rüffer&rub visionär / Every Drop Counts E-Book

Ernst Bromeis

• Herausgeber: Rüffer & Rub
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: rüffer&rub visionär
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 272

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Water is the foundation of life - for human beings, for animals, for nature in general. Notwithstanding this, access to water is endangered. And this holds true around the world. Causes are pollution, global warming and wasteful use. The result: millions of people are forced each year to flee their homes and become "climate refugees". While this is going on, global corporations are responding to the growing scarcity and hence value of water by purchasing rights to it. Ernst Bromeis' objective is to make human beings aware of clean water's being finite in quantity. He finds it intolerable that some 880 million people do not have clean water to drink. To change this, Bromeis - who is often called an "ambassador for water" - undertakes spectacular deeds. In 2008, he swam across 200 lakes in Switzerland's canton of Graubünden. In 2014, he swam the entire length of the Rhine - the some 1200 kilometers it traverses between Lago di Dento and its mouth in the North Sea. Ernst Bromeis' activities and book are intended to encourage humanity to take the steps needed to protect water and to dedicate itself to alleviating the problems facing our society and environment.

Leseprobe

Ernst Bromeis

EVERY DROP COUNTS

Swimming for the right to water

For those who thirst for life

The author and the publisher wish to express their thanks for the generous support provided by

Elisabeth Jenny-Stiftung

E-Book-Version 1.0 All rights reserved Copyright © 2016 by rüffer & rub Sachbuchverlag GmbH, Zürich ISBN E-book: 978-3-906304-21-2

Design E-Book: Clara Cendrós

The E-Book is based on the book (Brochure) First edition Autumn 2016 All rights reserved Copyright © 2016 by rüffer & rub Sachbuchverlag GmbH, Zürich ISBN Book: 978-3-906304-23-6

[email protected] | www.ruefferundrub.ch

Preface [by Anne Rüffer]

Prologue

“You are naive” — a passion is born

No blue blood, but a “blue miracle”

“Would I swim in pools, I wouldn’t go on swimming expeditions”

Why does water need our protection?

“Nobody is waiting with bated breath for your project, Ernst”

From fresh to salt water — the expeditions

Il miracul blau — Grischun 2008

Le miracle bleu – Suisse 2010

Das blaue Wunder – Rhein 2012

Het blauwe wonder – Rijn 2014

Il miracolo blu – Milano 2015

The ambassador’s double standard

The dream of a World Water Center

Let’s change the world

Epilogue

Appendix

Annotations

Photographs: credits

Thanks

Biography of the author

Preface

December 2, 2015, Geneva. SRO (standing room only) in the city’s Auditorium Ivan Pictet. Thronging it is a group of distinguished persons. They have come to honor the four winners of this year’s Alternative Nobel Prizes. The auditorium’s building bears the name “Maison de la Paix”—“home of peace”. Rarely has the name of the venue for an event so closely accorded with its thrust. The event is kicked off by two speakers: Barbara Hendricks, who is Germany’s minister of the environment, and Michael Møller, who is Director-General at the UN in Geneva. The event’s title is “On the front lines and in the courtrooms: forging human security”.

The discussion following the two speeches is conducted by the four winners. Suddenly, one of them, Dr. Gino Strada, makes a statement of electrifying import. He states: “The UN was founded in the aftermath of the Second World War. Its purpose was and is to liberate following generations from being hostages of unceasing warfare. Since that day, the world has experienced more than 170 armed conflicts. And you have never broached the subject of how to abolish warfare? Come on guys, this is incredible!” The audience responds with embarrassed laughter and incredulous amazement.

Gino Strada knows all too well what he is talking about. In 1994, he founded “Emergency”. This NGO provides medical treatment—often supplied at clinics built by Emergency itself—in regions roiled by conflict, and, as well, development assistance to victims of warfare. Of them, 10% are soldiers themselves—with the remaining 90% being civilians. Strada ends his statement with “You can call me a Utopian if you like. But remember, everything appears to be a Utopia until someone realizes it.”

“I have a dream.” Made by Dr. Martin Luther King, this statement is probably the one the most often quoted over the last few decades. That’s because Dr. King’s dream of a world in which justice prevails is shared by so many people. Some of them—more than we are probably aware of and yet not enough by far—have devoted themselves to employing their guts, their hearts and their minds to making this dream come true. Along with Dr. King and Gino Strada, other well-known “dreamers” include Mother Teresa and Jody Williams. Calling them “Utopians” is actually anything but an insult. Each great advance recorded by humanity started out as a Utopian idea, a hope, a vision.

