I say I am heading into the sky, but now the sky is heading toward me. On a slope to the right, a cloud comes pouring downward, its tendrils of white mist seeking every nook and cranny in the rockface. Soon it is upon me, and my panic turns to relief—the whiteness is gentle and I can see at least fifteen meters ahead of me. It turns out that this mist was a baptism, a welcoming, for within seconds I am atop the Furka Pass. To my amazement, there are no bikers to be seen—no tulip, bratwurst, pilsener, or schnitzel. My only companions are two Swiss guys with mountain bikes, standing at the sign marking the pass and giving its elevation, 2,429 meters. I walk over to them, applauding, and they execute theatrical bows. They hand me their iPad. I take their picture and wish them a “gute Fahrt,” the amusing German equivalent of Bon voyage. Soon I am alone in the cloud.
I get underway and the descent begins. In a way I am thankful for the mist, because I can’t see the scary views. It’s not that I’m afraid of heights, I just happen to like fog. Alas, the cloud and I soon part company and a horrific vista of yawning emptiness appears on the right. Far across the void is a solid wall of green, striped vertically by the white bands of narrow waterfalls. It is impossibly tall. I grip the wheel as though my life depended on it—the pathetic ankle-high guardrail couldn’t stop a tricycle, much less an automobile. I am swearing under my breath as the road narrows to one lane and I take a tight downhill turn.
I come face-to-face with a bright yellow bus, as yellow as Goldfinger’s Rolls. This is one of the PostBus passenger fleet that goes everywhere in Switzerland, giving a famed three-tone horn honk at obstacles such as me. The driver and I sit in silent contemplation of one another for a moment. He has the right of way—he is driving a PostBus, he is going uphill, and he is a helluva lot bigger than I am. I nod in defeat and then consider my options: I can back around the turn, up a steep slope until the road widens, or I can clear the way by driving off the damned cliff. I choose the former. I put the car in reverse and very gingerly begin backing up around the bend; the bus follows me closely, as though the driver is curious about whether I will survive. Less than a meter from my passenger-side door is a drop of a kilometer. In a touch of absurdity, I pass a sign unnoticed on the way down. It advertises some stupid golf course somewhere. Will this be the last thing I ever read? Sweating profusely, I finally arrive at a spot where the oncoming PostBus can pass. The driver waves at me. I do not wave back.
I HAVE NOW LEFT Valais/Wallis for the canton of Uri, one of the original three cantons—the others are Schwyz and Unterwalden—to confederate in 1291 and form the embryo of Switzerland.* Uri is the home canton of William Tell, the lodestar of Swiss nationalism. Tell, who many historians believe to be in the same league of verisimilitude as Rumpelstiltskin, supposedly defied a dastardly Austrian governor by refusing to pay him homage. The outraged official ordered Tell, locally famous for his strength and marksmanship, to shoot an apple off the head of the Swiss hero’s young son. Tell’s crossbow did not falter—and was used some time later to assassinate the governor and spark a rebellion against the Austrian overlords. The old tale obviously holds its attractions for the patriotic—and for the Romantic. Friedrich von Schiller’s 1804 play about Tell found success throughout Europe, and Gioacchino Rossini’s opera based on the play contains one of the musical canon’s most beloved codas, which many first came to know as the theme for The Lone Ranger.
The lovely town of Andermatt is no stranger to William Tell trinkets, even if Altdorf, some thirty-five kilometers north into the mountains, is celebrated as the site of the apple shoot. On Andermatt’s boomerang-shaped main street, the ground floors of almost all of its handsome wooden houses contain shops or restaurants open year-round, as the town doubles as a ski resort. The mountains surrounding it are festooned with the cables of ski lifts and arrays of snowmakers looking like oversized howitzers. The slopes are also pierced by the rabbit holes of road and rail tunnels.
