So now back to Europe, Switzerland to be exact. It’s Christmas Day and I’ve decided to climb the foothills of a mountain to perch somewhere and reflect on the full year. I packed some bread, wine, and calamari in American sauce, my go to for a growling stomach and bored headspace.
The foothills were open spaces, no forest or craggy rocks, sort of lush, wet grass that grew in clumps so I could get a good foothold. It was steep enough to where it made sense for me to zig zag some making the trek a bit longer but I had nowhere to be except inside my tent like an eagle to his nest.
As I walked upwards on this inverted soil behind me there were gray clouds at the peak of the mountain opposite, across the valley.
I should’ve picked up the pace with that 80 pound backpack and no real destination but I didn’t. Instead I sat down to watch snow flurries accumulate across the valley, opposite my mountain. I call it my mountain because that is how Americans think when they travel. We look at landscapes and call them our own. There is enough to go around, right? If I’m going to stop to observe a mountain I want that mountain to be right at my fingertips. I may even want it moved. Just pinch the peak and move it over a few feet. That’s what happens when you give an American a foothill.
Now that the hill was mine I felt alright trekking all over the seemingly unowned land, unoccupied by farmers in alpine huts that don’t own guns. I sensed zero hostility on my part too. I was just there because I’m used to this type of open space having a public designation.
As I made my way up the useless tract I eventually came upon a flat area where there were wooden structures with wood railings along the perimeter. I hopped over one and considered hopping over the building but I hadn’t yet earned the title Santa Clause.
Instead I was just a boy, still not able to drink legally, who was going to have a swig of wine with the intention of getting drunk alone like I did as a younger boy and as a grown man who always found that drinking alone was like having a rare disease that is curable only by being in more and more pain that you must cut out with the dull end to a useless life.
But this wasn’t the end nor dull.
One of those structures was a lean-to that was full of wood probably used in the summer months by Swiss Army Scouts (or whatever you call campers in the Alps), to sit around a fire where “the other fellow’s first”. This wasn’t my camp. This wasn’t my wood. I had to imagine that I was the other fellow.
I obliged by stoking a fire, opening a can of calamari, and popping the cork. There I sat under the spacious lean-to as flames hissed at the snow and cast orange light into the night until I let the wintertime bury the logs under a few inches of snow. I retreated into my tent alone, vulnerable to the winter, like a Robin on the willow branch.
Francis Erich McElroy 