I meant to tell you about this before:

I was lost in the Alps by my boyfriend several weekends ago.

I’ll admit that it wasn’t entirely his fault. I had an inkling—ok let’s just say a really bad feeling—that splitting up so he and his friend could take the bad-ass mountain biker path while I took the road (a relatively mild series of blind corners on a perpendicular road through sheer alpine precipices) was not a good idea. “We’ll meet you at the next house over there,” he said, gesturing vaguely at a hillside dotted with houses, and off he went. And so did I, grasping the breaks like they were hands outstretched over the abyss, which is pretty much what mountain biking in the Alps feels like when you can barely ride a bike across a parking lot.

It’s kind of exhilarating, I have to admit. Death-defying sports tend to be. I was getting the hang of it by the time I rolled up to what I thought was the patch of houses he had waved toward. The place was cold, deserted, and silent except for the forlorn dribbling of water into an overflowing trough. Was this the place I was supposed to stop? I couldn’t tell. Had they gone on without me? I had certainly taken long enough, inching down the hill. Perhaps it was the next group of buildings. Looking ahead, I suddenly saw two bikers making their way up the next hill—the bastards had gone on without me! Just like them! I cursed to myself as I peddled after them.

But by the time I reached the top of the hill—huffing and puffing and dragging my bike like an oversized purse—the pair was nowhere to be seen. Huh, I thought, not yet panicking. Must be the next one. The next hill—now 90 degrees straight up instead of straight down—took some getting up to. And the only thing that greeted me at the top was a crossroads marked by signs written only in German.

Now, I am one of those Americans who is not blissfully lodged in the untroubled world of the monolinguist. But I do not speak German. In fact, I usually try to stay out of countries whose languages I do not speak as much as possible, but this weekend had been and exception. I like the continual ego-boosting of being conversant in a foreign language. I like to know what’s going on. At that moment, I realized, I did not know what was going on. Neither did I know the name of the town I had come from, and to which I now had to forge ahead on my own.

I knew it wasn’t Furst. It sounded vaguely familiar, but I remembered something about my boyfriend’s friend Rolf saying that we shouldn’t go there because you had to take the expert trail down from there. I remembered glancing at the map, seeing the curlicued trail, thanking god we weren’t going that way, and shifting my attention elsewhere. But still. It nagged me. Like a trick answer on a standardized test. I wanted to pick it. It sounded familiar.

Instead, I rode down towards a ski lodge. There will at least be people there, I thought. People who will speak English and offer me hot chocolate and perhaps a ride back down in the tram when they see how lost I am! After I skidded and lurched down to the lodge—the road had devolved into gravel—I realized that the tram was closed, and nobody was there, least of all Rolf or boyfriend.

Dammit, I must have picked the wrong one, I realized. So I turned around and wheezed my way back up the hill, past the sign, all the way up to the next crossroads. My lungs were burning. You know that deep, cold burn in the bottom of your lungs that can only be occasioned by having rapidly ascended several thousand kilometers? It took a few moments to recover. I stopped and looked around. I stood all alone at a six-way crossroads above the tree line in a foreign country whose language I didn’t speak on a bike I could barely ride, and there was absolutely no one around. As I scanned the hills in all directions for signs of life, the fog started to sweep up, making the day about as bright and scenic as the inside of a washcloth.

Goddammit!!! I thought to myself, throwing my bike on the ground (clearly, it was the bike’s fault). I felt like an abandoned belonging, left behind because it was too cumbersome to bring along. This was just like my boyfriend and his “you’ll be fine” optimism to abandon me to the elements while he rushed off in the adrenaline haze of the inveterate thrill-seeker, leaving me to toddle along behind as best I could. Just like him!

Of course my mounting panic was in no way helping. Fighting the urge to imagine any number of grizzly events that could preclude a happy ending to my adventure, I suddenly spied someone making their way down the hill. When the woman approached I flagged her down and asked if she spoke English. The odd thing is that I can’t remember the last time I asked someone to speak English—that is the extent to which I have avoided countries whose languages I don’t know—and yet at the moment I most needed it, of course, there was no English to be found. But I had no time to worry that I was coming off as an ugly American tourist demanding the world in translation. Fortunately she spoke a bit of French and offered to accompany me down.

I.e., whiz on down the increasingly steep and increasingly gravely road while I skidded after her. In a sense I felt bad. I’m sure it’s not every day she gets to mountain bike in the Alps. But then again, it’s not every day I get lost in them.

In any event, I soon lost her as well. But I did come upon a ski lodge. Finally I would be able to find some help! As I made it up the short hill to the lodge, I realized it was the same place I had come down to half an hour ago. Well. At least I knew my boyfriend had not taken either of the roads, and thus I was clearly on entirely the wrong route, if not the wrong mountain by now.

The restaurant there showed signs of life, however. I walked in to five people sitting around a table chatting. “Bonjour,” I said. “Est-ce que vous savez quelle est la meilleure route pour descendre à la ville?” This was met with blank stares. Was my French that bad? “…Vous parler français?” I asked. Nothing. “Anglais? English?” my panic rising so that I was barely able to articulate words in any language. “A little bit,” one of them said hesitantly. Hallelujah, I thought. I found the last corner on earth that the English language has failed to penetrate. And that corner is Switzerland.

Thanking them, I left the restaurant and quietly had a little panic attack outside. Fortunately, there’s nothing like being lost outdoors in a foreign country as it’s getting dark to render plainly the futility of having a panic attack. I grudgingly mounted my bike once again. By this time my right calf muscle was throbbing from staying in position so long—you have to keep the pedals even so that you don’t get tripped up on any rocks—and my arms were shaking from holding onto the handlebars so tightly. But there was nowhere to go but down.

This part was so steep I felt like I was about to fall off the top of my bike, but breaking only made it worse because then I would skid, and to make matters worse about every 15 feet there was a drainage ditch—none too shallow—across the entire road. I tried not to hurtle down too fast but hurtle I did, all the while having visions of my breaks bursting into flames from so much wear.

Eventually I heard the most beautiful sound in the world swirling up invisibly out of the dense fog—cow bells. I was returning to society. There would be people, even if they did not speak any of my languages. Soon enough there was even pavement, although it was hard to imagine any vehicle actually ascending the nearly vertical slope. I began to enjoy riding, now that my journey seemed near enough to an end. I’m sure I was traveling at an octogenarian pace, but I enjoyed it. The hills were beautiful, steep and green and blotched with placid, bovine forms. As I passed one house, a couple was outside sitting on their porch, looking off into the glancing white peaks of the mountains opposite us. I, of course, was looking at the road and clutching my breaks for dear life.

But I needn’t have panicked. Just a few moments later I saw Rolf’s black Audi sweeping up the hill towards me. “Oh, hey. There you are,” I said when they pulled up, feeling equally inclined to strangle and embrace them. “Where have you been?” my boyfriend asked. ...Where hadI been?—well, I’ll spare you the details of that conversation. Suffice to say that I ended the day with a big fat pot of fondue, no cheese ball (of which more later), and copious amounts of chocolate. Don’t you just love Switzerland?