Kistenpass Read online

  I stepped back out into the sunlight and tried to read the sign again. No way. Inside, a simpler note by the light button told me that the lights would stay on for twenty minutes after I pushed the button. Back outside I checked my map again. Yes, the tunnel was between two and three kilometers long. Say a mile and a half. I could run that in less than twenty minutes. And I would have to, not only to beat the lights going off, but in order to get to the cable car station at the other end of the tunnel before 3:45-because it was now 3:31!

  I banished my distaste for the tunnel and stepped back inside the iron door and let it clang shut behind me. I hit the light button one more time and started jogging down the stone floor between the tram tracks.

  Quickly I was far enough down the tunnel that I couldn’t see the door behind me any more. In both directions the light bulbs ran together into faint lines, which eventually disappeared entirely in the gloom. There were leaks in the rock ceiling, and occasionally I ran under little curtains of dripping water; often I stomped through puddles between the tracks. Getting winded, I checked my watch; I had been running three minutes. Probably my initial pace had been a bit fast.

  Very low creaks echoed down the tunnel, as if the rock around me was somehow stressed. Maybe by the weight of all that radiator fluid. If the dam were to burst the tunnel would get torn apart. If an earthquake struck it would collapse. I ordered my mind to stop conjuring such unlikely events, but I have a fear of tunnels, and the infinite regress of dim bare lightbulbs in both directions was a strange sight. I kept on pressing the pace, my boots splashing in the puddles, my daypack flopping on my back, my breath beginning to whoosh in and out. My watched showed 3:35; but then I recalled that it was set five or seven minutes fast, to help me keep up with Swiss timeliness-to help me in situations just like this, in fact. So I had a bit of leeway. And hopefully I was around halfway through the tunnel. It seemed to me that I was running at a nine-minute mile pace at the very least, despite my boots. It all should work.

  Twice I passed open black side tunnels to my left, the lake side, and I hurried by them and their wafts of cold air, wondering if they ran out to the dam, or under it. Once as a child I had gone with my parents and brother to Parker Dam on the Colorado River, and we had taken a tour through one of the big turbine rooms, and that night I dreamed we had been locked in there by accident and they let in the water and it rushed over us, causing me to wake up filled with a dread so deep I have never forgotten it. There aren’t that many dreams you remember your whole life. Now I seemed to be running in that dream, and the empty black side tunnels scared me no matter what I tried to think. I suppose it is true that I am still eight years old in my mind.

  Thus when I heard a faint roar behind me I first put it down to morbid imagination and tried to ignore it. Then it got louder and was obviously real. A very definite roar in the tunnel behind me-and getting louder! I looked down at the tracks in the tunnel floor: tram tracks. A tram was coming!

  I redoubled my speed. Swiss tunnels are often sized only a few inches wider and taller than the vehicles that pass through them. I glanced over my shoulder, in what was getting to be the day’s signature movement, and saw two pinpricks of light. Little headlights under the string of lightbulbs, quickly growing bigger, filling the tunnel as the roar got louder. I turned and ran as fast as I could.

  Suddenly the tunnel widened and split into three. I ducked left, into the widest part of the open area, away from the tracks, and pulled up tight against the wall. An old gray VW van with a bad muffler sputtered past me.

  Its driver had not seen me, and he drove on. I took off after him, guessing as I ran that the sign taped to the door at the other end of the tunnel had announced the van’s schedule to people wanting a ride. No doubt its last trip of the day was timed to take people out to the last cable car.

  The van came to a sudden halt and I almost rear-ended it. We were at the end of the tunnel, it seemed. I had made it in time for the last cable car down.

  The driver of the van (he had carried no passengers) turned out also to be the operator of the cable car. I got in the cable car with him, not even trying to explain why I had run the tunnel rather than wait for a ride. He did not seem to be interested in any case. Right before our departure (he was checking his watch to leave at the first second of 3:45), we were joined by an elderly couple in the full regalia of Swiss mountain walking: heavy leather boots, long wool socks, wool knee pants, plaid long-sleeved shirts, suspenders, varnished walking sticks, old leather rucksacks. The man wore suspenders and a jaunty green cap with a feather. The woman’s white hair was perfectly coifed.

  When they were in, the driver closed the door and latched it, punched at his control panel, and the car jerked out of the station and dropped like a boulder hung on a clothesline. Down we sailed. Tierfed was a thousand meters below, and watching the cliff shoot by I was very glad I had hurried to make the last car. Without it there was no way I would have made it home that night. Now I would.

  When, I asked the van driver hesitantly, suddenly self-conscious about my German again, did the bus leave Tierfed for the train station in Rieti?

  He stared at me, surprised. Bus? There was no bus.

