Lukas Grimm climbs the stovepipe.

Krell, David Farrell

You have to set off from the Schweizer Alpenclub Hotel quite early in the morning else you will never make it by nightfall and it is too frightening to fly in the dark. The morning shade will be with you for the first half of the day since you are climbing the southeastern wall of the canyon. It is August but in the morning shade it feels like November. By the time you break the sun line you will be in a deep sweat and you will have to carry the clothes that are on your back in addition to the rucksack. The rucksack contains two slices of brown bread, a chunk of mountain cheese--something like raclette but to be eaten uncooked, unmelted--and two bottles of Culmbacher ale. Did you say you would have to carry the clothes? No. Today you can drop the jacket and the shirts on the side of the path as you go. Fold them neatly, Quentin did, so that other climbers will see they are not trash and will make use of them. Someone should make use of them.

Hiking up the road to the S.A.C. Hotel from the funicular station, where you had to leave your car, you couldn't help but notice all the memorials bolted to the cliff face. Children killed on the road, men killed felling trees in the forest above the road, everyone else killed by avalanches that removed the road. Some of the names stick with you: Lukas Tresch, "hurried by death," bearing your Christian name with him when a winter storm took him out, rest in pieces, Lukas; Fritz Jauch, a fifteen-year-old, "killed in an accident"; Franz Z'graggen-Jauch, a relative of the boy, only a few years older than he, but killed by a felled and falling tree. The photographs too stick with you: a thin, rugged old man with triste eyes and an elf's hat, a boy of fifteen just dying to live his life, a sweet nineteen-year-old who is nothing other than that, sweet, nineteen, and dead.

Fortunately there will be no photographs, no memorials, no local hagiography, no narrative frame. That is the advantage of foreign climbs. Foreign climes. Your punning papa would have been proud. No cloying sentimentality, except for what you bring with you in your rucksack. Brown bread and cheese to remember the earth by and two bottles of ale for courage and a good flight.

You pick your way through Cowshit Bog (that's what she named it after you lost your balance and fell into it the first time the two of you were here in the valley) then descend to the steel bridge that spans the raging Charstelenbach. Even the sharp grating of the bridge's surface doesn't keep your Vibram soles from slipping on the wet metal. You remember that years ago you leaned out into the mist over the pliant steel cables of the bridge, taking photographs at a thousandth of a second. One of them was almost sharp. Now you grip the uppermost cable and make the crossing quickly above the roar, unable to hear yourself not thinking.

High bushes obscene with pink flowers. Flat-leafed meadow rose. They are waiting for the evening sun, the only sun they will ever get. She would have known what they are called in Latin. She would have known and she would have bored you with all the botanical details you never needed or wanted to know. Her precious weeds. She would run a hundred meters ahead or hang back two hundred meters behind, bent over a bush. Not yours. She knew how to make a man feel unimportant. She was good at that. She was good at many things but she was especially good at that. You do not miss her.

Question: What man could be jealous of a juniper or a rhododendron or a lupine or a fungus?

Answer: Any man that was with her.

It was all a fake, of course. She pretended to be enamored of her mushrooms and her weeds just so she could feign indifference to you. All a fake, you are sure of it. Yet her ghost makes you ask whether now at summer's end it is the first or second generation of the plants you are looking at or that are looking at you: probably the first generation of blue ironhat, pink heather (they call it Erika here), the powdery purple juniper berry, and the delicate yellow propeller petals of Saint John's Wort; probably the second generation of wild columbine, sour sorrel, and rhododendron. (What are those red bulbous excrescences on the rhododendrons? Buds? Seeds? She would have known: that was her specialty.) Her ghost makes you realize how little you know--how little you will ever know now--about all these green things crowding and crowning the earth. Weeds. Why all that fuss over weeds when all that counts is the sea?

When you were a kid in Mendocino Papa would drive you north to the cliffs and the sandy shore. How cold the Pacific was all through the summer--though you didn't even notice the cold until you were grown up and took her there, her with her fair foul mouth.

--Fucking Christ, it's freezing! she cried, her arms wrapped around her ribs and squeezing her breasts until her cleavage climbed deliciously to her throat.

--It's refreshingly brisk, you countered.

--Fucking freezing!

--Bracing.

--Fucking frigid!

--Contradictio in adiecto.

--For Christ's sake, we're in California. Talk English.

--No one in California speaks English.

And so it went. The relentless give-and-get of argument: even lovemaking was a quarrel.

--You wanna have a fight? she would say, with the first bruise already forming on your aching bicep.

--Why can't we just kiss like other people?

--Chicken shit, she'd growl with a contemptuous laugh, and then, at long last, after several bruises more, she'd relent.

The path is so narrow now that you have to brush up against those bushes of pink obscenities and collect on your jacket and trousers all the dew that has settled on them overnight. Wet and cold here below. Up above, brilliant sun and blazing blue sky. You cannot see the glacier yet. Nor the Stovepipe.

Already your breath is starting to come in shorter gasps. Clouds of wispy vapor. Vanishing. Maybe your heart--already pounding against your ribcage as though it wants the ultimate freedom--will give out before you reach the halfway point. That thought makes you stop and laugh out loud. A heart attack would be one of life's little ironies. But it won't happen. You will have to climb. You will have to learn how to fly. Before nightfall.

You arrive at a crossroads: Griessboden [left arrow]. Hufi [up arrow]. Red paint on silver rock. You go [up arrow]. The upper Maderan Valley opens itself to you as you head eastward and upward. You feel the oppressive presence of the vast gray wall of the Chli' Windgallen on the other side of the Charstelenbach. Only the wide-bellying, arching strips of green that nestle into the wall lend it life. The green strips grow rarer as you climb. Countless waterfalls on the northern face; otherwise unrelieved gray on gray. On your own side, the southern, there is plenty of shale to keep life interesting, especially when you have to cross streams that are more waterfalls than streams. Your goal: the Stovepipe. You cannot see it yet, but you can think about it, you can calculate.

