Once you get into the valley it’s a sea of fog. I take the footpath down by the river through the dark and the moon gets swallowed. The sky looks the way old TV screens looked in the 70s after you clicked off the knob, for a while they still glowed a faint indigo-gray. The rows of rock stacked in the walls make a pattern with the cracks that could be like an alligator’s skin. You will come to a point when metaphor doesn’t cut it anymore, it just takes you out of the scene.

Got to the top of the Himmelsleiter just as the bells began, nothing to see below, all fog. A lap around the vineyards and orchards, counting down the days. My checklist of people to see and plans and then the whole trip in reverse. How unnatural it feels taking a familiar walk in the opposite direction. Lapping myself on the second week abroad, our fascination with time, mom and me. Trying to offset the loss of the past with gratitude. For all we have and had then, still have. When the full moon pops out of the fog it’s pink-gold, but not worth photographing. Some things are best left untouched.

I felt the whole expanse of it, the trip, as I lay on the sofa. The same as I did when I was here in January reading Castaneda, the same as years before. The sofa came apart in sections with some logic for adjoining each part but out of fear for what I’d discover down there I never looked beneath it. Instead the sections just drifted apart as I lay there half asleep. The sounds of men working construction below, school children laughing, mechanized things, jets. I felt the whole expanse of it and it made my heart tingle, all I’d seen and done. What was behind me and before me and what fell between the gaps. All life was like that; the trip was just a metaphor for how to live. Plan some, leave the rest to fate, travel light. Make copies of the most important things you might one day lose.

Eberhard came by in the afternoon for a short coffee, wearing his leather motorcycle pants and many layers he removed ceremoniously in the dining room. For a time we sat there watching each other and talking some. There were a lot of gaps in dialogue and mom and I got restless as he started his routine of checking the oil heat and then the mail, which mom sets aside for him to translate. He unfolds the A4-sized paper, folded twice, slightly longer than ours in the States. Then he grunts and makes small sounds as he reads, glasses balanced on the tip of his nose, leaning back to focus. Most of his hair is gone now on the scalp but long and tied in the back, some gray and white curls. When Eberhard asks mom for a status update on matters involving banking or bill payment it’s always with the tone of an interrogator, clipped, a throw-back to his days as a German cop. He has two coffees, a sandwich, half a pastry, two chocolates.

I ask how his son is doing but he doesn’t really know, he’s 47 and has a girlfriend now (they live in Sweden). I write later thanking him for coming. Mom always tells me to message him. When it’s time to go we follow Eberhard out to the Hof and watch him get back into his motorcycle gear and onto his bike, the hard part where he needs to swing one leg over the side to mount it. He makes a show of starting the engine and eyes me through the helmet visor, looking young again. Nods. We follow him up the little road and wave until he’s out of sight. And then that old familiar feeling again when he’s gone.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, travel