Chapter 30

At one point Cat and I had considered flying directly from Vietnam to Switzerland, but somewhere along the way that idea got dropped. It seemed like a good idea to check in at home for at least a few days. We knew the folks had all been worried about us, although we had tried to keep up a good face in the letters we wrote home. All the letters in the world wouldn’t make up for a few days of being there.

The folks – all of our folks – met us at the airport. Even Joey was there, since he’d been back from Germany and out of the Army for a couple of months by then, mostly looking for a job and not finding much of anything, just as it had been when I had been Joe. It was good to see him again, for I knew he could understand things that the folks couldn’t.

As you can guess, it was pretty emotional there in the airport terminal. At least we were anonymous, so there was no risk of the kind of welcome home Joey got. Cat and I were in pretty good shape, since we’d spent the night in a hotel in San Francisco to shake off the jet lag of a trans-Pacific flight. So, when the folks suggested we have dinner together at a nearby restaurant before departing for our homes, we took them up on it. Cat and I told some stories about what had happened to us since we’d been home last, but we kept them pretty innocent. We had no desire to pass along some of the harder realities of what we had been through. After dinner we split up to go our separate ways for a few days.

It was good, if somewhat strange, to be home. For a brief period it seemed like a throwback to the old days with all four of us living there. Mom did her best to fill me up on good home cooking; despite everything, I had lost weight at Phan Loc on my diet of Army food and C-rations. The debilitating heat hadn’t helped much with that either. Even though it was August, it seemed decidedly cool around Simsville.

A couple of days later, when the folks were at work, Joey and I somehow managed to talk about some of the harder times. It was awkward and uncomfortable, partly because the experiences we had gone through were so different, and I had certainly had a more exciting and stressful tour than he had endured. Even with Joey, who had a much better idea of what it was like in Vietnam, it was hard to talk about my experiences, and I was never able to explain the differences and how much more I went through. Even so, we knew we shared something that many people couldn’t understand.

The few days I spent at home were pretty surreal, and they went quickly. A little over a week later our families again dropped Cat and me off at the airport. We knew we would be gone for another year, but this time we didn’t expect it to be anywhere near as stressful. My own feeling was that Switzerland would be a good place to decompress, since it would be far away from the tensions and stress over the war that were still strong in the States at the time. I hoped that when we came home again we would be more or less back to normal.

To save our hard-earned money, we again flew to Europe on Icelandic Airlines, and I had not been looking forward to the long, noisy hours in a DC-6. But we were pleasantly surprised to discover that Icelandic had Boeing 707s now, so the flights only took a little over half the time. We were starting to get close to time to register at Université de Lancy-Paquis near Geneva, and do the other things we had to do in preparation for school.

This time we had no dorms or even hooches we had to stay in; we were on our own. Fortunately the university had a list of people who rented apartments, and after some searching we wound up in a small flat on a second story, only a short distance from the school.

It may have not been the best deal we could have found since it was eventually revealed to be heated only by a fuel oil space heater with a small tank. We had to fill a can from a drum in the basement and haul the fuel up two flights of stairs. It wasn’t something we couldn’t do, but in the depths of winter we had to do it two or three times a day. If we went away for a weekend or longer during the winter, which we sometimes did, it took the space heater hours to get the temperatures back up to comfortable.

The school also didn’t have a cafeteria or anything like that, so Cat and I usually ate in any number of small bistros or cafés within walking distance of the flat.

I might as well come out and say it right now: the program was not all we had understood it to be – or maybe our expectations were higher than the program managed – same difference. I think it was more designed for young students who wanted to spend a year in Europe without being worked too hard, rather than for those who really wanted to learn something.

The school charged some mighty big bucks for all of that, and we were still on our own for living expenses such as food and renting the flat. I don’t want to come right out and call the whole program a scam, but I’m sure the school received more money from impressionable and naïve foreign students than there was value returned to them. I felt the instructors were at best third rate and superficial, and mostly a waste of time.

