July 4, 2012
Up, up and endlessly up: Valdisotto - Prata del Stelvio, via the Stelvio pass
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MY NAME, said the barefooted man wearing nothing but tiny denim shorts, is He Who Breathes the Sound of the Wind. Actually, I can say the same thing, that I breathe the sound of the wind, especially after onions, but he was more serious. And more romantic.
I asked him several times what that name may be, he having insisted it was "in one of the languages of the North American Indians", but I couldn't wrench it from him. It was easier to discover that his mother, with whom he still lived and who was tending a vegetable plot with her back bent, her head down and her blue dress flapping in the valley wind, called him Kuntner.
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Kuntner is 60 but looks 20 years younger. He has blowing hair, scaring teeth and just the right amount of madness in his eyes for a man who has built countless totem poles and has spent his life scouring forests for the bones and antlers of wild animals. I suppose he started by putting them on his bedroom wall, like any other boy. But then things got out of hand and he filled the house, he filled the walls outside and the cliff face behind it, and then he started across the road and achieved what he calls his "outdoor museum."
How to describe it isn't easy. It is pure eccentricity. Bones have been turned into ornaments, some pleasant, some unpleasant, and mixed in with stones on which he has drawn or chiselled faces. None of it is for sale. He asks two euros if you care to take a picture but it's half-hearted and far from a living income, I imagine.
Today we crossed the Stelvio, the second highest paved road in the Alps and only slightly lower than the Iséran, in France. Kuntner's space-consuming but harmless hobby is just before Prata del Stelvio, the village at its base.
"I have always been fascinated by North American Indians," he says with a manic look and glistening teeth, his chest and back shaved of hair. "That is how I got my name." That's the name he wouldn't tell us rather than the one his mother thought appropriate. "I started with totem poles and then I went on from there. I used to have a job, but a job means having bosses and other people. I worked in a saw-mill but that was too noisy. So I left, a few years ago. I have never been happier."
He said all this in a mix of English and German. For the upward side of the Stelvio is in Italian-speaking Italy but the descending side, for us, speaks German. You can grasp the complexities of the history when I say the road over the mountain was built between 1820 and 1825 not by Italians but by the emperor of Austria to link his country with his possessions in Lombardy. Little about it has changed since, except the politics and the borders.
"We were on the losing side in the first world war", Kuntner says, "and they gave us to Italy. But now we are all one Europe. What do borders matter? They are just toys for politicians."
Kuntner is wise to stay down in the valley. There's little of the silence of nature when you ride the Stelvio. There are plenty of motorcyclists to see to that, although they ride sensibly and generously. So do car drivers. For one thing, there is every chance of meeting someone coming downhill fast if you cut a corner. It is mutual self-preservation.
We were lucky not to have ridden a few days earlier. On the way here we saw signs explaining why we had been so plagued earlier: there had been an international motorbike rally on the Stelvio the previous weekend and we had been silent witness to the masses riding to be there.
Johan, a Belgian from Antwerp who spoke perfect English, told us one of his cycling group had arrived at the foot of the mountain that morning and sent messages saying the road was unbearable.
We didn't get to the peak at the speed of a motorcyclist but we were content with a bit more than five hours. On a 26km climb averaging more than seven per cent, that didn't seem too bad on loaded touring bikes. After we crossed the col, which is a collection of everything plastic, overpriced and displeasing, we started the descent only to cross a couple on equally loaded bikes about to cross the top from the opposite direction. They were turning tiny gears just as we had done and their bright yellow panniers made them look like butterflies flapping their wings furiously. We waved mutual congratulations and then, in a tiny second, our ten hours of common experience had ended. We had ridden 50 hairpins and gasped in thin air at 2 700m. That four lives had had so much struggle and then bliss in common yet were united for no more than a blink seemed romantic but tragic.
Mike arrived at our campground as night was falling. He had taken 11 hours to reach the summit and walked, he said, 10 of the 26km. The best bit, he said, was the coming down. Not for the obvious reason - the repeated hairpins don't allow a free tumble - but because by then the road was clear and the sounds and scents of nature were paramount.
"I live in a built-up area," he said, "so I get little chance to experience things like that. It was pure magic."
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