Andermatt is situated on the River Reuss, a tributary of the Rhine’s drainage basin. By crossing the Furka Pass, I have traversed yet another boundary, the watershed separating the Mediterranean, into which the Rhône flows, from the North Sea, the Rhine’s destination. The town also lies on the route to the Gotthard Pass, which marks the boundary between the Germanic and Latin peoples—or, as we know it is called in Switzerland, the rösti ditch. The Gotthard route proper may be said to start a few kilometers downstream the River Reuss in the Schöllenen Gorge, a deep and wild declivity that frustrated travel for many centuries. In the sixteenth century, a stone bridge was built to span the gorge, and, in this fanciful land of William Tell, a legend was also built to explain its erection. The construction of the Teufelsbrücke (Devil’s Bridge) was undertaken by the Devil, at the request of shepherds fed up with fording the dangerous Reuss with their flocks. As payment for performing this task, the Devil demanded the soul of the first one to cross the bridge. The shepherds agreed and work got underway. When the bridge was completed, the Devil waited expectantly. The Swiss peasants then pushed a goat onto the bridge. The Devil could have its soul, as agreed. They had kept up their end of the bargain.
After admiring the old stone bridge—and crossing its modern companion—I traverse Andermatt once again, before heading for the mountains to the south. The road is beautiful and becalming, cosseted by greenery, the opposite of the route from hell over the Furka. Above the tree line, the landscape is one of rock, grass, and snow. One high valley introduces another; the third encountered is a painterly combination of snow and hard gray gneiss illuminated by slashes of amber sunlight to compose a type of Alpine Cézanne. The road widens considerably, so I pull over to take some notes. Outside my passenger door, a bratwurst of German bikers walks by. I look toward where they’re heading, along a lakeshore to a complex of buildings about a hundred meters distant. I realize with a start that this is the Gotthard (or St. Gotthard) Pass.
Somewhere in those high valleys I crossed several boundaries, including another watershed. The rivers and streams I passed after crossing the Furka flowed into the North Sea; now they flow into the Adriatic. Another rösti ditch was cleared; I have stayed in Switzerland, but I have gone from Schweiz to Svizzera, from the canton of Uri to the canton of Ticino. But it is still the same country, as attested by the stubbornly unilingual signage—only the language has changed. I buy an entrance ticket to the Museo Nazionale San Gottardo. The Alps are remarkable linguistic tricksters—in the space of a few kilometers, a whole cultural outlook shifts. If language can be said to shape our worldview—and I believe it does—then the mountains create worlds around themselves. I have just gone from the Germanic to the Latin, in a matter of minutes. No doubt the Swiss are used to this head-snapping abruptness of change, but those of us from other countries can only marvel at it.
Gotthard of Hildesheim was a tenth-century German bishop who subsequently became the patron saint of traveling merchants. Whether this category includes traveling salesmen is unclear. The museum calls the Gotthard the “King of Alpine Passes,” for its centuries-old economic, cultural, political, and military role in linking such important centers as Basel and Zurich to Milan and Venice. Thankfully, the curators lay no claim to Hannibal, as do so many other Alpine passes. The Gotthard boosters promote instead Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov, a tsarist general who daringly led his troops across the pass in the winter of 1799 and drove the armies of the French Revolution from their encampments in Uri (back at the Devil’s Bridge, a monument to Suvorov celebrates this exploit). The museum, in a very entertaining slide show, tells the story of the Devil and the goat, then adds that another devil came to plague the region. A portrait of Napoleon flashes up on the screen. Apparently, the Corsican has few fans in Switzerland, where he annexed cantons and made them départements of France and just generally waged war incessantly. Elsewhere there is an exhibit celebrating the yellow diligences (stagecoaches) and later coaches of the PostBus system, which I pointedly ignore out of solidarity with my once-shattered nerves. Finally, in a ru
eful admission reminiscent of the Zermatt museum’s evocation of rampant real estate development, the guardians of the Gotthard exhort the visitor to explore Ticino and “admire what’s left of this beautiful countryside.” I am also put in mind of the tour guide in Chamonix, who deplored the pollution of his beloved valley.
Once back outside, I feel like General Suvorov. Snow is blowing hard through a cold fog. The cloud is not the friendly misty mantle encountered on the Furka but rather a thick white blanket obliterating visibility. Rather reluctantly, I have to admit that this is what crossing a pass should be—an ordeal endured for the privilege of going somewhere new and unfamiliar. Paying one’s Alpine dues, so to speak. I abandon my plan to visit the cheese cellar housed in the Gotthard’s old stables, for my unworn fleece sits uselessly at the bottom of my backpack in the car.
