returned the scythe to Fritz, who was examining the work I had just done with a look of genuine disgust.

  Ten

  The Domesticated Life

  Over the next week in the Alps, I learned that putting up a fence for the sheep on a slope sometimes requires placing large rocks at the bottom of the fence's netting so that the sheep can't sneak out underneath, and that Hans sees nothing unusual about asking a journalist who has come to interview him to haul large rocks on his shoulders, and that it doesn't feel so good to be standing next to a dog and to have someone say, “I am leaving, but do not worry, the dog is in charge,” and that Hans once almost drowned in the process of smuggling a lamb into Austria from Germany by swimming across a river, and that when Hans made it across, a group of Austrian hunters in lederhosen discovered him naked on the bank of the river gasping for air with an exhausted lamb a few feet away, and that Hans thought Kati wore revealing tank tops just to torture him, and that just because you're a guest in the home of the world's greatest scyther doesn't mean his son is going to let you have the first turn on his Nintendo.

  What I hadn't managed to learn about was Gottfried. Each night when we came back from the sheep, I would try to locate him, but Gottfried was never available.

  Then, on what I had scheduled to be my last night in the Alps, my luck turned. The evening began at the kitchen table with Hans and Fritz, who had just finished his dengeln for the day. Hans told Fritz that I wanted to talk more about scything and Gottfried's records, and Fritz responded with a few “ja's.” Then he stood up and left the room, only to come back a minute later with a stack of papers, which turned out to be score sheets from Gottfried's various competitions. Fritz was all business as we looked over the score sheets. He turned the pages crisply, pointing to Gottfried's name atop every list. Apparently, the numbers revealed that Gottfried had managed to scythe more than one square meter per second in recent competitions.

  “Does Gottfried practice a lot?” I asked.

  Hans translated. “Always. He makes his practice and then gives it to the cows so they can eat.”

  “And do people ever get injured?”

  “Very seldom. The participants control their tools well, so it is safe.”

  There was more shuffling of papers and an exchange between Hans and Fritz. Hans turned back to me. “In the next competition he expects Gottfried will do forty-nine square meters in thirty-two or thirty-three seconds.”

  I had no idea what the number meant. “Wow,” I said.

  Then Gottfried lumbered into the kitchen in a pointy green mountain hat and a long-sleeved cotton shirt. He glanced down at the papers in his father's hands.

  “Ich the 139 Quadratmeter in einer Sekunde [I will cut 1.39 square meters in one second],” Gottfried said. Hans did the translating. Gottfried walked over to the kitchen counter to pick up a calculator. “Since long time I had vision that human with only hand tool can cut grass quicker than one square meter in one second. All the other scythers in Europe said this is utopia, but I did it. Now, when I am healthy, I will make forty-nine square meters in thirty-two seconds.” Gottfried began punching numbers into the calculator. “This will make 1.5 square meter in one second,” he said. He brought over the calculator to show me the number: 1.53125.

  “Wow,” I said. “How long is the blade of your scythe?”

  “It is 1.4 meters [4 feet 7 inches]. This is biggest in world.”

  I nodded. Hans had his big shepherd's stick, and Gottfried had his enormous scythe. Maybe I should start writing with one of those giant souvenir pencils, I thought.

  “You have heard of Falco?” Gottfried asked in English.

  I had. In 1986, Falco had become the first Austrian to top the American pop charts with “Rock Me Amadeus.”

  “Amadeus Amadeus,” I said.

  Gottfried smiled.

  Hans asked Gottfried if he and his father would sing for us.

  Fritz looked a little embarrassed, but Hans encouraged him and he agreed. He walked over to the kitchen to grab a beer. “He must first wet his pipes,” Hans said. Fritz returned with a beer for me as well. Then he and Gottfried belted out a shockingly good yodeling duet: “Dingle Dengel donger dinger Dengel donger dinger dooo, yo de le he hoooo, yo de le he hooo.” Gottfried was a real virtuoso, his voice climbing higher with each yodeled syllable.

  My enthusiasm was only slightly dimmed when I later played my tape from the evening for a German-speaking friend and discovered that Fritz and Gottfried had been singing a crude song about mountain girls, in which dengeln-ing was a thinly veiled metaphor for screwing.

  For the next act Gottfried went solo, yodeling about a cuckoo bird: “Cuckoo cuckoo cuck-el-le-eh-hoo, cuck-el-le-eh-hoo.”

  I took a few swigs of beer and clapped when he finished.

  “Do you sing?” Gottfried asked, growing more comfortable with his English.

  “No,” I said, then thought for a moment. “But I do rap.”

  Hans took a minute to translate “rap.” “Yes, I would like to hear this,” Gottfried said.

  I took another swig of beer and broke into an old-school song about girls with big butts hanging on my jock.

  No response. I considered apologizing. Then Hans, perhaps feeling a little bit left out, said that he too had something to sing. Hans broke out into a Yiddish song called “Zol Shoyn Kumen di Geule” (“Let the Redemption Come”). The tempo was upbeat, but Hans still managed to infuse the words with melancholy.