This book is the second in our new series of “rüffer&rub visionaries”. We have a very clear objective in launching it. These books are going to fan the sparks emanating from the ideas and hopes propagated by these visionaries into bonfires of dedication and endeavor. The heart of each book is the author’s very personal look at her or his—highly-important— scientific, cultural or societal topic.

Each author will tell—in simple, inspiring words—how she or he got involved with this topic, and how she or he started looking for answers to its questions that made sense, for solutions dealing with its problems. These books will tell you what it means to commit yourself to a cause, to live your commitment every day, to develop and implement a vision for its realization. These visions are highly variegated—political, scientific or spiritual—in nature. All of them share their visionaries’ yearning for a better world—and their willingness to put their hearts and souls into realizing them.

All of these visions and all of the activities undertaken to make them come true share something else in common: the deep-rooted conviction that we can positively shape our future, that we can restore the health of the planet on which we all live. Another strong conviction adhered to by all of us: we are convinced that each and every one of us is capable of undertaking the steps required to make each of us part of the solution, and not of the problem.

Anne Rüffer, publisher

Prologue

It is raining outside the church. Its bells are tolling in mourning. Someone has died and is being buried this afternoon. The mourners are arriving to commemorate the person’s life and times.

The bells then fall silent for a short period of time. Then the organ booms. It launches into the prelude. We have now the space and time of several hours to remember what we shared with the deceased, to reflect on our own lives. There comes a time in everyone’s life in which it becomes clear that our time on earth is limited, and that this time is being shared with a circle of people.

The church’s benches provide an ideal place to sit and consider the question of whether your life is passing you by, like a river does an observer, or whether you yourself are riding on and guiding your river of life.

The deceased’s biography is recounted by the pastor presiding over the funeral service. The most important moments are mentioned—birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, children and grandchildren. The pastor provides a brief overview of the deceased’s career, relationships and hobbies. This accounting is interspersed with anecdotes. All this gives rise to a flood of memories and images on the part of the people attending the service.

One thing that this recounting could have well included were the deceased’s dreams for his life. The reason for their omission is that the deceased, like most of us, refrained from telling the world what he really needed to achieve in his life, and how he had planned on attaining this. This refraining is not surprising. Most of us have, after all, a hard time admitting even to ourselves what we really yearn for, let alone telling this to others.

This may apply to even our partner and to our dearest friends. This lack of disclosure may mean that they are not aware of the places and deeds that we planned on visiting and doing. Our Western, reality-driven society often has a hard time with dreams and yearnings. This is because they are irrational and diffuse—and are based on feelings. As such, they do not belong to the world of adults, to a world ruled by calculations.

Artists enjoy one great privilege. They are allowed to pursue their dreams. The rest of us are enjoined to function properly and to dispense with daydreaming. A number of the people sitting on the church’s benches would have been embarrassed by the funeral service’s divulging of the deceased’s wishes for a free, independent and adventurous life. Sorrow belongs at such services—and dreams and yearning do not.

I am writing these lines in my office, which is but a stone’s throw away from the Church of St. John in the Swiss village of Davos Platz. The office is home to “Das blaue Wunder”. This is my company. Its name means “the blue miracle”. Since my office is located so close to the church, it’s not surprising that we get to hear the tidings tolled by its bells: of funerals, weddings, baptisms and new years. The rhythm of the tolling reminds me from time to time of how quickly time—my time on earth— is flowing past.

Why are we so afraid to realize our dreams and yearnings? After musing on that question for a long time, I resolved one day to face this fear. This book tells the result of that. It tells you the story of how I realized my dreams and yearnings: by swimming 200 lakes in Switzerland’s canton of Graubünden, the entire length of the Rhine—the 1247 kilometers it traverses from its source to the North Sea—and, as well, other bodies of water. And by founding “the blue miracle”.

This realizing of my dream commenced eight years ago, which is when I quit my “normal” job in order to spend all my time and energy in the realization of my water-related projects. These were motivated by the innate beauty of water, something that becomes highly apparent when observing it and the earth as a whole from space. The world and the life it contains are built of and upon water. It is thus truly the “blue miracle”. Our Earth-side, close-up vantage point enables us to perceive the fragility of this miracle—and the state of our global civilization.

