The School of Slovenian Alpinism
The 4,000-foot high north wall of Triglav. At 9,396 feet, Triglav is Slovenia’s highest peak. We scrambled to the left at the thin horizontal snowband below the summit pyramid to reach the popular year-round hut on the mountain’s shoulder. MARKO PREZELJ
Mount Štajerska Rinka, Kamnik Alps, Yugoslavia (now Slovenia): January, 1989
DUŠAN’S FACE IS PLASTER WHITE, his heavy beard and even his thick eyelashes are jeweled with snowflakes, which, amazingly, do not seem to melt. He looks up at me and blinks; the crystal mascara dissolves.
“Ta suk je kar zajebon.” He spits the hard tones of the Slovene words. “This next pitch is quite a bastard.” He continues slowly in Slovene, as he would to a six-year-old. “Did I tell you? This route probably doesn’t have a winter ascent. Hard it is…”
To see past Dušan’s doubt I squint upwards. The steep limestone wall is split with a weathered crack running vertically into the mist. I hope to see Ljubo, who leads this pitch through the swirling fog. Occasional snowflakes drift upwards on the wind currents; clouds hide the half-dozen peaks that ring the Logar Valley.
I strain to see as the rope pays out slowly through the belay device on my harness and my ice encrusted, wool-clad hands. Inch by jerky inch. There is a pause and I hear the dull echo of a hammer driving steel. Above me in the cloud a piton is driven and clipped. Another unannounced avalanche of spindrift – snow accumulated and then released from the steep summit slopes hundreds of feet above – envelops us. I hear the faint tapping of the tiny flakes peppering our nylon coats.
The rope lies still in my hands for a long time. Suddenly, a few feet pay out in a rush. Then the rope stops again. I hear the heavy thud of more soft iron pitons being driven into limestone cracks. Again silence.
Then a distant sound: a muffled human voice, and a quick tug on the rope. Our little stance becomes a flurry of activity. I take Ljubo off belay by freeing the rope from the figure-eight belay device. Dušan mutters something I don’t understand as he digs the fresh snow away from the pitons and deconstructs the cobweb anchor of webbing slings and climbing rope. I ignore his comment and hasten to knock out a few of the pegs myself, leaving the aged, rusty ones for the next visitor who will arrive sometime after the spring thaw.
I move off the ledge and moments later I am standing on the steel points of my crampons, the front tips balanced on rock edges. My right hand grasps the rubber-coated shaft of an ice hammer to clean pitons out of cracks. My left hand holds an ice axe.
For a short time I feel weightless. I have felt this paradox of connection when climbing rock with bare hands. I feel the most connected the moment I minimize contact with the Earth. This time my support is crampons and the naked steel of my ice tools. The cold makes everything more vivid, more perfect.
The bright yellow and electric blue ice hammer in my hand, with its square-edged teeth purposefully cut into a cast steel pick, is a tool made for the modern alpinist. An alpinist, I already know, is a climber of mountains by difficult routes, by technical routes: real climbing to summits like this one. The ice hammer itself is a key to the world of legends that I’ve dreamed of in my fading boyhood: the world of climbers like Reinhold Messner, Hermann Buhl, Riccardo Cassin, Walter Bonatti, and Yvon Chouinard.
I reach above me and place the sharp steel tip of the axe in the limestone crack. I wiggle it in, teasing it deeper. As I start to pull on the tool it shifts and my heart races. I test it again by jerking my body down on my outstretched arm, tugging to feel whether it is set.
“Come on,” I mutter to myself. “It’s solid.” I clench my jaw and my eyes squint involuntarily as I pull on the axe. As I step up onto a small ledge, the euphoria quickly dissipates into the chilled air. My crampon slips. My arms catch and keep me from falling onto the rope.
Regaining my balance, I stand, teetering on two small rock edges a dozen feet above the belay stance. The rush is forgotten. I have to concentrate. This pitch is graded as a V – a 5.9 for my American mind – that fact reminds me that it’s hard, right at my limit.
I touch the rock with my gloved hand, the holds are small, but there is no crack here in which to place my ice tool. I drop my tools so they hang from their wrist-loops. My fingers wrap onto a rough-hewn edge in the limestone. It’s only as wide as the first pad of my fingertips. I press the wool under my fingers, feeling the fabric compress into the edge as I start to climb.
