VIA ALPINA TREK PART 4: SECRETS FROM STRANGERS

If you missed it, here’s Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3!

Throughout my time in Switzerland, I met countless people and had conversations that stayed with me long after we parted. The openness of the trail created a rare kind of honesty, it felt like I was slowly collecting the secrets of strangers along the way. The longer you hike, the smaller the world becomes. You hear about someone one day and meet them the next. Stories travel faster than feet, and the trail becomes its own living network of connection.

I learned about people directly over coffee and unhurried dinners, and indirectly through the murmur of the trail rumor mill. Everyone carries a story, and if you’re lucky, for a brief moment, they place it in your hands.

Two of those stories stayed with me the most. Both revolved around the most beautiful and complicated of human emotions, love, and the relationships it shapes, fractures, and forever places in our minds.

Love Spanning Languages and Time

On my flight from Washington, D.C. to Zurich, I ended up talking with my seat mate after he offered me his extra Italian sub because “the airplane food was no good.” While everyone else slept in preparation for our 8am landing, we stayed awake and talked for nearly three hours. A steady ache settled into my neck as I remained turned toward him, unwilling to break the conversation.

He was an 80-year-old man from Sicily who has lived in New Jersey for decades. Naturally, I asked about his life and he got into the story of how he came to America sixty years ago.

He grew up in Sicily in the 1940s, the second oldest of four children. His father died when he was six, and his mother couldn’t support the family on her own. At twelve, he left school to work. At sixteen, he and his older brother moved to the Netherlands as migrant laborers and sent money home. They faced racism daily, targeted for being Italian and unable to speak the language, and endured it quietly out of fear of being sent back.

When he was twenty, he followed his mother and brother to the United States in search of better opportunity. He didn’t have a visa and couldn’t work legally. He also didn’t speak English. He met a seventeen year old girl who spoke only English, and they fell in love, communicating through hand gestures and drawings on napkins at dinner. Eventually, with the help of a friend who spoke both languages, they were able to talk more easily. But her mother told her to end the relationship: he had no job, no education, no future to offer. He told her to listen to her mother.

He went on to live what he called the American dream. After several failed attempts, he and his brother opened an Italian restaurant. It succeeded, then expanded. He learned English, met his wife, and they raised four beautiful children together. Over the years he built a life greater than his dreams: restaurants, real estate, stability, and even, eventually, his dream car- a Maserati. But he admitted that through all of it, he often wondered what had happened to the first woman he loved, the one who knew him before he had anything and loved him though he had nothing.

Then, fifteen years ago, his adult daughter received a Facebook message from someone claiming to be an old friend of her fathers and asked if she could connect them. It had been more than forty years. By then, she was living in California with a family of her own. They started communicating over text. I watched his expression shift, memories working through him. I asked if they ever saw each other again. He paused, then said quietly, “No one knows this. But we both flew to New York and met for lunch.”

How was it? I asked.

He told me that at first it felt strange, they were older, wrinkled, strangers in new lives. But then she laughed. And hearing her laugh, he was back at twenty years old, drawing pictures across a restaurant table to say what he couldn’t yet speak.

They didn’t try to change the course of their lives. They parted kindly, stayed in touch occasionally, and still send each other holiday and birthday messages.

He told me he loves his wife deeply and would do anything for her. She helped him build the world he has now. But reconnecting with his first love gave him peace, closure and a long sought after ending to a story that had always remained open.

I thought about how some loves aren’t meant to be lifelong. Some arrive simply to show us something, to move us toward who we are becoming, or to open a door we didn’t know existed. And sometimes the question of “what if” remains until life finally gives us an answer- whether or not it’s the one we expected.

A Cross-Continental Affair

This brings me back to where I left off in Part 3 of my Switzerland series: sitting alone at dinner in Kandersteg, listening to the couple next to me talk. I’ve been hesitant to share this story because it wasn’t told directly to me. It’s a narrative I unintentionally pieced together over several days on the trail, collecting fragments from different people without meaning to.

