I come to the iron bridge, a sturdy construction over a secondary gorge. The path leads on. Within minutes, I see the medieval bridge, a lovely single span of stone, humpbacked and covered in a soft carpet of green moss. Perhaps fifteen meters beneath it, the crystalline waters of the brook rush past.
I peer down into the waters, look at the bank on the far side. The rocks could hardly be more different. The green stone is layered in a resolutely horizontal fashion.
The brook below follows that fault’s path. When I look at the schists of the far bank, I see that I am actually looking at the leading edge of the African tectonic plate. My path down from the village took me along the edge of the European plate. The beautiful old stone bridge joins two continents. I contemplate the scene: The collision of these two plates over time led to the creation of the fantastic heights I have been crossing this summer.
All is peaceful now at this place of great geological upheaval. The only sounds come from songbirds and the soft rush of water.
_______
* Contemporary Switzerland has twenty-six cantons.
PART TWO
HEIDILAND TO GRINDELWALD
7. HEIDILAND, MEIRINGEN, AND THE EIGER
THE SMELL OF MANURE is overpowering. I have pulled into a highway rest stop near the small town of Maienfeld, in eastern Switzerland. As a clock strikes the hour, three wooden figures emerge from a belfry atop the restaurant and dance out onto a balcony. Heidi, a boy, and a goat perform several stiff pirouettes as a loudspeaker blares out an anthemlike ditty dedicated to Switzerland’s answer to Joan of Arc. A few Swiss seniors, eyes trained on the mechanical spectacle, begin to sing along, delighted at being in the right place at the right time. Clearly, I am entering new territory.
Inside, there are preripped jeans hanging on a revolving clothes rack affixed to the ceiling, as if something had gone terribly wrong at the dry cleaner’s. The stores upstairs are called “Kids World” and “Black Out,” a juxtaposition that suggests alcoholic parenting. The ground floor of the rest stop, aside from a capacious cafeteria and market, is devoted to all things Heidi, for it was in nearby Maienfeld that the beloved moppet was supposed to have resided. The inevitable souvenir shop abounds with memorabilia, much of it reminiscent of Hello Kitty fare. This Hello Heidi theme is carried over into how the character is portrayed: Most of the books on display show a round-eyed Heidi drawn in anime style, much like a character in a Hayao Miyazaki movie. It is thus not difficult to guess at the nationality of the tourists to whom these souvenirs are marketed. I also learn at this kitsch treasure trove that there is a Heidiland theme park in the hills above town. I resolve to go there and inspect it, before heading back to the fastness of the mountains.
But first an interlude, a brief holiday of sorts from attacking the high passes of the Alps. A Swiss friend, Ernst, awaits me in St. Gallen, a city near Lake Constance—or Bodensee, as it is called in German. We have known each other since our student-turned-journalist days in the Paris of the 1980s, and St. Gallen is his hometown. On holiday from Hong Kong, where he works for German-language business publications, Ernst has finally persuaded me to visit what he considers the center of the universe. Besides, St. Gallen is just a stone’s throw from the Appenzell Alps.
An owlish man in his fifties with a mischievous streak, Ernst proves to be an amusing tour guide. As we stroll the city’s squares and streets, taking in the carved medieval and baroque oriel balconies protruding from many of the older buildings, he carefully points out St. Gallen’s rich heritage of naked-lady sculptures and bas-reliefs. Many of these figures adorn grand nineteenth-century buildings, testament to the time when the city was an industrial powerhouse. Given all the nudity, it comes as a surprise to learn of St. Gallen’s bygone source of wealth: textiles.
Yet the town’s claim to fame lies in its monastic library, an exuberant baroque affair that almost hurts the eyes with its decorative excess. The elaborate marquetry floors are complemented by an explosive figurative ceiling showing biblical scenes as they might have been imagined by Cecil B. DeMille. The library’s collections of medieval manuscripts made it a center of European learning back when the Dark Ages were pitch black. Some of these manuscripts are written in old Irish, as the avatar of the establishment was a monk from what is now Ulster’s County Down. That monk, Gall, came to the area in the seventh century seeking a place to hide out as a hermit. He was accompanied by Colombanus, another Irishman, who would leave his companion behind, cross the Alps, and establish, south of Milan, the venerable monastery in Bobbio, one of the templates for Umberto Eco’s fictional library-monastery in The Name of the Rose. Gall decided to stay in what would become Switzerland, helped in his search for food and firewood by a remarkably hospitable bear, which then became the holy man’s companion for the rest of its life. So too did scores of spiritual seekers, who imperiled Gall’s quest for solitude, the fate of so many exceptional hermits in those days. Some seventy years or so after his death in 642, the monastery of St. Gallen was founded.