I concentrate, remembering back to the tiny practice cliff near Maribor, toproping in the sun with Ljubo. “Climb up by looking down,” he says in my mind. I look down at the pink front points of my new crampons. I find the places where the snow has settled, almost invisible horizontal spaces in this near-vertical landscape. Carefully, I put the tips of my crampon points on two. I stabilize my boots, hold my breath, and push into my toes. Slow and tenuous; I grunt and stand erect. Gasping I regain my breath in ragged gulps of frozen air.
I’m concentrating so intently that I nearly jump out of my jacket when the pink rope next to me, Dušan’s rope, suddenly stretches and goes tight. Dušan, hanging in the fog below me, unleashes a string of epithets: Something about a mother that I’m happy not to understand. I look up and spy a new crack. I pull up my tool and find the crack is just within reach. The pick of my ice hammer fits perfectly. I smile to myself and climb upwards. Two hours later we reach the top of the wall.
“There is ridge,” Ljubo shouts, pointing up into the streaming, windblown clouds, “to the summit, but it is too late today. Now we go down.” Dušan hurriedly coils the rope, and Ljubo turns to face the wind and starts towards the valley.
Zagreb International Airport, Yugoslavia: August, 1988
I follow the crowd of passengers past signs written in the Cyrillic alphabet and in a second language I don’t recognize. I gather my duffel and approach the wandering eye of a slouching, dark-skinned border guard. On the plane I had read about how, in 1945, Josip Broz Tito cobbled together Yugoslavia – land of the Slavs – from the bric-a-brac of post World War II Europe. The guard shuffles the pages of my passport, stopping to examine the holograph embedded in the photo page. Without a glance at the yearlong visa on page three, he stamps it, pushes it back to me and waves me through.
Tito has been dead eight years and the first cracks in his country are showing themselves in the international news. When I enter the arrivals hall a thin man with a light complexion and a dark, coarse swath of hair crosses the chipped tile floor towards me. His dark pressed slacks and ironed light blue oxford shirt contrast with the heavy, ill-fitting wool suits worn by almost everyone else. I stop, dropping my bag on the floor. A teenaged boy, wide glasses dominating his face and belted trousers pulled high, follows behind.
“Steve?” asks the man, swallowing the “v” to produce the word Stew.
“Yes?” I ask unsure if he’s really saying my name.
“Špindler. I am Špindler, you call me Franci. This is my son.”
“Jure,” says the boy, pointing to himself. “Slovene for George.” They both offer their hands, and I shake with my host father and brother for the year.
Three hours later the clattering Volkswagen diesel turns off the narrow highway and winds between potholes and the old town walls of Maribor, in the state of Slovenia. As we drive across the languid Drava River, I roll down my window to catch a fresh scent off the water. Instead I am met by a soon-to-be-familiar ammonia odor, the heavy smell of industry.
I am relieved as we pull up to one of the more spacious homes, driving through a wide gate and into the yard of a two-story stucco house. The front door opens as we get out.
“Stew?” My new host-mother steps out of slippers and into wooden clogs set outside the threshold. Stepping forward she puts out her hand limply, fingers angled towards the ground.
“My name Ani.” Her skin looks Turkish, dark and smooth, and her black hair is pulled back tightly into a dense bun. She wears a large flowered apron over a dark gray pants suit.
“And this is Natasha.” A young-looking 14-year-old girl peers around the doorway. Wearing a dark jumper, she has the same radiant face and beautiful skin as her mother, her large dark eyes shine with intelligence.
“Hello,” she says shyly, clinging to the back of her mother’s flower-print apron.
Franci changes into slippers. “Here,” he commands, carrying my duffel, and I follow him inside.
“No. No.” Ani yells. I freeze and look around. All four of them are staring at me. I turn towards Ani, “What?”
“Shoe.” Ani points at my Nikes.
“No!” says Franci sternly. “No shoe in house. Take this, is for you.” He indicates a huge oversize pair of slippers that I’ve stepped right over.
My feet slip on the wooden stairs as I follow Franci to a large bedroom facing the busy street. Unsure of what to do, I unzip my bag and begin to stack my belongings across a shelf at the end of a narrow bed: three pairs of Levis, seven T-shirts, a few undergarments, and four jumbo jars of peanut butter.
“I spoke with school today,” announces Franci at dinner. He speaks better English than anyone in the family, having traveled to Australia twice where he earned more as a gray-market laborer than he makes as a chemical engineer in Slovenia. “They think it best if you go to school with Jure. This is science and English track. I think you are good in science.”
