'Swiss time was running out,
      It seemed that we would lose the race.'
                                                   DEEP PURPLE, 1971

Hans Vetter takes shortcuts whenever possible and gets right to the point. We have been hiking together in Switzerland since 1988. I’ve never seen him stay on the path when there is an obviously straighter, shorter route—regardless of how steep up or down. Hans was already this way when I met him in 1987, when a tragic landslide first brought us together for a tension-filled 48 hours.

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IN 1987 I was in Switzerland working the August/September shift of Idyll’s Swiss Untour. It was my favorite time of year to be there—we had lots of guests to look after, and the great late-summer weather made the Swiss Alps the perfect office.

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MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, was, as the Swiss say, lordly. The skies were cobalt and the air dead calm. A few feathers of föhn clouds in the stratosphere marked the high-pressure weather. Temperatures would rise from the low 50’s at dawn into the 80’s by 2PM. This day no haze would obscure the long panorama of snowcapped Alps that delineated the southern horizon.

        I finished preparing the newsletter and calendar of events the next group would be handed when they arrived two days later. About mid-morning I climbed on my bike and pedaled south from my apartment in Sachseln to the train station at Giswil, 4 miles away. I was carrying my typewritten newsletter in my knapsack to the tourist office in the alpine village of Hasliberg-Wasserwendi for mimeographing. I was going to put my bike on the train at Giswil, and let the train do the hard work of climbing one-third-mile vertically up the Brünig Pass to Hasliberg. When all was printed, I would ride the bike back home—downhill all the way to Sachseln—and wouldn’t need to pedal much at all.

        When I got to Giswil station, the clock suspended over the passenger platform was stopped at 10:13AM. It had stopped 5 minutes before I arrived. Railway personnel were flummoxed. Swiss clocks never stop. But all the electricity was out. No trains could run, and I had to get up the hill.

        Okay. I would suck it up and ride up the hill. I climbed on my bike and headed south out of town. But just as I got to the start of the Brünig incline, a Giswil policeman stopped me. The road was shut. The hill had slipped. Half a mile south of town, the road was gone. Above it, the railway was gone, too.

        The Polizist told me there was another way up: an old goat path that climbed the hillside halfway to the next level, but I would have to carry the bike. I followed his directions, riding southwest across the Giswil bottomland on farm roads that petered out at the wooded hillside. Halfway across the fields I looked up at the hill on the east side of the valley that is traversed by the steeply climbing roadway and railroad. Instead of a uniform forest of tall red pines, there was a gray scar about ¼ mile wide and ½ mile tall, marked like a thumb that had lost a battle with a meat slicer.

        It was obvious that this would not be a minor interruption of rail and road service up and down the mountain. It was also obvious that any cars or trains that may have been unlucky enough to be in the slip zone at 10:13AM would now be buried under tons of rock.

        The old goat path was right where the policeman said it would be, marked by a yellow Wanderweg sign, but otherwise overgrown and barely visible. It was steep and slippery with exposed damp tree roots. But I was young then, and schlepping my bike and my knapsack uphill for 20 minutes wasn’t much more than a nuisance. I emerged at the Landeshaus Motel, a roadside landmark with a commanding view overlooking Giswil. Here, halfway up to Lungern, and ¼ of the way to Hasliberg, I could get back on the road and pedal the rest of the way.

        No one knew much at the Landeshaus. They only knew that a slide between them and Giswil had cut the road. Up at Brünig and at Lungern cantonal police were turning traffic. I was the first to come up from Giswil since 10:13AM.

        At Kaiserstuhl train station the platform clock said 10:13 when I passed by on my bike. No electricity—no trains. In the green meadows farmers in breeches cut hay. Others—wearing bib-waders—sprayed liquid manure with hoses. Sun-browned alpine women in long, flowing dresses were turning the hay with long wooden rakes. A few heavily muscled gray cows lounged in the meadows, oblivious to the constant clanging of their oversized bells.

        From Kaiserstuhl the road follows the eastern shore of Lake Lungern about 3 miles into Lungern town. Just south of Lungern the road starts its most difficult climb, a series of steep hairpins gaining one-sixth of a mile of altitude in about 3 miles of distance. This pass road, usually heavily trafficked, could be fun coming down, but was never fun going up. Instead, I decided to divert uphill to the Lungern rail station to see if there might be a train.

        The clock at the Lungern station said 10:13AM. But there was a diesel locomotive burbling at the platform, with a couple of coaches attached. The stationmaster was standing alongside. I had seen him often from the train window standing on that same platform monitoring the arrivals and departures in his red hat and black dress uniform. But I had never before spoken to him.

        He was all sinew and angles, with an economy of body surface like a featherweight boxer, a free-climber, or a long-distance cyclist. It was his face that was jarring. Its harsh angles and deep furrows were lines ending in two prominent points—a gray-bearded, jutting, triangular chin, and an oversized hawk’s-beak nose. I decided he looked at once official and off-putting, and, cruelly, I decided I would mark him mnemonically as Rasputin.

        Rasputin was as interested in talking to me as I to him. I was the first person to arrive at the station coming from the north, and he wanted to know what, if anything, I knew about the slip and the line break. Likewise, I had real questions of him:
        1. Is this diesel-powered train going up to Brünig-Hasliberg?
        2. Were any trains caught in the slide?
        3. Were there any reports of cars being caught when the landslide took out the road?
        4. How do I get my out-going group of Americans to the airport in Zürich in less than 48 hours?

        I had little information for Rasputin, except to say that I had seen the landslide and that the rail line and the road would be out of commission for days, weeks, or months, not hours.

        Rasputin had more information for me:
        1. The train is leaving within the hour for Brünig-Hasliberg.
        2. No trains were underway between Giswil and Brünig-Hasliberg when the landslide occurred.
        3. No one knew if any cars had been trapped.
        4. Rasputin himself would help find a solution to re-routing guests to the airport early Wednesday morning.

        We retired to his office in the Lungern station. Rasputin pulled out his copy of the Official Timetable. I had my copy in my knapsack. Together we studied the weekday morning train schedules to Zurich Airport. Assuming normal service, there should be no difficulty for the 40 or so guests staying north of the landslide. But the 80 guests staying south of the scar—in the villages of Kaiserstuhl, Lungern, Hasliberg, and Meiringen—would need to use a detour south and west via Interlaken and Spiez, then north to Bern, and finally northeast to Zurich Airport. Moreover, the trip would have to begin at dawn to enable passengers to check-in for their flights no later than 10:15AM.

        Our study identified two problems:
        1. No early morning train from Kaiserstuhl via Lungern and Brünig south to Meiringen, and
        2. A very tight 2-minute connection in Bern station (where a minimum of 6 minutes is required) to an InterCity Express train for the airport.

        Rasputin said I should leave the problems for him to work out and get on my way—the diesel train was about to pull out. I told him I would stop in at his station office later that day on my way back down the hill.

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