William Tell: a national hero

Every time we drove over an Alpine pass, I would age a decade and my son Andrew, who was driving a Jetta, would smile the more.

I have an abhorrent fear of heights, especially on a one-and-a-half-lane-wide road with no guide rails and sheer drops of hundreds of feet to the valley floor. Oh God, give me the mountains of northern Ontario any day!

If it wasn’t for the magnificent views of the glacially carved U-shaped valleys, the tiny houses clinging to the sides of the mountains and that wonderful Swiss food and beer, I would have stayed up in the Klausen Pass and never faced my fears again. Andrew loved the Alps.

Coming down from the Glarner Alps by way of horrendous switchback roads, we finally arrived at the town of Altdorf (old village), not far from the southern shores of Lake Lucerne in the centre of Switzerland. Switzerland is not a member of the European Union and has maintained its international neutrality. The currency is the Swiss Franc with a value of 1.50 F to C$1. Ninety per cent of the country speaks German. The country is spotlessly clean with never a sighting of a derelict house or vehicle. All roads are paved, with community streets mainly cobblestone. No matter where we went in the country, all the homes were festooned with huge boxes of flowers. It was so breathtaking in its beauty and fragrance.

Altdorf, population 9,000, has been there in some way since the beginning of time. Its true claim to fame came with the birth of the legendary William Tell. In the early 1300s, the Swiss were part of Austria. The regional duke had placed his hat on a long pole in the village square and expected everybody to bow to it. All did except William Tell.

In 1308, he was arrested and ordered to shoot the apple off his son’s head as punishment. This he did and then quickly inserted a second arrow into his crossbow in order to take out the duke. He was re-arrested, escaped and later killed the duke.

This was the start of a rebellion that led to the unification of the Swiss cantons (provinces) to form the country we know as Switzerland. In this town we stayed within sight of Tell’s statue, marking the spot where the arrow was shot. We drove a few kilometres up to a mountain village where there is another statue of him, this time over his grave.

We now had no choice but to take the Autobahn due north along the shores of beautiful blue/green Lake Lucerne and then on to Zurich. The thing about Switzerland is that the roads are usually all Alpine switchbacks or a four-lane Autobahn, which follows the valley floors. There are tunnels and avalanche sheds everywhere. When I was in the Canadian Army Corps of Engineers, we called a private a sapper — builder of trenches and tunnels. It truly describes the Swiss people. Their abilities to overcome obstacles in their tiny nation are unbelievable. The simple act of snow removal is nothing for the weak of heart. We avoided one Autobahn south of Zurich that went through a 23-kilometre tunnel.

We reached the Swiss town of Rheinfelden on the south shore of the River Rhine. On the opposite side, in Germany, sits a much larger city with the same name. Crossing the Rhine is a two-lane bridge built by the Romans and still in use to this day. It is here that the totally navigable (lower) Rhine starts and the (upper) Rhine begins, separated by Europe’s largest hydroelectric dam.

The local Swiss police station was in a four-storey watchtower with the upper floor reserved as cells. No escaping here. We were really looking forward to the next stage of our trip into the Black Forest.