09.18.19

    We are careening back to the right side of the German autobahn while a car flies by at about 120 mph. These are the rules: There are none. You can basically drive as fast as the speedometer allows and you are licensed for life and there are no age or vision requirements. The highway is war and as Hanne’s uncle said: “The car is a weapon here.” I’m more amazed at the lack of fatal accidents anywhere on our route. Hanne’s got it all under control but it’s still unnerving. We’re in her dad’s Audi station wagon and he’s let us use it for a six-day road trip up through the Rhine toward Berlin and down through Austria where we’ve got lots of faces to see.
   We drive up through the pines and back into the cool air of Oberhof where we stop at one of the winter sports training facilities that Hanne used to frequent back in the Olympic years, walking along the great bobsled runs over-run by summer grass…these places look like a wonderland on television when they’re covered in snow. When the snow is gone it’s a tangle of rusting pipes and bolts and projects in the midst of repair. The bobsled track is massive with men’s women’s, and junior starting locations and I picture Hanne carving around the ninety-degree turns with scores of people lining the edges and observation platforms. A little memory.   
   We talk about what it means to be competitive - how we fell into these roles earlier in life and performed for a period only to watch ourselves change with the years and look for inspiration on different paths. Society’s general standards seem either too low or too high or too bizarre to worry about. You turn inside. You seek more answers there. I suppose you build studios and write music. You go on long walks. These aren’t mutually exclusive lives by any stretch though. I still love cycling as much as Hanne still loves all the Swiss winter fun.
    We walked back down and settled into a booth at a traditional German restaurant for the best meal I’ve had in six months. No offense to the Swiss. They do their thing and they do it impeccably well, but good food, good wine, good music…these things come out of the heart and soul. They come out of the past and all the shared memories and traumas and love and loss therein. Soul food to me is food made with love whether it’s from New Orleans or a mountain village in Germany. I’m not sure what I’m eating but it’s slow-roasted, tender, and infused with something I haven’t had in ages.
    The next day we continue east toward Berlin where her grandparents and aunt and uncle and a few friends live. It’s going to be a lot. My German is rudimentary on a good day but I’ve learned to accept it and get by. Wine helps. Living in Zurich doesn’t give me the highest incentive to learn either. Everyone speaks basic English and my routes and routines are fairly established. I know what markets I like. The rest of the time I’m writing, editing, or in the mountains. Sometimes being unable to communicate as well as you’d like opens different doors. While you play Charades with people and make wild gestures and mimic shapes with your hands, you are doing something very primitive. Instead of pushing across your personal existential bent you’re trying to get to the point. It’s pure communication and you’ve got to make it happen before the other person falls asleep or grabs their phone for the exact translation. The German language has specific rules that you’ve got to follow if you want to appear sane. If you deviate too much from the articles or pronunciation you often get a concerned, almost pitying look from the other person who will then nod and begin speaking slowly for you whereas in English there’s one hundred and one ways to say “The cat sat on the mat” and no one really cares if you butcher the whole thing. A lot of Swiss English speakers still learn whats known as “Business/international British English” and uses Victorian-era phrases left and right that no one would say today…but again, it doesn’t matter. Switzerland is beset by four other countries and divided into Cantons like our states that each have their own dialect and way of doing things. This never happened in the U.S. because we set up transnational communication before we marked too much territory whereas in the rest of the world, one mountain range or river could isolate you and your people for centuries while you built your own customs based on the geography, weather, animals, farming etc. For that reason alone Switzerland is ten-times as diverse as the states but not in the ways we tend to assume. It’s also very Swiss and the Swiss are perfectly fine with that.
    When we arrive at Hanne’s grandparents we are treated to coffee, cake, a tour of their sprawling gardens and all the pictures from the previous generations. Her grandfather was a musician as well so we’ve got that. I do my best not to sound mentally defective and after awhile we all drive over to her aunt and uncle's down the road for more food and drink. They are all smiles, welcoming with big hugs and laughter. “Welcome to the family” they say…and I realize no one’s said that to me before.    
