OK, so you're in the Swiss Alps, it's 7 pm and the end of another long day on the trail. You have just walked across a lonely and level plain studded with silver lakes and snow fields and are now switch-backing up a 2,900 m ridge between two valleys and two language communities. It is the best time of day, when the quality of the sunlight, so glorious all day, softens and takes on the gentler hues of rosy golds and pinks.
But you are a little apprehensive and walking fast. The saddle is still quite far above you and you need to get over and down onto the other side before dusk sets in. You are tired, but bouyed up by the beauty of the landscape and the anticipation of spending the coming night in the austerity of high altitude.
You eventually hit the saddle and new vistas open up. New mountains to find on the map, different contours and glaciers and onward valleys, and a chance to survey the land immediately below: another lonely level plain but this time peppered with sheep. It is still up here, the wind lazily footers about among the few blades of grass poking through the rocks before petering out in the triumph of silence.
You descend 200 m to the plain and scout out a place to pitch your tent, some place level, somewhat raised and sheltered. Before long you find a spot next to a small lake which, though a little exposed, is so picturesque that you cannot resist it. You pitch, eat a ravenous meal of bread, cheese and sausage washed down with schnapps from a small plastic bottle, and lie back on your mat to savour the exquisite views of the nearby snow capped mountains and the sweet aching pain of your feet.
The first thing you notice is the wind... it must have been slowly gaining in strength all the time you were eating but only now do you realise it is no longer the still, warm evening it had been on the ridge. A pang of anxiety as you recall the warning of storms down in the valley. You try to put it out of your head and enjoy the sound of the wind playing merry havoc with the fabric of your tent, try to recall similar evenings on Greek island beaches when the furious meltemi was at full pelt, whipping up waves and driving shards of sand hard against the nylon. Just make sure all lines are tight and all pegs are secure and you will be fine. You try to relax, but the wind is getting stronger, intermittently mastering the fabric so totally in the duration of a short, sharp gust that you feel perilously exposed.
You stick your head out and look around. Over on the other side of the ridge, a pack of battered clouds are gathering, mingling with the dusk to darken the sky and rob the earth of the welcome colours of the evening.
Your dilemma: to stay put and sit it out here at 2,700m with only 700 g of sil-nylon and a hiking pole separating you from the elements? Or to up sticks and descend 700 metres to the tree line and the shelter of the forest? It has already been a long day and you really can't face the prospect of another hour's walk, very probably under heavy rain and with lighting bolts to dodge. You lie back again, trying to convince yourself that this little tent can make it. But when another gust comes, shaking the tent poles so convincingly that they rattle and bend like garden canes, you know you have to get yourself out of there and down... and quick.
It usually takes you around twenty minutes to break camp. You do it in five. Soon, you are bounding across the plain through the thickening wind and now spats of rain, while all the while bemused looking sheep stare on, placidly, chewing the cud like it is a summer's day. You feel like laughing out loud, except that you don't. Harder and more persistent rain is falling, soaking your down jacket from the outside even as sweat soaks it from the inside. The rocks are slippy and twice you go over on your ankle in a way which would normally cause you stop dead and hop around in pain. But you are as in a tunnel, so chock full of adrenaline that you can only focus on your next foot fall and your ultimate destination of the tree line. How far can it be now? Two hundred? Three hundred metres? At this pace another fifteen minutes? Half an hour?
It is at this point, soaked through and lung-burst, with lightning bolts crackling around you, that something huge and white looms up in front of your eyes, rain pelting down off of its smooth sloping sides.
It is a tee-pee.
You have no time to think and so hurdle the fence that surrounds it, throw yourself in through the front flap, and slither the last few feet into the interior on your belly.
You lie there for a moment as rain batters off the canvas then slowly raise your head from the hot, steaming, soggy mess of your folded arms.
There in the centre of the tee-pee is an ornate and ceremonial candle holder, all baroque twists of iron topped off with a glass casing containing a candle surrounded by rock crystals. Around the perimeter are about ten beds, arranged in a circle with their foot ends pointing toward the candle. All are emaculately dressed and ready, it seems, to receive their guests.
'Is this a cult dwelling?', you say out loud, unable quite to take it all in.
The thunder and lightning continue to crackle. The rain batters down on the canvas. You remember the vacant faces of the sheep up on the mountain, and now this extraordinary scene.
Suddenly relieved from the grip of adrenaline, and now with a keen sense that you have just burst into an incredible story, you laugh out loud.
I never did find out what that place was. I spread out my things on the floor as the rain pelted down harder onto the reassuringly thick canvas walls of the tee-pee and fell asleep. In the morning, I packed up at first light and got the hell out of there, down to the valley floor where I wandered into a hotel breakfast room, replete with gentile Swiss German guests, nursing a bruised ankle, but also an insane pride hidden in the folds of my 100 yard stare. My adventure, so new and strange, was too impossible to tell. It would need reflection, distance and a cool head to wrap the right words around it. So instead I just strutted to and from the buffet and grinned into my coffee, allowing the images to tumble past my mind's eye like rain.