Our courses were in French and Western European history, but they were not hard. Cat and I agreed that we could have learned as much French sitting around bistros in Chamonix, and we did a lot of that anyway. The European history courses were interesting and tended to focus a little more on Switzerland and, to a lesser extent on France, than we had experienced at Venable, but I don’t think we learned anything that we couldn’t have picked up just staying in the States. But the credits still counted toward our American degrees, so they were worth something.

On several occasions Cat and I were so disillusioned that we considered calling up Mrs. Oldfield in Washington to see if she needed a couple of experienced donut dollies, but in the end we decided not to. After all, the Susan Barnes Memorial was paying for my tuition, and Cat’s father, taking pride in what his daughter had done in Vietnam, was picking up the cost of hers. In the end we didn’t feel as if we should just walk away from the program and lose the money. Besides, we were in Europe, and the slackness of the program gave us plenty of time to do other things we wanted to do.

Many of the students were American, but they were not a majority; the rest came from here and there all over the world, except that there were very few from Europe. I don’t want to come out and say they were all wealthy, but Cat and I must have been near the bottom end of the scale, so even for that reason alone we didn’t have much in common with our classmates. I doubt if many of them had ever worked a day in their lives or intended to ever do so, which also set us apart from them. As a result we didn’t make very many friends there.

Cat and I had agreed beforehand that we wouldn’t make a big deal out of our having been in Vietnam. We knew the war was not popular in Europe, but it was more of an intellectual unpopularity since few Europeans had anything to lose there, be it lives, sons, money, or honor. That did not necessarily extend to the French we met, for their view was a little different than elsewhere. It had been fifteen years since they had been kicked out of Vietnam and there was still some resentment about that, although we felt that the French are good at resenting. At least there was some understanding of what a hot, hard, and dirty war was like. That may not have been true among others we met, especially at the university.

In any case, we agreed that it would not serve us to stir things up unnecessarily.

So we wound up spending as little time around the school as we could manage. This was not a hardship; Chamonix was not far away, and there were regular buses and trains running there, so we spent a lot of time there, especially in the fall, and we probably knew more people around the town than we did at the school. While some of it was spent sitting around bistros and talking in three languages (Cat knew a little Spanish, much more than the German I remembered from Joe’s experience fifty years before) a lot of it was spent out climbing somewhere.

In spite of my epic climb up Mount Kosciuszko and Cat’s more daunting trek up Fujiyama, our mountaineering skills were a little stale by that point, so we spent some time brushing up on some of the less-difficult pitches. We had brought little of our mountaineering gear with us, since with a few exceptions such as chrome-moly pitons European gear in those days was generally considered to be better than ours and we figured we ought to take advantage of it. We bought even better climbing boots than we had gotten in Chamonix years before, along with other gear.

Chamonix was less busy in the fall than it was in the summer, and most of the tourists had gone home. There was still a lot of climbing, and the routes were not as crowded, but as the weather got colder being out on them became less and less appealing, but at the same time the ski season was starting to get under way.

I had never been on skis, and Cat had only been on them a time or two at a resort in Northern Michigan, where the skiing, while interesting, wasn’t exactly world-class. It had been years since that experience of hers, so we were both essentially novices – but it was fun and we learned quickly. Let’s face it: being out on a ski run in the Alps was just about as far away from a hot and dusty hooch in Phan Loc as it was possible to be. While we were in good shape financially, it wasn’t exceptional like some of the other students at school, but we soon came up with ways we could get out skiing on the weekends without the cost killing us. We may not have exactly been on the world-class premier slopes, but the ones we skied were sometimes about all we could handle.

We didn’t always go out skiing every weekend in the winter. Sometimes, especially if the weather was bad, we just stayed around Geneva, eating out in local workingman’s places, occasionally having a drink in some little local club, making plans about what we were going to do the next weekend. Or, we might go down to Chamonix for a day and do the same thing, sometimes holing up in one of a couple of small bistros frequented by climbers rather than the ski crowd, where we still felt a little out of place.

There were always climbers hanging around, sometimes working at some odd job in town so they could hang on there a little longer before their money ran out and they had to go back home or somewhere else to get a real job. When you got right down to it that description included us, although we weren’t quite as grubby as some of the people we met. In any case, they were fellow climbers and we made many more friends among them than we did at school.

