Engadine Adventuring

Further musings on family life, river rafting, bilingualism, and language in general

Wednesday morning on the River Inn

Yesterday morning barely dawned, blanketed in grey mist and clouds. Still, over the tops of the clouds blue sky winked. It was going to be a good day for river rafting that Jason reserved for us four days prior when we went to Scuol to grocery shop at the big store. Eleanor bounced around the apartment, effervescent and always ready to try a new sport. Victor, on the other hand, who very much takes after his father with respect to public safety, felt some real trepidation about paying a bunch of money to do a very dangerous thing for fun. They’re professionals, we assured him. They have to be certified and insured. They will be careful. It is a family activity. We will be with other families in other rafts. He glowered and said nothing, annoyed at being dragged from his rainy morning slumber to do, of all things, a sporty family activity.

At the river rafting office the ebullient staff very much matched Eleanor’s mood. Jason trekked off to get cash from the ATM to pay while I talked to the owner, an affable Scot with a tiny long braid high at the back of his scalp. Alex had exclaimed that I looked every bit the bumblebee when I walked in due to my preposterously cheap sunglasses. I’m going to call you Bumblebee! You can call me Bumblebee, I assured him. Victor snorted over by the snacks and coffee. Mom. He finds it concerning that I smile at and talk to people whom I just met.

I studied the guide board: all native English speakers, save perhaps the two lone Italians who no doubt had impeccable German as they were probably from the Alto Adige. More and more families arrived: Dutch, German, a French family from Geneva. We all struggled into drysuits, helmets, lifejackets and river booties. Victor affirmed he would not be seeking a professional career path that required such getup. So astronaut is out, I said. Yes, astronaut is very out! The most capable and in-charge Raftfrau took the German families while the English-speaking crowd went off with a Kiwi for the safety talk.

Under a concrete overhang with a sample raft the Kiwi showed us various techniques and procedures for every possible situation. A Dutch boy named Moritz was called up - “the Death Sentence,” Victor muttered, battling some residual trauma around interrogazioni di scuola media at home - to sit in the inflatable raft while the Kiwi demonstrated everything. In case the boat flips … in case your head hits a rock .. in case you traverse downward through the rapids with only your body … where to find an air pocket if you are trapped under a flipped raft. Victor looked more and more intently at the Kiwi while Eleanor’s enthusiasm dampened a bit and she went even paler.

We gamely filed off to the van, four rafts staked behind us on a trailer, and set off for the departure point on the River Inn: blue, foamy, ethereal. The safety talk had taken so long that we watched the German raft bump by over rocks. Once we all got in the raft and found our positions, everyone relaxed. Our guide turned out to be the owner of the business, rafting for forty-plus years in sixty-plus countries, a Highlander full of banter and bonhomie. Victor and Eleanor sat in the catbird seats at the front, clutching their paddles as instructed. A shove and we were off on the water.

The river was not running high, as we learned, only at about 25% of capacity. The rapids were as rocky as promised, but no mishaps occurred. Victor and Eleanor quickly calmed and began to enjoy themselves. Victor was even laughing at Alex’s jokes and raising his paddle in triumph over the particularly rushing rapids. We might have gone through ten to fifteen sets of them in all. I love being on the water, that close to nature, the fresh smells of mist, evergreen, cold stone, moss, and lichen. Natural springs about in the Engadin, spouting clear mineral water, and Alex the guide pointed out each place on the riverbank where the minerals collected like geological whipped cream in puffy white- and rust-colored deposits. Alex said the first time anyone had tried to raft this segment they were uninformed about the ten-meter drop over the dam into Austria, “and most of them died,” he chuckled. Victor stiffened in his seat and looked around. “But we won’t be doing that,” Alex added cheerfully. “You’ll be swimming in the end to the dock!”

Seemingly no sooner had we set out than the one-hour excursion drew to a close. “One, two, three, OUT!” Alex commanded, and we all jumped overboard into a topaz-blue swimming hole of calm water of about 8 degrees Celsius. Victor lost a bootie on the water but quickly grabbed it. We all clambered up to the dock and dripped in our puddling footwear.

Back at the rafting office we peeled off all our wet gear and got dressed. None of us remembered to bring our dry undies into the rafting changing rooms, having left everything down the hill in the parked car, so for one glorious hour the whole family was commando. Remembering the intense construction taking place under our apartment during the workday, we opted into another session at the Bogn Engiadin in Scuol. This time I continued to patronize the salt pool and the steam room, added the infrared warming bed, and did the cold plunge half a dozen times, immune to the shock now after the river dip and endless splashing. I don’t remember the last time I felt so deeply washed, rinsed, steamed, dried and tired.

