The novel I am reading for my book club (Rite
of Passage by Alexei Panshin) contains a conversation between
Jimmy and Mia about what constitutes an adventure. Jimmy argues that Mia had
one when she went down to a planet's surface; she responds that falling off a
boat and swallowing nasty tasting water is NOT an adventure. so he sets out to
find a "real adventure" for her. This sparked my thoughts about experiences I have
had that would fulfill Mia's idea of "adventure,” of taking the high road
to somewhere.
The high road experience I want to share had
nothing to do with ethical dilemmas, nor with the “Bonnie Banks O' Loch Lomond.”
My high road had everything to do with fulfilling a dream, checking an item off
my Bucket List.
In
my 20’s, I read an adventure novel by Trevanian entitled The Eiger Sanction. The climax of the plot was precipitated by an
avalanche down the North Face of the Eiger. Years later as part of a college
summer studying in Europe, I had the chance to go to Switzerland, to stay in Lauterbrunnen,
the town at the base of the Jungfrau Massif… a collection of three Alps of
which the Eiger is one.
The
first morning I woke up in the youth hostel in Lauterbrunnen, I began to make
arrangements to see the Eiger, up close and personal. I convinced Ivy Westwood
to accompany me on my quest. We talked to several people at the hostel and the
post office. We checked our shoes and socks (very important everyone told us,
to have thick socks in comfortable shoes), loaded our back packs, made sure we
had film in our cameras and water in our canteens. We did not need a map; after
all, we only had to “follow the road behind the hostel until it turns into a path
which will take you to the high meadow. From there you’ll see the glacier.”
Ivy
and I set off the next morning right after breakfast. As we walked the path, we
found ourselves in Heidi country: steep, grass covered slopes peppered with
small colorful, slant-roofed chalets. We stopped taking pictures of each other
and the breathtaking scenery after the second roll of film. As we stepped over
a couple of shallow rills, we remembered the hostel manager’s advice, “Don’t
drink the water. It’s clean and pure, but it’s straight off the glacier and
will freeze you from the inside out.” We didn’t really “climb” in the
technical, Alpine sense of that word, as the path we followed wound up the side
of the mountain in easy stages. Though we were fairly sure the manager was kidding us as tourists, we didn’t risk it. We never gasped for breath from exertion, though
the air tasted different that far up an Alp. As we walked, the sun shone in
cloudless skies; warm breezes made us never notice the sweat, if we even had
any.
Ivy
and I ate lunch sitting on a flat rock overlooking the Lauterbrunnen valley, which I discovered years later was J.R.R. Tolkien’s inspiration for Rivendell. After all these years, I still
remember the silence of the place. We fell asleep in the Alpine grass and napped for about an
hour. Then we began our trek home
to the village.
The
day remained perfect. Until we reached what on the climb up had been a shallow rill but had
become a roaring torrent of glacial run-off, after the day of warm weather.
What had been a step-over waterway had become a four-foot wide wade-through
waterway. Ivy and I decided that removing our shoes and socks would be smarter
than walking home with wet ones. We did not anticipate how cold glacial run-off
is! One shoe in each hand, we stepped into the rushing water . . . shrieked and
jumped, landing on our rear ends on the opposite side of the rill. That water was so cold, it BURNED. Dry socks and shoes never felt so good.
Only
one negative aspect of our experience: in our leap to dry land, our packs
jolted off our shoulders and all our stuff floated down the water. Ivy and I
have memories but no proof of our close encounter with an Alp. Our Kodak
moments drifted away on a mountain stream.
I
took the high road that day and had an Alpine adventure I’ve cherished for
years.