The Stovepipe is not the highest butte on the Windgallen range, which divides the Maderan Valley from the Glarner Alps, but it is surely the steepest and most forbidding. Its rounded, oblong face is the hardest to climb on the southern side. You never got good enough even to try to scale it. You love the sea too much. The sea of kelp and krill, whale and whitefish, Moray and Medusa, hermit crab and gregarious barracuda, sea lion and sea horse. The generous and all-devouring sea. She was the one who always wanted to troll the mountains for weeds. She would have wanted it this way for you. She would have wanted to see you fly. Her mocking laugh. You won't miss her.

--So, you're on the wing? she quipped, the day you left her at the medical center.

You never saw her again. Her disappearing act. Though it wasn't an act. You wouldn't have known a thing but for her picture postcard of the cove. Your cove.

Courageous or brash, who can say? Scrambling up the stairs of the Eiffel Tower; worse, dashing down: she walked right up to the edge of every railing, thrilled at each view of the city spinning out of control down below, the Seine winding snakily to the south. You held back.

--Chicken shit, she growled.

--Damn right, you said.

She'd kick you out of the swayback bed in your apartment over the rue Descartes every morning at the first sign of dawn to go get the croissants and start the coffee brewing.

--Pas trop cuits! she'd command.

--Not too well-done, don't worry.

Crumbs at the center of the swayback mattress and coffee stains on the sausage pillow. Her morning breath incomprehensibly sweet and sour at once. Her fair foul mouth. The two of you very young. When was that? Too long ago. How long ago since she? Too long ago.

Every morning you would open the heavy oaken door that led from the courtyard to the rue Descartes and find a fresh hillock of dog shit to greet you.

--Bon jour! Bienvenu a Paris! Bienvenu a Piz Crotte! Welcome to Mount Dogturd.

Usually of an impossible orange color, as though the French stuffed their dogs with nothing but carrots and tangerines. Rue Dogshit. Descartes--he's the one who says the soul is easier to know than the body. I think therefore I am only potentially ankle-deep in doggie-do. Then you would remember that your parents were German. You'd remember, or she'd remind you.

--That wouldn't happen in Germany, she would say, pointing at the steamy orange pile.

--Damn right.

--Even the dogs are constipated in Germany.

--Damn right.

The years in Freiburg at the natural food store were your best, even she had to admit that. At least until Max. The Reformhaus. No matter how poor the two of you were you made enough to spend every summer in Poun. A Condor flight to Athens, a people bus to Volos, the chicken and goat bus to Zagora, then on to Poun. Slate roofs of whitewashed houses, flower boxes in all the windows. Your best years, in spite of all the anemic cranky old ladies who claimed to know more about your own business than you did. She was good with them: the right mixture of courtesy and fuckyou. She kept you away from the front of the store. Too much fuckyou. You unloaded the boxes in the back. In between boxes you tried to get some reading done for your dissertation. Biscuit boxes and Bismarck. Bismarck was drier than the Swedish straw biscuits and so you stopped writing it, stopped writing it about five years before you realized you had stopped.

--That dissertation of yours has caused us more grief! she griped one day.

--What dissertation? you replied, and that was when both of you knew you'd never finish it.

You both knew you'd never finish your doctorate, never teach, even though there was never anything else you intended to do as far back as you could remember. Papa was a professor of civil engineering; you would be a professor of something else. Papa was German. You would go to Germany to study. You were sure she would dump you there; as it turned out, she liked losers. That was when the two of you took over the natural food store in the Wiehre. You couldn't buy it outright, but you ran the shop for old Mutti Drescher for nine years until she died and left the store to you--her only family. You built up the business for five more years then sold it for an absurd profit and retired.

She chose that moment to get sick. Another of life's little ironies?

What are you saying? She didn't choose anything. Not even her hallucinations that you were dumping her and seeing other women, even if you did need a little r 'n r at the end. She fumed and stormed so she could force you out and die alone, you know that now. They were early steps on her very deliberate way down. At the time it seemed like stupid, misplaced anger. As though you had brought it on. It made no sense.

As though anything made sense, with her then, with you now. No sense. Just direction. Up. Then down. One and the same.

Every few minutes, off to your right, both up ahead and right behind you, you can hear the stones rolling down the cliff face. Stones, not yet rocks; clickclack, not yet rumble and roar. You recall that the Maderan Valley is famous for its slides and avalanches: snow, mud, firs, rocks, people. The faces in the photographs. When the snow-slides come they release so much wind and suck out such a vacuum in the valley that the pines burst at half their height long before the snow reaches them, exploding as though by action at a distance. You can hear them snapping like match sticks all the way down the mountainside. You can hear them, that is, provided you've left some of the windows in your cabin open. If you've closed all your windows the pressure inside will build to the point where you'll be shot out of the nearest sealed window like a cannonball and they'll find you a hundred and fifty meters abroad several months later when the snow melts and you'll be well preserved with that same momentary surprised look on your face.

--What's that roar? what's that infernal snapping? your face will still be asking in June, whereas in February there will have been only the feeling of a crushing, suffocating pressure and then an explosive release.

Free at last. As free as your heart wants to be now.

