A Trip to the Alps

In 2019, months before my child was born, I found myself near the town of Berchtesgaden in the German Alps. The following is my account of a two-day solo hike.

Day 1: Berchtesgaden to Stahlhaus

I struck out at 10:30 a.m. for Stahlhaus, one of several mountain huts for hikers in Berchtesgaden National Park. Berchtesgaden is in southeastern Germany on the Austrian border. Established in 1978, the national park covers 81 square miles. Nearby is Kehlsteinhaus, or the “Eagle’s Nest”—a Third Reich building built for Hitler and other Nazi leaders, which now functions as a restaurant and beer garden for tourists. (What will Mar-a-Lago be someday?)

I began my hike in a European heatwave. The temperature was around 38°C (100°F), so I generously applied sunscreen and glugged water. At the Berchtesgaden tourist center, where I picked up a cartoonish map, a busload of Chinese people crowded around the bathroom entrances.

I wouldn’t see any of the Chinese tourists on the trail. Apart from a few guys speaking a Slavic language, I seemed to be the only foreigner, and my American nationality, to everyone I’d meet in the hills, would be a novelty.

The first thing I noticed about German hikers was just how steady they were. Normally I cruise past middle-aged hikers on a trail, but out here, if I took a moment to snap a photo or eat a protein bar, I’d soon be overtaken by those whom I’d just overtaken. Many of these hikers didn’t look like they were in amazing shape. Plenty were lumpy and soft-bellied. Yet here they were, gliding up the steep trail with little difficulty. I’ve noticed plenty of German men who have sizable potbellies but otherwise, physiognomically, look hale and hearty. If there is such a thing as a healthy obesity, I’d found it here.

I arrived at the Stahlhaus shelter at 3 p.m. I’d planned to climb a mountain peak, but that would mean I’d miss the three-course dinner in the beer garden, so I sat on a bench and did a sketch of the mountains. I tried to write some thoughts down in my journal, but my mind was mush and my memories were melting—all from the heat.

These German huts weren’t like Appalachian Trail shelters with their three walls and lots of mice. The Stahlhaus was well constructed, offering three-course dinners, breakfast, showers, and electricity. Camping is prohibited in the park, so if you want to do an overnight hike, you have to rely on these shelters, which cost $27 a night. Breakfast, dinner, and my rented cotton sleeping bag liner were another $40. That’s $67 for a night of camping! Some people spend five days hiking out here, where nature is definitely not free.

When I arrived, I was surprised to see how the beds were sandwiched together, shoulder to shoulder. Four Slavic men were whispering loudly on my bunk level. Two middle-aged German women came in and took their bras off in front of us to change into their sleepwear.

I nodded off to sleep quickly, but the Slavic men snored horribly, waking me after an hour. I found the volume intolerable, and I wondered how they weren’t waking one another. As I tossed and turned, I thought that if someone knows that they snore that badly, then they ought to, as a moral duty, never sleep publicly. But I, too, was committing remorseless sins in my corner bunk, softly farting into the fabric of my rented cotton sleeping bag liner.

• One longitudinal study found that men who became fathers experienced median testosterone declines of 26 percent in the morning and 34 percent in the evening. This had me concerned for all the obvious reasons. Will I lose my hair, my muscles, my, umm, drive? Will I eventually get my testosterone levels back? I suppose I feared becoming an unambitious, overweight, and sedated man. I didn’t want to lose what I most liked about myself, which was a kind of take-on-the-world obstinacy. Will my culture or evolution be to blame for the eventual testosterone drop? Is this relegated to us men living in small, atomized nuclear families in industrialized countries, where the father takes on 50 percent of caregiving duties? Is this another example of how my culture may affect and alter me on a profound (hormonal) level? Or does this happen to all fathers?

• It should also be said that, as the research suggests, new fathers also experience hormonal changes associated with love and bonding, such as dopamine and oxytocin. I suppose I do like the idea of experiencing the world with a new perspective (and body, to some degree). There are many lives to live in one life, and there was indeed a part of me that welcomed a new one for a time. Plus, I suppose I was heartened to see so many fit older German men on this trip—something I don’t really see in America. (A few days later, on a train, I sat across from a man who must have been in his mid-sixties and who was definitely capable of kicking my 36-year-old ass.)

• German strangers look at you longer. It’s not quite a stare; it’s more a gaze. They hold their eyes on you for an extra second or two. A Brit might consider this rude, but I don’t mind. The German gaze contains a mix of curiosity, indifference, and sometimes a little bit of warmth.

• This paragraph is not going to help me if I’m ever suspected of a homicide, but I’d say that, several times a week, I impulsively and mentally rehearse acts of violence. It often occurs when I’m walking down a vaguely unfriendly city street that increases my stress levels. I’ll imagine a man or a group of teenage boys attacking me or my partner, and I’ll dispatch them with a series of artful moves, or I’ll just commit to a burst of bloody head-butts, outdoing superior numbers with my pure animalistic rage. I should clarify that I only fantasized about striking someone in scenarios of self-defense. And I should say that I’ve never actually been in a fight, and that I’m happy to go the rest of my life without getting into one. Yet, during these rehearsals, there’s a part of me that is relishing the sensations of mentally delivering a savage beatdown. I call these “rehearsals of violence.” They mentally prepare me for unlikely events. They keep me on my guard. It’s not very different from when I imagine ground balls hit my way—such visualizations are supposed to help me be a better shortstop on my softball team. I’m pretty sure this is all perfectly normal, maybe more so for a man than a woman. These things just go unstated.

A few days earlier, I proposed to my enormously pregnant German wife.

We’d spent most of that day doing separate things. I climbed a few small peaks while she sketched in her notepad at a picnic bench at an alpine beer garden. After we reunited, and as we walked down a hill, we stopped to sit in a quiet meadow, alive with purple and yellow flowers, next to a gurgling stream. The meadow was hopping with insects. In front of us were two of the biggest, sheerest mountains I’d ever seen. Their peaks seemed to lean gently toward one another. In local legend, one was “the king” (Großer Watzmann) and the other “his wife” (Watzmannfrau). We ate apples and chatted and removed some clothing in the sweltering heat.

She was sitting in the grass with her legs spread. Part of me was thinking I could turn this into some rare nature sex (and an even rarer “heavily pregnant” sex). But I recognized that this was also THE OCCASION I didn’t know I was looking for, so I, shirtless, placed a knee down in between her legs and said a few cursory words about my adoration for her. I wanted to go on about how much I loved her, but that seemed too corny even for this most solemn of occasions. I promptly proposed, and she accepted.

A great relief came over me—not only because I got the job done, but because I was bringing a bit of order into a messy life: here I was with a woman seven months pregnant whom I’d only been dating for a year, living in a new country (Scotland), at the beginning of a career implosion, and now traveling through a foreign country.