So when I came to the widening at the north end of the Kistenband, where the slope lessens, I stopped and took a breather. There was a spur just below me to my left, jutting out over the Limmerensee, and to my surprise a little roof top poked out over the last rock. I walked over and found a tiny shed tucked under the spur. Possibly an emergency hut; but its door was locked, and there were no signs on it. Maybe it was a storage shed for cowherds, or trail crews. In any case there it was. The top of the spur above it was clear of snow, and had a magnificent view; and I was past the crux of the hike, and suddenly hungry. I sat down to eat my lunch, feet kicking over the edge of the rock.
Checking out the next section of my hike, behind me and to my right, I could see that the ridge of the Muttenbergen curled like the top of a question mark, arcing from the Muttenstock to a peak called the Ruchi to another called the Rüchi. Tucked in the curve of the question mark was a snowy basin called the Mutten, filled for the most part by an icy lake called the Muttsee. I could see the trail as a line of bootprints running across the snow covering the rib that held the Muttsee in place, and there on the rib stood a little square dot, black in the piebald mix of snow and rock. My map identified this building as the Muttseehutte, SAC (Swiss Alpine Club). When I got there it would be caffe fertig time for sure.
Under my feet the space over the Limmerensee looked like an enormous roofless room, long and narrow, with the lake as its blue carpet. The wall on the other side of the lake was a horizontally banded cliff, rising sheer from the water to my own height; above that it broke up and lay back in a wild jumble of snow and boulders, ending in a jagged skyline that ran from peak to peak-from the Vorder Selbsanft to the Selbsanft to the Hinter Selbsanft to the Vord Schiben to the Hinter Schiben. All these names made sense in relation to my vantage point, as if they had been named from there.
The Muttsee and the Limmerensee were both blue, but the blues were very different. The Muttsee was the brilliant turquoise of water lying over submerged ice, under a clear sky. The Limmerensee, on the other hand, was a reservoir, and its catchment basin included two hanging glaciers that added glacial milk to the clearer waters coming in from elsewhere. The resulting mix was the opaque virulent blue of radiator antifreeze.
The reservoir flooded a valley which must have been quite something before it was drowned. The mapmakers had retained the contour lines of the submerged area, turning them blue rather than the usual brown, and these showed what had probably been meadow or forest, or a mix of the two, with the Limmerenbach running down the middle. It might have looked like Yosemite; but this had not stopped the Swiss from damming it. In their drive for electricity they had dammed and drowned many of the deepest gorges in the Swiss Alps. I suppose you can’t afford to regard sixty-five percent of your country as an untouchable wilderness, but I was still a little shocked whenever I saw how relentlessly they have altered their landscape. We’ve done a lot of it in the Sierra too, but nothing compared to them. No doubt a hidden valley like this one never had a chance.
And yet it was still a great space; and the Muttsee at least was still beautiful. I pulled my bahnhof sandwich from my daypack, pleased with my lunchtime prospect.
As I began eating I heard a buzz from below, and spotted a helicopter the size of a mosquito, floating just over the antifreeze. It rose in slow spirals, working hard to gain altitude. No doubt it was climbing to resupply the Muttseehutte: I had been at other SAC huts when helicopters flew in with supplies. It was going to be interesting to watch it from this distance.
The helicopter rose in an expanding spiral that used the entire space of the gorge. It took at least ten minutes for it to ascend, giving me a sudden new sense of just how deep the gorge was. It’s hard to see vertical distance; the eye has a predilection to see all great heights as about a thousand feet, a foreshortening error that does not go away even when you know about it. Now the helicopter’s long struggle was making the real height of the gorge evident.
Eventually it completed its climb and banked in a final spiral that brought it under my part of the cliff. I was going to get a good view of it as it passed me by. I sat on my overlook and observed its two circles of blurred blades, big one horizontal, small one vertical. They are strange machines. The engine noise, which had started as a mosquito buzz, was now a roar. It was really going to pass close to me.
Then it rose to my level and hung right before me, making an incredible racket. It turned toward me, and I found myself looking into its bubble windshield, eye-to-eye with the pilot. He was a black man, wearing mirrored sunglasses and big earphones. I thought he looked American, and waved at him, but his hands were busy and he didn’t wave back. I saw his forearms shift on his controls, and the helicopter tilted forward and began to drift straight in at me.
“Whoah!” I said. What the hell? The helo was still closing, the pilot’s face was still blank. I scrambled to my feet, turned and retreated quickly onto the spur’s flat top. I looked over my shoulder to be sure all was well and was astonished to see the helicopter was topping the spur and turning down toward me, louder than ever.
I bolted up the hill in a panic. The blast of its wind buffeted my back, and in the horrible roar I dared a look over my shoulder, terrified of what I would see—
It was landing on the flat spot behind the spur.
I stopped running. All was suddenly clear: I had been sitting on the edge of his landing pad. It was the only flat spot around. He was bringing supplies to the little locked shed under the spur.
Well of course! I had not fallen into a horror movie after all! I should have been able to figure it out earlier.
I stood there feeling my heart blast the blood through me. All my capillaries throbbed at every hit, and my vision was bouncing.
The pilot killed the engine and climbed out of the cockpit. I walked back down the hill toward him, anxious to apologize for taking so long to figure out what was happening
He saw me and said something before bending to his cargo door, but there was still lot of noise and I couldn’t hear him. I came a little closer to yell that I didn’t speak much German, and all of a sudden he straightened up and shouted, “ACHTUNG!”
I stopped in my tracks. He pointed up at the blades still thwacking the air overhead. In that instant I saw that as rotor blades slow down they become visible from the inside out. What I had assumed were the ends of the blades were actually just the ends of their visible part. Looking more closely I saw the faint blur of sky that marked their real ends; the blades were about twice as long as I had thought they were. Not only that, but as they slowed they were beginning to droop, and I was descending onto the flat from the slope above. So the actual tips of the blades, now quite visible to me, were at my head level, and about fifteen feet away.
I turned and walked off. The pilot was busy anyway, and I had lost all interest in talking to him. I got out of there.
Several minutes down the trail I noticed that my half-eaten sandwich was still in my hand, squished into a ribbed tube of dough. I nibbled it as I hiked, and realized after a while that I was too deaf to hear myself chew. I looked back once or twice without intending to. I came to some of the deepest suncups I had ever seen, skidded this way and that on snow that had lost all structural integrity. It didn’t matter; I wasn’t there anyway.