Swiss mountains are unforgettable. So too are the people you meet up there.
Last year my wife and I were hiking a remote trail high in the Alps. We came upon a farmer repairing a stone wall. He was a burly fellow with a mutton chop mustache. He looked like Obelix the cartoon character, or an agrarian version of Lemmy from Motorhead.
As we passed I wished him a “Guten Tag”, this being the German part of the country and greetings an essential part of Swiss culture. He raised his hand in a Roman salute and responded “Salve”. His greeting was Romansh, an ancient derivative of Latin used by only a handful of Swiss, yet still one of their four official languages. It was a moment straight out of another millennium.
I regularly hike up a mountain trail behind our house. Three hikes out of five I will find a man there, sitting alone on a mountainside bench. He is my age and from the Middle East, either an immigrant or an asylum seeker. He sits and smokes and gazes with sad eyes over the broad Lake Geneva valley. We nod and smile at each other as I pass by, but we have never conversed: he speaks neither English nor French nor German. Still, he has become a fixture on the mountain. I miss seeing him when I find the bench empty.
Just today I was hiking alone in high mountain pastures when a storm boiled in. It began to rain hard as I made for the shelter of a stone cattle barn. I sat there under the eaves as a wicked thunderstorm rolled through. It was glorious.
Then out of nowhere three Swiss farmers appeared. We greeted each other. They began to prepare the barn to milk cattle. One of the farmers wore a baseball hat that featured a Canadian maple leaf and the silhouette of a bull. I pointed to the hat and said, with some pride, “Vive le Canada!” He responded with a smile and perfect English, “Yes! Canada! That’s where I get all my bull semen from”.
[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]