I mused to Victor how the international language of adventure sports seems to be English. How much he relaxed when he heard that the guide was Scottish, and thus we would all be on the same language page, equal footing for equal comfort. And in fact his teenaged daughters, he said, had grown up in Africa, Mexico, and France. I had wondered who was so effortlessly translating the safety talk for the Geneva family! As for us, our combined family language skills are not in question, but we would all agree that, for one reason or another, a certain emotional overhead enters into the equation depending on circumstances and the language of currency.

Strange how having traversed over and north of the Alps speaking English, being heard doing so aloud, or politely asking if locals might speak English is interpreted not as a mark of barbarity but as a sign of courtesy and a thorough education. The kids and I have all noted how we do not stand out in Switzerland as we do in Tuscany, speaking fluent Italian and educating our children in Italy, yet suspiciously fair of complexion and publicly speaking the tongue of vandals.

Another layer of complexity is added in Florence, where in the small city, hollowing out of residents and fatigued by overtourism, we “code” visually as tourists rather than residents and often receive all deserving treatment thereof. Victor, now fourteen, seems more aware of his third-culture status than his sister Eleanor, younger by four years. He also emigrated from the US to Italy at five, having spent three formative years in English and in the US from two to five, and his psyche may have wound more tightly around that lodgepole. I worry that harder blows are in store for Eleanor and make my own mental plans to educate and arm myself with literature and research for the inevitable, poignant conversations that are surely in store for us, given the hidden challenge of laying to no true home beyond the borders of the heart.

And that, my friends, is a tough lesson for wanderers and pilgrims of any age on this earth, a bit like Rumi asserting that the reward of patience is patience. More broadly interpreted for our purposes here: the reward of perspective is perspective in situations where perspective may be lacking.

A holiday outside of Florence makes me breathe a little easier. It’s a bit of a pressure cooker, economically, linguistically, and culturally. Everyone looking at everyone. Everyone listening to everyone. What to do with these 20+ million tourists a year in a city of 350,000 when fewer than 50,000 of those citizens even live inside the old city parameters as we do. Locals so tired of tourists. Tourists devouring the city and (maybe) wondering where the locals are. Locals constantly eyeing locals -who are you? who’s your family? Never mind, they already know everything about each other since their families have been intermarrying, quarrelling, competing for market share and generally jostling up against one another since the Catasto of 1427.

And to locals in Florence, non-locals are pretty much as good as ghosts, unless you’re a loyal customer at a fioraio or a bar or the mercato. I remember this feeling in France, where local Alsatian people (noun specified for any British readers, for whom this word can only denote a German shepherd) could just manage and in the rarest of circumstances to be polite, much less talk to non-locals and the more transient among them. I mused on the amount of “France” that lurks in Florence way back in 2016, grateful for the skills in cultural navigation and a thicker hide that I learned in the blocks of a city bickered over for centuries and though more wars than most people can even name.

On the flip side, a trip outside of Italy makes me feel like my Italian is awesome, a solid C-level (A being the lowest, C the highest in the European CEFR model). Why is this? I don’t know, but I might hazard a guess from language-badgered brain that being able to lay aside daily input to the effect that I sound weird / incomprehensible / my Italian accent is indecipherable / any other number of comments which come my way daily, most tellingly from my own family makes me move forward cognitively unburdened. I read Italian news with facility. I speak Italian to Swiss people - when they start in it first - without hesitation. I am happy to bring out German or try my new Rumantsch as the situation demands. With what amusement did I eavesdrop on and parse the language of the Romansh contruction workers tidying a water main below our apartment here (verdict: roughly 80% Italian, 20% German). Can also unpack French very quickly as needed in Ardez, and have done so at the boulangerie! You know that lady who became a famous for her TedTalk a few years ago for her medical-grade olfactory skills? I really wish some neurolinguists would put my head in an MRI when I encounter these situations. (I wouldn’t mind some personal olfactory analysis either, being a supersmeller.) My language gears switch so quickly and subconsciously that I don’t even notice a decision to do so.

But, at the end of the day, here I am, speaking English and living in Italy, sounding like a semibarbarian when south of the Alps but a thoughtful and learned traveller in transalpine locales. I write in English. I make jokes in English. I read in English. Even as I might live the rest of my life in Europe, clicking through language gears, I cannot rewrite my personal history of growing up in the US, in a home with one language (and only very occasionally the second language of Finnish when on trips to visit my mother’s family and extended family. Of being educated in English from age 4 to 32, save the (many) language classes I took, and two programs abroad in Spain and France. It’s sobering to think how many more years I have lived in English since I first found myself in Spain long-term in 1993.

To quote Popeye, I yam what I yam. An anglophone linguist. Riverrafting. Commando with my family. It was a great day. O Augenblick Verweile! (“O moment, linger!”) (Goethe.

Setting out - still dry.

And if you should ever find yourself in the Engadin, do look up the good people at Engadin Adventure. They were really lovely and so friendly - perfect for our family. I am sure they can dial it up for adrenaline junkies.