We perceive the inequality of apportionment of fortune and misfortune and of wealth and poverty. We perceive how over-abundance and paucity go hand-in-hand in a world in which nature preserves and environmental catastrophes are allowed to exist side-by-side, in which water runs free—or is owned by private interests. The resolution of these dichotomies requires the world’s society’s implementation of solutions. We are not talking about a responsibility for tomorrow or the day after—but for today, for right now.

My involvement in protecting water stems from the sum total of my life’s experiences and the philosophy to which it has given rise: that each kind of life has a right to live— and thus a right to water. This maxim may sound banal. It is fact anything but that. It is, moreover, difficult to implement. Calling for this implementation is the easy part. The true challenge is realizing this in an ocean of comprised of individual interests, with this applying to both the local and global levels. This book answers the question of how we as individuals can help bring about the world’s handling of its precious resource—water—in a sensible way.

For the last eight years, while fighting for the protection of water, I have also been experiencing—through swimming— the other aspect of water, which is its palpable beauty. This experience is enhanced by the poetry of self-induced motion. This book is thus about both aspects of the world’s water—the challenge of protecting it and the enjoyment of interacting with it—and how these clash with and impact upon each other.

My time on this earth is limited. My devotion to the “blue miracle” is my way of imparting meaning to this time. This meaning will be what the church’s bells will be tolling when they sound for me and the life that I so purposefully lived.

“You are naive”— a passion is born

My devotion to water was the product of neither a revelation nor a near-death experience. Nor did I experience a fall from a horse on my way to Damascus, one that caused Saul to become Paul.1 The fact that I became a swimmer with a penchant for expeditions and, subsequently, an “ambassador for water” is, rather, the end-product of a series of minor events. These built up to the point that the dam holding back my will had to break.

Some find what I do and how I do it to be logical. Some— those who have known me for a long time— say “That’s got you written all over it, Ernst!” The latter include those who studied physical education with me at university, during which time I completed a degree in the training of high-performance athletes. The latter also comprise my colleagues at the K-11 school in Zuoz, Switzerland, at which I taught.

Many from a third group have gotten to “know” me through the media’s reports on my first expedition in the canton of Graubünden. As I have had repeated occasion to learn, this group has had a hard time grasping why I have chosen to take this course of action. Their “explanations” include that I am having a midlife crisis, that I am dropping out of society, that I am on an ego trip or that I am a publicity hound.

A woman came up to me after I had given a lecture, and said, in all frankness: “You are naive! Why are you doing this?” Her tone was patronizing and accusatory. Its implicit question was “how can anyone give up everything near and dear for a vision or for a mission?”

As is probably the case with all of us, the seeds of this revolutionary change in my life were planted in my childhood. I well remember an important moment in my life. It took place at a small brook, which ran through the vicinity of Ardez, a village in Switzerland’s region of Lower Engadine. This was where I grew up, where my father was the teacher at the village’s school. My father had two great hobbies: making music and keeping bees.

All throughout my childhood, in August and the end of the summer holidays, it was my job to help my father harvest the honey produced by his bees. My father and I would lift the honeycombs from the boxes containing the bees. We would then knock the remaining bees off the honeycombs. This would send the bees tumbling into the containers designed to catch them. Our next job was to place each of the honeycombs in their designated places in the large-sized box, which was capacious enough to keep them separate from each other.

The center of our beekeeping was a hut that stood all by itself on a meadow located near Ardez. The hut was surrounded by bushes, flowers and deciduous trees. In my mind, I recall the honey harvest’s as always having taken place on sunny days whose warmth would turn the interior of the hut into an oven. My father’s philosophy was to not harvest all of the honey, but, rather, to leave several full-length honeycombs for the bees. This enabled them to survive the winter in their sanctuary of their box. My father was very close to his bees, even though there were thousands of them, all completely anonymous, each lacking a name. Despite this, my father was involved with each and every one of his “lady employees”. I believe that my father placed great importance on being a member in good standing of a large cycle of activity. This “membership” required his respecting and caring for “his” bees in ways—such as the leaving them enough honey to thrive mentioned above—showing his gratitude for and appreciation of them and their work. My father was neither plunderer nor exploiter. He was, rather, a “coexister”, one cultivating a reciprocity of utility and protection, of living and let live.