    Their home is more like a realm. It’s the home that Better Homes and Gardens hasn’t found yet and everything exudes an air of nearly surreal coziness. We sit along benches at a beautiful wooden dinner table and share what we can. I never expect people to start speaking English on my behalf but I’m able to pick up enough of the subject matter to where we’re actually communicating. Hanne helps a ton by making my fragmented sentences into articulate meaningful German and all is well.
    The next day all the food and wine has me reeling and I’m staggering about trying to smile and maintain basic conversation. We go on a mid-morning walk around the farmland of Potsam which is a bit outside Berlin and surrounded on all sides by water; some natural and some man-made. It’s technically an island but a very large one and very bucolic. I lose count of the amount of times I’ve said “sehr schön” to describe everything from bread to cattle and this is no exception. The sun is beating down and I’m trailing behind, staring at my shoes, feeling like I’m going to collapse and die on the edge of some east-German farm where I’ll be found by goats or small wandering children but we keep moving until we return for some light refreshments and a splash of cold water to the face upstairs.
    We drive down the road to meet some friends of Hanne’s that she’d met at a seminar a couple years ago; a young couple in the midst of young-couple life: remodeling and expanding the apartment for a new baby and managing the nonstop energy of parent-hood. Again, I do a lot of nodding and half-English/half-German and hand-gestures with wide eyes for emphasis but all the little miscommunications typically add up to entertainment and laughter so I just go with it. I’m also teetering on the edge of mental collapse and all I can think about is the Italian dinner down by the river which is guaranteed to include some hair of the German Shepard that bit me, but we have a nice walk and I get to see where the Berlin Wall used to carve up the country. This river was one of the official zones separating east and west Berlin. What neither I, nor most people seem to know, is that West Berlin was a tiny outpost completely surrounded by East Germany which was Soviet-controlled. Berlin itself was more of an international zone after the war, controlled by four different countries. It’s complicated…and it was difficult to imagine just then. I remembered watching the Berlin wall fall down in 1989 on television. Well, it had only been up for thirty years to begin with but Reagan lauded its destruction as the biggest event in world history. Germans I’ve spoken with tend to regard it with shrugs or plain indifference. "It was a good thing when it came down." “It was life.” or “Yes, we all wanted to enjoy things from the west but it didn’t mean we had no life in the east.”
    Hanne’s family came from the east side and moved to Switzerland for professional and academic opportunities and has been here ever since. It seemed to be a pragmatic move and the rest of the family stayed around Berlin and got on with life (and it looked like a pretty good life compared to a lot of what I’d seen in the southwest growing up). On the reservations you’d encounter third-world conditions. The same went for some of the dire levels of poverty and crime found in the cities. It’s confusing to compare; to try and get ahold of why people decided these things were so damn important. Is it political? Is it social? Was it that impossible to get along? We’d listened to an audio book written by some former Flagstaff natives about their travels around the world and were struck and dismayed by the statistics he rattled off about Cambodia and Laos as they took their VW through.
    It’s always disturbing to imagine what people are capable of and how easily they’re coerced into the most atrocious acts of barbarism. Over what? I look back toward America. I read the posts coming in from social media or 'the news'. All divisive. All posturing and virtue-signaling. All me vs you vs us vs them. Everyone’s taken a side. Everyone thinks they’ve got a handle on the moral and ethical truth du jour. Everyone thinks they speak for everyone else. Everyone has an axe to grind. No one’s remotely aware of the social engineering and divide-and-conquer politics they’ve been subjected to for decades. No one has the faintest clue they’re being set up to hate each other on a daily basis. America has so much potential and so much to offer. So much wealth and so many ground-breaking ideas and arts. The Swiss don't see how beautiful and precious Switzerland is and the Americans don't see how childish and absurd they can appear to a western world that has already gone through many of these growing pains.
    I have all these thoughts while I’m walking around the perimeter of the former wall. Now it’s lined with a nice foot-and-bicycle path with trees on either side. The old sniper towers sit abandoned or repurposed and integrated into the trail and covered in modern graffiti.