For the moment it is only a few friendly pebbles falling from higher up the mountain. With a bow to Newton. You are still hours away from the sun line but already you are in a deep sweat. You are thinking about discarding that jacket. But no. The shadow is still so deep here it is like the night. You are approaching the first waterfall. You cannot see it yet but you can hear it. Soon you'll be in its mist, in its midst. Papa again. The incorrigible punster. It will be important then not to slip. It would be foolish to hurt yourself now. A bad joke, worse even than a pun, lower than the lowest form of humor: broken and moaning on the banks of the Charstelenbach--they wouldn't find you for days.

What was it she used to say? The point is to get inside a feeling, to get right to the very heart of it and to stay there. Not to be in such a hurry to return to the surface.

--You never give yourself time, she said. Lie back. Don't do anything. Just stay there, she said. Do nothing. Let me do you.

All her feelings were deep-sea feelings: she could stay under water longer than anyone who wasn't a fish. You could do it too, just as long as she could. Later she would lay her hand on your sack and scoop up your eggs like pallid orange urchin innards and hold them as you lay there, the two of you talking endlessly into the Greek night. You could stay under water inside the feeling as long as she did that. You could fan your newly formed gills and feel deeply. You could become the fish the mollusk the sea cucumber she wanted you to be.

Or you would plunge into the sea that she always carried with her. You would swallow brine, pass it through the gills she gave you between your throat and your chest. The freshness and sweet lemon of her brackish water, like her fair foul mouth in the mornings. She was a very contradictory person.

You asked her once, more than once, if she thought of you while she was coming.

--Never, she replied.

--Never?

--I never think of anyone in particular. Not you, not me, not anyone.

--Sometimes you say my name.

--Do I get it right?

--You haven't called me Ralph yet.

--There's never been a Ralph.

--I thought you said people didn't matter?

--Leave it alone, will you?

Her name was always on your lips when you finally gave over and leapt into the unfathomable. You are sure she was thinking of you, she must have been thinking of you.

The sun line is closer. Perhaps an hour away. Not a cloud in the sky. What luck. Infinite visibility. Perfect flying weather.

You have by now made your way across two broad swaths of gravel and three small waterfalls. The waterfalls are rivulets, really, except that the canyon is too steep for rivulets: the water leaps and skips rather than flows. Brooks of water, brooks of stone. Cleavages in the mountainside filled with chunks and flakes and occasional boulders of granite, shale, marble--whatever the high mountains have donated by way of water. The granite is stained with rust. In a stream bed you spy the first chunk of white marble, veined with yellow and blue, petrified Gorgonzola.

Then, just below the sun line, you see something new: a high bank of frozen snow hollowed out below by a glacial brook. If you duck your head just a bit you can walk upstream through the ice tunnel; the tunnel narrows at the other end to a tiny vaulted opening above the gurgling water. The ice wall inside is gritty with granite dust; it glows with the cool incandescence of winter. You wonder whether the roof would hold your weight if you tried to walk across the top. You will not try. You turn and scramble back downstream to the opening and emerge now into blinding sunlight. You forgot that the sun line moves. It was moving to meet you halfway all the while.

The warmth is immediate. You slip the straps of the rucksack from your shoulders. Your shoulders say thank you. You doff your green army jacket. You were never in the army. You got the jacket from some friends who had access to the PX near Frankfurt; they weren't in the army either but they delivered newspapers to the service personnel. You fold the jacket neatly, Quentin did, you lay it on a flat rock that bears the trail mark: three stripes, white red white. It is the first difficult thing you have to do. To leave that jacket. But you have to leave it. It would keep you warm tonight up on the Stovepipe and you cannot afford to tempt temptation. Someone will see all the years of service that remain in the army jacket. Years of service for the services. Papa would have been proud. Finally.

You were never in the army even though the Gulf of Tonkin had just occurred and they called you up and you went to the armory for your medical. Half your friends at the university were called up at the same time. The lottery meant something different back then: get dead quick.

--Conscientious objector, your friends all said. It's the only way to go. The only way not to go.

--I've never been conscientious about anything in my life. I just don't want to kill anybody for Walt Rostow.

--What you want or don't want doesn't mean a rat's turd. They'll draft your ass, man. Conscientious objector, that's the only way.

--I read a book by Walt Rostow once. It was well written.

--Fuckin'a?

--But I don't want to kill anybody for him. It wasn't that well written.

--The only poor bastard who's gonna get himself killed is you.

But you didn't get yourself killed. The chief medical officer at the armory stopped you. He was a captain who looked as though he were eighteen years old, though he must have been older. From Harvard Medical School no less. (How do you know that? You must have asked him. When exactly did you ask him?) There you were, with a thousand other guys, shuffling in line from one table to the next, surrendering the file that was your fig leaf. Afraid you might turn out to be gay, the cock of the walk. You told the captain at the front table about that back injury but like an idiot you eliminated your only chance.

--That was seven or eight years ago. It hasn't bothered me since. I'm fine.

The Harvard medical captain nodded slowly. He noticed that you didn't talk like a normal person. He asked you questions about your graduate study and your research.

--I'm interested in Bismarck as an old man, after Wilhelm fires him. Nobody's done that yet.

The captain nodded slowly, made a brief notation.

--Move on.

After you'd made the round of tables, had your lungs checked and your balls squeezed, not the way she did, you wound up once again at the Harvard captain's makeshift desk.

--What's so interesting about Bismarck in his old age?

--He was so powerful, he could have toppled the young Wilhelm, or at least held him in check. Why didn't he? That's my question.

The captain seemed to be pondering the problem of the aging Bismarck and the upstart Kaiser Wilhelm II.

--I don't like the look of that back, he said.

Three weeks later your 4-F came in the mail. Six months later the others who had been herded through the armory that day were losing their legs and their lives. It is worth hanging onto life just for the surprises, hanging on just as long as you can.

