Living the dream

I had a dream when I was a kid. A literal, “I’m asleep” kind of dream, that is. This isn’t an inspirational post. In it, I’m swimming along the bottom of the pool, my favorite place in all of Childhood’s Kingdom, when I realize I can breathe down there. Not fully, not well, but if I calm down and do it just right, modestly, I can breathe. I remember an infusion of calm and an understanding that everything could be fantastic. Could be better than I’d known to hope for. (It wasn’t until later that I suspected I’d just rolled over and was breathing through my pillow.)

Amsterdam welcomed me my first day

This morning I’m coming up for air. After 21 days of Best of Europe tour-guiding, I’m waking up to a day without appointments, no reservations to confirm or information to convey. Not even a city to depart.

The street is polite vespas and well-dressed Parisians, nothing on my plate but baguette crumbs and the promise of more good food to come, perhaps after a stroll by the Seine? And I remember that dream. Its epiphany that I can do something I really enjoy and get the air I need while doing it. And I realize that’s what I’ve been doing for 21 days.

Swiss Alpine calm

I’ve been swimming, diving into Amsterdam’s historic harbor before turning up the Rhine to reach Austrian Alpine passes, waterfalling down Roman roads to muse about Venetian canals before making my way through old Florence to reach older Rome, just to smile and drift up into Swiss glaciers, a liquid core of calm that persists when I slide down through the vineyards of Burgundy to wash up fully rational on Seine shores.

And I’ve been breathing.

Water was an element of my boyhood joy, and travel is essential for my adult satisfaction. Sharks and me, stop moving and we suffocate. But it’s not a compulsion, not addiction, neither distraction nor delusion. It’s adoration. Adulation. Celebration of our worldwide nation and the strokes that pull us all together.

Islam is supposed to be scary? Me and
the little girl don't buy it. You?

For years I traveled. Helpless before my vagabond urges. It was right for a time, but wrong in the end. Insufficient for the long term, serving nothing but my whims. Now there’s a purpose to my travel. In a world of multimedia capitalists who profit from our fear, who compete for the spectacles that widen our eyes and shrink our horizons, I find something more worthy than mere movement when I take others with me, show them these faces of beauty left here by centuries of human struggle and millennia of natural process.

For twenty one days spread across half a dozen countries we delight in the reality of the places, rooms in our global house, and I watch the tension of the first day dissolve into the ease of the last. Day One I see apprehension when I show them the train track that will reliably bring them home, Day Twenty I drop them off in Paris’s elegant metro maze and say “See you tomorrow” and they’re off without a pause.

And in the calm, when they don’t need me at all, I can imagine them going home, feeling merely tired, to be greeted by the anxious homebound with their pinched brows who desperately inquire “You were in Europe? But weren’t you worried? Didn’t you feel unsafe?”

And in my daydream I see their calm smile, perhaps wearing the appropriate regret for the incidents of the moment, but underneath is the deep understanding that the world is something other than the misconception made up by those make-up talking heads. And my traveling companions ease back to a full library of happy moments, warm welcomes, beautiful humanity and they can shrug off the constipated clench of petty terror. Stories they know better than to buy, now.

Think they wish they'd spent more time fearful and divided?

No, they didn’t feel unsafe. They felt free. If I did my job right. And the memory of every one of their smiles resonates within me, and I feel that dream’s sense of delighted astonishment, astonished delight, and can pull in deep lungfuls of fresh air.

Maybe it’s an inspiration post after all. For me, anyway.

Europe's normalcy and hospitality are waiting, on every boulevard and back street.

Who cares about cows?

Yeah, that looks like a homeland to protect and remember

Farm bills and agricultural subsidies are always a big deal, from the US to the EU, and definitely in Switzerland. This baffled me a bit. Swiss agriculture? In a country that wealthy and stable (take my word for it, or come on tour with me and I’ll explain) why are a few cows such a big deal?

The answer I always gave was national identity. The people of Country X want to see themselves as coming from pastoral roots. This didn’t make a ton of sense to me, since if you didn’t grow up on a farm why do you need to feel like your nation did? But I’m used to not quite understanding identity politics since I come from the rampantly, disastrously, shamefully dominant demographic set. Straight, white, middle-class, American male with full health, mobility, education etc? Having every advantage in life reduced the need for an identity to process it.

But other people will talk about such things until….(wait for it)...the cows come home.

Ain't she so pretty!

That expression was always a mystery to me. I’d picture farmers chatting on the porch until the cows meandered home in the evening light. Or was it that the cows would never come home on their own, so you’d talk forever? That could be, too, but let’s go with something else.

Because it’s wearing a floral headdress.

Every spring, the farmers throughout the Alps drive their cows up to higher pasture for the summer. They stay up there eating rich green grass and justifying Alphorns for the warm sunny months, giving some folks time off to talk endlessly (hence the phrase, I’m thinking) while a few heroes of national identity up in the mountain meadows churn butter and coagulate protein. (Ain’t that just the sexiest phrasing I could have chosen for cheese-making?)

Get on with your cow self!

Leave it to this last tour group I had, with their preternatural luck and timing, to arrive just in time for the almabtrieb, or viehscheid, the annual parade of cows returning from summer pasture. It was stupendous. The cows, dressed in their finest and caring not one udder about it, paraded through town in a ceremonious way that was most a-moo-sing. (You’re welcome.)

So what? So some cows walked through town, why should I blog about it, and why should legislatures spend so much time on ag issues?