During such “honey harvesting”, our wont was to work for two hours in our hut, and then, as a relief from its sauna-like temperatures, to take a break. We would walk for ten minutes to the Valdez. This little stream tumbled downwards to the En river. Prior to our sitting down on the stream’s banks, we would check to make sure that no bees had hidden themselves in the other’s jacket or under the protective veil. The harvesting— which yielded a large range of quantities of honey—left the bees aggressive. We had no intention of being stung by them. This would hurt us—and cause them to die.

Once we were sure that we were bee-free, we would then unpack our picnic basket, which held sweet cider, coffee and cookies, and have a snack, during which we would let our feet dangle in the water.

Once during such brook-side snacks, I posed the following question to my father. Speaking in the local language of Rhaeto-Romanic, I said “Dad, if you could do it all over again, what would you change?” His answer: “I would have showed less respect for authority.” My father did not mean by that he would have been more impudent or arrogant, or less law-abiding. His wish was, rather, to have displayed more courage when living his life.

The brook rushed past our feet. Its water did not, however, take my father’s words with it. These words stayed, rather, with me, shaping my life in the process.

I have now reached the age of my father at the time of this conversation. Even in those days, though still a boy, I grasped the import of his words. These words have never stopped gaining pertinence to my life. My being an “ambassador for water” has caused me to expose myself more and more to the general public. That requires my repeatedly calling upon my courage. There are times when criticism or the failure of an action to proceed as planned cause me to want to hide. This wish is always countered by the realization that my failure to stand up for my objectives and values would cause me to regret my having given in to my fears my life long.

Once our break was over, my father and I packed our basket, donned the white overalls and the veils, made sure that everything was intrusion-proof, and walked slowly back to the beekeeping hut. The next beehive awaited us. Later on, after we had brought the honeycombs back home and had placed them in the basement, it was time for my mother to do her thing. She was responsible for two key phases of honey harvesting: the spinning of the comb to release its honey, and the latter’s being filled into preserving jars. The honey was a yellow miracle.

Milk and honey—figuratively and literally—do thus flow in Switzerland’s Lower Engadine region. But no one swims in either liquid—nor anywhere else in the canton. In my childhood, no one knew how to swim. Sports were in those days already a great passion of mine. I was a passionate cyclist. Swimming was simply not an option—and remained such until I at the age of 25 encountered Gunther Frank. He was a lecturer on swimming at the University of Basel, which is located on the Rhine. This opened up a new world for me.

I am convinced of the following. Had I learned to swim as a child and had this been in swimming pools, I would have never become a long-distance swimmer. Those who swim in pools see the water as being another piece of equipment. They see swimming as being an athletic “competition”, one whose “rules” they observe while pursuing it. When I am on a swimming expedition, I feel more like a sailor than a swimmer. I pick a course and swim in the direction that I myself choose.

It was Gunther Frank who kindled this passion in me. His face would light up while discussing even the tiniest of turbulences and underwater currents formed by the swimmer’s hands and feet. His passion caused him to give hours-long talks from his vantage point on the edge of the pool. Gunther’s audience was his swimmers, and his subject was their—often tiny—errors in form.2

During my study of physical education at the University of Basel, I never went—not a single time—swimming in the Rhine or in a lake. Despite this, it was my studies and specifically Gunther Frank which and who gave me the deep-seated trust in my ability to go my own way. I of course had no way of anticipating at that time that this way would take the form of expeditions in Graubünden, in other parts of Switzerland, and in other countries traversed by the Rhine—Gunther was in fact very negative about swimming in the river. Had I not gotten to know Gunther and had not learned from him the ability to “read” water, there never would have been a “blue miracle”.

Many years late, Gunther was about to retire. He asked me whether I wanted to be his successor at the University of Basel. After a long period of careful consideration, I turned the offer down. I was not enthusiastic about a future comprised of teaching swimming from the edge of a pool—and of working in a regimented environment. The search for a challenge worth mastering went on.

No blue blood, but a “blue miracle”

Notwithstanding the words uttered by my father on the banks of the stream, what I lacked for a long period of time was the courage to finally go my own way. This is never easy to do, especially when you’ve grown up in a world in which everything— even the smallest of things— is governed by society-imposed imperatives. Switzerland’s Lower Engadine region is beautiful. Its society is tightly controlled. The region’s people are there for each other— and watch each other closely. Courses of lives are often determined at their inception. Or at least that used to be the case. Maybe things have changed in the interim.

I left Ardez thirty years ago. Despite this length of time, a feeling of constraint still overcomes me when I think of my years in the area, which is traversed by the River Inn.