You have only now removed your jacket. Already you are feeling the damp heat, the heaviness of your flannel shirt. You are climbing steadily in full sunlight. Night is an eternity away.

The two of you lay on the chilly night beach below Poun near the smoldering bonfire and studied the stars. Neither of you knew anything about them. Even in August you needed your sweater late at night or early in the morning: the breeze off the sea and the refrigerator sand. Some stars were falling, but not all of them.

--There's the Big Dipper, you said.

--Everybody knows the Big Dipper.

--There's the Little Dipper.

--Everybody who can find the Big Dipper knows where the Little Dipper is.

Silence. Sidereal time passed.

--What do you suppose is being dipped up up there? she asked.

--Huh?

--By the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper? What's being dipped up ?

--Don't say anything crude. You'll spoil the mood.

--The mood? What's the mood? I was just thinking of Orion's Belt.

--Orion's Belt? Wait, don't tell me....

She scrunched closer.

--I want to undo it. I want to fuck the stars.

--You should settle for less.

--You should rise to the occasion.

Her mockery. Her eyebrows and her lips working the sarcasm, doing the seduction. Her laughter, boisterous then quiet. Her deft hands undoing Orion's Belt, renovating the night sky, rebuilding the pale universe.

You have to tighten your belt a notch now because you've removed your flannel shirt, the blue-checkered one, the red one too ostentatiously lumberjacky, and now your jeans are too loose. Still size thirty-four. An achievement for a man of fifty. In his early fifties. Going on sixty.

--Who eats like a pig, she would have added delicately.

You tighten the belt a notch and then fold the shirt after holding each armpit to your nose for identification purposes. There is enough of you there to give you pause, more on the left than on the right, but you fold it neatly, don't mention his name again, both his and hers, Quentin the sister's daughter's name too, and place it on a yarrow patch near a scrubby rhododendron bush, one of the last this high up the valley. You place a flat rock over the heart of the shirt so that it doesn't blow away in the relentless glacial wind of the Alps. The wind blows steadily out of the east, sweeping over the glacier and into your face. Propitious for flight?

You walk on. You notice your shoes, your mountain shoes, your worn but still sturdy hiking boots. Odd that you have not thought of them before this. What will you do with them up on top? With your boots off or on? They are light, you could keep them on. It would hurt to land on your bare feet. And your socks? There are so many little decisions to make. From minute to minute. The decisions keep you going. Which a minute will reverse.

Up ahead a jutting rib of rock. You round it and make a sharp jog to the left. The northern wall across the valley opens up and now you see the snow-capped peaks of the Chli' Ruchen and the Chalchschijen. Silver rock and white snow against a sky on fire with blue. Cerulean would be the color, though cerulean is more a sound than a color. Your eyes are tearing. The sky is on fire with blue and your eyes are tearing as though you were in Greece. The sun is in the southeast, at your back as you gaze across the valley, but the sky is on fire and your eyes are tearing. You cannot see the Stovepipe yet. There is still a way to climb before the Chalchschijen deigns to reveal it.

Is that the Chli' Ruchen or the Grosse? You can never tell. Their locations look so different on the map, you'd have to be born here to tell. Anna's son Sepp down at the hotel would know. Anna too would know, she especially would know, she knows about everything and everyone in the valley. Brahms was here, she said, and that philosopher who went nuts, not Descartes. Bismarck was never here, not even in his old age, not that you know of, anyway; you gave up reading about him before you sold the Reformhaus. You gave it up and decided you would never grow old and useless like Bismarck so that some smartass neophyte could fire you at will or whim. Better to go out in a blaze of glory, you thought.

That long stretch of green grass with the path bisecting it: reach the top of that and you will see the glacier. The massive Hufi.

--We're hoofing it to the Hufi, she said, the first time you made the climb together.

--You're just like my old man. The munster punster. Except that you never get the umlaut right.

--The American mouth is lazy, she replied by way of defense.

--That's the last thing I'd say about your mouth, you said, slipping your arm about her waist.

She was so thin even back then you could feel the vertebrae as your fingertips grazed them on their way to that inward curve of soft flesh above the hip.

--Then I guess I'm not the purrfect Amurrican, she growled, drawling it out like a cowpoke from the Panhandle.

--No, not the perfect American, Gott sei Dank!

Then her arm slipped beneath yours and around your waist.

The two of you were very much together then. Soon you will not miss her.

And this was your secret valley, your Shangri-La, too steep for the ski industry, too narrow for much of a paved road, too lonely for normal people. And then there was you. The two of. She was seven years younger, eighteen when you met in Greece, you teased her about her feet. She wore an unreadable smile as she unbuttoned.

--My feet? They've taken me here and there, she said.

--Feet in the clouds, head on the ground, she said.

--I've been around, she said.

She had the gift of understatement. She had been around and she had learned and she passed on her lore to you, who never finished a dissertation. And she worked hard, harder than you ever did, and she gave the two of you whatever money she earned. And she refused to think about going back to the States in defeat, no matter how nerveracking the poverty and the pointlessness of your life in Germany.

--So what happens if we do go back? she growled, her hands on her hips in defiance.

--I don't know. What happens?

--We plop down on my mom's couch and watch "Laverne and Shirley" and say "Some day we're gonna make it."

--We'd write a better song than that.

--Yeah, but could we sing it on a bicycle?