    Everywhere you go in Europe you are walking through remnants of history. Some of it goes silently. Some of it lies covered in farmland and new buildings. Some of lies at the bottom of great winding rivers. Some of it remains. Most of it has been reassessed and made functional. Germans are a happy bunch and a little less reserved than the Swiss - ready for a good joke. Hanne and I try to put our fingers on it, but people are just people at the end of the day and none of my evaluations will amount to much. The Swiss think they understand ‘how Swiss people are’, but they don’t see it from an outsider’s perspective just like I’ll never fully see it from theirs. Like most people in the western world, they are busy with careers and kids, making ends meet, and Googling where to go for those precious three weeks off in the summer.
    We say goodbye and head back to meet her aunt and uncle at a wine festival at one of the town squares and they direct us over to Italian spot where we all relax and look into the great amber sunset going down over the water. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m talking about with people anymore…I just know we’re talking, making connections, and hopefully laughing. This seems to be the most important thing at the end of the day.
    When we return to their home it’s a look at the old photo books. All the memories from the GDR. A time passed but probably never forgotten. For some it was just childhood. For others, they were already raising a family and working hard amidst nonstop political change. We laughed at the fashions of the time and talked about the lines people that formed just for the chance to taste the same tropical fruits as the West-Berliners. Black and white faded pictures of Hanne’s parents as a young couple, looking into the distance, cradling children…holidays with extended families all sitting around tiny living rooms. Hanne’s punk phase, neon-splashed sofas and spiked hair. Everyone’s story.
    Hanne’s grandparent’s had left a yellow bag in the corner by the door that we thought they’d forgotten, but it was full of things for us. Jams and jellies, white wine from the region; then an assortment of old jewelry that we looked at and turned over slowly in our hands. A small dark green piece caught my eye. “Wait a second…is that Moldavite?” How on earth…I took it under a lamp for a closer examination. "Hanne, this is Moldavite!" It was a strange coincidence because I’d taken a liking to the rare tektite over two years ago and purchased a not-so-cheap piece at the local mineral store in Albuquerque. I’d even taken it with me on the PCT as a sort of lucky stone but I’d lost it somewhere around northern California. The saying is that Moldavite comes and goes as it pleases and I’d finished the trip without it and never given it much thought. When I got off the trail I bought another piece and promptly lost it as soon as I unpacked in Zurich so I bought yet another piece from a vendor in the Czech Republic where it hails from and lost that piece within two weeks. The strange thing was that I didn't feel like I necessarily lost any of them. I’d kept them in pretty obvious places or in my own pockets but they’d vanished into thin air. I’d scour the apartment twice, retrace my steps by the front door in case I’d pulled it out with my keys on accident, but nothing. I didn't lose anything else - just two consecutive pieces of Moldavite. A few months later an old friend living in the Czech Republic offered to bring me some more on his way down to visit us for a couple days and I could have said “Sure! Great!” But I hesitated. For some reason this stone didn’t want to be a part of my life just at the moment. Whatever I thought about the metaphysical properties of crystals and all the new-age hocus-pocus surrounding them, it just didn’t seem to matter that much so I let it go. I stood there looking at this piece with a bit of wonder. Moldavite isn’t a stone you’d typically find in someone’s jewelry box. It’s just not that stunning unless it’s cut. This one was raw - encased in a ring of pewter with a small loop at the top. I just found it interesting (if you adhere to the old mythology of this gem.) The whole time I’d been off the trail it’d been go-go-go. I felt like a fire had been lit beneath me…maybe on the simple account of my mother’s passing making me feel like life was way too short to justify any more hand-wringing. I felt like I didn’t have a decent excuse not to go to Switzerland. Friends kept reminding me how lucky I was but it felt like luck was the last thing I was dealing with last year. I suppose I held onto the Moldavite because it was said to be grounding when you’re going through big changes. It’s also said to bring those big changes, but how can you ever know these things…
    I met Hanne on the first day of the PCT, having no idea what would happen from Campo. At that point in my life another relationship was the last thing on my mind. I was consumed with the idea of getting through the trail, sharing it with my mom, and praying for some miraculous recovery…but life did its own thing and by Bishop I knew the score. Hanne got off the trail with me then and drove down to Flagstaff so I could say goodbye. She waited at the Grand Canyon Hostel for three days and we drove back together to finish. We never planned on hiking the whole thing together and never talked about it all that much. We were just “Hummingbird and Campfire” and at the end of the trail the love remained.