My native tongue is Rhaeto-Romanic. I love the timbre of its words. The language also symbolized for me the situation of my life in my homeland. The word “Romanic” is a synonym for me for “preserving” or “protecting”. Why? Because the small minority speaking this language in Switzerland often devotes itself to preserving and protecting it and the past in which it grew up, to the administration of its culture and traditions. This concentration leaves little room for the creation and implementation of new approaches to living. Living in my homeland was for me like living in a jar containing conserves.

One encounter symbolizes for me my life in the Lower Engadine. I ran a couple of years ago into an artist from the region. He is world-famous. He is a world traveler, one who owns property on a variety of continents. He is highly cosmopolitan. While we were talking, he asked me in our language: “Don’t you miss the yellow larches of the Lower Engadine, and the way the trees stand out against the blue sky?” My response was to ask “Why should I miss those things?” This artist could not understand how anyone growing up in the Lower Engadine would not miss its hues and scents. I answered that the larches in Davos and the blue sky over Lenzerheide (both towns elsew here in Switzerland) looked and smelled the same to me.

I don’t like this penchant for seeing and thinking local. I prefer to love all yellow larches, all blue skies, whether they be in the Engadine or elsewhere. The famous artist couldn’t understand me.

The reason for my lack of local patriotism may well be that I am not a “genuine” resident of the Engadine. My blood does not bear the local hues of yellow and blue flowing in the veins of those who have been living in this region for centuries. Both my father’s family (the Bromeis clan) and that of my mother (the Hateckes) hailed from Germany. They migrated to Switzerland, and did so without cultivating a nostalgia for their original homeland.

So perhaps it was not surprising that I wanted to “emigrate” from the Engadine, that I wanted to get away from its constricting patriotism and self-love. And this “getting away” spewed out of me in a flood of energy and aggression. The object of this aggression was never directed at the other residents of the area—or at anyone else. I respected the lives being led by the population of Ardez, Bos-cha, Guarda and other communities in the area. The aggression was directed inwards—against myself. These feelings were not to be borne. To get relief from this accumulating heap of aggressive feelings, I tried (and still try) to transform it into positive, creative energy.

I was still light-years away from coming up with the “blue miracle”. After having completed my degree in physical education, having been certified as trainer, and having worked as such, I launched upon something new. I became an executive in the tourist industry. My new job was to serve as a manager for athletic and other events staged in the city of Lenzerheide. This caused me to follow the Rhine up towards its source, and to thus return to Graubünden.

My years working in the tourism industry were marked by my gathering of professional experience in dealing with the business sector. A key discovery was that of the world of communication. This represents a core skill of tourism destinations, as it enables them to successfully position themselves on the market. During my years, I helped shape the communication and positioning of Lenzerheide as a destination for cyclists and cross-country skiers. I was also charged with the management of athletic events. These responsibilities taught and showed me a lot. The quintessence of my experience is summed up in the phrase “The world needs nobody to help it spin. Everybody else requires the skills of communicators.”

After several years of working in this field, I decided it was time to seek a new challenge—which I found in the world of media. Another possibility would have been to work as a consultant for the Swiss Olympic bid. This would have given me national exposure.

I decided not to go for the above options, but rather for one enabling me to stay in the vicinity of Chur. This was because Cornelia and I had gotten married and had had children, and these, in turn, helped shape our lives.

The next step in my career was a short stint at RTR Radio e Television Rumantscha, the Rhaeto-Romanic broadcaster. Although brief, my tenure as a radio journalist was very important for my career and my life. This was because my new job caused me to realize that I would prefer to proactively shape events—rather than reporting on them. This job—though brief—did have its advantages. I was put in touch with a large number of news channels, with these ranging from the ANR Romanic-language broadcaster to SDA (Switzerland’s Reuters).

My reporting provided me with a fundamental insight. Water was becoming a hotter and hotter topic in the media. This applied to both the local and global levels. This insight, in turn, caused me to realize that I wanted to be a driver of and not a reporter on such topics as the melting of glaciers, the growing scarcity of water, and climate change.

My years of working in the worlds of athletic training, tourism and the media turned out to be my apprenticeship for what took place in autumn 2005. Until that time, I was not sure where I wanted to go. The years were marked by my inner uncertainties. My interior life was full of tumult. One thing that I was certain of: I wanted to create something all my own. I wanted a project upon which I could possibly work for the rest of my life, a project that would provide me with fulfillment, a fulfillment stemming from the realization of a vision worthy of a life’s dedication.