  “Very fine,” Gottfried said in English when Hans finished.

  “The song says, ‘Wake up, Messiah, from your little nap, your little dreaming after having dinner,’ ” Hans explained. “ ‘Wake up, and we hope you will not wake up too late to come and save us.’ ” Hans paused and looked at the table. “For some it was too late.”

  When I arrived at breakfast the next morning, the changing of Hans's woman had taken place. Christine was gone, and Kati was sitting next to Wolfi at the table. I felt a certain loyalty to Christine by that point, and Kati's presence made me uncomfortable. We sat across from each other without trying to bridge our language gap.

  I was headed to Vienna that night. I would stay with Christine and meet up with Hans in the city on the weekend—Kati would take over the flock. After packing my things and saying good-bye to Gottfried and Fritz, I caught up with Hans atop the hill behind the house. He was talking to Kati on his cell phone, even though she was only a hundred yards behind him at the back of the flock. It felt too early in the morning to hammer Hans with questions about his past, so I drifted along in silence and thought about cancer, which is what hypochondriacs do when we have nothing pressing on the agenda.

  We were on our way to Judenburg, where Hans had to take the sheep in order to use the nearest bridge across the Mur River. We walked along a wooded path in the mountains until we reached a barbed-wire fence blocking our way. The entire flock came to a halt. Hans and Kati began to argue over how to proceed. Hans wanted to cut the fence and then, after the flock had passed, repair it with a wire kit he carried for just such occasions. Kati thought there was enough space for the sheep to squeeze through if someone held the wires apart. At a pause in the argument Hans pointed to the curls of barbed wire along the top of the fence. “This is why we no longer have the donkey,” he said. “It was too hard to pass the fences.” It was the fir
st I had heard of the donkey.

  “You see what these people do with their fences,” Hans continued. “It makes me think of concentration camp.” Hans rambled on about the Austrian landowning aristocrats and how they hate to let people on their property and how the only things they care about are money and hunting. Then he told me to take a photo of the barbed wire, as though it were evidence of the dark side of the Austrian character. I was running low on film and talked him out of it. “They use barbed wire everywhere,” I said, in a rare moment of rational perspective.

  Kati won the fence argument, and the sheep took turns, one by one squeezing between two strips of wire. “This is the difference between a wandering shepherd and others,” Hans said, squatting and pulling up on the wire with a stick so that the sheep wouldn't get scratched as they made their way through. “Others see a fence and decide they cannot go there, but a shepherd must think about the best routes no matter where people have put fences. You have to look at the world very different.” I remembered that the day before, Christine had talked about having walked through this same part of the country last year. Now that she was working as a shepherd, she said, she couldn't look at the landscape in the same way. Before she saw beauty in the mountains; now she saw beauty in a good patch of grass.

  On the outskirts of Judenburg, groups of curious children appeared on the sidewalks. The sheep took over the road, and the line of cars behind us grew longer and longer, until it was hard not to feel the pressure of the interrupted lives. Later, in one of our only conversations, Kati found the English to tell me that the local radio station in Judenburg will sometimes announce that the sheep are in town so that people can avoid the traffic.

  We made our way to the bridge. The sheep filled one lane of the road and the cars the other, so that the drivers, if only for a second, might have felt as though they too were a part of the flock or that the long line of cars was a gasoline-fueled flock of its own, with stop signs for a shepherd and honking horns for hops.

  At the end of the bridge Hans and the sheep walked past a MCdonald s JUDENBURG sign. Two middle-aged women with tired eyes stood nearby, watching the sheep and smoking. Hans asked them if they knew why Judenburg was called Judenburg.

  The first woman said that the name may have come from the Jews, but she quickly conceded when the second women said that, no, Judenburg comes from an old duke whose name was similar to “Juden.” Hans smiled and began his history lesson. The women looked on confused, no doubt surprised to find themselves suddenly listening to a lecture on medieval Jewry from a wandering shepherd.

  In a city park that afternoon, the flock stopped for a leisurely lunch. Hans sat down next to me on a bench.

  “It feels weird to be in a city with the sheep,” I said as I watched a lamb curl up for a nap under the shade of a water fountain.

  “This is another reason I like being shepherd,” Hans said. “As wandering shepherd, you have very special perspective. You see all different levels of society. First you walk by the fields of farmer, then through city, then along the banks of the river with fisherman, then you pass over the grounds of one of these aristocratic landowners, then you meet the people on the bicycle paths. You begin to understand how all these people live.”

  I liked this observation, but at the moment I was thinking not about the people, but about how the sheep lived. I was impressed by how independent they seemed as they spread out across the park. Why, I wondered for the first time, were they so willing to follow around a man in a big hat who cuts off their testicles and periodically slaughters them? The dogs were urging them along, but the system could work only if the sheep were willing to buy into it. Wouldn't the sheep be better off ignoring the shepherd?

