THE LUXURY OF SIMPLICITY

14 SQUARE METERS OF AUSTRIA: THE LUXURY OF SIMPLICITY IN A TINY ALPINE HUT.

Father is a bit afraid — and the bad thing is, the kids notice it. “This is nothing unusual in the mountains,” he says. But his tone of voice, which is intended to sound calming, is a bit shaky and uncertain. And he senses that the kids sense it, too.

We’re huddled together on a craggy bit of rock in the Lechtal Alps at a height of around 1,900 meters. Somewhere behind us is the Dawinkopf mountain and somewhere in front of us the Hoher Riffler peak. But we can’t see either of them. Strictly speaking, the only things we can see are each other and the rock formation that we hope will provide a bit of protection. Otherwise, all we see is fog. More fog than we’ve ever seen before.

It’s late afternoon and we’ve already been hiking for six hours with three children, one of whom we’ve been carrying by turns on our backs. We want to return to the Alpine hut where we’re vacationing; supposedly only one and a half, two hours tops, away. But the fog has taken us by surprise. Suddenly, it envelops the pasture so thickly that we can only see five, six meters in front of us. We’re scared that we’re really going to lose our way now, as we did on the way up at noon — by sunshine. A bit helplessly, we begin to search for protection near the rocks where we can wait it out. But for how long? In two hours it will be dark. What to do? Gather our courage and march through the fog? It’s also turning noticeably colder and wetter as father utters his helpless “in-the-mountains-this-is-nothing-unusual.” We are silent as we huddle together and yearn for our hut. For Larchi.

DORMITORY FOR THE HAY HARVEST
The Larchi hut is located a short distance behind the Alberg Tunnel in Tyrol, just above the little village of Strengen at a height of 1,500 meters.

Relatives who live here in the area once built it as a dormitory for the hay harvesting days on the steep surrounding slopes. Larchi can only be reached by foot and is anything but luxurious — except for the luxury of the simple life. The hut consists of one room with a fireplace, a wood stove, an old kitchen cupboard, an oversized bunk bed for two on top and two on the bottom, a fold-out sofa, a table and corner seating with a crucifix hanging above it and a drawing of “Sitting Bull,” who appears to be knowingly surveying the place. Larchi has no electricity and running water is available only from the well in front of the hut: a rivulet from a mountain spring, always icy-cold. During arid summers, it sometimes dries up — which then means having to fetch water with canisters from a spring that is located higher up. The outhouse, which is 20 meters down the slope, is flushed with sawdust, and the amazingly cold refrigerator is a four-sided brick construction in the cellar with wooden doors in which scythes, whetstones, axes and sheep skulls are strewn about. Everything just as we wanted it to be: modest, reduced; just us and the mountains and nature.

This is the third time we’ve spent our holidays here. For the children, the biggest difference between vacation and everyday life may be the fact that we, their parents, are with them 24/7. We only go into the village every third day to buy food; the simplest way down takes threequarters of an hour. If you forget something, you think twice about going a second time to get it. Which means that there are sometimes three days without red wine or apple juice or butter for bread. That’s just how it is — and most of the time, it’s just fine that way. We parents don’t think about the daily newspaper or telephone; the children don’t seem to miss their audio books or TV. On the best days in the Larchi hut, a kind of flow seems to set in: The hours roll by timelessly while each one of us is immersed in what we’re doing. And should one of us look up from what we’re doing, the family might seem as if they popped out of a perfect photo album: The children play near the well, searching for lizards in the crevices of the stone wall and grasshoppers in the field, they create patterns on the floor of the outhouse with the sawdust, carve, read, wander along the mountain stream, poke about in anthills, roll down the meadow, build a secret Indian camp somewhere in the forest where the dolls, which have been fashioned from leaves, moss and twigs, are tied up like hostages. We parents wash the tableware at the well, make the hut a comfortable place to live, read, cook (mostly some sort of stovetop dish), chop, saw and carry wood. The pace of what we do is always just a bit slower than in our normal life: not with the drive of a determined, goal-oriented mountaineer with altimeter, but rather like a relaxed hiker climbing a mountain, hands clasped behind the back and in rhythm with his own breathing. During the evening hours we sit at the corner table by candlelight, under the crucifix and the steady gaze of “Sitting Bull.” This is the time when Larchi, which is pretty dark even during the day, really becomes like a cave: Shadows dance along the walls, the air smells like smoke and wood, the kettle hisses on the stove, behind a curtain our youngest child lightly snores while sleeping in her bunk bed. We play “Memory” and “Old Maid” and other board games, and go to bed much earlier than we usually do, as playing by candlelight is quickly tiring.

