I started up the steep cobblestone road to my partner's parent's former house, still emblazoned in scraffito with the Romansch phrase her father had chosen: "Man proposes and God disposes." [Wish you could see larger photos? Click on the images.] 
As I passed by the house, my mind wandered through the apartment, holding the iron rail as I followed the curling stairway onto the stone floor, then padded into the Stüva (sitting room) and sat on the bench behind the slate table. By the time I was reacquainting myself with the mahogany music stand near the wood stove, I'd gone up the gravel road behind the house and almost reached San Peter, where dear Gaudi's urn is buried. 
I opened the heavy iron gate and crunched across the pebbles to the cemetery's inner wall, where simple square stone plaques hung. I found his and stood looking at the name carved in stone. My throat tightened. I began to cry. My tears were for the empty spaces his death has left in my partner's and her mother's lives. I mourned in anticipation of the loss I will feel, perhaps all too soon: my partner has cancer. 
Sweat pouring off me, I trained for soccer using intervals: walk fast enough to pant, relax the pace while hunting for a good flower specimen amongst hundreds, stop to take a few shots, and then off like a racehorse again. This would have driven my partner nuts--she chugs steadily along like the little engine that could, almost never stopping. I kept at my intervals until I reached the ubiquitous electrified fence. I unhooked the plastic handle, moved through, and hooked it back again. A friend of ours traveling with us had been outraged that there were no warning signs on these gates. How was a tourist to know not to touch the orange fabric tape? What kind of jolt might one suffer? Touching a fence once with his tail was enough to make our cousin's dog shy away from electrified fences forevermore, but the shock certainly didn't kill it. I assume it would just take once to teach a tourist too. 
It was much too steep and the topsoil too fragile to climb straight up, so the trail switched directions back and forth, and always up. I moved in and out of shade as the trees grew more sparse. Shade passed over me as clouds moved across the dazzling blue sky. I kept taking my camera out of my pocket. I'd become obsessed by f-stops and macro-focus on my capable but simple point and shoot camera. Perhaps more of the flowers would have been in focus and the highlights not blown out if I'd let the camera think for itself. 
Sparse spits of rain on my iPad made me look up from reading news about that night's US v. Sweden game in the Women's World Cup. Off to my right was the Piz Padella. The first time my partner and I had made it to the top of the Piz, we'd gone because we had been told "it's the family mountain: the village children just scamper up." While the triumph of being atop the peak wiped our memories of the steep climb that was punctuated by sections with even steeper drop-offs, my fear and the pain in our knees on the way down is forever cemented in our memories. No one scampers up there, much less back down. We swore we'd never hike the "family mountain" again, but, for some reason we made our son do it with us a few years ago. Now all three of us are convinced: we'll never hike up there again. Really.
The gloomy clouds around the Padella reminded me to wipe off the drops on my screen. It was time to go. A sign directed me into the barn to find the "vay-tsay" (WC), which had industrial strength door hinges I could barely move. Inside, there was a nice view out the window so I took a photo to add to my collection of windows. Doubtful that the "Danke" donation box was just a clever money-making operation run by the kid on the trike, I added 40 raps, then went back through the barn and onto the dirt road heading back to the trail head. 
Despite the promise of rain, I passed the trail head to reach another beautiful view. (Not that there are many views in the Engadin that aren't beautiful.) I'd initially planned to sit alone on this hill and read, but on the way up someone had been there eating his lunch. Nearly straight below was Samedan. There was the train station, its railroad tentacles reaching up and down the Inn valley and into the Val Bernina. There was the airport, taking a weather break from spawning sail planes. Small specks, hawks that our friends could have identified, soared high in the sky. Across the valley, atop the Muottas Muragl, was a hotel that used to be painted a muted pink that one could just pick out on the horizon. Now it was a stark, garish white, easily seen in the summer. On all of our visits over the years we've taken the Muottas Muragl Bahn (funicular) up to the hotel and taken one of the walking loops, or hiked to the town of Pontresina.
I heard a noise behind me. I turned to find not a fellow hiker, but a horse, one of the ones I'd seen through the WC window. It was lazily munching grass in the way of my return to the trailhead. I am not wild about meeting large animals outside of their pens. I'd often had to dodge cows, sleeping or standing like boulders on the middle of a trail, under my partner's protection. She loves Brown Swiss cows. As we pass by, she mesmerizes them by murmuring softly how pretty they look and about what a nice day they must be having. I decided I'd just wait for this horse to move along. I sat down on one of two benches placed there by the village, and pondered the darkening clouds.
I turned in the direction of Samedan and went down the gentle slope into the grassy meadow.
Satisfied I was free of the horse, I turned back, faced the Piz Padella, and worked on another photograph. I manipulated the settings on camera to lighten the scene enough to clearly see the mountain itself rather than the details of the clouds. My partner and I have always speculated that "padella" means knee cap, although the top doesn't look much like a knee cap. With a knee cap like that, you could fight like a spurred rooster, but you definitely couldn't play soccer.*
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| Not taken the day of the story! |
Labels: cancer, hiking, ipad, Stories, Switzerland