Eurotrip 2022 Chronicles: Guille’s Left Foot
Context: every so often, Exodus employees meet up IRL to vacation and co-work together. Wonderful and memorable things happen. Unfortunately, half of those memories drown at the bottom of a glass. The other 49% disappear into the ether, casualties of bugs in short-term to long-term memory consolidation, exacerbated by certain individuals snoring themselves and everyone around them into an early grave. Sleep apnea is not a joke (yet).
Enough FUD. 1% is plenty. I’ve filled the gaps with poetic license, smoothed over inconsistencies with ambiguity and diluted the result with lies that I’ve since convinced myself are true, using the great science of homeopathy. The Truth is dead, long live The Truth!
Spoiler alert: if you’ve seen the movie My Left Foot, it’s irrelevant to this story.
Guille was shipped to us damaged. He’d hurt his foot — left or right no one remembers, so we’ll say left — on a vacation he took a week before, which was why he needed this second vacation so badly. He favored his left side as he walked but otherwise didn’t complain even miles into exploring Geneva. When we found an abandoned garbage dumpster full of treasure and people-watched near it for a half hour as passer-by after passer-by fell into its gravity well and walked away having lightened its load, he didn’t take the opportunity to disassemble the mannequin that fate had hand-delivered there and harvest its good leg. No, he pointedly ignored it. This turned out to be a nearly fatal error.
The next stop was Grindelwald, a jaw-droppingly beautiful valley nestled between storybook mountains, where the view haunts you. You literally can’t get away from it no matter where you go. The mountain peaks loomed over the dining room of our Airbnb, they stood proudly outside the back patio of every cafe and souvenir shop, they stalked us on every walk like the moon stalked me around town when I was a wee bairn. It was exhausting, being perpetually impressed. I had to take out my dirty handkerchief from time to time and stare at it as a palate cleanser. But first I had to buy a dirty handkerchief, which wasn’t easy, Switzerland being so clean.
We’d had some Diegtonics the night before, but not so many that we lost count. Diegtonics are like gin and tonics but infinitely better through the power of placebo. Diego’s the only one in the world who knows how much placebo to add to them. There are also Diegdiegs, which are bad news through the power of not having any tonic in them, but we were saving those for Slovenia.
We woke up bright and early, having planned a long hike. I checked on Guille. He was still alive. I counted his legs. Two. Remembering an old proverb, “measure twice, cut once,” I counted again. Still two. Then I remembered that in Russian, the proverb is “measure seven times, cut once,” and counted six more times. Thirteen. Did I already cut once? I couldn’t remember. I checked the calendar. Oh, it was a Friday. That made sense.
The plan was to take the Eiger Express gondola up and hike down. The first part was easy. In Switzerland the gondola carries you. The view from it was nice, but I found I preferred the view from the ground. Some of the magic of the mountains is lost when they’re not menacing you from above.
The trek down was eleven kilometers long. Before we started, we cautiously asked Guille if he wanted to take the gondola down, but he felt up to the hike. We bought some mountain sandwiches, which are like regular sandwiches but with an altitude markup, and took off.
For the first five kilometers, Guille limped along gamely. Then his leg started to throw errors, bend in the wrong direction at the knee and say nasty things about our mothers. Fears of second hand debilitation mounted. Vaccines ran out before we could invent any.
Andrej had the bright idea of pretending he had an important call to get to and skipped off like a little mountain goat. The rest of us weren’t clever enough to come up with our own excuses or bold enough to reuse his. We did put some distance between us and Guille just in case, except for Nacho, who decided friendship was more important than silly superstitions.
Progress was slow. We understood a bit how Frodo and Sam must have felt, constantly having to wait for Gollum to catch up. (Remind me to tell you about the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, and how it wouldn’t let us sleep, think or work. Actually, that’s pretty much the whole story).
Guille said later that his leg was sending shooting pains all the way up to his eyeballs. Weird, the rest of us hadn’t felt a thing. He still smiled his friendly smile but it grew 15% more crazed with every kilometer. With that kind of compounding, we’d need to hire an accountant soon. Guille’s walk was starting to worry me too. I was recalling scenes from the Walking Dead more than usual. It didn’t help that he gritted his teeth a lot, making unholy nails-on-chalkboard sounds that sent shivers through our souls.
Speaking of kilometers, there’s no way the Swiss use the same ones we do. There were trail signs every so often when the path forked but they lied shamelessly. That or distance inflation is rampant on that mountain. All I know is that every half hour we were shocked to learn we’d only walked fifty meters. Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, convinced that this is all a dream and I’m still on that mountain with Guille chasing me.
In the end we made it down only to have to climb a mile back up to our Airbnb. Luckily uphill was easier for Guille. We made it back just in time to hear Andrej say “hey, Dylan, the guys are back, let’s wrap up this very important meeting.” What a plausible coincidence! Guille survived, but was basically out of commission for the next day and on a strong painkiller & electric scooter diet for the next week.
To make him feel better, for the next weeks, the rest of us broke our mouths daily. For those who don’t know, that’s a Uruguayan expression for “I ate too much” or “those gringos are so gullible,” depending on how gullible you are.