You were both still writing songs back then. You had given up singing, you were going to produce her. During one of her recording sessions in Germany you watched her from behind playing her big old Martin and singing: her back rose and fell with each flight of her voice, thrusting forward with each emphatic word, then leaning back into the sighs. You watched her for a long time. You wanted to make love to her right there in front of the sound engineer. You stopped caring much about the music soon after that, though you didn't know yet that that too had ended. Sometimes the two of you talked about going back to California and trying to break into the business. She knew it was California dreaming, and you knew it before she did. But she was the one who was adamant about not going back, about not permitting defeat.

--We'd eat Fritos and drink Coke and roll off the couch only to drive to McDonald's for more macgrease.

--We could go to McDonald's here in Freiburg, you said.

--Yeah, but we'd both shoot ourselves before we set foot in the place.

--Sometimes your mom's couch appeals to me.

--Of course it does! That's the point! We could quit, we could put all this effort behind us.

--Effort?

--The nerves, the shot nerves, the feeling that every fucking thing is a challenge--writing a check, getting your driver's license, unchaining a shopping cart for God's sake!

--We could call it a day and flop down on your mom's couch and get fat and patriotic.

--God bless Armorica!

Your father was nuts about her.

The two of you were never ready to go back. You went back for funerals. First to California, everyone at the college crying, then to New Mexico. Soon there was nowhere to go back to. They sold the couch. There was only Poun. There was only cooking minced lamb keftedes on the cheap grill over chopped olive wood and dried oregano. It grew all over the hillside above the house; it attacked your nose each time your clothing brushed against it. Washing down the lamb and bread and stuffed tomatoes and peppers with retsina, not store-bought but Dimitri's homemade, with the broom and horsehair seal plugging the demijohn. Before the fermentation even started Dimitri would toss a clump of milky pine sap into it, a few pine needles still sticking out of the clump like quills on a porcupine.

--Iakhe Bakhe! Dimitri shouted, as he pulled out the makeshift cork and filled the liter bottles through a grimy white funnel.

--Iakhe Bakhe! you shouted to the god, once you had lugged the bottles home and opened them out on the terrace. The Aegean below was as smooth as a tabletop.

--Look at that lake! she growled contemptuously.

The sea went from gold to lead to purple to black. You belched up flavors of lamb and lemon, flowers of oregano and pine needles, and went to bed. You grumbled:

--We'd better tell Eftychfa to keep her damned goat fenced in: we've only got one sheet left.

--Nope. The goat stays free. You've got one sheet under you ... Then she rolled over onto you with that agility and grace that were beyond all understanding, making herself the vault of the heavens.

--... and me on top of you. What more could a guy want?

--To stay this way forever.

She laid her cheek on your chest, turned, delivered a series of deliberate bites.

--Done. Forever it is. We stay this way.

And then you slept. And then you woke up.

You were different then. You will not miss her tomorrow.

A chamois. Not twenty paces off the path, grazing on the steep meadow. A mother. You know she is a mother because she looks away from you to where her brood ought to be. They are nowhere in sight. Perhaps she dropped them only in her dreams. She is more frightened than you are, though for an instant you wonder whether chamois ever charge. She shudders the length of her torso and makes her wheezy sneezing sound, stomping with her forelegs, to frighten either you or her babies or both. She stares at you down the length of her pointy muzzle and shows you her racy black mask, black over beige, black as the ridge of mane that runs down her back at the spine. Then she lopes away, long-legged, graceful. She continues grazing. You move on after speaking softly to her.

--It's all right, Mother. I'm on my way. I'm already gone.

You gaze upward now, up the path that does not seem to end. Your eyes have never really adjusted to the snow and to the sky on fire with blue. That is why they wear polarized sunglasses up here. Everyone but you, that is. You own a pair but you always leave them lying somewhere. They are on a doily on the bedside table in your room down at the Hotel. Frau Anna will find them.

--He's going to go blind up there, she'll say.

--We've got squinters enough around here, she'll say.

But you won't go blind. You will protect your eyes. They have to last you a lifetime.

You laugh. Not aloud. That is the sort of thing your mother used to say when you poked yourself or got hit by a linedrive or gave yourself pinkeye.

--They have to last you a lifetime.

Seeing her in her flesh-colored slip bending over to adjust a stocking about her ankle, her bosom as ample as the heaven of stars from horizon to horizon. Seeing her in her coffin, her chest sunken, her hands and eyelids gone to parchment, you wondered if you would ever stop missing her. They have to last you a lifetime.

She and your mother. They had the same wide shoulders, the same long figure, the same fullness and generosity. Different tongues. Did the one mother simply replace the other mother? And did time itself balk when the replacement mother reneged? Aborted motherhood? Her two trips to Amsterdam. They have to last you a lifetime. Odd that they died within a year of one another, your mother and she. Things have not been good for you since the time time balked.

Except that Alison never took to her coffin. Into thin air, they said. You never thought it was into thin air, that wouldn't have been her choice of element. Nor the ground. Not the grand earth, not even to feed her precious weeds. Little good they did her. The ridiculous faith she had in them, as though they all could work the way oregano worked. But then how do you explain oregano?

The sun burns through the India-paper air. You'd like to take off your T-shirt but the rucksack would rub and your shoulders would burn. The sun has dried your perspiration. Your T-shirt flutters in the wind. Embossed on the front of the T-shirt are a torch and a flame and the words "American Cancer Society." It is your most comfortable T-shirt. That's why you are wearing it. You will keep it on.

The valley opens impossibly wide. It gapes. There in full view to the north towers your destination. The Stovepipe. You saw it earlier, back at the that final grove of scrub beeches above the Griessboden, as soon as the path took you beyond the vast obstruction of the Chalchschijen. But you saw it from its lower and thinner end, whereas now you see it for the stovepipe that it is. A stovepipe hat, like Wilson's at Versailles, or like the largest smokestack of a luxury liner, but without paint or insignia, all silver. Closer up will be the white red white of the trailmark, but from here all is argentine against cerulean. You lower your eyes. A flock of piping larks sweeps across the steep meadow. They are talking to the chamois, not to you. You climb the path that cuts across the meadow steep and straight. The southern slope juts out far into the valley. You round a grassy bend.

