The Heart of the Journey

   When is a people a nation, a border a boundary? Can I find out by encircling a small multilingual country with vast borders, one footstep at a time? And what about those mountains: Can I possibly climb them all in one summer?

    “Border Stories” layers a challenging  physical adventure over an exploration of the history, culture, and environment of one of the most fascinating places on earth: Switzerland.

    Emotionally, nothing will top climbing the north face of the Eiger—and out of Dad’s legendary shadow. But I’ve long had another dream also, much bigger and higher: to make a complete circumnavigation of Switzerland, staying exactly on the border and climbing each of the hundreds of summits that divide my former homeland from its neighbors. In the summer of 2010, I will take on the challenge.

                                                  The Borderline

   According to simple map-distances, I’ll cover roughly 800 kilometers by bicycle and kayak and 1,000++ kilometers on foot—including lots of technical climbing over difficult mountains (for example, the hardest ridge on the Matterhorn). Were I to stick to the exact border the entire distance, it would ascend roughly 170,000 vertical meters (and descend another 170,000). That’s like climbing Mt. Everest 20 times round trip from the sea. I’m hoping to bypass some of the less significant summits, but it should still be plenty hard.

    But the physical adventure is merely a personal challenge, good for a few stories (especially when things go wrong). The greater depth of this journey will be its window into the borderlands.

    From Julius Caesar’s forts on the Rhine to today’s fighter jets hidden in caves, from a tribal alliance in 1291 to women’s suffrage in 1971, from fielding mercenary armies to being the world’s icon of peaceful neutrality, from poverty to riches: Switzerland long has been at the paradoxical heart of Western history.

    And above all, I will wonder: Why is THIS Switzerland? With four national languages (and dozens of dialects), why is the border here and not there? Is an Italian-speaking Swiss more or less like his German-speaking countryman than like an actual Italian on the other side of the ridge? What does this say about each of us—no matter which country claims us by accident of birth?

    History is a collection of stories, about people and places. After three months on the borderline in the company of experts and friends, I’ll have a few tales to recount, including my own.

The 5-page pdf below summarizes many components of the Swiss Border Stories

section of this website in a form that can be downloaded.