I eventually dig it out and put it on, then turn on the heat in the Mégane. This is ridiculous. I wait for the cloud to pass. And wait some more. Unless it’s my imagination, the conditions seem to be getting worse. Finally, my impatience to go down into the valley and enjoy the benefits of being on the right side of the lard line gets the better of me.
Descending a mountain road in the middle of a cold, cottony cloud is an exercise in masochism. Salvation soon comes in the form of a sloping tunnel, entered a few kilometers from the pass. It is a fairly long affair; when I exit it, the cloud sits harmlessly overhead. This is, and is not, a good thing. On the valley floor now visible far below, I can see an airstrip. This does not reassure—the only time I have seen a similar view was when I was actually in an airplane.
At last the descent ends and I travel along the valley floor of the River Ticino. The farm buildings here are distinctly Italianate. On arriving at the canton’s capital city, Bellinzona, the impression of being in Lombardy is overpowering. Perfume fills the air and smart-looking men stroll stylishly down the spotless sidewalks, obvious practitioners of the cult of la bella figura.
The city seduces the eye. Although its sister cities in Ticino—Lugano and Locarno—are better known, Bellinzona possesses a grace enhanced by exuberant public art in its squares and streets. I walk past a group of figurative statues with huge phalluses. A group of Italian cheerleaders, complete with pom-poms and short purple skirts, are taking pictures of themselves in front of the statues.
Bellinzona’s enduring attraction—one that merits its inclusion in UNESCO’s World Heritage list—lies in its necklace of medieval structures built on the town’s hilltops. The place possesses no fewer than three medieval castles (each now thoughtfully housing an excellent restaurant), built when the dukes of Milan feared the marauding depredations of the hard men from Uri and Schwyz. In the Middle Ages, the Swiss were more or less invincible, their hedgehog of pikes feared throughout Europe. The largest of the three castles, aptly named Castelgrande, is a two-towered behemoth attached to a crenellated fortification more than a kilometer long. To view it, to walk along the battlements, is to understand what a rough neighborhood this was in the fourteenth century. It hardly needs to be added that in the ceaseless back-and-forth between the Lombards and the Swiss, the latter eventually came out on top. Ticino may look like Lombardy, but it is emphatically not the same place.
ANOTHER BOUNDARY AWAITS. In this journey of lard line, rösti ditch, linguistic switch, and watershed, a far more fundamental border is about to be crossed.
The boundary is the Insubric Line, the most important fault line in Europe. It is where the African and European tectonic plates meet, where they smashed into each other millions of years ago, where the Alps were born. This is to oversimplify, perhaps, for there were several collisions and upheavals in the very distant past, many creating “nappes,” great sheets of rocks that slid over their predecessors on the earth’s surface. Geologist Richard Fortey, who gave us the lasagne analogy in his Earth: An Intimate History, cites historian Mott Greene, who compared the movement of these rocky nappes to a tablecloth on a smooth tabletop: “If you should place your hand flat on the table and push forward, the cloth will begin to rise into folds. Push more and the folds will flop over (forward) and the rearmost fold will progressively override those before it, producing a stack of folds.” These stacks are, in essence, the Alps, a geological puzzle that took centuries to work out.
Fortey takes his readers to the place that initiated the process. The fault line lies in the steep Morrobia Valley, below the village of Pianazzo and south of Bellinzona. The geologist, on his way down to the Insubric Line in the company of his daughter, takes pains to clarify the collision so long ago.
The principle of the Alps being squeezed out inexorably between the moving mass of Africa and obdurate Europe is correct enough. However, the margins of both “sides” were not one single piece of continent—like the jaws of a woodworker’s vice [vise]. Rather, both the African and European edges comprised several smaller pieces that behaved with considerable independence. A better analogy than a vice is to think instead of two huge ice sheets jostling in the sea, with pieces fragmented from either edge grinding together or free-floating by turn as the gulf between the larger sheets waxes and wanes.