  Part of the answer, I've since learned, is that sheep are born to play follow the leader. Like other species that travel in herds, wild sheep usually have a flock leader that walks in front of the group and leads them to new pastures. The leader will most likely be an independent animal and among the dominant members of the group—although not necessarily the most dominant. In the eyes of the sheep, the shepherd is merely another member of the flock who has assumed this leadership position.

  But the larger question of how sheep came to be so comfortable around man is really the question of how sheep first came to be domesticated some 10,000 years ago. The widely held understanding of animal domestication credits ancient man for capturing wild animals and breeding them into docile, cuddly versions of their unruly forebears. Wolves were too vicious, so we turned them into dogs. Wildcats were transformed into lovable kitties. Although I confess to not having put too much thought into the subject prior to my trip, I had always assumed that this was more or less how it happened.

  The problem with this theory is that the fossil record reveals that sheep tended to hang around ancient man even before our ancestors were eating them in large numbers. In other words, rather than being captured, sheep were coming to us out of their own free sheep will. Also, humans have tried and failed to domesticate other species, which suggests that something outside of our control must have made sheep more amenable than, say, bears to domestication.

  In the alternative theory, made popular by the science journalist Stephen Budiansky, domesticated animals evolved for the simple reason that the docile life was full of advantages for them. If this animal-centered view of domestication is right, Hans's sheep are following him, his singing notwithstanding, because the partnership between man and sheep turned out to be a pretty good deal for the sheep. Man got meat—wool came later; but the sheep got food, medical care, and protection.

  According to this animal-centered theory, the story of sheep domestication goes something like this: Man started cultivating plants and staying in one general area. The sheep that were more curious and less fearful began to hang around these early human settlements and eat from the grain fields much like mice hang around our kitchens today. At some point man realized he could make good use of these tame sheep and began to herd them and eat them according to his own needs. But it was the sheep, at least those that didn't get eaten, that were arguably getting the better part of the deal. The numbers speak for themselves. There are more than a billion domesticated sheep today, while wild sheep are almost extinct.

  For the animal-centered theory to work, there must have been a genetic mutation that led to the first docile sheep. And here's where the story of animal domestication becomes particularly strange. The mutation that separates domesticated animals from wild animals appears to lie in those genes that determine when the animal becomes an adult. Domesticated animals reach sexual maturity as adolescents and then simply never grow up to be wild. That is, in both appearance and behavior, domesticated animals are remarkably similar to the young of their wild progenitors. Adult dogs both look like juvenile wolves and exhibit the same submissive traits: They whine, roll over to expose their bellies, and, like all domesticated animals, are less fearful around other species. In sheep the best evidence for this permanent adolescence, known as “neoteny,” is the large size of a domesticated ram's horns. Unlike wild rams, which stop growing their horns in adolescence, domesticated rams grow their horns throughout their lives.

  Budiansky theorizes that the melting of vast glaciers that occurred around 8500 B.C.E., at the end of the geologic epoch known as the Pleistocene, would have provided an advantage to animals that exhibited juvenile curiosity. These animals would have been more likely to explore, and thus benefit from, the newly unfrozen frontiers. And because domesticated animals tend to reach sexual maturity at a younger age than their wild counterparts, they would have had the advantage of higher reproductive rates.

  Put another way, the sheep were hanging around Hans because they were teenagers who had figured out how to exploit him for free food, like a nearsighted clerk at a 7-Eleven.

  We ate dinner at a roadside restaurant that night. Hans and Kati argued the entire time. I played chess with Andi at the side of the table, thankful to have an excuse to ignore the te
nse conversation. With Christine, the group felt like a loving dysfunctional family. Now we just felt dysfunctional.

  There were several teenagers sitting near us in slightly out-of-style hip-hop attire. Hans leaned over and asked them if they knew why Judenburg was called Judenburg. A plump girl in a sweat suit giggled. “Because of the Juden,” she said. Her friend turned red and hit her in the arm. They both laughed. Then a blond-haired guy in an Adidas sun visor said, “Why is Knittelfeld called Knittelfeld? It's just a name. It doesn't mean anything.” His agitation was obvious. Hans let it go.

  On the way out Hans stopped by the bar and asked a mean-looking mustached man in shiny boots if he knew the origins of his city's name.

  Without turning to face us, the man snarled, “Go read a history book.” Hans gave me a knowing glance and we left.

  At the Judenburg train station Hans told me for at least the third time how good it made him feel to be around someone like me who understood him. I felt suddenly nervous. I didn't yet feel as though I understood him. I still had a lot of questions, still needed to get to the bottom of his transition from radical teen to a wandering shepherd, still needed to figure out exactly how Yiddish had come into the picture.

  “I'll see you in Vienna in a few days,” Hans said.

  “Zay gezunt,” I said.

  Eleven

  The Shepherd in the Airport

  The shepherd and I are wandering through Houston's Intercontinental Airport. We are waiting. Around us people are eating Cinnabons and talking about missed connections. Away from his sheep and without his stick, the shepherd seems uneasy. In the gift shop he drops a glass water globe. A miniature Alamo spills out.