When I trudged up the final approach to the Muttseehutte I was really ready to sit down and have a caffee fertig or two, or three. After that I would continue over a nearby rise called the Muttenchopf, and descend to the cable car that would drop me to the road at Tierfed.
The hut keeper was standing on the porch outside his door. He greeted me as I approached: “Grüüüüt-zi!” It was the Swiss greeting at its most Swiss.
He was short and bald, barrel-chested and suntanned, with immense forearms. He asked me where I had come from and I told him, re-entering that zone of competence in German that I had magically occupied during my time with Mario. The hut keeper asked questions about snow conditions on the south side of the pass, and I described what I had seen, and it was all as clear as could be. I did not attempt to tell him about my encounter with the helicopter, which was beyond my German to express, and so the conversation proceeded well. At one point, enjoying my ability to do it, I asked him how long it would take me to hike over the Muttenchopf, and when the last cable car of the day left Galbchopf for Tierfed.
The question startled him: Why? he asked. Did I want to take it?
Exactly, I said. I did want to take it.
He walked across the porch to me and said very firmly, “Du muss schon gegangen sein!”
You must already gegone to be.
I thought it over; yes, that was what it meant; most of the words were utterly simple, and I knew very well that “schon” meant “already,” because that was what I used to yell at my Swiss baseball teammates when they did something good, meaning to yell “schцn” like they did, a mistake that had given them no end of amusement before they had finally corrected me. So:
You must already be gone!
“Whoah!” I said. The hut keeper nodded as he saw I understood, just as the train conductor had that morning. He took me by the arm and walked me down to a trail sign just below the hut. In rapid but still magically comprehensible German he told me that the trail that went down to the dam, and then through a tunnel to the cable car station, was a much faster route than the trail over the Muttenchopf-so much faster that it was my only hope of catching the last car, which left at 3:45.
It was now 3:05. I got out my topo map and he nodded approvingly and traced with a thick finger the trail I should take. “Fiertzig minuten,” he said emphatically. Forty minutes. And then he stepped back and cried, “Fliegst du!”
FLY YOU! Yikes! No more than five minutes had passed since my arrival, and here I was waving good-bye to the hut keeper and running down the trail, over the lip of the Mutten and down a steep green bowl to the shore of the virulent Limmerensee.
The trail was snow-free, and dropped down gullies and over grassy humps, and most of the time I could run it. Where the trail banked against rock walls there were cable handrails bolted into the rock, and these helped me maintain a good speed even when things got quite steep.
After about ten minutes of this I paused to catch my breath and eat my Toblerone bar, and look again at my map. As soon as I calculated the altitudes and distances involved I took off again, running down the trail faster than ever. Forty minutes! He was crazy! The drop to the lake was six hundred and fifty vertical meters, and the tunnel looked to be about three kilometers long! No way!
But way. He had said it was possible, and he wouldn’t have said it if he hadn’t been sure. He had done it. Those Swiss Army guys passing me by in their car could do it, each chased by his own personal Bццgen perhaps, but they could. If they couldn’t the hut keeper would have told me to forget it, that I should stay the night at his hut,where there would be a radio phone that I could have used tell Lisa what had happened. Then I could have relaxed on the hut’s porch drinking caffee fertig,, or just the fertig (cognac), while watching the evening alpenglow light up the Muttenstock. That was a good idea, now that I thought of it, but instead here I was hauling ass down the trail like a Keystone Kop, cursing the Swiss with every leap. Have a nice day in the Alps, I shouted as I plunged. So relaxing! God damn you guys! God damn your cable cars, and God damn you for closing the fucking things eight hours before dark! When you bother to keep them open at all! It was ridiculous! But I was going to do it anyway, and without any Bццgens to chase me either-just a determination to get home that night, and because the hut keeper had said I could do it.
So I descended 650 meters in twenty-five minutes, certainly my all-time record (at least until I cut my shin on the Black Giant, but that’s another story). I panted along the shores of the radioactive Limmerensee until I was stopped by a cliff that dropped straight into the water. The trail ran right under a black iron door in the cliff.
The tunnel. God damn it one more time. I don’t like tunnels. I approached the door and looked at a page taped to it. The printed message, in German of course, had words so long they crossed the whole page. I couldn’t understand any of it. Apparently my streak of German had ended in the great exchange with the hut keeper. Fly you! I had flown.
I turned the handle and pulled the door open. There was a light button just inside the door, and when I pushed it a line of bare bulbs came on overhead, illuminating a tunnel about nine feet high and not much wider. There were metal tracks, like tram tracks, laid on the tunnel’s stone floor.
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.