But you are a little apprehensive and walking fast. The saddle is still quite far above you and you need to get over and down onto the other side before dusk sets in. You are tired, but bouyed up by the beauty of the landscape and the anticipation of spending the coming night in the austerity of high altitude.
You eventually hit the saddle and new vistas open up. New mountains to find on the map, different contours and glaciers and onward valleys, and a chance to survey the land immediately below: another lonely level plain but this time peppered with sheep. It is still up here, the wind lazily footers about among the few blades of grass poking through the rocks before petering out in the triumph of silence.
You descend 200 m to the plain and scout out a place to pitch your tent, some place level, somewhat raised and sheltered. Before long you find a spot next to a small lake which, though a little exposed, is so picturesque that you cannot resist it. You pitch, eat a ravenous meal of bread, cheese and sausage washed down with schnapps from a small plastic bottle, and lie back on your mat to savour the exquisite views of the nearby snow capped mountains and the sweet aching pain of your feet.
The first thing you notice is the wind... it must have been slowly gaining in strength all the time you were eating but only now do you realise it is no longer the still, warm evening it had been on the ridge. A pang of anxiety as you recall the warning of storms down in the valley. You try to put it out of your head and enjoy the sound of the wind playing merry havoc with the fabric of your tent, try to recall similar evenings on Greek island beaches when the furious meltemi was at full pelt, whipping up waves and driving shards of sand hard against the nylon. Just make sure all lines are tight and all pegs are secure and you will be fine. You try to relax, but the wind is getting stronger, intermittently mastering the fabric so totally in the duration of a short, sharp gust that you feel perilously exposed.
You stick your head out and look around. Over on the other side of the ridge, a pack of battered clouds are gathering, mingling with the dusk to darken the sky and rob the earth of the welcome colours of the evening.
Your dilemma: to stay put and sit it out here at 2,700m with only 700 g of sil-nylon and a hiking pole separating you from the elements? Or to up sticks and descend 700 metres to the tree line and the shelter of the forest? It has already been a long day and you really can't face the prospect of another hour's walk, very probably under heavy rain and with lighting bolts to dodge. You lie back again, trying to convince yourself that this little tent can make it. But when another gust comes, shaking the tent poles so convincingly that they rattle and bend like garden canes, you know you have to get yourself out of there and down... and quick.
It usually takes you around twenty minutes to break camp. You do it in five. Soon, you are bounding across the plain through the thickening wind and now spats of rain, while all the while bemused looking sheep stare on, placidly, chewing the cud like it is a summer's day. You feel like laughing out loud, except that you don't. Harder and more persistent rain is falling, soaking your down jacket from the outside even as sweat soaks it from the inside. The rocks are slippy and twice you go over on your ankle in a way which would normally cause you stop dead and hop around in pain. But you are as in a tunnel, so chock full of adrenaline that you can only focus on your next foot fall and your ultimate destination of the tree line. How far can it be now? Two hundred? Three hundred metres? At this pace another fifteen minutes? Half an hour?
It is at this point, soaked through and lung-burst, with lightning bolts crackling around you, that something huge and white looms up in front of your eyes, rain pelting down off of its smooth sloping sides.
It is a tee-pee.
You have no time to think and so hurdle the fence that surrounds it, throw yourself in through the front flap, and slither the last few feet into the interior on your belly.
You lie there for a moment as rain batters off the canvas then slowly raise your head from the hot, steaming, soggy mess of your folded arms.
There in the centre of the tee-pee is an ornate and ceremonial candle holder, all baroque twists of iron topped off with a glass casing containing a candle surrounded by rock crystals. Around the perimeter are about ten beds, arranged in a circle with their foot ends pointing toward the candle. All are emaculately dressed and ready, it seems, to receive their guests.
'Is this a cult dwelling?', you say out loud, unable quite to take it all in.
The thunder and lightning continue to crackle. The rain batters down on the canvas. You remember the vacant faces of the sheep up on the mountain, and now this extraordinary scene.
Suddenly relieved from the grip of adrenaline, and now with a keen sense that you have just burst into an incredible story, you laugh out loud.
I never did find out what that place was. I spread out my things on the floor as the rain pelted down harder onto the reassuringly thick canvas walls of the tee-pee and fell asleep. In the morning, I packed up at first light and got the hell out of there, down to the valley floor where I wandered into a hotel breakfast room, replete with gentile Swiss German guests, nursing a bruised ankle, but also an insane pride hidden in the folds of my 100 yard stare. My adventure, so new and strange, was too impossible to tell. It would need reflection, distance and a cool head to wrap the right words around it. So instead I just strutted to and from the buffet and grinned into my coffee, allowing the images to tumble past my mind's eye like rain.