When I was young, my parents liked to say I was a “little corn with big ears” because I listened closely to adult conversations. As Midwestern a saying as it gets. I don’t typically eavesdrop, but when you’re alone in an empty restaurant, it’s nearly impossible not to absorb the only conversation in the room. So, here’s what that little corn, now a grown one, heard.

When I walked into the restaurant, I was seated next to the only couple in the restaurant: a Swiss man and a woman from North America. After I ordered, their conversation began to catch my attention. The woman was asking him about spirituality and how he became a spiritual guide. She asked what he could teach her about herself. He answered simply, “Nothing you can’t teach yourself.” Fair.

He spoke about the travelers who pass through Kandersteg and how he leads guided mushroom journeys in the surrounding woods. She was inquisitive about psychedelics and how the landscape in Switzerland compares to the rest of the world. He told her about the Airbnb he runs out of his home, his eleven-year-old son, and the clients he connects with through Instagram, which is how they had met.

As she shared more about her life, something about her story felt oddly familiar. She spoke of her fiancé back in Canada, of the carbon-capture company they had built together, and of how they traveled separately because one of them always needed to stay behind to run the business in its early stages. She spoke with affection about their growth over the years, both together and apart.

That’s when it clicked. The day before, my new friends in Griesalp had told me about a kind, intelligent solo woman traveler they’d met on the trail and I realized she was now sitting in the booth next to me. Almost immediately, those same friends walked into the restaurant. When the woman saw them, her face lit up and she called out hello. Then they noticed me sitting nearby and we all laughed and greeted each other because what are the odds you know every person sitting in a restaurant in a small town in Switzerland.

My friends were seated elsewhere. I ordered dessert and continued to check in on the conversation of the couple next to me because now I was shocked at what I was witnessing.

The Swiss man and the North American woman had made an arrangement. For this one night in Kandersteg, she was going to step outside of her relationship. She shared this would be a secret she takes with her to the grave. It was something she felt she needed before she tied the knot.

I was flooded with conflicting thoughts. The day before, when I first heard about her traveling alone while her fiancé stayed home, my immediate, unfiltered question had been, “Why aren’t they traveling together?”, a question I instantly regretted. I’ve traveled solo for long stretches while in a relationship myself and have been asked the same thing many times. I’m a firm believer in the value of traveling alone. It’s when I’ve learned the most about who I am. I don’t think solo travel is a reflection of a relationship’s strength, though it’s easy for others to assume that it is. Stories like this don’t help dispel that assumption.

I don’t condone stepping outside of a relationship, and I struggle to fully understand it. But what stayed with me most wasn’t judgment, it was the imagined weight of the secret itself. I wondered what carrying that truth, unshared, might do to a person over a lifetime. How a single decision made in one evening could linger like a dark storm cloud just within reach of the mind for years. Some choices take up enormous mental and emotional real estate long after the moment has passed. This felt like one of those choices.

When I left the restaurant, a thunderstorm had fully broken. Rain poured down in sheets. I had no umbrella and no rain jacket, so I ran the half mile back to my hotel, splashing through puddles and taking my second shower of the night.

Back in my room, listening to the rain, I thought about all the secrets I had been entrusted with and those that I stumbled upon from strangers on this journey, especially those tied to love. I thought about the man on the plane and how sharing his lingering “what if” with his wife might only have caused pain rather than resolution. Some secrets, I realized, may be best left unspoken for the sake of a relationship. Others, if kept, may slowly erode the person holding them. And some truths, once revealed, cannot be taken back.

Maybe our what-ifs are unavoidable. Maybe curiosity sometimes outruns consequence. Maybe we rarely understand the full weight of certain decisions until years later.

I fell asleep to the sound of rain, turning over the beautiful messiness of life in my mind. Mostly, though, I was grateful I still had two more days on the trail ahead of me, one of which I’d spend walking in that very same rain.

Next week, I’ll close this Via Alpina Trek series with Part 5- the fifth and final.

Until then… Happy trails.

-Hannah