Areuse Gorge

I woke up while the sky was still mostly dark, to set off on the first bus to Nyon train station. I had one weekend a month that I stayed in Switzerland where I was working, instead of taking the five am Saturday flight back home to Alicante for the weekend. The route back to Geneva on Sunday was then via Lisbon, Amsterdam or Madrid since there were no direct flights that day. It felt like a reprieve to have a Saturday that I wasn’t getting up at three in the morning, getting up at seven felt indulgently luxurious. 

It was mid-January, and the air was brisk and cold, but still. I waited at the bus stop outside my house and watched the full moon set behind the snow-capped mountains in the west. I had wrapped up warm, my scarf wound around the lower half of my face, thick gloves and fur-lined headband on to keep my ears warm. I got on the bus and we trundled gently into town, past flat, brown fields under a heavy winter sky.

I jumped off at the train station and went to wait on the platform, huffing into my gloves to keep my fingertips warm. The train to Neuchatel ran along Lac Leman and required a change in Lausanne. I loved taking the train here, the views were stunning, particularly in the soft morning winter light. We carried on past the end of Lac Leman and onto Lac Neuchatel, placid silvery waters wreathed in mist, like something out of an Arthurian legend.

Neuchatel train station was busy on a Saturday morning and I was pleased to get on the little local train that ran up to Noirague. It was almost completely empty and I felt like I was leaving the human world behind already. We went further up, into the mountains, mist and fog shrouding fir trees as we journeyed higher up the mountain. I was the only person that got off at this stop, and I unconfidently followed my written directions to the start of the trail.

I followed the train tracks until I reached what I hoped was the turning off place and wandered along until I found the Areuse River. It was high and fast, an exuberant winter river, swollen with rain as it tumbled down out of the mountains. It was an open landscape to start off with, bare mountains and scattered nude trees, long branches starkly black against the white of cloud and mist. I followed along the river, seeing it leap and foam over grey boulders, the only smear of colour appearing from the deep green firs that shouldered their way among the bare deciduous trees.

I had just been reading Tristan Gooley’s ‘How to Read Water’ and delighted in spotting the signs of an upland river, pillows and pools in the river’s course. Tristan says, “Understanding the things we see and the reasons for them does not reduce the beauty of the whole, quite the opposite […] there is room for poetical and analytical minds to stand on the same quayside.” I let his words guide my thoughts, finding a depth in seeing and understanding that took me beneath the surface, both of the river and myself.

There was not another soul on the path and my heart lifted as I felt my mind float free and my consciousness filled the expansive sky. My feet were some metres above the river and I tracked its course as it carved its way down through the unforgiving stone. Its waters were like green glass, clear and sharp when it ran smooth. It laid serpentine white coils around great boulders and immovable rocks, a green tideline of mosses running parallel above it.

My feet found their way along the rocky and uneven path, a walking meditation as I laid the soles of my boots down upon the earth. Walking beside a river is possibly the most blissful thing I can think of, tasting the dampness in the air as my feet and legs take over the thinking. Thich Nhat Hanh says that “we can walk with gentle steps, in reverence to the Earth who gave us birth and of whom we are a part [...] so each step should be loving and peaceful.”

I tried to walk with a lightness and a reverence for this incredible and wild place, feeling the earth beneath my booted feet. My steps slowly descended to meet the river, and the mountain peak loomed above me, ineffable and distant, looking like the remote site of a Buddhist temple. I read the river as I walked along it, tracking its riffles and glides, pools and eddies, seeing through the river itself to understand its nature. I didn’t see a sign of life, no falcon riding the thermals, no squirrels chattering in the branches. It was wide and silent except for the river, my footsteps and my breath.

The river and I started to descend together, dancing and looping our way downwards, cutting ever farther into the mountain. Cliffs reared above me, festooned in questing roots, water-jewelled ferns and pillow-soft mosses. I’ve always adored the luminousness of damp riverine valleys, the eternal verdant greenness that the spreading bryophytes lend. It’s like walking inside a natural cathedral, the stained glass light of shining mosses, lichens and ferns casting a glow on even the greyest day. There are whole worlds in these miniature forests, a microcosm of the world we move through.

This is another dimension that I long to explore and adventure through, to understand as I tried to understand the river that flowed beside me. Robin Wall Kimmerer calls it a “mossy wallpaper,” and “a complex tapestry, a brocaded surface of intricate pattern”. The weave of this brocade is soft and luxurious, a richness that humans could never recreate.

The footpath flowed up and down over the river, so sometimes I was walking next to its surface, at other times high above. It hugged close to the sheer walls of the gorge, the slick rock holding the course, a container, and yet shaped by what flowed within it, through it. At points the footpath tunnelled through the very stone itself, a dark, tight uterine chamber that pushed you back out into the dim January sun and the humid air of the running river.

I found my way back to the river surface as it broadened and calmed, turning from an upland mountain river, to a lowland valley river in a matter of seconds. The path widened too and left the stone face of the gorge, which had now dived back into the earth. There was a wide bend curving away from me, leaving a gravel that graded softly into the water, dry stones leading to little pools, then the shallow side of the river, before the deep channel of its meander.

I sat and pulled out my lunch and ate contemplating the area before me. Trees lined the riverbank and ran up the mountain slope behind. There was a lushness that watered the yearning in me, unfulfilled by the Alicante semi-arid, sear landscape. It was cold, but I put my hands in the water and cupped it to my lips. I drank in the essence of the mountain in winter, this place, this time. The icy coldness flushed my cheeks and made my teeth ache. It was wonderful. I felt a deep contentment, away from the office, politics, to do lists and housework. I felt a spark of awakening and communion, one that we can all feel when we are in our element, wherever that may be.