That its precious collections have survived down to the present day is nothing short of miraculous. The first great trial occurred in the year 926, when the Hungarians were on the move. Wiborada, a female recluse immured in a church wall equipped with a small slot through which food could be given to her, had a vision in which she saw the monastery’s seizure, the monks’ murder, and the manuscripts’ destruction. Informed of the premonition, the abbot took his monks and his books off to the Isle of Reichenau in Lake Constance. Wiborada refused to go, and when the nightmarish onslaught came, she was yanked out of her cubby, raped, and killed. But the manuscripts survived. By all rights, Wiborada should be named the patron saint of literary agents—a profession, to my knowledge, still lacking one.
The library’s other moment of jeopardy occurred in the early sixteenth century, when Switzerland rocked with the turmoil of Reformation. The leader of the movement here was Huldrych Zwingli, a charismatic and brilliant thinker. Zwingli, a native of the St. Gallen canton, came to be associated with Zurich, the city in which he preached his revolutionary theology in the 1520s. Like his contemporary and sometime sparring partner Martin Luther (the two men famously disagreed on the presence of Christ in the Eucharist), Zwingli was fed up with the ceremonials and customs of Catholicism, none of which had any grounding in the scriptures. Whereas Luther began his revolt in 1517 by nailing ninety-five theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg in Saxony, Zwingli contrived a much more amusing way to launch his Reformation. In March of 1522, Zwingli and his confederates sat down in the Zurich house of a printer to witness people feasting on sausages, a foodstuff forbidden by the Church during the Lenten fast. The so-called Affair of the Sausages propelled Zwingli to fame, and soon Switzerland saw a steady succession of public theological debates and eventually wars, as different cantons opted for different faiths.
One of Zwingli’s principal colleagues, Joachim Vadian, became mayor of St. Gallen in these turbulent years. Whereas in other Reform-minded Swiss cities, the Protestants evicted the monks hated for their corruption, sacked their monasteries, and burned their libraries, nothing happened in St. Gallen. Vadian was a Humanist—and an ardent bibliophile. His prestige and authority must have equaled Zwingli’s, for during his tenure no one laid a finger on the monks or their books. The library’s remarkable survival is thus owed to Wiborada, then Vadian.
One of the senior librarians recounts these stories with a certain sly pride. She is a rail-thin young woman with kind, expressive eyes. Where do all the Irish manuscripts come from? Gifts from Irish pilgrims to St. Gallen in the Middle Ages. Do you read old Irish? Yes, of course.
“But my favorite thing,” she adds, “are the marginal notations.” She explains that the copyists a millennium ago sometimes let their minds wander from the task set before them and wrote down what they were feeling. “One reads, ‘My hand aches,’” the librarian recalls. “Another says, ‘Tonight is a stormy night so we don’t have to be afraid of the Vikings.�
� And another: ‘A blackbird is singing outside my window. Spring is in the air, and here I write to the birdsong of a blackbird.’”
This information silences even the ebullient Ernst.
“I love reading those personal messages,” she says quietly. “You feel like you’re peering over the monk’s shoulder, in the same room as him.”
ERNST AND I decide to walk up a mountain, a height he summited many times in his boyhood. It is a glorious Sunday afternoon and the peak in question, the Ebensalp, seems to have attracted a sizable plurality of Switzerland’s population. The northernmost of the Alpstein, a range of the Appenzell Alps, its accessibility and ease of ascent have made it popular with the paragliding jump-off-a-mountaintop crowd—scores of them float silently hundreds of meters above us.