There below you is the face of the glacier, the Hufi, a hundred meters high, dirty, rutted aquamarine. How many feet per year does it slide? You know but you always forget. Because it takes too much faith to believe that it moves at all, that it actually flows like a river, that it is a river, grinding through another dimension of time and matter. Suddenly you are unsure of stone: the glacier seems harder, a diamond edge that slices mountains. Only the meager trickle at its base, the rivulet that feeds the roaring Charstelenbach below, tells you that this rough diamond is water. You look farther up your path. The Schweizer Alpenclub hut, the Hufi-Hutte, must be just behind that ridge to the right. Or maybe behind the next several ridges--it is always higher up and farther on than you remember. How old were you when you first came here? You don't remember.

You bend forward. You climb. The valley wall is almost vertical here, the goat path weaving forth and back, ever upward. You climb.

And there it is. Home Sweet Home.

The Club erected the three-story Hufi-Hutte, with its cheerful blue-and-white striped shutters and doors, as one of a chain of shelters across the Central Alps. It will hold sixty-six persons in an emergency and sleep forty comfortably on mattresses packed away in every available space. There is a small kitchen, a toilet and bathing area, the large unheated Stube, and a vast sleeping area on the second floor. There is no tile oven or iron stove because there is no one crazy enough to be up here in January. In August and in clear weather you are grateful for the terrace in front of the lodge. Flat paving stones of black granite lead to a knee-high stone wall and wooden railing enclosing the square terrace. You can sit at the picnic tables on the terrace and drink a glass of mineral water that burns your throat and you can chat with the young woman who has been flown in by helicopter and who lives here from late June to early September.

She is perhaps twenty. A child. Her partner is down in the valley getting the mail, she says. He'll be gone all day. The helicopter flies in supplies but it doesn't come often enough to bring mail. You scrutinize her youth and fresh beauty, her clear eyes and smooth skin. Then you remember that she knows more about saving lives under well-nigh impossible conditions than you ever will or can know. You ask her about storms.

--We have a radio, of course. They tell us when weather is expected.

Then she points back toward the south and west, toward the Dussi, where the glacier begins. A single towering cloud has formed in the sky there.

--But you never know. A storm can brew up any time.

She smiles.

--What are they saying about today?

--Haven't heard anything. It's a spectacular day, no?

You do not reply, but your eyes follow hers over toward the Windgallen and the Stovepipe.

--Where are you headed? she asks casually.

She is supposed to ask. What goes on up here is her business. You could be her next problem.

--May I go up onto the glacier?

She pauses only for an instant.

--You may. Most of the soft spots have melted through; you can see them clearly enough. The rest is solid ice. But you'll keep your eyes open?

--I'll keep my eyes open. Don't worry: you're dealing with a coward here.

--We prefer to think of it as intelligence.

She smiles. You laugh. The sound of your laughter is unfamiliar to you.

--Okay. You are dealing with someone who is very intelligent.

--There are some deep crevices up there. You'll see them. But stay clear of the edges: there are lots of thin shelves.

She pauses. Then she repeats her question:

--Where are you headed?

--I was thinking of heading toward the Stovepipe.

Her eyes open wide, then close in a protracted blink.

--You can't get there without a mountain guide.

She has already seen that you have no crampons, no ropes, no pickax. She has already noted that you have little stamina and no skill. And no partner. Your German is good, even your Swiss is passable, but she knows what it means that you are not from these parts. It means that you are bound to overestimate what you can do.

--I told you: very intelligent. Don't worry. What I meant was, if you were headed there, and if you had a guide, how would you get there? It seems completely inaccessible.

She looks at you closely, ponders, then makes her mistake, tells you too much.

--If I had a guide, and a lot of experience, I'd head down the Hufifed, cross to the Windgallen side, right down there, then climb--very carefully--up the Bocktschingel to the Schutt-Morene. About three hours, I'd say, with a very good guide.

You have the feeling that she will soon see through you as through plate-glass. She says nothing. She does not smile. She is very young. But the wheels are turning and you know it is time to move on.

--I'd better be on my way. I'll just walk out to the edge of the glacier. I brought a picnic with me.

She is careful to point out where the neighboring S. A. C. lodges are: one on the far side of the Stovepipe, down quite a way in a westerly direction toward the Grosse Windgallen, another, the Hinterbalm-Hutte, in the Brunnital to the south. Perhaps she is trying to tell you something. But she relents.

--You can pick up the trail just behind the building, she says, pointing back toward the kitchen area. You'll see the trailmark on that big rock there. After you squeeze between the kitchen wall and that rock the trail heads off to the right.

You pick up your rucksack and slip it on. The bottles of beer are heavy, but their contents will feel good when you are up on the glacier in the sun in need of courage. Your stomach is talking to you about bread and cheese. You interrupt it to have one last word with her.

--What's your name?

--Silvia.

She holds out her hand and smiles. No last names at this height.

--Merci, Silvia.

--When you pick up the trail, keep your eye on the rockface. There's a plaque there. You should read it. It's interesting.

You turn and head up the stone stairs that lead from the terrace along the side wall of the Hufi-Hutte to the rear of the building. You squeeze between the outer wall of the kitchen and the rockface, then turn to the right. Off to your left, across the gaping valley, the Stovepipe waits in silence. To your right, bolted to the silver rock stained by rust and spotted with black and white lichen, a silver plate. You tap it. It has a strangely hollow ring. It may be aluminum, it is hard to say. But it is exactly where she said it would be. And she is right. It is interesting.

