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

famous description of California’s Sierra Nevada, as gentle wilderness; we agreed that the Swiss Alps
could well be called savage civilization.

Passing one of the big barns, I mentioned that I had once hiked by one just as it was being opened up for
the spring, and how struck I had been by the sight of the astonished new calves staggering in the sunlight .
Mario laughed and said that was one of his favorite sights of spring. They see the sky! he said. For the
first time they see the sky, and it blows their mind!

At these altitudes, Mario went on, dairy farming was unprofitable. The government subsidized it, paying
more the higher the farm. But it wasn’t enough to keep the young people at home. The houses had been
built to hold extended families of three or four generations; now they were mostly empty, kept going by
husband-and-wife teams and maybe a couple of kids. The homes had become like millionaire’s
mansions, much too large for their occupants. People thought that would be great, but it wasn’t so. It
would be sad.

Too much money makes you sad, I ventured.

I wouldn’t know, he said with a laugh. I’m very happy myself! I live in a suitcase! I live in this taxi!

He had lived in many places since leaving Ticino, including Zürich. His German was fluent, but he didn’t
appear to care about or even to notice my grammatical blunders, which were many. As he said when we
discussed it, if you get your meaning across, the rest doesn’t matter. This thought made me even more
comfortable, and I damned the torpedoes and sped full ahead. And I suppose it is also true that I had
finally crossed some threshold in my miserable German. Lisa and I had been going to night classes twice
a week for nearly two years, and they were finally beginning to have an effect: I seemed could hold up
my end of the conversation. As we continued up the narrow gravel track we talked about Zürich, about
what I was doing in Switzerland, about our wives’ work, about where he had lived, about Ticino and the
Vorderrhein, about the German Swiss as opposed to the Italian and French Swiss. I confessed that I had
been the one to call him from the restaurant below Breil, but had failed to flag him down because I had
been looking for a cab like one from Manhattan or London. He laughed at that, said it didn’t matter, as
we had finally met in the end.

That was the best conversation in German I ever had, and when Mario dropped me off at the dairy barn
at the upper end of the road, shaking my hand and taking off with a wave, I was really happy. All those
dull classroom hours had finally been put to use!

Not only that, but it was only noon! Between the kindness of the Swiss farm women, and the
professional help of the tourist gal and Mario, I was not all that far behind my original schedule. Although
looking at my map and the slope above me, it did seem that I was going to have to hurry.

#

I took off up the trail, and immediately lost it. That’s hard to do in Switzerland, where most trails are
obnoxiously over-signed and as obvious as freeways, especially across the alps, where they are brown
trenches in the grass. But this alp was contoured by many narrow dirt runnels, either cow trails or the
erosion patterns left by solifluction, and I had apparently taken off on one of these false trails, until it
petered out and disappeared.

Probably I had headed out too low. But it was an easy enough slope, so I traversed up the grass,
assuming I would soon intercept the real trail.