My obsession lasted through college. I couldn't see a rock face, a road cut, or even a building without mentally picking a route up it. Never did I feel more alive than when poised on eighth-of~an-inch flakes of schist with a hundred feet of nothing beneath me. Rock climbing fostered the illusion of being in control.

      The last pitch up the Mutthorn was easy but vertiginous. I realized as I led that this was one obsession I was cured of. I was so heavy I couldn't retable-pull myself up to a ledge without the help of footholdsfor the life of me. Reaching the needle's crest and looking down to the glacier 500 feet below, I, who at one time hadn't been afraid of heights, felt a wave of nausea, the taste of fear in my mouth. What if I slipped? Could the boys hold me, or would we, like Whymper's climbers, all go crashing down?

      From where I sat belaying Jerome, I could just see the Breithorn, bathed in sunlight, peeking behind the Tschingelhorn, and the blinding whiteness of the Ebnefluh's summit cone, slightly whorled like the tip of a Chinese fortune cookie. I admired the steely beauty of these peaks, and it occurred to me that I felt absolutely no need to climb them.

      It was during the sixties, while caretaking an abandoned farm in New Hampshire and going for long, stoned walks in the woods with binoculars, that "nature hit me," as my mother remarked. Rock climbing fell by the wayside. Suddenly I had a new obsession: birds. I began to learn their names and habits and to make small, detailed watercolors of them. The birds led me to the trees, the mushrooms, the wildflowers. I became a naturalist, following a six-generation line of naturalists going back to Russia in the 1830s. Returning to my hometown, I became the director of a local wildlife sanctuary and started to write about nature. In 1976 I spent nine months in the Amazon researching a book. Then I started going to Africa. I had parlayed a love of nature, begun in the Alps, into a career.

      When I was 13, my father and brother and I climbed Wyoming's Grand Teton. I was the youngest person, we were told, to have done the Exum Ridge. (It's probably since been scaled by a six-year-old.) One day we visited the naturalist Olaus Murie, who had written Field Guide to the Animal Tracks and lived with his wife in a simple cabin on the valley floor. Murie was an old man, and he seemed like St. Francis. He had a spiritual radiance that I assumed came from being close to nature, though in the decades that followed I would meet very few people like him. Another was a Yanomami shaman named Leonca who seemed to be one with all the other forms of life in the rainforest, even the leaf-cutter ants. This was an important discovery-to learn that such people actually existed.

       But then there were others, living in step with nature yet clearly tormented. Dian Fossey, who spent 18 years trying to save the mountain gorillas of Rwanda, would whip the testicles ofTwa Pygmies with stinging nettles, punishment for setting antelope snares that her gorillas occasionally stepped into. The original human inhabitants of Rwanda, the Twa were as endangered and as deserving of protection as the gorillas, but Fossey's web of compassion, like that of a surprising number of nature lovers, didn't extend to her own kind. I didn't find much compassion among sociobiologists, many of whom seemed to believe that all behavior has a single, underlying motive-to maximize reproductive success-or among environmentalists, who often didn't consider indigenous people in their conservation strategies. Looking at my own anger and darkness as well, I was forced to conclude that proximity to nature doesn't necessarily make a better person. The Glaus Muries and the Leon~as of this world are few and far between.

AFTER A NIGHT SPENT AT THE TOP OF Lotschenpass with hosts who seemed to pride themselves on overcharging their guests and then kicking them out by 8 A.M., we scrambled up the 10,866-foot Hockenhorn. By evening we were back at the Ktinzis', where Christian quickly restored my love of the Swiss by serving his specialty, raclette prepared the old-fashioned way: putting a flame under half a round of alpine cheese and, as it melted, scraping slabs of it onto small boiled potatoes on our plates.

     Next afternoon we said our good-byes to the Ktinzis and took a bus in the rain down to the foot of the valley. There we headed up into the Gurnigel gorge, which is said to be spectacular, but we couldn't see a thing. There being no distractions, I concentrated on the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other, on getting in touch with myancestral bipedality. I recalled the theory that Bruce Chatwin advanced in his penultimate book, The Song/ines: that walking is what makes us human, that the best prescription for physical, spiritual, and mental health is simply to take a walk. The theory has been growing on me. The first artifacts are footpaths. Like water making its way downhill, finding the fastest, easiest way over terrain, there is a logic to their randomness.

     We eventually came upon an open valley of pasture and rock bisected by a narrow dirt road. A longhaired Swiss hippie gave us a ride in his farm truck to Spittelmatte, where a wasted lot of young escapees from Zurich, Berne, and Brussels was tending cows for the summer. They were taking a break from the "evilization" below, a s!1ock-haired girl explained. "The culture is only money," she said. We accepted a kilo of fresh mountain cheese and continued up the gorge.

