LUNCH, AN OMISSION

To be entirely truthful, lunch in Switzerland is not always hot, after all.  I think I have mentioned before how popular picnicking is among the hardy Swiss, especially when they spend the day on foot hiking their beloved countryside. On these excursions, the Swiss are content to simply, as they say, "eat out of the rucksack." In other words, they have packed a cold lunch made up of components easily recognizable to us Americans who were brought up to believe in the health-giving, restorative properties of  a sandwich at lunch time. Be that as it may, the woods and pathways of the Swiss countryside are also dotted with impromptu fire pits. Often, they are even mysteriously supplied with tidy piles of kindling for those happy wanderers who tucked a few sausages into their rucksacks, along with their army knives, apples and wedges of gruyere.

And so it is that when one of the boys is scheduled for a field trip at school, we parents receive detailed instructions several weeks in advance as to what to pack our young adventurers for their day. If grilling is on offer, we are told to include Cervelat, the national sausage of Switzerland which also comes in a handy pork-free version for the non-pork eating population. In addition, we are to include the Znüni,  the daily mid-morning snack usually consisting of fruit and crackers intended to bridge the gaping abyss between breakfast and lunch. Should the field trip last all day, we must not forget the equally charmingly named  Zvieri, a snack, often on the sweet side, designed to silence the hunger pains of the late afternoon.

As it turns out, Wolfi was scheduled to go on  a field trip with both the fourth grade classes just last week. As it also turns out, his mother forgot all about the field trip and completely neglected to pack him this thing called lunch. Off he went to school with his regularly scheduled backpack and with only the daily Znüni inside. It was not until it was much too late that Mama realized her mistake. The children had already set off on their journey. Wolfi's lunch would neither be hot nor cold. It would be missing entirely.

This blaring omission was not, however, the only malheure of the day. As is usual here in Switzerland, the schools almost always use public transportation for their field trips, and so the fourth-grade classes along with three teacher chaperones, set off first by foot to the train station and then onward by rail towards a science center in the neighboring canton. Unbeknownst to them, a tragic accident occurred further on down the line, something straight out of the pages of a certain Russian novel, and about halfway into the journey, the travelers learned of a serious delay. The trains would not be running normally for the rest of the morning. The children and their teachers found themselves stranded in a small village, miles away from their destination. Any hopes of reaching the nature center were dashed.

Another useful Swiss German maxim is to speak of experiencing luck in the midst of  misfortune, and this notion of Glück im Unglück ended up carrying the day. For it happened that the children's train halted in the very village where one of the chaperones happens to make her home. Accordingly, all 40 children piled off the train and stomped through the village streets to the teacher's house. Here they regrouped and warmed up while feasting on platter after platter of cookies, kept on hand (one imagines) by the prescient teacher for just such occasions.  As the weather was fine -- cold and crisp with snow covering the mountains above but dry and sunny down below -- they decided to make the most of the situation and spend the rest of the day hiking.

Fortified by flour and sugar, the adventurers left the teacher's house and made their way through forest and glen, until they eventually ended up in the town of Grenchen, incidentally known as the place where Swatch watches are manufactured. With fabled Swiss precision, the teachers managed to heard their wards onto a train and deliver them back to their home village around 3:30 pm, exactly the hour at which they were scheduled to return had they spent the day at the nature center.

So instead of learning about butterflies and rainforests, the fourth graders on their field trip received valuable lessons on ingenuity, flexibility and hospitality. For poor Wolfi the day was also a lesson in endurance. Since he had mistakenly taken his regular backpack to school, he had schlepped his homework with him for hours through the forest. He had eaten only cookies for lunch. He had had very little to drink. Not surprisingly, he arrived at our doorstep bedraggled and grouchy. Unlike me, he did not seem to delight much in the remarkable resourcefulness of his teachers nor in the serendipity of arriving on our doorstop at exactly the scheduled hour. No, my boy was tired and more than a trifle disappointed as he sat at the kitchen table and told me this tale. He spoke wearily between bites of steaming, hot pasta, eaten, rather unconventionally, for his Zvieri.