Grindelwald & the Eiger
It was Wednesday November 28, 1973 and I awoke that morning from a memorable yesterday, my first full day in Grindelwald, a day full of camaraderie and special moments. When I emerged from the bunk room after a long hot shower and getting dressed, I could see out the big picture window that the sun was shining, and so presumably the clouds had finally lifted and the featured mountains would reveal themselves. I went immediately out on the balcony and the view was stunning beyond anything I had anticipated.
The hostel sat on the north slope of the little valley, looking south with the village below at its base. Rising out of the other side of the valley were three magnificent mountains that seemed impossibly high and gave me vertigo just to look at them. The winter morning sun was behind them, and though their northern faces were shaded there was enough diffused sunlight to see that all three of them were sheer rock and ice, literally rising from the valley floor almost three kilometers (a mile and a half) nearly straight up like giant teeth. Their jagged snow crusted tops caught bits of the sunlight behind them and glittered silvery, making their shaded faces that much more foreboding, like one was viewing those teeth from inside a humongously large gaping maw. Then to the right of these three, two other peaks loomed just a bit farther off, more conical in shape, the last completely white, more apparition than corporeal mountain.
It was still Tuesday November 27, 1973 in the Grindelwald youth hostel, and as most of us were finishing our yummy hostel supplied dinner, somebody in the group shouted out, “See you at the pub!”, and most everyone else laughed. I noticed that some people were hanging on to their plastic trays after bussing all their dishes and silverware, including the Cleveland gang. I looked at Derrick and pointed at the tray in his hands.
It was Tuesday morning November 27, 1973, and given little good sleep on the long overnight train ride from Venice the previous night, I ended up sleeping in and missed the breakfast I had paid for. It was 9:05 when I got down to the little dining room and breakfast was served just until 9:00, and things ran on schedule in Switzerland. They were lowkey about stuff but they stuck to their schedules. My first reaction was frustration, not so much because I was hungry and there was nothing to eat but more because I had missed a meal I had paid for with my precious remaining funds. I had figured with a big breakfast I would even skip lunch and save that money. But after contemplating my initial reaction for a moment I realized that the good long sleep probably had been more than worth it.
It was Sunday November 25, 1973 as I perched on a bench on the platform at the Venice train station waiting for this dormant steel beast in front of me to come alive. It was the train that would take me to Switzerland, and my anticipated Alpine paradise, soon to open its doors and let us board. As it got close to its departure time, I saw a group of four other what looked like Americans roughly my age with their long hair and backpacks. I kind of recognized them from the hostel. They all looked a few years older than me with their stubbly unshaven faces. (At eighteen, I still wasn’t growing facial hair yet, but gratefully at least pubic hair!) I could hear them joking with each other but in a sharp edged jocular sort of way, like Derrick, but even more so.
It was Friday November 23 1973, the day after Thanksgiving in the States. Despite all my fellow backpackers traveling the Rome-Florence-Venice circuit like I was, I somehow ended up on the after lunch train from Florence to Venice by myself. The guys from Cleveland had decided to skip Venice because they had heard it was dreary and depressing and there was not much to do. They had instead headed farther northeast to Vienna, where I had originally planned to go after Venice. Jen and Sarah had left Florence for Venice earlier that morning. Trix and Evelyn and their crew were probably already in Vienna. Moana I think was headed west to Paris, continuing the Western European leg of his world tour that would take him across the States, via a two-month Greyhound bus pass, in December and January.
It was Tuesday November 20 1973 when I awoke in the male bunk room of the youth hostel in Florence, or as I was referring to it now by it’s suaver sounding real Italian name, ‘Firenze’. I had arrived at the hostel the previous evening with a big throng of my cohort, all of us with wet ponchos from the rain, dripping everywhere in the main common room as we stood in line, boisterously chatting with each other about the shitty weather, anything to break the ice. Trix and the other five young women, who I had shared a crowded compartment with on the train from ‘Roma’, went off in their own directions for the evening, and Jen and Sarah, who had left Roma for Firenze a day before, were yet unsighted among the throng in the hostel that night, but hopefully I would encounter them again.
It was Monday November 19 1973, and I boarded the train headed from Rome up to Florence. I saw others of my ilk, easily spotted by their backpacks and ‘freak flag’ hair boarding as well amongst a crush of people at every coach door. Some of them I recognized, but I presumed most of them had been staying at our hostel, or perhaps another one across town, and were now headed for guess where, probably Florence.