Mature Flâneur
Mountains of Surprises
Shocking secrets of Austria’s western alps.
This is the view out the window of our home for five days in Stanz, a tiny village in the western part of Austria. This section of Tyrol is like a slice of pie wedged between Italy and Germany, with Switzerland at the pointy tip. From this vantage point, Teresa and I planned to explore all the peaks and valleys along those borders. Yes we were going to climb every mountain, flâneur high and low. Sorry, it is really hard to get The Sound of Music soundtrack out of my head.
That tree in the photo above is a plum tree. Right below it is an orchard — one of dozens strung along the hillside above the town of Landeck and the Inn River Valley far below us. Stanz is famous for its plum schnapps. It’s a village of 150 buildings, and sixty of them are distilleries run by local families. I suppose you could call them, mom and pop schnapps.
Just behind our guesthouse is a network of trails that runs up the steep hillside. My first afternoon, twenty minutes out of the village, I came across the ruins of a stone tower. A woman hiker I met on the path told me this was the Schrofenstein Castle. It is privately owned by a local family, and they keep it padlocked shut — except when the family decides to throw a party.
From the castle, the trail loops up into the pine forest above Stanz. To my surprise, the forest floor was carpeted with pink heather, something I associate with Scotland, and have never seen before in the Alps.
Much further along, I came to a water channel running beside the path. I followed it right to the end, to a cascading mountain brook. Ah, this must be the source of Stanz’s drinking water and used by its distilleries. No wonder the water right out of our tap tastes so delicious.
The next day, Teresa and I headed west, up the valley to the Alberg Pass and into ski resort territory. Though it was early May and the lifts were closed, there was deep snow on the roadside at the top of the pass. The route was precipitous, built right into the side of sheer cliffs in places. In some places, it was shielded with a roof to ward off falling rocks and avalanches.
On the other side of the pass, with the German border just to our right, the road dropped gradually into undulating green agricultural valleys dotted with little villages with whimsical names: Au, Wolfegg, Argenzipfel. This is Austria’s famous Cheese Road, which features over a hundred cheese producers and dairy farms. We’ve been eating the gorgeous butter-yellow, firm cheeses of the region all week, so it was lovely to see where all that goodness comes from. These are the happiest dairy cows I think I’ve ever seen.
Although we could not find any dairies open to the public (indeed, the restaurants and hotels were mostly closed in this “dead season” between skiing and hiking), we did learn that these cattle produce more than dairy products. They are an abundant source of fresh fertilizer. Every now and then we hit a stretch of farmland that reeked so horrifically we had to roll up our windows and crank the AC. A word of warning to anyone considering buying a little chalet in the Alps: come in springtime and make sure your dream property is not down wind from a farm!
Our final destination for the day was the medieval town of Feldkirch. To get here, we followed a tunnel that dropped from the end of the Cheese Road to the Upper Rhine Valley. Here, the Rhine runs though a disorientingly flat valley that forms the border between Switzerland, Austria, and Lichtenstein. Feldkirch has an unusual literary claim to fame: The Irish author James Joyce came here in 1915, and was almost arrested as a spy when he arrived at the train station. Influential friends intervened, and he was released. Joyce himself said that his famous work, Ulysses was inextricably linked to Feldkirch. He wrote: “Over there, on those tracks, the fate of ‘Ulysses’ was decided in 1915.”
Our subsequent days’ drives took us along the river valleys south and west of the Inn River, bordering Switzerland and Italy. In the Trisanna Valley we found a Church of the Nativity in the little town of Gathur which held a fascinating and macabre collection of 23 skulls decorated with gold paint. The writing identifies the person’s initials and year of death. It’s both beautiful and spooky.
So far as I can tell, these are not the skulls of saints or martyrs; they are too recent for that. They are dated from the 1860s-1870s, and I can only imagine that for a brief period, it became a local custom to clean, paint and exhibit the skulls of dearly departed parishioners in this strange way. It’s a little hard to reconcile “R.I.P.” with actually resting in peace, when your severed skull is in a display case. The use of these initials puzzled me at first because the German phrase is Ruhe in Frieden. In Italian, however, it is Riposare in Pace, so, R.I.P. — evidence perhaps that this Tyrollean valley was more Italian than Austrian 150 years ago.
The road above Gather was closed due to avalanche hazards, so Teresa and I took a stoll on foot past the barricade up to the first actual avalance, which was sobering.
There, we were surprised by blooming crocuses in a field freshly clear of snow:
On our final day of exploration we followed the Inn River valley south to the Swiss border, and then took the turn-off to a high alpine lake, surrounded by mountains, just across the Italian border. From here we could see in the distance the white massif that forms Stelvio National Park. Last year in May we were in Bormio, a ski town on just the other side of those mountians.
Lake Resia/Rechen is most famous for an ancient church tower that sticks up from the water, part of the tragic story of the village of Graum. The first records of this Medieval town are from the 1147 A.D. As the name makes clear, the town was mostly Austrian-Tyrollean, but it fell inside the part of Tyrol that was ceded to Italy after WWI (in which the Italians fought with the Allies against Germany and Austria). So, in 1938, when Mussolini’s government decided to raise the level of the lake and build a hydropower dam, the state was not much concerned about submerging a historic village with Austrian frescos, architecture, and inhabitants. The powerless villagers received meagre compensation for their expropriated land and buildings. Some 700 people, who had only ever known Graum as their home, were to be resettled.
Work on the dam was suspended due to the war in 1943, but then recommenced 1947, despite the desperate efforts of the villagers. They only succeeded in getting slightly better compensation, and 500 of them were forced to leave the valley altogether. Lack of funding in the post-war era could still have halted the project, but the Swiss company Elektro Watt stepped in; they took over construction in return for the rights to the power for 15 years, and the village was submerged. All that remains is a unique tourist photo op.
The sky was clear, the mountains white and beautiful our final day in Stanz, and so I went for one last walk in the forest.
I watched a hang glider soar like a white eagle on the mountain behind me, and then found a larger than life sized metal statue of Jesus dragging his heavy cross alongside the trail.
On my walk home to pack my clothes, I heard the pounding of hooves. Three of the most gorgeous horses I have ever seen in my life came right up to a fence by the path to have a look at me. They were honey colored, with shocking while manes. One of them seemed to have its mane permed in a wave and draped over her eyes like some emo-princess pony. Her nose was covered with flies, so I shooed them away and patted her long face soothingly while they stood there, these blonde beauties, just soaking up the attention.
Suddenly, someone tazed me at the waist. I jumped spastically in the air, limbs flailing in all directions at the shock. The horses reared back for a second as I struggled to recover my footing. What the hell? I realized I had touched the little white strand of what was in fact an electric fence. It gave me quite a jolt, clearly strong enough that it deters the horses. Of course, they knew enough to stay back from the wire.
Did they prank me? I wondered, suspiciously. Did these honey-beauties lure me close in order to have a laugh at my expense? I will never know.
After that incident, I thought nothing more could shock me about Austria’s western alps. But I was wrong. We had twice brushed the Swiss border in the past few days, so I was curious where exactly, did the von Trapp family cross the mountains into Switzerland to escape the Nazis, as they did in the final dramatic scene of The Sound of Music?
Well, it turns out the family never walked across the Alps to freedom at all. They took a train from their home in Salzburg into Italy the day before the Austrians closed the border at the start of WWII. When Maria von Trapp complained to the producers of the movie that such an escape over the Alps would have been geographically impossible from Salzburg, which was hundreds of miles from the Swiss border, she was told not to fret. “Hollywood has its own geography,” the producers told her.