     It felt like there were rocks in my pack, which was indeed the case. The boys had slipped some in as a joke. We came to a plaque that said R.I.P. and listed six names. On September 5, .1895, the Altels Glacier broke off and 4.5 million cubic meters of snow, ice, and stone fell on Spittelmatte, burying these six farmers who had stayed behind to separate cheese. One day earlier and many more would have been killed; a day later and nobody would have been there.

     Just as it was getting dark, we reached the old stone inn ofSchwarenbach, which guarded the enttance to a cliff-lined bowl. The cliffs were stteaked with the black manganese- and iron-oxide-rich drip known in the American Southwest as desert vamish. In my youth, Schwarenbach had been run by Otto and Dorli Stoller. Otto was a mountain guide and ran a climbing school. Now it was run by their son Peter and his wife, Trudi, who were delighted to play host to a new generation of Shoumatoffs and their friends.

      Schwarenbach has had a distinguished cast of lodgers over the years. Picasso stayed here 40 years ago. Mark Twain wrote about his stay in A Tramp Abroad. Tolstoy was guided by Peter's great-grandfather. Another Russian, the young Lenin, signed the register with his wife, Krupskaya, in 1905. The inn inspired short stories by Dumas and Maupassant, who wrote one called "L'Auberge" about two locals named Ulrich Kiinzi and Gustav Hari who decide to spend the winter there. One day old Hari goes off to hunt chamois and doesn't come back. Alone, young Kiinzi is terrified. He hears moaning and scratching at the door and, thinking it's Hari's ghost, barricades himself and drinks all the schnapps. In the spring a rescue party breaks down the door to find Kiinzi whitehaired and stark raving mad. Outside the door lies the skeleton of Hari's dog, which after days of unheeded moaning and scratching had finally starved to death.

      The next moming we descended to Kandersteg and took a chairlift up the Oescheninsee, a teal-colored lake, and spent the night. Then we climbed up to the Hohtiirlie Pass, above the clouds. By dusk we reached the farmhouse inn of Marcus Lengacher, where I had stayed 30 years before. "America, eh?" asked Marcus, who didn't remember me. "Dol1 war ich noch nicht. I've not been there yet." Marcus's matratzenlager; or communal bunkroom, was the best deal yet, only six francs a head, and he and his wife, Elizabeth, were warm, welcoming mountain people, friends of the Kiinzis, not surprisingly. After the boys had hit the sack, Marcus, Elizabeth, several local cowherders, and I stayed up drinking kirsch and kreuter made from wildflowers. When I commented on the beauty of their place, Marcus replied, "You like it? You can buy it-the inn, the restaurant, the farm, and 20 cows."

      "Our sons are all in Berne," Elizabeth explained. "They're not interested in the pastoral life. That's the problem allover."

      There seemed to be two distinct cultures in Switzerland: the mountain culture and the money culture. Where did she think the money culture came from? "The culture of money comes from work," she explained. "It's in the body to work. If you don't work, you get sick. But some work so hard they forget to appreciate nature. Some don't even notice when there's a beautiful flower by the road."
The next day the cloud cover had risen over mountaintops, and the whole Oberland was socked in again. I had been looking forward to the view of the Eiger, Monch, and Jungfrau from the next pass, the Sefinenfurgge. As we started the climb, we saw an eagle and a chamois within 30 seconds of each other. The chamois stood on a spur, posing obligingly for several minutes before bounding down a nearly vertical series of cliffs and gullies.

      It was raining in earnest when we got to the pass. We couldn't see ten feet, so we hotfooted it down to the Rotstockhiitte, spreading ourselves out to reduce °the chance of being struck by the lightning flashing all around us. The hut had already been taken over by 20 members of a triathlon club from Cologne. We hung up our wet clothes with theirs. By evening the weather broke briefly, and we could see that the Sefinenfurgge was veiled in snow, as was the thicket of skyscraperlike towers graduating to the summit of the Schilthorn.

     The morning brought heavy rain, so we decided to bailout and head to sunny Lake Como. We'd settle for postcards of Meirengen. We bombed down to Miirren, beating the yellow signs by 35 minutes. This was our last dash. For the first time my knees gave me no trouble. I felt in better shape than I'd been in for years. I demonstrated to the boys the lope I'd learned from the Yanomami. In the mountains again, the old man had gotten his second wind.

Alex Shoumatoff is the author of such books as The World Is Burning and African Madness. He is also a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and Esquire.

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