As Fortey descends the north slope of the Morrobia, he notices that the exposed plates of mica, formed by tremendous squeezing and heating, stand vertical, forced into that posture by the lateral pressure of the collision. At the valley floor, where an old bridge spans a rushing brook, he and his daughter lean over to inspect the rocks visible through the clear water. They are entirely different, what he calls green schists. Stranger yet, they stand not vertical but horizontal, at right angles to the rock on the northern slope. This then is the place where Africa meets Europe. Father and daughter find a place on the riverbank where the Insubric Line appears on dry land. She poses with her feet on either side of the fault and Fortey snaps a picture. “I can imagine the photograph, by then fading slightly, puzzling one of our descendants—why the legs akimbo on a leafy path somewhere that seems without particular distinction?” he writes. “What would they say if they realized that the curious posture straddled a significant fraction of the world?”
It is hard to comprehend the violence of mountain formation. At Switzerland’s San Bernardino Pass, there are rocks on the surface that once lay over a hundred kilometers within the earth. The vertical displacement caused by the events at the Insubric Line is thought to be nineteen kilometers. At a scenic overlook on my way up to the Iseran Pass, I characterized the mountainous panorama as a sea of rock, a metaphor that turns out to be not far off the mark. The seething movements continue, sometimes resulting in seismic catastrophe. Add to this the insidious work of millions of years of erosion—the tall peaks we see now might have stretched much farther in the air, thousands of meters taller. Several times they were engulfed in ice. The gentle mountains that predate the Alps by at least a hundred million years—the Vosges, Jura, and Appalachians—stand in mute testament to the punishing effects of water, wind, snow, and ice over incalculable stretches of time. We cannot get our heads around such eons. In an arresting comment in his study of geology entitled Basin and Range, John McPhee writes: “Consider the Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.”
I drive out of Bellinzona to find the village of Pianazzo and the Insubric Line. The capital’s hinterland is covered with industrial buildings and construction sites. I begin to understand what the guardians of the Gotthard meant when they spoke of “what’s left of this beautiful countryside.” Happily, Pianazzo is remote enough to retain some of its natural charms. It is a higgledy-piggledy collection of medieval and modern, many of the homes of recent construction as holiday retreats. The doors and shutters are closed in the midday heat as I squint into the sunshine, hoping to see someone, anyone in the street.
After wandering aimlessly for about ten minutes in the deserted village, I finally spy a middle-aged couple rounding a
corner. I sprint over to them and explain that I am looking for the entrance to the path that leads to the medieval bridge in the Valle Morrobia. Would they know where that is?
No, they wouldn’t. They have a holiday rental flat here and plan on staying for just a couple of weeks. When they see my disappointment, they kindly offer to take me to a local man they know.
The door-knocker is dropped loudly on the wood. An elderly woman’s head sticks out of a window on an upper floor. The helpful couple calls up and explains my mission. Other heads appear in other windows, some doors open, and people come into the street. My visit seems to be newsworthy.
At last the door of the old woman’s house swings open and her husband appears in the threshold. He wears boxer shorts, a blue-gray dressing gown, and fluffy pink slippers. He and the couple exchange information in very rapid-fire Italian.
When he at last turns his attention to me, he says that I must go to the ponte di ferro. I explain that I don’t want the iron bridge, I’m looking for the ponte vecchio, the one that crosses the brook in the Valle Morrobia. He insists on the iron bridge. I shake my head.
Exasperated, he sets off down the street and gestures for me to follow him. I bid goodbye to the helpful couple and catch up with my guide. After walking in silence for a good time, we stop at two recycling bins at the edge of a gorge. A walking path leads past them.
“Why do you want to go into the valley?” he asks.
“To see Africa.”
He smiles at this and nods.
“Take the path to the bottom. You’ll pass the iron bridge.” And with that, his pink slippers head for home.
The path is not too steep, and a canopy of chestnut foliage blocks out the harshness of the sun. I pass a shrine to the Virgin Mary. I pay careful attention to the rocks exposed on my way down. Interspersed amid the traces of mica are elongated stones and pebbles standing vertically, as Fortey reported—proof of the tremendous tectonic pressures exerted on them millions of years ago.
The Alps Page 13