"Kim Stanley Robinson - Kistenpass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

I began to think I had under-researched the trip. Maybe my method of going out with only a topo and the
information I could glean from my plastic three-D map wasn’t such a cool thing after all.
The kindly Swiss woman turned off on a side road by a small building called the Hotel Alcetta, still well
below Breil. She told me there was a PTT phone booth in the hotel’s entry, and suggested I use it to call
a taxi that ran out of Breil, and ask it to come down and give me a ride. I thanked her again, and went
into the hotel and made the call, and told the man who answered where I was and where I wanted to go.
Then I went back outside and started walking up the road again, figuring I would see the taxi coming
down for me.

But no taxi ever passed. In desperation I started hitching again. Too bad that woman had not been going
to Breil, or hadn’t been even more of an angel than she had, and given me a ride all the way.

Then another farm wife stopped for me. I got in her Jeep feeling really fond of the women of the
Vorderrhein. I repeated my story, and she too exclaimed “Keee-stee-pahsss!”

By the time I was done describing my day we were in Breil’s town square, and she was dropping me off
at the door of the tourist office. It looked like a village more devoted to farming than tourism, and the
office appeared closed. But the door opened when I tried it, and a surprised young woman looked up
from the book she was reading . She too heard out my story. Her English was almost as bad as my
German, but between us we confirmed that I had wanted to take the cable car up toward Kistenpass,
but that I had learned already it was closed for the summer.

She suggested I call the village’s taxi service and ask him to take me up the farm roads above the
village—these went all the way up to a dairy that was actually a little higher than the cable car’s upper
station. The dairy was in fact the real trailhead for the Kistsenpass trail. The taxi fare would be about thiry
francs, she guessed, meaning about twenty dollars, and the vertical gain, I saw on my map, would be
about eight hundred meters. Such a deal! Cheap at the price, in fact, as it would put me back on
something like my schedule.

I conveyed this to the young woman, and she called the taxi for me. A few minutes later it rumbled into
the square: a big black pick-up truck, with huge snow tires and radio gear sticking out all over it—a truck
that had in fact passed me going downhill as I was walking up from the restaurant. I had been expecting
something more cablike, although now that was obviously a silly expectation.

The driver got out and shook my hand. He was a big man wearing blue jeans and a plaid shirt, with thick
black hair, a round face, and a cheery manner. He spoke no English at all. I explained in German where I
wanted to go, and he nodded and made a gesture: in you go! And off we went.



The steep one-lane road we ascended ran in switchbacks past several of the characteristic farmhouses
one sees in the high alps. The taxi driver, whose name was Mario, talked about these houses as we
drove by them. His German was amazingly clear to me, probably because he was from Ticino and his
first language was Italian. The farmhouses, all enormous, were usually attached to even larger barns, and
together they housed both the herders and their herds. Dairy farming at such altitudes was hard, Mario
said, but they had been doing it for many generations, and had their system perfected. The green alps
themselves were creations of the herders—huge lawns, in effect, cleared of their original load of forest
and rock. The centuries of labor necessary to achieve that kind of a transformation was mind-boggling to
contemplate. We agreed that it was part of what made the Alps feel strange—both safe and dangerous,
domestic and wild—a pretty park that in half an hour could turn nasty and kill you. I mentioned Muir’s