   As I staggered upstairs her uncle said “Hey, you’re a good guy. You’re part of the family now.” I should be over sentimentality at 39, but after the past two years and the stress of acclimating to a new country, new people, and new energy it hit me. "Thank you." And I fell deep asleep.
     We said goodbye in the morning and headed south. Our next stop would be Freebird’s. He was a tall, mellow Austrian we’d met outside Agua Dulce and gone through the Sierra to Bishop with. The highlight had been our 5 AM ascent of Mt Whitney where he’d led us up over the ice-fields with Spiderman from South Korea. We’d spent an hour on the top huddled in the morning sun by the stone shelter, drinking hot green tea and helping Spiderman add to his "naked summit photos" portfolio. He’d been there in Bishop when I got the news and had to leave the trail and now that I think about it, Freebird was the longest companion we had on the whole trail. Otherwise, we’d leap-frog with most people and meet up at camp sites and trail towns for any socializing.
    Freebird’s wife Martina answered the door and let us in while he finished a shower upstairs and we spend the evening rehashing old stories and moments after a walk by the river. The beer came. The wine came. The whiskey came. “Dear God: help me say nein to European hospitality!” But…of all these reminiscent conversations the theme always reappears: “So, how are you doing with life after the trail?” That’s a whole different story isn’t it? We’ve spent the last year re-living the year before. We’ve edited thousands of pictures, given presentations, made short documentaries, written books, etc. Stefan has honored his trail in many unique ways. He’s also a professional photographer so he took a lightweight camera capable of shooting in RAW and captured some absolutely stunning photos that no iPhone can quite manage. But what is life like after the trail? This question haunts us a bit. It follows us around like a nagging child. You think you’ve readjusted and put some of the romanticism in a safe drawer where it doesn’t control your daydreams anymore, but then you’re in Austria and all the stories come back and you’re right back there trying to remember where you first met each other, what this or that day was like…and it’s apparent that The Trail is still very much alive. Of course, we’ve all thought about other trails. While Hanne and I have looked at the CDT, Stefan’s interest went over to the Te Araroa in New Zealand. We all dream of being back “out there”. We’ve debated whether it’s healthy communion with nature or outright escapism or both. The point is…you’re just never going to be quite the same after one of these. I’d like to say you can come back, have your cake and eat it, rest on your laurels, and ride that wave of unfettered inspiration on your way to the next adventure and some ways, everyone is…but I think that year afterward requires a lot of digestion, especially if it’s your first one.
    In the morning we took a hike up into the hills around the village and meandered through farmland and forest toward a little waterfall that was one of Freebird’s favorite spots. We ate lunch at a beautiful spot overlooking the river and ambled down toward the golden light where the village sat quietly below. It was a solid 18 km peppered with local history and the stories of our own lives and more memories of the trail.
    Of course Freebird and Martina (being the ultimate hosts) had another surprise for us: That afternoon, two more fellow PCT hikers would be showing up. What were the chances? Ranger and Dr Pepper from the US and UK were buddies that parted ways after the trail. Ranger was retired and his wife was hiking the Camino Del Santiago at seventy years of age…wow. So he was in town and met up with Dr Pepper who was quite a bit younger, maybe thirty (?) and they were going to pal around the Polish mountains and train-ride through Austria for a few days and catch us for a night of revelry and backyard grilling that would culminate in an epic slide-show of Stefan’s favorite curated pics of the trail.
