I suppose there are worse places to be homeless than the Swiss Alps during harvest time, but since I had no connections, no destination, no grasp of the language, no roadmap, and not the faintest notion of where I would sleep that night, my circumstances could have been considered unstable even by the standards of homeless communities.
Paying for a hotel or hostel was not an option. The expense of lodging in a country where the asking price of a roadmap was $26 was something I neither wanted nor needed to know. Besides that it was a stagnant, unadventurous waste of time and would fail to provide me with a raw, up close experience of the place.
After the lady behind the counter at the tourist bureau failed to sell me the aforementioned roadmap, I managed to buy a Swiss SIM card, which gave me communication abilities and GPS. Being thus prepared at all points, I began looking around the area for an interesting mountain, found one, and started walking. It was about 2:00 in the afternoon by then, and I needed to be out of town as fast as possible so as to avoid sleeping on the streets. However, with 100 lbs of belongings on my back, tight new shoes that weren't worn in, combined with a week's worth of living soft in Milan, suffice it to say that I was not setting any speed records. All the same, most of my route was alongside of a lake in the middle of town, which was cupped in the middle of an amphitheater of gorgeous mountains, and dotted with all sorts of exotic little ducks. The lake was full of people swimming and water skiing, and surrounded by city buildings, old and new, while picturesque farms and villageish places dotted the distant sides of the mountains in little clumps. I looked up at the mountains and increased my pace.
I metioned it was harvest time. Once the road took me out of town, I found myself walking up and down smooth green hills with peaceful little dairy cows grazing everywhere, jingling the bells on their necks. Wooden chalets were also in abundance with flowers over the windowsills and apple cheeked villagers haying with little mowers and rakes so that the scent of fresh cut hay was on every breeze. Pears and apples were ripening, children were walking home from school, tiny shrines with crucifixes (hand carved) and statues of Our Lady (very old) would appear to the pedestrian as abrupt visions or as old friends. It was all so picturesque, so idyllic, and so natural that I felt like I was walking through a painting or had gotten lost inside some postcard.
After two hours of being almost drugged into some sort of nostalgic ecstasy by this type of scenery, my route took me along an old logging road through a pine forest which was of course, punctuated by little brooks and musically accompanied by cow bells in nearby pastures as behooves a good Swiss logging road. By this time it was getting towards evening, so I ran up the mountain into the woods so as to be out sight of the road. I then slung my hammock between two trees and feasted on baguette, cheese, chocalate and apples while watching the sun fade behind the mountains.
That night I had a most haunting and poetic experience. Just as things were changing from dusk to stars and the whole mountainside was in silence except for the distant tinkling of cow bells, I heard, or thought I heard, a shepherd's horn blowing from some distant valley. The notes had an indescribable beauty, a metaphysical peace, an oldness, and a newness. There is no lullaby, no serenade and no ballad that can compare with a shepherds horn echoing through the mountains under the stars. I felt that the only appropriate way to process the experience was to imagine myself as a shepherd in Ancient Greece, curling up in my wool blanket after a meal of figs, olives and goats milk and watching the sheep fall asleep on the slopes as cold swirling mists cloak the mouth of some nearby oracle's cavern in the valley below. It is no wonder that both pastoral style and Romantic era poetry contain so many references to shepherds horns. It is by far the most idyllic and the most enchanting sound to ever grace my ears. No words can describe it.
The morning of day two I luxuriated in my hammock for a little while, then packed everything up and had a dirty, mossy, twiggy slide back down to the road. Soon enough, it ended and turned into a trail with steep switchbacks going straight up the forested part of the mountain. At that altitude the lake was completely invisible and everything was foggy with morning mist while the sun was just rising above the clouds.
As I climbed, the scenery changed from humid forest to a sort of idyllic highland type landscape similar to the Italian Apennines, with white rocks, lots of green moss and grass.
The trail passed through several farmers fields with little gates which the polite hiker was expected to simply open and close behind him.
The next thing I knew, there was a din of clanging cow bells and a wool clad little farmer with a bristly white beard was calmly prodding his herd, staff in hand, down the mountain.
That night I snuck myself, my sleeping bag and my backpack into a mossy hollow underneath a massive boulder and, after a meal of mostly chocolate and sausage, fell asleep to the sound of cows crunching grass and tinkling their bells inches away.
To be continued in Pt 2...