You are always surprised to discover that the first face of a butte that shows itself to you looks entirely unapproachable, whereas one of the initially hidden faces eventually lays out a welcome mat. A welcome mat and a staircase. That is how the northern face of the Stovepipe will seem to you when you first lay eyes on it toward the end of this long day.

You have been walking on ice and granitic gravel for the past three hours. The trail took you right up onto the Hufi Glacier. You crossed fields of snow and silver rock and black granite slag until you reached the stone sentinels that told you you were about to step onto the glacier. The sentinels, tall piles of flat granite rocks, some of the piles full body height, look as though the Easter Islanders had made their way to the Central Alps once they finished their work on the home island. You would have wanted to ask someone, someone like Silvia, who put them there, who, when, and why. She would have told you that no one knows exactly who put them there and how long ago it was. They are cairns, or stone heaps, that pointed the way to climbers long before there were any yellow iron signposts nicely imprinted in black with place names and optimistic hiking times. Silvia would have told you this reasonable story, but you remember that cairns are roadside tombs, the oldest markers; you are convinced that Polyphemus put them there, or some more benevolent Hesperian cousin of the stony giant. But you had no time to ask. You were already up on the vast tabletop of ice looking over into County Glarus and then down at your feet checking for crevices and cracks in the ice.

The Hufi ought to have sounded and felt solid, a hundred meters of dependable, massively compacted ice. You would have staked your life on it. In fact, you did. Yet from the moment you were on the glacier you heard the sound of running water everywhere beneath you, rushing water, invisible but clearly audible. You and those stones, you and those boulders, were walking on the surface of a lake or sea or river. You and the stones were like Jesus walking on water, but without Papa Houdini providing the magical hovercraft support.

By now you have arrived at the Stovepipe and you have ascended to the northern side. Young Sepp told you the northern face of the Stovepipe was an easy climb.

--You don't need anything, just good shoes and strong hands.

He made a gripping gesture with his fingertips and grinned. He then spoke his two words of English.

--No prrroblemm! with a guttural r and the accent on the second syllable.

You can trust Anna's boy: he was born and raised here and he has climbed every peak in the Maderanertal. He is a Strahler, one who goes out on mountain crystal expeditions, seeking out the most obstreperous concealed places where the milky formations might still be hiding. Maybe you will find a crystal yourself. Maybe it will bring you luck and health for the rest of your life. You smile. You hate to see a crystal get off so easy.

Faith in rocks. Faith in weeds. Faith in coffee grounds. That old witch at the taverna who read your future for small change. You tried to warn her about the witch.

--She's a fake. She tells you what you want to hear.

--Of course she's a fake. That's why I have her tell me my fortune every evening.

--So that one of these nights she's bound to get it right?

--No, so that I see she never gets it right, and I'll be free.

You told her she was crazier than the old witch, crazier but more beautiful. She laughed and pulled your hair and bruised your bicep. You will not miss her. Soon. Tomorrow.

You are off the ice now. Your bootsoles are spotless; the glistening black rubber is dry. You insert the toe of your left shoe into the niche that is the first step of this stairway. You don't even have to hold on to the rockface but merely brace yourself before the toe of your right foot enters the second niche less than knee-high above the first. No prrroblemm. And so it goes, step after step, niche after niche, until you reach the first good-sized ledge, the first landing of the staircase, as it were. It is about a meter wide, so that it is easy for you to turn your body--with only a sudden stop in the breath and anxious flutter of the hands and arms--and take in the vista.

That is, it would be easy if it were not for the acrophobia. Because of the acrophobia you flatten your spine against the wall of rock and close your eyes then open them then close them again. Your breath is not quite there yet. Not quite there. It will come. It will come whenever the panic passes. You will not throw up. It only feels that way. It's nothing. No prrroblemm. You have tried the recommended exercise of avoiding the sweep of eye from horizon to feet or from feet to abyss. You have tried to single out points of rock in the distant north where you can rest your gaze for a moment, intermediate points, points of transition between you and absolute vertigo. Useless. You grip the wall behind you with your scoured fingertips and you wait. It passes. At least now you can crane your neck to seek out the next set of stairs, higher up. They are not as clear-cut as the first set. And the niches seem now to be much farther apart than they appeared to be from down below, much more than knee-high. You wonder when it was that your fingertips were rasped so raw. You reach, grasp, wince, seek out the next niche for the toe of your boot. The niche is not as deep as you'd like it to be. But it takes your weight as you swing upward almost like flying and continue the climb.

You are focused on the task at hand. Flying is not falling. You do not want to fall. You are very focused. She does not cross your mind. You will be very occupied with her on your way down. But not now. Up you go. Left. Right. Bozo. Botticelli.

You are already on the second ledge, the second landing of the staircase, not a full meter wide. You are careful not to look down and away but only at the rockface--when you feel the sudden coolness of the wind. You are on the shadow side of the Stovepipe; naturally, it would be cooler there. Perhaps the sun has already set. No, it is far too early; there are three good hours of sunlight left. The gelid wind has another cause, but you will not know it, not even surmise it, for another five minutes or so.

On this second ledge you experience a sense of reprieve: the niches in the rockface above are closer together and they are easy to spot. They are deep enough. You climb.

The third ledge, if you can call it that, is as wide as the length of your foot. You face the rock. You could not possibly turn around: your own butt would lever you off the edge. It would be an ugly fall but you would not die unless you landed on your head, and that seems highly unlikely. You are almost laughing at the phrase "highly unlikely" when the blast of frigid wind arrives. It nearly sweeps you off the Stovepipe into unwritten history.