The going immediately becomes steep. We begin on a gravel road with a pitch like that of a double black diamond ski slope. This gives way to a cliff-hugging path, inconveniently littered with boulders. Ernst bounds ahead of me, a suicidal mountain goat, then patiently waits for me to catch up with him, his eyes sparkling behind his round-rimmed glasses as he notices that my legs are visibly shaking.
With the tree line behind us, the path narrows and the drop to our right becomes deeper and deeper. At a particularly dizzying spot, Ernst, who has let me go first, suddenly grabs hold of my shoulders, causing me to shriek in fright. He laughs, I do not.
The way up has been hewn out of the tremendous limestone face of the Ebensalp. A few caves are encountered. The first houses a troglodytic barnyard—chickens and sheep wander about behind a mesh fence. Then comes a remarkable cave restaurant-bar, crowded with hikers sipping beer at the edge of the abyss. We sit beside two German men—one a striking young buck with a well-groomed Labrador on a leash; the other, an older fellow with spiky white hair actively engaged in hitting on his companion. Ernst drily notes that the denizens of the two caves we have seen put him in mind of the long summers of transhumance, when the shepherds led their flocks to the high pastures and then stayed up there with them for months at a time. “It must have been lonely,” he muses. “What in the world did they get up to?” I manage not to spit up my beer.
There are more caves to come. One houses a fully furnished Catholic church, the so-called Wildkirch (Wild Church) that gave its name to the cave complex—Wildkirchli—in the mountain. Ernst explains that the Neanderthals once lived here, followed by Neolithic men, thirty to fifty thousand years ago. The latter would not have seen a yawning valley from their cave dwellings but an immense glacier on which they could venture out to hunt. In the largest of the caves, some eight hundred animal bones were found, which medieval man took to be dragons’ teeth. We walk farther into the largest of the caves, which gives onto another chamber through which light shines ahead of us. Here and there on the cave floor stand small cairns of arranged stones, manmade stalagmites. Ernst suggests that these are the work of Switzerland’s Tibetan community—Europe’s largest—who traded the Himalayas for the Alps when China took over their country in 1960.
We emerge from the cave mouth of the second chamber onto a grassy meadow. On the expanse are three types of mammals: sheep, hikers, and paragliders. We walk over to the last group and watch as the aerial daredevils untangle and arrange the cords of their chutes, pause to catch the breeze, then run and hurl themselves off the cliff, so many multicolored lemmings intent on a good time. Swiss environmentalists have managed to limit the number of places they can pursue their airborne pastime, once it was learned that they frighten the bejesus out of deer, who take them for pterodactyl-like birds of prey.
As this is the country of the Hotel Belvedere and Rigi Kulm, there are of course two restaurants and an inn on the summit. The great mountains of the Alpstein range rise gray and white and fearsome far into the sky. The view southward necessarily commands respect. Or perhaps not. The two restaurant terraces are jammed with Swiss hikers, many of them wolfing down heapings of sausages à la Zwingli when not hoisting giant steins of beer. There is nary a packet of trail mix in sight.
That evening in St. Gallen, we are joined by NoéMie (her spelling, not mine), a Suissesse in her thirties who works in London as a fashion journalist. I pitch an idea to my expat Swiss friends: Why not go to Heidiland tomorrow? Of course you two have never been there—why on earth would you go? But now you have an excuse—me. The invitation is met with skepticism, especially from Ernst, but curiosity wins out in the end.
The following day begins in a seemly fashion. We drive out of St. Gallen and back into the postcard landscape of Appenzell. Rust-colored chalets, rolling green hills, the sounds of cowbells, distant snowcapped mountains—this is Switzerland at its most bucolic. At a pass called Stoss, between the two cantons, I pull over. It was here, in 1405, that the hard mountain men of Appenzell, in revolt against their landlord, the abbot of the St. Gallen monastery, dealt a decisive blow for their freedom. The day was bloody. And rainy. When the troops from St. Gallen stopped at the pass to wipe the mud from their sodden shoes, the Appenzellers launched a surprise attack, slaughtering hundreds who had become separated from their weapons. Ernst, NoéMie, and I head over to the monument commemorating the battle and look out over the scenic perspective of the Rhine Valley. The river flows north here into Lake Constance. Far away to the east rise the heights of the Austrian Alps. The proximity of what was fairly recently a belligerent neighbor is underscored by a collection of defensive bunkers constructed prior to World War II into the hillside below us. This being contemporary Switzerland, the bunkers are now being transformed into vacation rental properties.*
As we are about to cross the road, we pause to let a car pass by. The young man at the wheel is alone, yodeling at the top of his lungs. My Swiss friends burst out laughing as the driver waves to us, his yodeling unbroken. They both swear that they have never seen anything like this before and that, no, this is not some sort of prank staged for my benefit, a kind of Truman Show for a gullible visitor. A brief seminar on the art of the yodel and the alphorn ensues as we head onto the autobahn in the valley for the quick trip to Maienfeld.
