Guttenberghaus

Sunday morning, 6:30 AM, Central European Time. I wake up hesitantly, peering through the floral curtains of my bedroom on Schiestl Farm. This is the beginning of my third week in Austria; the third week surrounded by mountains that tower over me like heads in a crowd; the third week of quietly cooking and cleaning; the third week of madly sifting through the shifting sands of vocabulary for the correct German words; the third week of writing letters and taking pictures with no people in them.

I’m waking up so early, so nervously parting the curtains, because I am supposed to go hiking this morning. Up to a church service in the mountains: Kirche am Berg. If the weather looks promising, we will go. If it’s raining, or threatening us with the violent thunderstorms that have punctuated many of our afternoons lately, we will go back to bed and wake up again at a more Sunday-appropriate hour. A great deal hangs on this weather.

The weather, actually, controls me more here than I could ever have imagined at home. A few weeks ago, I mentioned to one of my hostesses that it was easy to forget about the weather in the city, where everything important can happen under umbrellas, hoods, and roofs. “Not here!” she laughed, as we feverishly tossed hay with pitchforks in the dim, sweet darkness of a hayloft, then again glancing over our shoulders at the black clouds gathering themselves into a fierce scowl, threatening the proceedings. Here, we wake up every morning and listen to the weather report on the radio, then watch it on TV an hour later, and then read the five-day forecast in the newspaper when it comes with the mail. Weather is everything: growth, life, work, future. All in the hands of weather and—they remind me—God. “If God wants us to get the hay in, we will,” she remarks with a placid shrug. “We just need to trust.”

Curtains pulled aside, I see a mountain shrouded in fog. Unsure what this means, I plod down to the kitchen, where Annemarie is building a fire in the huge and ancient stove.

“So, what’s the deal?” I ask, curling up in a chair.

Annemarie takes a cursory glance out the window. “Looks good,” she decides. “I think we go.”

There they are, the words I have been dreading. Because I will never disagree with them, the words that urge me forward and upward and into the hills, though inwardly I am complaining and my heart is sinking. I know this hike, you see. One thousand meters elevation gain of unrelenting steepness, up and up and up, to a pass with a brown and white lodge. I’ve been there once, and though I remember it as spectacular, it is the thousand meters that I’m thinking of. I know this trail, and I know that I am tired and it’s early and that perhaps I would rather stay here, warm and dry, with a cup of coffee, and really isn’t the Sabbath supposed to be about just that? Rest?

But Annemarie said we’re going, and I have always been too proud to admit my own penchant for the sedate, so we go.

The trail is just as I remember it—grey and steep and rocky—as for a few miles we ascend through a forest and then an avalanche chute. I stare at grey pants and grey boots on grey trail under grey sky, and consider, with each breathless step, how I came to be doing this. Me, the one who as a little girl would have been mortified to list “hiking” as an interest or even an activity. I wanted to be a ballerina, then a violinist. Where did I learn this?

And the path is haunted with memories, not of the one time I have been here before, but of all the hikes, a whole life of them, the times that I have grudgingly swallowed complaint and followed someone up a hill. I think of fire lookouts in the Cascades, lingering in the panoramic views of the endless breaking waves of stone and tree. The time my parents and brother and sister climbed a small mountain near our house, bringing a stove and pancake batter and preparing crepes while the sun set. I flip back through hikes with friends, hikes with kids, hikes with Dad and me and the mountains. Yes, he was the beginning, my hiker father, shouting “Isn’t this glorious!” while I caught up to him on the trail. I followed him first.

The grey trail narrows, and we come out of the trees. We’re looking up now at a green wall, still perhaps four hundred meters below the lodge. The formidable green slope, grassy and dotted by sheep and stones, looks pathless, as if we will need to crawl, on hands and knees, straight up and to the pass. Yet the path keeps appearing, as if by magic, as we keep walking along. The path I couldn’t see from the bottom of the green slope has taken us halfway up. Now three quarters, unwinding like yarn along the emerald carpet. We never see more than a few yards of it, though. I am deep into the land of metaphor—a habit inherited from my sermon-illustrating father—before I realize it, considering the ways in which life is like this trail, never clear until it absolutely needs to be.

I’m distracted again by memories, now turning to mountaineering adventures during high school summers, again embarked upon at the urging of my dad, who coaxed me into coming with a nonchalant, “Come on, you’re not doing anything! You just finished track season! It’ll be fine.” No training for him. Just get out there, dripping with ropes and carabiners and claws for clinging to icy paths. Use your head and your ice axe, and we’ll all be OK. And I’m hopping from step to step across a glacier, following a string of lights, reviewing French history to pass dark summit-morning hours, and watching the long-awaited sunrise over row upon row of mountains dressed in ice and stone. Every summer for the last eighteen, at least, I have spent several days walking up trails, between trees, in the shade of great mountains. Sometime it became part of me.

Which part? I ask myself, as we wind back and forth across the slope, following the string of the magic trail. (The German word for this is Serpentine, I learn; so much more elegant than the English switchback, a sharp word that seems out of place in the calm silence of days in the mountains.)

The part of me, perhaps, that knows that many things in life won’t be easy—and some things won’t be fun at all—but that these things may still be good. This hike is not easy by any stretch, I think, legs aching from the walk, head aching in anticipation of the German message I will soon be trying desperately to understand. But I know that it is good. Good to be out here in the cool grey morning, looking down and back on checkered Austrian farmland, spotting the roof of the very farm where I have been living. Good to be in fellowship with believers from the other side of the world, reading the same scripture, praying the same prayers, repeating the same creed, language the only fragile barrier between us.

We reach the pass, blown by winds so strong that we can lean back into them, and turn around to face the valley. Neither easy nor consistently pleasant, this journey—like all of those others—has been stunningly beautiful and overwhelmingly good. And I am glad, now as then, that I came.