Almost from the beginning of the idea to spend the year at Université de Lancy-Paquis, Cat and I had agreed that since we were going to be in Europe we might as well enjoy it by spending another summer there. That did not mean spending the whole summer hanging around Chamonix; there was much more to explore in Europe, places we had never been near, and some of the things we wanted to do didn’t even involve climbing.

After quite a bit of discussion, we agreed that as soon as the spring term ended we would pack up and ship home most of the things we had accumulated including the new climbing gear, or give them away. We’d load up our backpacks and a fresh copy of Europe On $5 and $10 A Day, then hit the hostel trail like we had done three years earlier. If we could keep the costs under control we would still be able to get back to Venable with at least a part of our hard-earned money from Vietnam still available, although it was clear it would not last forever.

We figured on still doing some climbing, but easier alpine things not involving high-difficulty rock pitches. Although Cat and I still enjoyed rock climbing, we had backed off on doing the most difficult routes. Our tastes were evolving more toward peak bagging on somewhat easier climbs, usually if there were rewarding views involved. We expected that would be our focus of most of our summer climbing, what we did of it.

Several of us were sitting around a bistro in Chamonix one weekend afternoon in the early spring when the weather was a little too snotty to want to climb anything higher than the steps to get on the train back to Geneva. A little unusually, none of the group was French; all were foreigners of one nationality or another, and as I recall it now Cat and I were the only Americans. Of course, all of us were either telling lies about the horrendous pitches we had climbed, or the ones we wanted to do in the future, and there were a couple proposed that I was pretty sure were beyond the real capabilities of any of us.

As the beer flowed the ideas got even more outlandish. It was then that Bruce, a tall and ruddy New Zealander spoke up. “You know,” he said, “what we ought to do? All of us? We ought to do the Matterhorn.”

“Mate, you’re crazy,” an Australian voice spoke up – I seem to recall that his name was Doug. “That’s pretty much tourist routes now. It may be the most spectacular looking mountain in the Alps, but there are more fun and challenging things to do.”

“You’re right on that,” Bruce agreed. “But think on this: eventually we’re all going to go home. Sooner or later someone will ask us where we climbed, right?”

“Of course,” a small Japanese guy agreed.

“So what are those people going to say if we tell them we climbed the north face of the Eiger? I mean, not that any here are up to climbing the bloody thing in the first place. I’ll tell you what they’re going to say, an’ that’s ‘Never heard of it.’ Everyone who knows a bloody thing at all about Europe has heard of the Matterhorn.”

“Yeah, mate,” Doug replied, obviously sold by Bruce’s logic. “You’re right on that. And if we’ve climbed the Matterhorn, they’ll think we’re a bloody good climber.”

“Right,” Bruce smiled. “I’d say to not try anything spectacular, just get up the bloody thing by the easiest tourist route and back down again so we don’t waste more time than we have to.”

“You know,” I piped up, agreeing with Bruce’s logic, “I’d be up for that.”

“I would, too,” Cat agreed. “I can’t think of more than half a dozen mountains in the world the average person on the street would be impressed with, and I’ve already done one of them. Mont Blanc? What’s that? But Fuji, or the Matterhorn . . . well, people know about them.”

We ordered another round of beer – and it was pretty good beer – and settled down to planning our international Matterhorn expedition. Actually, there wasn’t much planning to it. We pulled in a French guy who had been there, and he filled us in on it.

A couple of weeks later a group of us that mostly included the group who had sat around drinking beer in that bistro got off of the cable car at Schwarzsee. We walked up the easy hiking trail to the Hörnli Hut, a mountaineering hut located a little above ten thousand feet up on the lower approaches to the mountain. We stayed there for the night, got up well before dawn, had a bite to eat and started up the mountain on what is known as the Hörnli route, the easiest of several ways up the mountain.

Despite what Doug had said, the climb, while not terribly difficult for those days, was not “an easy day for a lady” either. However, there were fixed-rope cables in most of the difficult spots, and we only had about four thousand feet of elevation gain to deal with. Being fairly early in the spring the route was not crowded, and in spite of the altitude, which was a little more than any of us were fully acclimatized to, we were all pretty good climbers, and we made it to the top in under six hours.