I shrug, and smile. “Ok,” I don’t object. Not knowing any Slovene yet, it seems like I might have a chance with the language of numbers and symbols, especially since I’ll be taking courses I’ve already had back home.
“And Slovensko?” I ask, using the word they call their own language. So far I’ve learned to count to 500, the verb “to tell,” and the word for grass. I still can’t get my tongue around “piščanetc,” Slovene for chicken, though I’ve tried because there are six living in the yard.
“For this we have to see. Is not so easy,” says Franci. He turns back to his plate of pocket-sized fried cabbage rolls.
As Jure and I pedal towards the first day of school, I discover that only third gear works on Franci’s bike: the shifter is frozen. Nervously, I shadow Jure through crowded streets bursting with diesel fumes and honking mini cars that swerve and turn with complete disregard for lanes. I wear Levis and Nikes, and a gray Patagonia fleece jacket, patched at the elbows.
“Do you like the Levis?” Jure asks. “I thought the American cowboys wore the Wrangler jeans?” He reveals for the first time that his English is pretty good.
I am surprised that he thinks I am a cowboy. I’m not. “Yeah, that’s usually true, but especially for the movies. In the summer sometimes I worked on a ranch, and nobody really cared what jeans you had.”
“Mmmm. Cool. So, do you have a gun?” He has an excited look now and I think that his bringing me to class might mean big points for him, especially if I have some good information.
“A gun?”
“Yeah, a pistol, like the, how do you say, sick-shooter?”
“Six-shooter?” I laugh. “Six. Six bullets inside it. No, no. I don’t have a gun.” I lie, kind of. Guns back home don’t belong to anyone. They belong to a family. One old Parker shotgun we have was 100 years old before I was born. Guns are passed on and cherished. But guns, I have been taught, are tools, not props. I had always thought these Hollywood stereotypes of Americans were over stated.
“Do you have horse?”
“Horses? No.” The movies reach further than I thought. “I live in a small town. In town. I have ridden a few times. But I don’t know anything about horses. I have a motorcycle though. And we rode four-wheelers on the ranch.”
“What is four-wheeler?”
At school, the kids Jure introduces me to are either too shy or too self-conscious about their English to talk to me. Class time is very serious and during the lessons the students are strictly attentive. The math and chemistry look familiar, but due to the language barrier, I haven’t the faintest idea what they are talking about. Bored, I write a couple of letters and absentmindedly gaze out a large wall of dirty windows.
Next to the school a construction pit yawns. Bulldozers push dirt, cranes lower bundles of steel to a clutch of waiting men. Trucks idle on the perimeter. Tearing a page from my notebook, I sketch the scene and pass it to Jure who sits next to me. He’s focused on the lesson, but I push the paper in front of his notebook anyway.
Startled, he looks up, looks at my picture, and passes it back. “Nice.” He mutters.
“No, no,” I shake my head. Taking back the drawing I scribe a line to the lawn beside the construction pit. “Trava,” I write the Slovene word for grass. Then I draw lines to all the objects in my sketch and push the paper back across the desk.
Soon I have a list of words: man, truck, hat, crane, fence, rock, wheel, wall, driver, and pencil. Two verbs: to dig and to write. I make a list; 10 nouns and two conjugated verbs. On the bike ride home I practice reciting my new knowledge to Jure.
My first Saturday I take off on the bike to explore. I pedal down the back alleyways that lead into a huge war cemetery and exit near a series of hulking square, gray apartment buildings. Children play outside on a steel swing-set in the center of a broad, dead lawn. Across the busy bridge the new frontage street is lined with promising new buildings with empty plate-glass windows. I bike past a crowded bus depot and through a long park; the firm gravel path crunches and snaps as I pedal past three ponds.
The trees show the fatigue of late summer as I climb the narrow road leading up, out of town, and into the countryside. The concrete road becomes more and more broken, and the houses more spaced apart and less well kept. I start to sweat and as the oppression I feel builds, I pedal harder.
Past the last house the road narrows to one lane and passes fields of drying cornstalks and bare patches that just last week held cabbage. On the hills I strain to pedal the squeaking bicycle. I do not find the untouched wilderness I grew up with so near to my Oregon home. The deer, elk, beaver, bobcat, foxes, hares, trout, and fall-run salmon are not to be seen. No pine-scented breeze lifting the limbs of the forest. I see nothing like the cattle ranches I worked during my summers. Even here the acrid city odor hangs over me and the leaves sag under a strange coating of grime. I feel sad. I have left behind the freedom I’d earned by way of summer jobs. I had been admitted to a good college, had respectable savings, and a fast Yamaha motorbike. I exchanged that for a vague fantasy of adventure.