THE WOOD CRACKLES, THE TENSION IS TANGIBLE
Idyllic? Yes. A picture of harmony? Definitely not. There’s simply too much noise caused by bee stings and splinters, not to mention the frequent arguments owing to the fact that life in an Alpine hut is anything but a place of retreat. Sometimes the tense mood hovers in the one and only room like the wet wash that hangs over the stove. On rainy days in particular, while the wood in the fireplace crackles and pops, the tension in the room is almost tangible. However, as our oldest daughter says, everything that takes place on vacation in the Larchi hut is “real.” And when asked just what she means, she relates how those who sleep in the upper bunk bed bang their head every morning on the wooden beam; or how it’s really scary in the pitch dark of the night to walk through the damp meadow to the outhouse whose door is creakier than in any horror film; or what fun it is to dip the selfpicked parasol mushrooms in egg and then fry them up. The feeling that everything here is very “real” is also something that we adults feel. Two hours of chopping wood and filling every basket and storage space with it; mornings, kindling the fire and warming the hut and, voilà, a feeling of self-sufficiency sets in, no matter how ridiculous it seems. A log cabin located on an Alpine pasture, fewer traces of civilization — and suddenly: a new adventurer is born. Even whipping cream with a hand beater becomes an element in the self-fulfillment fantasy world. “Somehow tastes better than at home,” the children confirm.

ANIMAL BONES AND MOUNTAIN INDIANS
“Very much the real thing” is the animal bones that we find in the morning on our hike to the Dawin mountain farm. The children immediately start to guess who the victim was — a deer, a calf, a wild boar? And then about the hunter: “Dad, are there wolves here? Or lynx? Or even bears?” The bear and wolf questions take on more and more phantasmagorical and threatening contours — and luckily stop abruptly when we lose our way, climbing further upwards through the forest, crawling under electrified fences and following our instincts. Suddenly, three boys appear out of nowhere. Matthäus, 13, the oldest, is wearing a wooden carrying frame and a spool of wire. The three cowherds are going to take down a pasture fence, which they will then put up in another area. At home, our kids would have found Matthäus’ Seppl Hut, a traditional Bavarian hat, to be totally un-cool; however, the fact that Matthäus so unerringly winds through the forest, as if intimately knowing every stump and path, turns his hat into a symbol of his skill. And when the boys go on to relate that they’ve lived alone in a cabin in the woods for several days, they become genuine mountain Indians for our children. Matthäus knows, of course, the way to Dawin, and also remains completely cool when, right before our eyes, he reaches into his backpack and accidentally cuts his finger on his axe. Pale but composed, he crouches on the ground and shows us the way with his bandaged thumb.

“WE ARE HEROES”
At the Dawin mountain farm, which is open to the public, there’s fresh, creamy milk served in heavy porcelain mugs, and the cheese and ham are piled in slices on small wooden planks. The dairymen let a few pigs run around freely; they sniff inquisitively at our backpacks, and we feel somewhat awkward about answering our daughter’s persistent questions as to what the ham and the pigs have to do with each other. In the meantime, our older kids collect dozens of frogs in the meadow and condemn them to taking a dip in the cattle trough. On the way back to Larchi, we encounter a few cows that are being urged on by a shepherd boy who’s wearing a t-shirt that reads: “Wir sind Helden / We are heroes.” Our oldest daughter is now convinced, once and for all, that she also wants to be a herdsperson one day. “And not just for one summer.” After the cows, the fog rolls in, forcing us to take a break on the craggy path. We sit and wait. But after half an hour, we begin to fear that we will have to hike through a pitch-black forest — which is greater than the fear of hiking through fog, and so we set out once again. Two hours later, shortly after nightfall, we actually arrive at Larchi. The hut soon fills with smoke and noise. How silly of us to have imagined that the children would now be exhausted from the long hours of hiking and all the excitement, and would be happy to simply fall into their beds. First, they argue about lighting the fire, then smoke billows out of the cracks and crevices of the stove, since it’s been clogged with too much newspaper. And our littlest one seems to want to make up for all the running around that wasn’t possible during the long day she spent in the baby sling.

BABY SNORING AND WELL WATER
And of course our kids don't forego horsing around and, when they go to bed, also don’t miss out on banging their heads on the wooden beam. When their jabbering is finally over, the only things that can still be heard are the baby’s snoring and, outside the hut, the icy water as it trickles into the well.

Text: Stefan Scheytt, Photos: Cira Moro
Bilfinger Berger Magazine 1/2010