Schangnau:
the Switzerland
of Legend

Here we sit, in the half light, with a bottle of homemade schnapps between us. A man, carved out of stone. An alp, cold even in the summer. Measured stillness. And somewhere beyond the lace-lined windows, trickling under the mountain clawed by the devil, the sources of the Emme, the river that gave its name to the Emmental.

But this is Schangnau. With it’s back to the Emmental, whose rolling hills and postcard views convulse violently, without warning, as they rise here. Schangnau is like nothing else. You could drive five minutes away, and you would lose this. This feel, this look.

I recognize it intimately. Recognize the haircuts, the clothes. That unmistakable growl of an old WRX that is climbing, somewhere under us, on a road barely wider than a car. Cars that keep their winter tires on all year round. Roads where everyone knows who the other driver is. One finger rises above the steering wheel (always one, never more), a silent handshake between Subarus, between men known only by their ‘Schangnauer’ names. Silence, barely ruffled by life. Every word, every gesture, chosen carefully. An almost Buddhist-like consciousness.

I was warned of such stone-faced people. Hard and impenetrable even to other Swiss, who arrive as tourists, to see a people they have only heard about.

But the poetry of their thoughts; their infinite patience; heavy, drawn-out words; weathered wood smoothened by centuries of experience; that savageness of the land that excited me: all of this soothed my troubled mind, and absorbed all my sins. And, over time, the Schangnauers became my biggest champions, just as I became theirs.

And five minutes away, the rest of the world. And that magic is gone.

I know this because I was a Schangnauer too.