Back at the Špindler’s home I sit in the kitchen, the warmest place in the house. Writing in my journal I examine my new situation. “Life seems oppressive,” I theorize, “because there is so little outlet for aspiration.” Franci has the television tuned to the evening news. The sharp edge of political rhetoric reverberates across the language barrier. I continue to write: “Or, more likely, the fatalistic feeling I have from these people is derived from the fact that the very future of this nation seems to be in doubt. In such an environment there can be no funnel for ambition. Only waiting for better times.”
A month later I roll out of bed and drop my feet to the floor. I pull on some dirty jeans and let out a great sigh. Barefoot, I enter the kitchen late; Jure and Natasha are finishing their fried egg breakfast.
“Hočeš (you want) American breakfast?” Ani asks in the brand of Slo-English we’ve developed. The family quickly adapt to using the Slovene words I’ve learned with my notebooks full of lists, and substitute English when they use a word I haven’t yet learned.
“No thanks, I think I’m sick.” I reply in Slovene.
That sets off a cascade of words I don’t understand. Ani shoos me out of the kitchen with her apron, and I understand that I’m to stay in my room. Five minutes later Ani delivers a liter pot of strong chamomile tea.
“Homemade,” she says proudly in the simplified Slovene she uses with me. I had noticed the chamomile flowers ringing the garden.
“Here is sugar. Now work,” she says pointedly, and heads down the stairs and out the door to her job as a civil engineer inspector.
In the evening I am invited back into the kitchen. I’m happy for that, because my room is cold. When everyone else has cleared out after dinner, Ani looks up from her cleaning, sets the oversize wooden spoon down and gently turns to me.
“Štef,” she says. Since no one can pronounce Steve, I have quickly been renamed Štef. “You aren’t sick, you are homesick.” She sits down and is quiet for a moment. I am unsure if I should be grateful for her sudden attention. Her big, round, dark eyes look into mine and she asks, “Why?”
I look at her with startled eyes. Yes, of course, I hadn’t seen this myself. “I, I, … “I stutter and drop my gaze to summon my courage. “I am bored. I don’t understand the school lessons. The students only have time to study. There are no athletics.” I stop and look at Ani.
“Which sports do you like the most?” Ani asks.
The next day I follow Franci and Ani into the basement and down a dark, low-ceilinged hallway toward the furthest corner of the Maribor Mechanical School. We turn a corner, step over a stone threshold, and duck into a brightly lit room. Inside I see quarried stone walls and an uneven terracotta floor. Twenty people, mostly young men, twist on the benches, halting their meeting to see who has barged in.
A blonde man with hair feathered back hunches at the desk with large hands crossed in front of him. He looks at the Špindlers, glances at me, and waves us forward. After a short conversation in fast Slovene his blue eyes – so uncommon here – look straight at me. He puts out his hand, and addresses me in English.
“Hi, I’m Ljubo. Welcome to Mountaineering Club Kozjak. You climbing before?” I nod and he continues. “You sit and see how we make things here. Afterwards we go on one beer and we make plan for climbing. No? You have bus pass to go home? No?”
Three days later Ljubo and I are climbing on a small slab of rock in the forest of Pohorje, Maribor’s patron mountain. I had toproped many rock climbs and led easy multipitch climbs at Smith Rock in Oregon. But Ljubo’s lessons are strict. More directed. Definitely more purposeful than the school-of-hard-knocks lessons a teenager with a climbing rope and a rack of hexes learns on his own.
After allowing me to scamper up, eager to show off my skill, he lowers me back down. “Štef, again. Now slowly and be sure.”
I have found a new school: one whose language I readily understand. The school of Slovenian alpinism.
Karavla Bivouac Hut, North Face of Triglav, Yugoslavia (now Slovenia): February, 1989
I lie down on the bunk and snap off my headlamp. I squeeze my eyes shut. Thinking about tomorrow makes my head spin in the confines of the small bivy hut. Outside, in the darkness, looms the 6,000-foot north face of Triglav: Slovenia’s biggest wall and Yugoslavia’s highest peak. I mentally go through my gear, food, and water. I have little: a sandwich, a green apple, a liter of sweetened tea, and a sweater. Everything else I will wear for our predawn start, now a scant three hours away.
