2012-06-25 47 8

Location

A churchyard in the village of Emmen

Participants

Plans

Calamus hopes to arrive in Lucerne at 3:07 and walk from there in order to get to the hashpoint by 4pm.

Expedition

It had been an easy day at the office, which Calamus had mostly spent giving legal advice to customers despite law being nowhere near his line of work. Consequently, nobody minded that he took off a little earlier to get to Lucerne.

Lucerne is a nice town in central Switzerland, which, while being of little national importance, is a veritable tourist magnet due to excellent advertising and really beautiful surrounding landscape. The Swiss themselves know Lucerne mostly from the museum known as Verkehrshaus (meaning "house of traffic", but, amusingly, also being interpretable as "house of intercourse"), which is a popular place to drag one's children. So it was no wonder that at least half of the people Calamus encountered in Lucerne were Asian tourists. There were bound to be some Americans too, but he only recogized those if they were wearing Hawaiian shirts or shouting "Oh, loooovely!" at ordinary objects, both of which wasn't the case, as it was raining.

Calamus left the town and hiked along the Reuss towards Emmen village. In spite of the sporadic rain, it was a beautiful walk, mostly trough forest area, a part of it being a wooden sculpture gallery.

He arrived in Emmen just in time. He had surveyed the hashpoint to be in a churchyard, which he entered at 4pm exactly. As if he hadn't seen enough cliché today, the sky turned black upon his entry to the cemetery, the church bell struck, and heavy rain began to fall. This didn't make finding the hashpoint any easier, which took Calamus a good five minutes even with the space being rather confined. Suddenly, the GPS's distance meter turned to zero. The hashpoint wasn't just in a churchyard. It was inside the very tomb of Gertrud Schmidlin, née Habermacher, born 1918-02-08, deceased 2007-06-16.

Calamus felt odd. It was the first time he met another person at a hashpoint, and she had been lying there for five years. He wondered what kind of person she had been. A catholic, obviously, or she wouldn't have been buried here. Would she have understood why Calamus was standing at her grave? For some reason he felt strangely connected to her. After having stood at her grave for some minutes in silence, he entered the beautiful church, bought a candle and lit it in honor of Gertrud Schmidlin-Habermacher.

When Calamus left the church, the rain had subsided. Still not feeling the way he had before coming to this place, he went over to a nearby tavern, whose line-of-sight from the hashpoint was just barely obstructed, and lifted a rod (the Swiss way of expressing one had a pint). He then went off back to Lucerne, stopping in Emmenbrücke to buy some bread and cheese. While eating it in the woods, he had an intense philosophical debate with a dog on the ownership of his dinner, which he lost due to the dog's compelling arguments ("Whiiine!").

He would have liked to stay in Lucerne a little longer, now that it had dried again, but Waldzitherclown had called him while walking back, announcing a concert in Winterthur the same evening. So Calamus got on the train, leaving the exploration of Lucerne for another time.