I took off up the trail, and immediately lost it. That’s hard to do in Switzerland, where most trails are obnoxiously over-signed and as obvious as freeways, especially across the alps, where they are brown trenches in the grass. But this alp was contoured by many narrow dirt runnels, either cow trails or the erosion patterns left by solifluction, and I had apparently taken off on one of these false trails, until it petered out and disappeared.

Probably I had headed out too low. But it was an easy enough slope, so I traversed up the grass, assuming I would soon intercept the real trail.

It didn’t. My traverse began to steepen, and I had to work a little. And apparently it was fly season here. There was only one kind of wildflower to be seen, a yellow thing like a daffodil; and this flower apparently attracted flies. There were hundreds of them, even thousands, even tens of thousands, all buzzing in the air. I had never seen flies in the Swiss Alps before, and these were big ones that liked to land on you and then bite, or maybe it was only an exploratory pinch, but it hurt. I hiked along slapping at my legs and cursing, and cutting a higher and higher line in hopes of intercepting the trail and then running to escape them. Eventually I turned and hiked straight up the slope, intent on finding the trail as soon as possible. The slope steepened again and I ended up climbing a grassy wall, using my hands to pull myself up from clump to tuft to clump-and here I was only ten minutes into my hike!

Finally I intercepted the trail. It made a decent contour across the slope, as expected, and I did as planned and ran along it to escape the fly zone. But there proved to be a number of little pastures to pass through, and the flies pursued me for a long time, because the little pastures all sported summer barns that were as dirty as any buildings I had ever seen in Switzerland. The Disney spotlessness of the tourist zone and the German Swiss cantons generally had here given way to a grubby working landscape, hot and glary and dusty and flyblown. It looked like a ranch in Nevada.