A moment later, a boot steps down onto my bunk and dismounts onto the worn wooden floor. I sit up sharply, suddenly aware that I had been in a deep, dreamless sleep. A spark ignites under a kettle. Groggily I sit up and stuff my feet into plastic boots and fold the hut blankets. A few gulps of warm and sweet tea and the four of us – Branko, Zdenko, Mira, and I – step into the darkness. For a brief moment before Mira illuminates the icy trail with her headlamp, I see that half the hemisphere before us is black: the dark, looming mass of an alpine north face. Looking above it and behind us, a canopy of stars pierce the cold sky.
After a short walk we stop and the broad, mustachioed Branko flakes out the climbing rope that he has carried coiled over his shoulder. I join him on a broad ledge coated with frozen gravel. As he starts climbing his crampons scrape and then spark. Already the lanky and quiet Zdenko and the short, round-faced Mira, a piston of energy and determination, have moved well past us. My rope comes tight from Branko, a tug and a distant grunt and I’m off, scrambling as hard as I can. I am slowed only by the occasional blank slab or broken crust of ice.
At the top of a steep crack I find Mira smiling as she belays. Branko chatters something about the route and pulls off his sweater. Above us I hear the thud of a heavy soft iron piton finding its way home. Zdenko suddenly shouts; I look up to see an ice axe flying towards me, bouncing off the wall and sailing past out into the abyss thousands of feet below. He unleashes the now-familiar curses as he turns back to the wall and starts off again.
The pitches of climbing end with hasty monosyllabic shouts from Branko. Each pitch leads to another. The day is short, and in the darkening evening I switch on my headlamp. I’m cold, but I’m already wearing my spare sweater. I’m hungry, but my sandwich is long devoured. I’m thirsty, but my thermos is dry.
I lead off – finally I am allowed to lead! I tail Mira as closely as I can, clipping my rope into the many fixed pitons that mark the route. Gradually, the wall becomes less steep, and suddenly we’re on nearly flat ground. I brace myself behind a boulder and belay Branko up.
Ljubo Hansel, Dušan Golobič, and I (from left) take a break on a ski approach into the Logar Valley during the winter of 1989. DUŠAN GOLOBIČ COLLECTION
“Summit?” I ask, my Slovene still limited to short sentences.
“Ne, ne,” says Mira with wide eyes. “Jutri.”
“Tomorrow?” I don’t get it. How can we climb all night? Aren’t we near the top? But I don’t ask more. Branko crests the wall, finally silent, and I stand, hurriedly coiling the rope as he unties and skips off toward Mira and Zdenko’s receding lights. I finish with the rope and start off after them, trying to tie the finishing knot on the coil as I run and stumble across the scree-covered shoulder of the mountain. I catch up with Branko just as another light appears and we start downhill to a large, well-lit hut.
Outside the door we take off our crampons and I follow the three of them through the front door. Here in a small entry room, Branko searches through a huge bin of mismatched and threadbare slippers and hands me a pair. I slip my tired feet into them, placing my boots on a shelf among dozens of other boots, and step into a crowded room that has the look and feel of a tavern back in the valley. The place is heavy with split-log benches, sturdy, worn tables. A few people look up at us from plates of hot food with half-empty pitchers of beer in front of them.
As we sit I begin to understand. We’re staying here tonight. This was probably explained to me, but I did not understand. Branko, Mira, and Zdenko approach the counter where bills are exchanged for bowls of soup, plates of mashed potatoes dashed with meat and gravy. They each return to the table balancing a tray and a glass of beer.
I sit sheepishly until finally Mira asks, “What’s up Štef? Aren’t you hungry?”
After a few minutes of unintelligible shouting and backslapping between Branko and the hut master, I am in the kitchen. The hut master unbuttons the front of his blue smock and leans against the counter. He extends one arm towards me in laughter and says something I don’t quite catch about America, pronouncing it Ameri-ka. He seems quite amused at having an American doing his dirty dishes.
I stand at the sink and pick up a large pot. The hut master laughs again, folding his large hands in on himself and twisting with his own hysterical joke. He steps away and I start to fill the pot with water, searching for detergent.
The hut keeper walks over to me, holding a full mug of beer. I wipe my wet hands on my pants, thanking him for the beer, and take a long drink. I set the glass on a high shelf and survey the pile of plates before me. One holds a half-finished meal of sausage and sauerkraut. This time, I laugh myself as I pick up the plate and start to eat the abandoned food to the cheers of the hut master.
“Good, Štef. Good!”