Grüezi Miteinander!

So the Swiss greet a pair or more (one per­son alone gets an unadorned Grüezi) and we’ve had good oppor­tu­nity to prac­tice it today, mov­ing beyond Hei­di­land and into Graubün­den, the remote part of Switzer­land where the very old lan­guage Roman­isch still has a tiny strong­hold in the population.

As we left the hotel in Bad Ragaz this morn­ing, the pro­pri­etor was look­ing at our web­site, very enthused about it, though he calls him­self an “unbe­liever” raised under com­mu­nism in Croa­tia with rel­a­tives who are both Catholic and Protes­tant Chris­tians, Mus­lims, and Jews. He was curi­ous about prayer; we told him we’d pray for him as we con­tin­ued on.

The weather was once again beau­ti­ful, clear, and even hot. Unfor­tu­nately we got a late start (again) and just as we were leav­ing Bad Ragaz were star­tled to see the road signs indi­cat­ing the dis­tance to the next des­ti­na­tion, quite a bit far­ther than expected. It turns out that our Google browser, being set to the Amer­i­can ver­sion, cal­cu­lates dis­tances in miles, not in kilo­me­ters, but we are so accus­tomed to using kilo­me­ters in Europe that it didn’t even occur to us to check which mea­sure­ment was being used. Which means a dis­tance that we thought would be a breezy 18 km turned out to be a lengthy 18 miles (about 30 km). That was dis­cour­ag­ing. It turned out to be a long day’s walk phys­i­cally as well as psy­cho­log­i­cally and we were really feel­ing it by the end. (On the bright side, my flaw­lessly lanced blis­ters have given me no grief at all.)

As dif­fi­cult as any­thing is the fact that we are too tired to read at night or fol­low the news or really any­thing else, so we have no new input going into our brains. In the long hours of doing noth­ing but walk­ing our minds get stuck like scratchy records on the same thoughts over and over. I have never been so bored in the pres­ence of my own mind. I also note that we are just about at the mid­point of our trek. The monas­tic tra­di­tion came up with the handy term “noon­day devil”—in the morn­ing you’re fresh and eager, in the evening the end is in sight, but at noon you have nei­ther ben­e­fit and that’s when the trou­ble comes. This is the noon of our pil­grim­age and the rest­less­ness has struck. I’m hop­ing the strik­ing changes in land­scape, flora, fauna, cul­ture, and archi­tec­ture in Italy will cure this.

The lit­tle vari­ety in the scenery today was that, unlike in days past, we walked by a lot of indus­try. It’s amaz­ing how the alpine land­scape is marred by an enor­mous fac­tory declar­ing that it makes “energy out of trash.” In prin­ci­ple we like the idea, though we kind of wish it could hap­pen some­where else. Same for the end­less string of con­crete fac­to­ries. It occurred to me that this is a good argu­ment in favor of tourism—there is a vested inter­est in pre­serv­ing the nat­ural land­scape unspoiled. Hei­di­land may have its own tack­i­ness, but at least it’s on a small scale and more con­gru­ous with the surroundings.

Besides the human impact, we saw still more of the Rhine—the most strik­ing part was where a trib­u­tary from the val­ley, gray with silt, flowed into the milky turquoise of the main branch, cre­at­ing two dis­tinct col­ors of river flow­ing side by side. There were a few lizards, a few cows, a few crows, and still more corn—makes you won­der what on earth they grew before corn came along! We are pre­sum­ably walk­ing uphill but our alti­tude has stayed steady in the 500 m above sea level range. Only at the end of the day did we climb a bit higher to the town of Tamins for the night.

Tamins is a Reformed village—as in many other places in Europe, towns are actu­ally con­fes­sion­ally aligned, though the res­i­dents are free to be what­ever they want, they just might have to travel to the next town to get it—and our evening hosts were another pas­tor cou­ple serv­ing the Tamins church, Georg and Anja. Anja grew up speak­ing Roman­isch in one of the nearby vil­lages; until the age of 12 half of her school hours were in Roman­isch and the other half in Ger­man. The two of them live in a picture-perfect Swiss chalet which hap­pens to be the par­son­age (and per­haps more impor­tantly has a wash­ing machine, so our cumu­la­tively stinky, hand-washed daily out­fits can get a more thor­ough clean­ing) and they wel­comed us with a lovely din­ner fea­tur­ing the local spe­cialty, kugelhof—a sort of bundt cake, but a bread, stud­ded with big chunks of bacon. Just the thing for weary, can’t-distinguish-kilometers-from-miles pilgrims.

This morn­ing we’ll turn away from the Rhine and begin the steady upward march in earnest, an esti­mated 1000 m. The weather is sup­posed to be nice again today and not too bad tomor­row, but on Saturday—when we are due actu­ally to cross Sep­ti­mer Pass and begin the descent down the Ital­ian side of the Alps—the fore­cast is for highs of 0 degrees Cel­sius with mixed rain and snow. We are try­ing to be cheer­ful about the chance to expe­ri­ence, once again, Luther-like authen­tic­ity (he would’ve crossed in Decem­ber 1510), but this def­i­nitely falls into the cat­e­gory of mak­ing the best out of a bad sit­u­a­tion. Prayers for safety (and incor­rect mete­o­rol­o­gists, just this once) would be much appreciated!

Steve Godsall-Myers says:
September 24, 2010 at 4:24 pm
Dear Andrew and Sarah, Con­grats on reach­ing the halfway point, prayers on reach­ing the ‘noon­day davil’. I found a prayer in Ger­man hym­nal (a ver­sion used in Bavaria) for mid­day (Mit­tag). It has the head­ing, “Innehal­ten in der Mitte des Tages” — pause in the mid­dle of the day. (Inter­est­ing — innehal­ten can mean backpedal, maybe you have had this expe­ri­ence, even though you are on foot). The prayer seems to cap­ture the notion of a noon­day devil. In my best trans­la­tion effort: “God, in the mid­dle of the day, I come to you. Do you hear me? I bring no faith, I have no peace. I lay my cares, my doubts, my fears on you — in your hands. Be with me so that I am with you. Lead me, so that I find you.“
God go with you and God hold you. Know that you are also held in many prayers. Steve G-M
Reply