Giving a deep heartfelt thanks, I rejoined the footpath and carried onwards. The valley was brief but beautiful, nestled in the Alpine winter. I saw wooden huts and no sign of life, the sun burning off the cloud to glow through the fir branches. The golden glow of sunshine through trees is the greatest medicine for me, it brings an indescribable joy and peace. I bathed in it all, the crisp mountain air, the bright, sharp sunshine and the river water that cloaked everything here.

I moved onwards as the river dropped away again into the gorge, and I followed it at a height. I started to see one or two people out on the path now, in the afternoon. I felt as if my mind had been invaded, their presence somehow lessening the enchantment, the obligatory nods and bonjours breaking into my wild reverie. Still, after they were out of sight, I put them away from my thoughts and allowed myself to be carried away by the rushing waters.

The sun was passing overhead towards the west, and I neared the end of the gorge, where the river spilled back out into the human world of concrete and steel, houses and roads, vehicles and noise. I drank in every last drop I could, rolling it around on my tongue and savouring it like a fine brandy. We levelled out, the river and I, the mountain giving way to the flat area around Lac Neuchatel. I heard distant human sounds and sat for a moment in gratitude and wistfulness before walking out into Boudry.

I made my way to Latenium, the archaeological museum at La Tene, on the shores of Lac Neuchatel. La Tene is the type site of the La Tene style of Celtic art, named after the discovery of hundreds of metal objects found deposited in the lake. The familiar and enigmatic curls, loops, swirls and triskeles of Celtic art, found all across Europe take their name from this place. 

Deposition of objects like this started in the Middle Bronze Age, in what Francis Pryor calls the “New Order”. From around 1500 BC onwards, worship across Europe changed focus from sky and celestial focused “substantial sites such as round barrows and henges” to “new order practices […] often based around water”. This was likely in response to climatic changes, leading people’s gaze down from the stars and the sun, into the earth and the life-giving waters. Many surviving Celtic myths and stories centre around water, springs and rivers, the sea and lakes, often as entrances to the otherworld.

The approach to the museum had been jarringly industrial, but the lakeside looked as though nothing had changed in the past 2500 years, and I could see why those early tribes felt as though they could dive into another, magical world through its quiet, dark surface. The outside of the museum ran along the lake edge, with a reconstructed Roman herb garden and Bronze Age pile dwellings, ubiquitous through this area of Switzerland. 

Long rushes billowed in the winter breeze, and sunshine sparkled off the water, ruffled by the wind. It was a peaceful place, and far enough back from the road that with a bit of effort, the modern sound of vehicles faded into the background. With the Bronze Age houses behind me and just the sound of children playing, this could have been exactly what a tribeswoman felt as she stood looking out across this same lake, from this same spot, thousands of years ago. 

I eventually made my way inside and descended backwards into history. The exhibits took me further and further back in time. Beautiful ancient wooden boats were displayed, as well as a feast of La Tene style objects, elegant, sinuous curves and anthropomorphic figures gracing shields, swords and jewellery. I could have spent hours drifting among the beauty of the ancients, fingers itching to trace those curling, winding patterns. They made me think of the graceful and coiling ferns that had graced the river gorge I had just journeyed through.

Then I came across quite possibly the most beautiful and captivating object made by human hands that I have ever seen. A menhir, a giant block of stone, with the most haunting face carved into it stood and gazed down at me. There were the merest hints of ribs carved below the small face, perched atop the great stone. Eyes of shadow peered out over a rough nose and a slash of a mouth, but nothing had ever looked so human, so real, carved in stone. For me, the great carvings of classical Greece and Rome could not compare to the deep beauty and connection I felt across the millenia through this carving. It was entrancing, I couldn’t pull my gaze away from it. Never before had I felt something so alive, so ancient, so moving.

It was found at Treytel-A Sugiez, with an age of between 5700 and 6600 years old. The Neolithic reached Switzerland over 7000 years ago and turned into the Bronze Age somewhere between 4000 and 4500 years ago, putting this statue somewhere directly in the middle of the Swiss Neolithic.

It was mind-blowing to me, to see the face of someone stare out at me from the depths of the Neolithic, across an expanse of time too big for me to grasp. What were those people like? I know that in some ways their culture would have been completely alien to me. Things that I take for granted about the way I see the world and humans in it would have bewildered them. But there are many things that would have made sense. Their everyday lives would have been filled with the business of living. Cleaning, cooking, getting food, tending the fire, baking bread, weaving cloth. Loving family, arguing with neighbours, complaining about the weather. Parents would raise their children, people would fall in love, sometimes with the wrong person. Everyday miracles and tragedies would play out, things that seemed so huge that it would occupy the minds and hearts of people, now all dust, all forgotten.

Through that carved face, I felt those people, I felt their lives, their smiles and tears, their loves and losses. They were people, just like me. I wonder if one day, many thousands of years from now, someone will contemplate something I have left behind, that has survived through time and wonder about me, about my life. Maybe they will feel connected to me in some way, and understand that once I was alive, that I breathed and laughed and cried and loved, that I spent my days cooking, working and being with friends and family.

Eventually I had to shake myself past the menhir and carry on further backwards through time, through the Mesolithic, Upper Paleolithic and back through to our Neanderthal cousins, the last human species we shared this world with. Now they’re so far distant from us in time that we have lost all stories, all cultural memory of our other human companions.

I was in a melancholy and wistful mood when I left and walked back through Neuchatel to the train station, tired and ready to get home to a hot bath and hot food. I wrapped up the vast vibrant wildness of the gorge and the depths of time I had crossed through the menhir and put them in my heart, to carry with me as I journeyed back home.

© Elena Tornberg-Lennox 2023