Crossing the Alps
Years ago a good friend gave me a book of poems, reflections and field sketches by the German writer Hermann Hesse, who most college students of my generation knew primarily as the author of Siddhartha. The book was titled Wandering,and it celebrated exactly that.
It began in narrative verse with Hesse describing the smells and colors and emotional changes he felt as he crossed the Alps on foot, leaving behind the familiarity of his native Germany to the north for everything that was fragrant and warm and new in the south.
I never intended on my own journey to follow in Hesse’s footsteps or to try to match his experience. But on the other hand, my plane ticket from Alaska to Europe landed me in Munich. And while my solitary trip from there to Italy began on a train — stopping to visit the Bavarian village of Schwangau and the fairyland castle of ill-fated King Ludwig II — it ended on foot in the Alps.
That’s because I had the good sense of saying yes when six fellow rowers, also bound for Torino, invited me to join them beforehand on a hike through the Dolomites near the Austria-Italy border.
After meeting in northern Italy in the small town of Dobbiaco, we bused to a trailhead at Lago di Braes, a handsome alpine lake where we spotted (and I photographed) four shirtless Italian pensioners, rowing a boat in the sun. It seemed like a very good sign.
From there the trail grew steeper and narrower, leaving the picnickers behind. Everything we would take to Italy was on our backs, but we all managed to pack light, since — hiking hut to hut, or rather rifugio to rifugio — we didn’t need gear for camping.
For not much money (about as much as you would pay to stay in a youth hostel) the rifugios also provided dinners and breakfast, showers and beds with lots of cheerful company.
In all we traveled only about 40 kilometers in five days of hiking, mostly up and down. But all of it was stunningly picturesque and new.
We saw stone bunkers and caves where soldiers died in the World War I border battles between Austria and Italy. We saw people from those same nations together hiking and biking today.
We passed fields of grazing cows. We saw a small dark horse that herded sheep, and a free-range pig that for a moment herded us — and almost everywhere heard the Heidi-like clank of cowbells.
We saw marmots and mountain crows and fresh fields of wildflowers, all reminiscent of Alaska.
We got rained on and we dried off. We got sunburned and we healed. We shared hours upon hours of stories.
When we finally reached the end, I decided Hesse was probably right: A little bit of wandering can really sooth the soul.
Then we boarded a train for Torino.
Rowing with Ulysses 