There is no mistaking that Arctic blast. Its portent is transparent even before you notice how very dark it has become, even before you hear the first crack of thunder and see the first bolt of blue lightning. To be precise, you do not see the lightning bolt because you are face to face with the rock and also because the storm is sweeping in from the southwest on the other side of the Stovepipe. Yet from time to time everything around you and you yourself light up in a luminous neon blue. The cracks of thunder are so precipitous that the Stovepipe shudders and you are almost shaken off your perch. You hold on for dear life. You do not even think about little ironies. You remember a storm dancing a jig out on the Aegean, but you do not think about little ironies.

Then the rain comes.

Then the hail comes.

You are certain you are already dead when the hail turns to snow.

You hear the thunder rolling off into the distance somewhere to the north and east. It is darker than ever but still light enough--with that unmistakable silvery leaden light--for you to see the perfectly formed snowflakes that alight on your shoulders left and right. They are minuscule and perfect, they look like the snowflakes in children's books or the kind you decorate your windows with at Christmas time. And they do not melt. They do not melt because your shoulders are properly chilled now, fit to receive and keep the snow, which continues to fall, in swirls now, too many flakes, surely they cannot all be perfect there must be some botched ones in the batch but they all appear to be perfect.

There are epaulets of snow on your shoulders. You are the Field Marshal of the August Snows, and you would laugh at this if it were not so numbingly cold, too cold for laughter, and if it were not so gusty. No, nothing seems particularly funny now.

You pictured matters quite differently. You should be standing atop the Stovepipe with your arms outstretched like Jesus over Rio or the highdivers at Acapulco or on Oahu. It always amazes you when you see how fast they fall. The divers, not Jesus. No matter how high up they are. In fact, the higher they are the faster they fall. Thirty-two feet per second per second. It's the second second, the second per second that you never reckon on. It's a little like snow in August. You should be dominating the Stovepipe with your adamantine face to the southwind, your hair blowing photogenically, grown long just for this occasion; you should be setting sail from atop the Stovepipe into the southwind of unwritten history to rejoin old Bismarck from a port of embarkation higher than any other in the world.

You couldn't write a dissertation. You disappointed your punning Papa. You couldn't keep a woman happy. You can't even do this.

You pictured matters quite differently. You would wait for a thermal draft and then glide effortlessly out into it, your boots discarded, your toes flexed, your fingers outstretched and ready for anything. Your arms would be extended at shoulder height in something of a swan dive, your elbows bending almost backward like the pinions of a mighty condor or the knees of a crane. Between the thermal draft and your wings you would find flight easier than man ever envisaged it, easier than man ever dreamed it, even in your own dreams when you would rise like Remedios the Beauty though without the family laundry and soar in and out of the boughs of leafy trees.

--Hey, what are you doing up there? Be careful, you'll hurt yourself! cry the fraught bystanders of your dreams.

--Don't worry, it's only me, and I'm flying. I've climbed the Stovepipe and now I'm flying.

Dreams of flight are not about sex. Sex is about dreams of flight.

But then there is the real thing, real flight, and not the mere dream of it. Real flight will give you your only chance to think, to think clearly, without interruption. As for the rest, life requires one decision after the other, minute by minute. It's like walking or climbing: you have to interrupt your fall with a judicious, well-placed foot, step after vigilant step. Flying happens when you stop interrupting. And then you have the chance to remember without repression, and that is the very heart of thinking.

You won't remember that you are clinging to the leeward side of the Stovepipe in a snowstorm and that it is August and that Silvia should have prepared you for something like this. No, you'll remember in freefall the important things, the things that constituted a life, the taste of Alison before her period more acidic than usual, almost sour, but on the other days of the month sweet and savory, with a smack that was not really of the sea but nonetheless somewhere close to the sea. The savor of oregano and lemony lamb above the skirts of the sea from Zagora to Pouri.

The two of you used to stand on your tiptoes out on the terrace of the cracked stone house and stretch your arms just like that and clasp hands still slippery with olive oil and pretend you were flying down to the sea. You would plunge into the brine with a perfect splashless dive and sail all the way down to the urchins.

I will remember that.

You say that that doesn't constitute a life.

I say I will remember that.

We used to pick our way down to the beach on the goat path of lucky stones planted vertically in the dust, down through the orchards in late summer when the figs were ripe. We would not pick the figs off the trees because they didn't belong to us but we would borrow their insides: we would circle a tree and look for the figs swaying at face height that showed the telltale droplet of sugary sap at their sex and we would pry open the green and purple skins and suck out the pulp and crackling seed, all the sweetness and savor of the earth, then reshape the empty skins so that no one would know that marauders had raided the fruit.

Alison would make the most emphatic sucking noises and she would say things that embarrassed me. I would repeat them that night, having learned the lore.

She gave me the tongue for figs. She showed me how to devour them without disrupting the skin. She showed me how to be a marauder without plundering the orchard. I was different then. I am different now. It is almost soon. It is almost tomorrow.

Is this what you will remember on the way down? Will this be the summa of a life, flashing by you or unfolding slowly scene by scene? What of work? What of learning? What of your father? What of heroism? What of sacrifice? What of the eschatological four last things?

These things you will forget; these things you have already forgotten. They are fairy tales to frighten children. You have grown up, and in the nick of time. You have other things that frighten you now, things that frighten you to death and focus you on life.

You will not see her again.

The two of you are gone.

You have become something sacred.

And now.

You cling to the rockface.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

It is the most riveting snowfall you have ever seen.