In this year of an insane US presidential candidate, United Kingdomers choosing to leave the most successful diplomatic structure in European history, and Colombians voting to reject peace in favor of punitive measures and further bloodshed, well, it’s damn fine to sit back in the sun and watch something so hearty, so earnest, so down-home rustically peaceful and reassuring as a parade of decorated cows coming home.

Not a shabby looking place, that Switzerland

Is it worth it? All the tax revenue spent to prolong a procession of bovine ladies and tractors of cheese? Well, it did me good, and the whole town with me, so I guess the fiscal considerations are a moooo-t point.

I'd seen Switzerland, but not like this

Staubbach Falls, the type of place
I find evidence of the divine.

Sure, technically I’ve been to most European countries, but not exactly in the same style. As a grungy backpacker I ate greasy kebabs and slept on the couch of a wonderfully lunatic girl I met in Prague. As a Rick Steves tour guide? Oh, we just stay in a little Alpine chalet of blond wood, homemade fondue, and a view out my window of the Staubbach Falls that starts as lace but ends as mist after falling 974 feet off the side of the preposterously scenic Lauterbrunnen Valley. No biggie.

And if that place is booked, we move to another chalet, more homemade fondue, more gorgeous views, but closer to the cable car that (Did I not mention this?) will take us up 1,568 feet from Stechelberg to Gimmelwald. Impressive? As we rise into the cloud cover and look down the Wagnerian Lauterbrunnen Valley, you bet your hintern it is!

Then from Gimmelwald, another cable car takes us up a further 768 feet to Murren, where children run, ride, and presumably ski through the early morning light to school among avalanche protection tripods and evergreen conifers that stand equanimitously tranquil in both snow and sun.

All done? Nope, the next one rises an impressively steep 3,445 feet to Birg, where the air is noticeably chillier when you step out onto the Birg Skyline Walk, where the terra firma ends long before a metal grating that lets you see the cliff dropping away below your feet, and only then do you reach the clear plexiglass that lets you look straight down, only hazily encumbered, into the vertiginous expanse of glacial geologic debauchery.

Looking out behind the Schilthorn, the direction generally considered less scenic

The exclamation mark proves they mean it.

Now to the actual destination. The last cable car rises another thousand feet or so to reach the Schilthorn. From there, at nearly 10,000 feet, you can look across the Bernese Alps to the storied peaks of the Mönch, Eiger, and Jungfrau, and walk along the ridge line, past where the marvelously redundant sign warns “You are now entering an area where hazards inherent to mountain regions may occur!” Just in case you hadn’t noticed.

Looking down at Birg from the Schilthorn, the least
spectacular of the four cable car rides to get there.

And if neither the view nor the revolving restaurant are quite enough to hold your interest? How about George Lazenby? You know, the Australian James Bond? The last one you remember on Trivia Night, and only remember when the cocky guy in the corner whispers it at top volume to his friends? Just watch On Her Majesty’s Secret Service before you come, then you’ll recognize all the scenes that were filmed here. That will make the Bond exhibit even more interesting, though even clueless, I still found the anecdotes of people losing limbs, pioneering film-making techniques, and drunkenly volunteering to ski into trees at 60 mph were pretty darn interesting. Oh, and the guy who had to hold up his own head by the hair after he broke his neck while filming. That story is excellent.

So yes, I’d been to Switzerland before. And yes, it’s totally different with a Rick Steves tour. And yes, you can come with us. And finally no, you won’t have to hold up your own broken neck on the way to the doctor. That’s what the guide is for.

In my email; or, landscape porn from Switzerland

No worries on slow response to my last email, especially since it’s now my turn to apologize for the same thing. How was the rest of your trip? And coming home? Is it weird to be surrounded by people speaking English? Did the American grocery store blow your mind?

Oh man, I was indeed nutty busy those last few days before coming over here for tour guide training, a feeling that has only intensified since. I am mostly loving it, with sinusoidal swells of fear that I won't be able to manage the 7,000 ongoing tasks of a solo guide. Also, what the hell am I going to say on the bus tomorrow? I'm supposed to talk about what it was like to live in Belgium. Do I talk about European racism? Tone it down and say “xenophobia” instead?

It seems preposterous and wonderful that people might trust me with all this, as well as ponderously primed for disaster. I take notes on paper and in gray matter all day, then get back to my room when the clocks have started over, with every intention of reviewing my scribbles, do research, and prep for tomorrow, but my eyelids have a way of punctuating all that.

Oh, and my new shoes? They stink. Swamp breath. Paris was l’inferno, and when I wasn’t walking with the group, I was hoofing it to the sights people are going to ask me about. Speaking of which, did you know art is actually pretty cool? My dominant memory from our previous trip to the Louvre was where to sit and wait it out. Turns out it’s much more fun when you’re not 7. Of course I’m super glad mom took us there, but now I can enjoy it in the present tense as well.

And how did I make it so many years without every really looking at the time? How long does it take to walk from here to there? No idea. To buy tickets? Nope. To take a metro across town? Not the foggiest.

But today at "work" I took a series of gondola/cable car/flying thingies up into the clouds of the Swiss Alps, and walked along an alpine ridge between old drifts of sliding snow and boisterous clusters of the season's first cleansing flowers, while somewhere off in the godlike shadows of glacial blue and limestone gray, the rumble of falling snow reminded us that we are insignificant here. So there's that.

Hey...I think that just wrote a blog for me, more or less. Thank you. Because these days are far too full of Doing, and empty of Sleeping, to leave me time or wavelength to write. Say hi to your lady for me, we’re headed for Germany next.

(See four other pics from the day on the vagabondurges.com version here.)