One of the heartlands of Swiss yodeling, I learn, is right here in Appenzell. The peculiar song, alternating between low and falsetto notes loudly produced in rapid succession, carries much farther than a mere shout, especially when aimed at a rockface that serves as an echoing board. The purpose was to convey information from one mountain ridge to another, connecting cowherds from different valleys and telling of local developments, marking liturgical feasts and just generally celebrating life. Predictably, Ernst claims that Swiss yodeling is superior to its Austrian variant. The former is more staccato, edgier, more beautiful, while the Austrian is overly melodic, almost syrupy in its delivery.
“Austrian yodeling sounds nice to me,” I say, just to goad.
“Well, it’s not,” Ernst sniffs. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
NoéMie decides it’s wise to step in. “Think of yodeling as …,” she says, searching for a metaphor, “… as the vocal equivalent of smoke signals.”
The alphorn is something altogether different. A musical instrument six to eight feet in length, the horn is fashioned, often, from the trunk of a slow-growth fir tree, hollowed out and pared down and polished to smoothness. At one end is the mouthpiece; far away at the other extremity is a bell-shaped aperture, slightly upraised, giving the tubular horn the shape of a very elongated umbrella with a very short handle. The bell rests on the ground, facing upward, while the musician stands at his full height, clasping the monstrosity in both hands and putting his mouth over the blowhole.
The purpose here is not to serenade far-flung neighbors in faraway valleys but to play for the cows. The horn, whose doleful sound carries over great distances, was customarily used to call in the cows from the pastures to come to the stables to be milked. Thus, its loud blasts were usually followed by the tinkling of cowbells. Another purpose of the alphorn, my Swiss friends tell me, was to encourage skittish cows to take
the last few steps uphill to the high Alpine meadows where they would spend their summer.
Once past Maienfeld, we head east, up a winding road bordered by high stone walls, to the Kaaba of our pilgrimage. Tour buses disgorging parasol-laden Japanese and Koreans announce that we have arrived. A well-trodden path through a mountain meadow adorned with winsome statuary leads to the goat-cheesy hamlet of Heidiland. A petting zoo awaits inspection, as does a series of chalets, all with a commanding view of the Rhine Valley below and a trio of green shark-toothed mountains to the north, identical in shape and modest height. Erosion has been busy here. An informational plaque tells us that Heidi is the third most translated book in history, after the Bible and the Quran.
The heartwarming story, written by Johanna Spyri and first published in 1881, opens when a six-year-old orphan, Heidi, is taken to live with her curmudgeonly grandfather in a mountain pasture far above Maienfeld. Her good-natured charm eventually wins him over, as it does the other mountain folk, including a mischievous goatherd named Peter. After three years of sunny work and play, the young girl is sent to Frankfurt, to be the companion of a sickly child, Clara Sesemann. The country bumpkin gets into a few amusing misadventures in the big city, but the Sesemann family comes to love her, with the exception of their housekeeper, who thinks she’s a tiresome brat. While in Frankfurt, Heidi also learns to read and write, which she promptly uses to understand the Bible and see the light.
Trouble arises when Heidi grows pale and thin, and a ghost begins haunting the Sesemann house. Mr. Sesemann resorts to an all-night vigil and discovers that the ghost is, in fact, Heidi. As a result of her acute homesickness, she has taken to sleepwalking. Clearly, the little Suissesse is very unhappy. Much to Clara’s dismay, Heidi is packed off and sent home for her own good.
The Alps Page 14