  I stared at him, appalled. I had never heard of such a thing. All the cable cars had bus connections to the nearest station! It was over ten miles from Tierfed to Rieti, there had to be a bus!

  The van driver shrugged. No bus. The elderly couple stared at me. I was still sweating from my tunnel run, and in fact I had broken a sweat several times that day, some of them hot, some of them cold. I could taste the salt on my lips, and feel the sunblasting I had gotten; I knew from past experience that my face would be a flamboyant red, and in the window of the car I could see a faint reflection that showed my hair spiking out as if I had been electrocuted.

  So when the van driver suddenly asked the elderly couple if they would give me a ride to the Rieti train station, I blushed an even deeper red. We still had a fair distance to descend, and this certainly put them on the spot. They didn’t look like it was their kind of thing, and I was pretty sure they wouldn’t have offered on their own. Some Swiss like their Auslдnder, but others don’t. There were political parties that wanted to kick all of us out, and their membership came mostly from the mountain cantons.

  A quick discussion between them and the van driver dove immediately into the deepest Schwyzerdüüütsch: I couldn’t understand a word of it. But after a bit of back-and-forth, the husband turned to me and made the offer himself, very stiffly, in Swiss-accented Hochdeutsch. I nodded gratefully and said Danke, at this point the only German word left to me.

  We clanked into the Tierfed station and got out. I thanked the van driver and trailed the couple to their car, a big square Mercedes. Gingerly I got in the back seat. The husband drove us down the curving road in a dead silence.

  There were so many things I wanted to say, stuck on the tip of my German tongue. Your country is so beautiful. I love the Alps. I’m only going to be here another few months, and I want to see everything before I go. Your transport system is really quite amazing. Although the bus component in this case has let us all down, forcing me to ask for your assistance. A helicopter almost chopped my head off at lunch. It chased me. I’m also scared of tunnels. I thought that VW van in the tunnel was a tram that was going to squish me like a bug. Even without that I was unhappy. I’m sorry you’ve been forced to do me this favor. I hope I don’t smell too much, but I was terrified twice today. That rarely happens even once. If it weren’t for the kindness of Swiss women I wouldn’t even be here. Your farm wives are so nice. But a lot of you are mean to hitchhikers. And your cable cars stop way too soon in the day. I think a lot of you must have been traumatized by the Bццgen, wouldn’t you agree? It’s a Swiss theory. It explains a lot, you have to admit.

  I said nothing;. None of it was sayable. I could hear the sentences in a sort-of German in my mind, but I could not make my mouth say them.

  In the front seat th
ey were just as quiet. It was too bad, really; we had just spent the day up there in the same mountains, after all. I focused my mind, ignored my insecurity about tense and word choice and sentence order, about whether it would properly be wohin or woher, tag or morgen, die or der or das. . . . I had made so many mistakes. How do you play baseball? You take nine human beings. . . . my teacher had grinned at that one, he couldn’t help himself. But if you got your meaning across, Mario had said, that’s all that matters.

  Where to today did you wander?

  Rüchi, the wife replied.

  Rüchi! The mountain?

  Yes, the mountain. Rüchi is a mountain.

  It was the peak at the end of the question mark, one of those looming over the Muttseehutte.

  Wow, I said.

  They had gone up there for lunch, she explained.

  I got out my topo map, and she twisted around to show me their route. From the cable car they had traversed the Muttenwandli-then climbed the south slope of the Nüschenstock at the end of the question mark-then run the ridge from there up to Rüchi. Ah genau, I said as she named every point, g enau. Exactly. This was what my Swiss teammates always said when other people were telling them things. It was something like our uh huh, or I see, or yeah yeah, or you bet. Genau: it’s a word the Swiss love to say and to hear. It may be the national anthem all by itself.

  Pretty? I asked, being careful not to say Already?

  They both nodded. Very pretty, the wife said.

  Then she said, And where did you go?

  Kistenpass.

  Keesh-tee-pahsss!

  That must be what one always said. Some kind of surprise about it. Well, maybe so. Yes, I said. Keee-stee-pahss.

  And was it pretty?

  Very pretty. The Alps, I said, are very, very pretty.

  They nodded again, glowing with quiet pride, with love. Genau, the husband murmured.

  #

  The train for Zieglebrücke was leaving when I walked in the station, and in Zieglebrücke I had to run to catch the Zürich train. My legs were sore. On the Züri train I relaxed. I was going to make it home that night. Zürichsee, Hauptbahnhof, a number Six tram; up the hill, up the stairs, into our apartment, flop into my kitchen chair. It was 7:15 P.M.

  “How was it?” Lisa asked. “You look kind of wasted.”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I gaped like a goldfish.

  She pointed a spatula at me. “Did you have another adventure?”

  “Genau.”

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