    Ranger (a US Army Ranger of 20+ years) was about as American as American can get and proud as hell. To see these study in contrasts while we sat around sharing our memories was one of the most incredible things I’d experienced in awhile. It just blew me away so I raised my third beer and said “A toast! I mean, what are the chances you’ve got five thru-hikers from four different countries all meeting up for a night with hosts as great as these?” Here here. On the trail you meet people who you’d never otherwise come in contact with. You might have completely different sociopolitical backgrounds and beliefs, but if you were on that trail together for any period of time and hit it off, you probably had a life-long friend on your hands.
    We learned a lot about each other, what we were up to and where we were headed. Ranger was a hell of a conversationalist but it didn’t bother in the least. He bled red, white, and blue but at seventy or so years, he was sharp as a tack and keenly interested in everything around him. Dr Pepper on the other hand, exuded a level of calm I hadn’t seen in many thru-hikers. He’d done the AT already and was shooting for a 2021 or 2022 CDT bid. This would make him what we call  “Triple Crowner” having achieved the near-impossible completion off all three major transnational US trails.
    We retired to the living room for some of Stefan’s best whisky after dinner and watched, mesmerized while he clicked through photo after photo. “Oh I remember that guy!” “Oh that’s…where was that?” He had photos I hadn’t seen of the S. Kennedy Meadows-to-Bishop stretch and it was all sinking in. Where had I been the past year? What was I doing? I’d been overcome by a sort of claustrophobic prodding in my side. An ‘unease’. It was like I could never do something with such a pure amount of purpose, with so much personal and peripheral meaning and magic as the PCT again. It’s good to have purpose, but we like to throw around words with bigger implications than we can grasp. Words are just trying to describe the qualities of the experience as you perceive them. Birds don’t know they’re called birds by the hairless monkeys below the trees, nor do they care. I tend to place feeling and intuition higher in the hierarchy of human tools. Feeling is what brought me to the PCT. Feeling is what brought me to Switzerland. Feeling brought me to music and cycling and everything else that’s constituted "The Good Stuff". Hanne asked Ranger why he did the PCT. It looked like it was the first time he’d even considered the question. He scanned the table for less than a second and looked up and smiled: “Because it’s there!” I mean, ya. This was Hillary’s reason for climbing Everest. All the books and post-trail videos said the most important thing was to know WHY you were doing it. I always felt like I was a mixture of lots of reasons but when I knew I was going to do do it, all the little reasons didn’t necessarily matter. I just "knew" and I think a lot of people just "know". Either way…I missed the trail. It brought up a lot of emotions but I told Freebird “Thanks…I needed that.” I was exhausted by six days of heavy food, drink, driving, language barriers, reminiscing, et al but wanted to show gratitude for all the care he’d put into the photos, bringing us all together, and giving us a good time. He was thoughtful..and that’s something I rarely encounter.
   The next morning we had a traditional Austrian breakfast, exchanged contact info, and hit the road. We swung through parts of the perilous German autobahn and back into Austria, back into Germany, and down through Schauffhausen to Zurich. We listened to more of the audiobook while the authors detailed their harrowing experiences with Indian culture and roads, desperately trying to get to Nepal before their van fell apart. “Man…we’ve got it pretty good. I used to dream about traveling through India with a solid camera but this sounds like utter hell.” Suddenly the autobahn didn’t feel so crazy and my own challenges didn’t amount to much worth mentioning. I needed a shower and a good night’s sleep that didn’t involve regional spirits or wine. We drove on and listened in silence. In the west we like to complain that we haven’t found that One Thing because we’ve got the freedom to actually look for it and when the going gets tough we just bail because if it doesn’t feel just right then it must not be the One Thing. I suppose there are physical limits to freedom and I’m aghast at what people typically do with whatever freedom they have but Camus suggested that “freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.” Maybe that is so. Maybe I’m in impulsive over-thinker. Maybe it’s time to start planning the next hike. Maybe it’s time to publish this book.