My father was a mountain man, at least in spirit, and he loved this mountain in particular. Probably for the almost rhetorical beauty of its landscape, a view that sweeps you over the entire central Rhone valley. I'm not as susceptible to that sort of panorama as he. And I don't have his sort of mountain gait, a weighted one, where you know where you've put the soles of your shoes and look where you'll be placing them in the following steps. High, higher, higher still, farther and farther away from the world of the people of the valley until you can finally feel the rhythm of your own breath. I tend instead to lose myself in the pleasure of the senses, the smells and sounds around me, the horizon, maybe while diving under the sea. Deeper and farther down where the water carries away the traces of your passage and where you swim along with your entire body and hold your breath, one minute, two, three ...
The day my father left this mountain he was with an Abruzzesan (his home region in Italy) friend, though maybe one of a slightly less romantic disposition. He had a Red Panda, his friend, (redundant to say in those years. For every man over 40 in those parts there were at least 2 Fiat Pandas. One, the most elegant, was white, usually driven by a wife or daughter. He drove the red one.) Anyway. They left in late morning. I said goodbye to them in the parking lot, they started the Panda, and I turned to take a walk. But then I first heard, then saw this long line of cows, Herens, the cows that turn high alpine grasses and flowers into a rich, textured, fatty milk that in turn farmers work and age into delightful rounds of cream-colored cheese that, when heated, melt and glisten into raclette... fair and strong Herens are, stepping down the street above. It was the end of summer then, or the beginning of fall, as today.
After a few days I joined them down south. They told me that that day in the Panda they remained silent until they were all the way south of Milan. Tears and danger of tears, even my father's less sentimental friend. (Abruzzesan men should not cry in Red Pandas, I suppose. Maybe in the white ones.) Anyway. Both are gone now. Years before my father's passing he was no longer able to remember that day, then not even this mountain. But there was that day, those things. He was here. And this year the queens of the mountain, the dark Herens battle cows, went down into the valley again and a tear was in my eye. I miss them.
I've been missing them. I think, when summer returns next year, it will be time to return and hear them, to feel them close, again.