We stood around for a little while, got some pictures of each other to prove we had been there – something we wouldn’t normally have bothered with on other climbs – and started back down. Going down was easier than going up, as it almost always is, of course, and we got back to the Hörnli Hut well before dark. We could have gotten down to the cable car that evening, but we knew we would get there after it quit running for the night, so stayed there for the night again, drinking beer and telling more tall stories.

In fact, that was one of the few times that year that Cat and I talked about our being in Vietnam, and I brushed over most of the things we did. But I wound up telling the story of how Chainsaw Dombrowski used his rotor blades to cut a hole in the woods to rescue me. I probably wouldn’t have told the story then, but I’d taken enough German beer aboard to loosen my inhibitions a little.

Bruce proved to be absolutely right. For many years to come when it was revealed that I’d spent quite a bit of time climbing in the Alps, people would ask me about some of the mountains I’d climbed. They would usually get blank looks on their faces when I mentioned Mont Blanc or the Jungfrau, or some other more difficult climbs I could name. I was considerably more proud of most of those. But when I mentioned the Matterhorn, usually their eyes would get wide, and I’d hear something like, “Wow! You really climbed that?”

By then our time at Université de Lancy-Paquis was starting to run out, and Cat and I were anxious to do a little more tourist bumming around. Within a day after the classes ended we had shipped most of our stuff home. We turned the apartment back to the owners – they had been friendly, although we never got to know them very well – slung the backpacks on our backs, and headed for the train station.

We were soon to discover that things around the hostels had changed noticeably in the three years since we’d last traveled that way. While there were still plenty of more-or-less clean-cut American college kids spending their summers in Europe, by then the hippie days had come and while they weren’t overwhelming, we could tell the difference. There was a lot more pot smoke, more unwashed bodies and long hair, a lot more ragged travelers decked out in peace signs. And some of them were guys who clearly had taken the chance to stay out of the country to avoid the draft. Of course, there was a lot more anti-Vietnam talk, but by then Cat and I had learned to keep our mouths shut about our experiences there.

Many of the hippies were hanging around Europe as a warm up for heading down what was beginning to be called “the hippie trail,” which involved kids taking trains, buses or just plain hitchhiking their way to India and perhaps points east. They were doing it for lots of reasons, to immerse themselves in Eastern religions, to seek foreign experiences, and a lot of them were doing it for cheap pot, hash, and other such ways to seek an extended high to turn away from the mundane realities of life.

More than once we were given friendly offers to accompany this or that group of hippies as they headed for India in search of whatever it was they were seeking, but we always turned them down. One time when Cat and I were by ourselves, she summed it up for both of us: “I think I’ve spent enough time in Asia to hold me for a while.”

Fortunately the hippies were more interested in looking for cheap dope to expand their minds than they were in tramping around the mountains, so we managed to avoid them much of the time. We spent a lot of time in Eastern Switzerland and Austria, much of it on mountain hikes and climbs. From there we went on into Germany and spent some time poking around. We did not spend any time to speak of in places I remembered from when I had been Joe, but those had mostly been Army bases and the Autobahns, anyway. We even managed to spend a few days in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; it would have been nice to spend some time there and some of the mountains in Norway looked especially interesting, but we really didn’t have the time for it that we would have liked.

As the summer started to run out, we knew it was time to be heading toward home. After all, Cat and I still had a year to complete at Venable. We had made arrangements for our return over the winter, but we had other things to arrange and they were going to be more complicated than they had been in the past. Eventually, we had no more choice: we got cheap train tickets to London, and we were soon on our way. We crossed the channel on a ferry from Ostend to Folkestone, then continued on the train into London. We got a room for the night in the same little hotel we’d stayed in three years earlier, but this time we only stayed long enough to catch the train for Glasgow in the morning.

A day after that, we were again aboard an Icelandic Airline 707, this time heading for the States. We called home from New York, and arrived at the airport just a year to the day since we left for our so-called “junior year abroad,” and well over two years since we had last seen the college. What’s more, we were not kids any longer.