This ambition to create something bearing my signature and affirming my identity is one of my obsessions. It is also the obsession of an artist who wishes to devote herself or himself to creativity to the point of experiencing suffering for it and beyond.

People who know me from the media view me as a swimmer who gets from point A to point B by engaging in this sport, and as someone “playing” being an ambassador for water. I see myself as someone undertaking projects, be they on land or on water, be they involving art installations or physical performance.

Each of these projects is a fragment of something that will hopefully reveal itself to be a whole at the end of my life. This entity—this “blue miracle”—will then be able to be perceived as a work of art—as a self-sufficient entirety.

Reinhold Messner is a legendary adventurer. The books that he has written about his feats inspired me to go my own way. One of these feats was Messner’s Arctic expedition. While recounting it, Messner mentions that he can’t swim.3 This “footnote” became the key to my project. “Eu noud intuorn il muond”—“I will swim around the world” in Rhaeto-Romanic —was my first thought. That’s it! This would enable me to depart from my standard routes, to not have to follow others’ wakes, to set my own course around the world. This new plan liberated me from the past by showing me literally the way to go, the way to transform items that had been oppressing me into sources of strength.

From that moment on, I looked at the world in new ways. I scanned it for ways to realize my plan, which I found so exciting that I couldn’t sleep at night. I pored over the atlas, trying to map waterways taking me around the world. This search reached its climax during my family’s vacation in autumn 2005. which was spent at the mountainous village of Hasliberg, which is located in central Switzerland.

No electronic devices—neither Internet-linked computers nor smartphones nor televisions—disturbed our holidays, during which it rained all the time. During the vacation’s nights, while the rest of my family was fast asleep, I would get out of bed to peruse maps of the world. Whilst doing such, I would hear the rain gently tapping on the windows, through which a weak light came, illuminating the waterways that I had found on the maps. I kept all of this searching a secret. It was simply a dream, a crazy idea of mine.

I gradually realized that my life would not permit me to realize the idea of swimming around the world. Doing such would cause me to not see my family for years on end. How could I possibly earn a living during this time? How would others see the situation? I started running through the criticism to come through my mind.

But the idea of a project involving swimming had grabbed me. There was no way of getting away from it. My objective was to achieve a Utopia. And I needed a vision that would get me there, a vision that I could realistically expect to realize.

I started looking for other projects involving swimming— and found the answer in the largest lakes in the world. In contrast to the highest summits in the world, which have all been climbed, the world’s largest lakes have yet to be discovered by swimmers. These bodies of fresh water include Asia’s Lake Baikal, Lake Victoria in Africa, Lake Titicaca in South America, the Great Lakes in North America, a variety of small-sized lakes in Oceania, and Lake Ladoga, which is located north of St. Petersburg, and which is the largest fresh water lake in Europe.

The more I studied the atlas, the stronger that I perceived the blue it contains, and the less the colors of its land masses. I have retained this focus to this very day. The first things I notice nowadays when consulting a map are the blue lines and expanses it contains. My way of perceiving the world is that of someone looking at a negative, in which the gaps between solids strike the eye. I have retained this 180° reversal of perception to this very day.

The large lakes—the “sweet seas” as I refer to them—occupied my mind throughout the entire winter of 2006/2007, and into the spring beyond.

It was spring and I was in Chur, a city in eastern Switzerland, when inspiration struck me. I was drinking my coffee— as usual unsweetened—and was regarding the unopened bags of sugar provided to me. The bags were illustrated with maps of Switzerland, its cantons—and its lakes. In the small maps’ tiny scale, my canton of Graubünden was an expanse of white, with no blue of lakes and rivers to be seen. This map was akin to those of the great explorers, for whom the world was comprised solely of such white uncharted areas. “Eu stögl cumanzar davant mia porta!”—“I have to start right at home” in Rhaeto-Romanic—was my response.

And that’s how my first trip was sketched— in my head, while I drank a cup of coffee. The first great expedition would be in the waters of my homeland.

It is perhaps not logical to believe that I was always destined to take this path. “Logical” sounds in any case too mathematical, too rational. It would perhaps be better to describe it as a “natural course of events”, as natural and obvious as the way a rivulet becomes a brook, a river, a waterway, a sea and finally an ocean. Anyone who shares or shared my feeling knows what I am talking about.

You have two choices in life. Either you bury your dreams as your life unfolds, or you decide “to go for them”.