August bank holiday

The August bank holiday marks a turning point in Pietro and Bruno’s river exploration in the summer of 1987: as the holiday approached, the fourteen-year-olds had traveled upstream beyond Bruno’s uncle’s territory and were nearing the river’s hidden source. Its significance is less a particular date than the way it locates their youthful undertaking in the late summer, shortly before they hoped to connect their separate efforts into a single ascent of the whole river.

A Marker in the River’s Course

The boys spent a month exploring the river in the water rather than from its banks, moving upstream from the bridge at Grana. They crossed rapids by rope and improvised a pontoon from a fallen tree, sometimes spending hours negotiating even a modest waterfall. Their plan was to solve the difficult passages one by one, then join them into a continuous journey at summer’s end.

As the August bank holiday approached, they had passed a large tributary that supplied the alpine farmsteads and a rough bridge made from a few planks. Beyond it, the river narrowed and became easier to follow. The thinning trees marked their arrival at about two thousand meters: alders and birches gave way to larch, and the rocky world above was the Grenon that Luigi Guglielmina had named. The riverbed changed from a channel shaped by flowing water to scree; the water disappeared under the stones among the twisted roots of a juniper. Pietro had imagined the river ending differently and felt disappointed. Bruno, climbing a few steps behind, had withdrawn into his thoughts, leaving Pietro to follow in silence.

Summer Time and Mountain Time

The holiday anchors this episode in a season of youthful exploration, but the river’s disappearance also unsettles the expectation that a journey will end in a clear, visible destination. Pietro reaches the source only to find water slipping beneath stones. The episode’s calendar marker thus accompanies a small reversal: the boys’ methodical progress brings them to an ending that does not look like one.

Elsewhere, the narrative measures time through seasonal contrasts rather than a single calendar. When Pietro returns to Grana as an adult at the end of April, snow still covers the high mountains even though spring has advanced in the city; the sight consoles him amid the altered valley. His mother later visits the rebuilt house on a short September day, when the rivers are low and meadow grass is drying. These separate moments are not identified as August bank holidays, but they echo the episode’s attention to how mountain seasons give journeys their pace and meaning.

Records That Carry the Past Forward

The summer exploration belongs to a longer history of journeys recorded in the landscape. When Pietro returns to his family’s old kitchen, he finds his father’s trail map still pinned to the wall. Over twenty years, its colored lines have transformed a map of valley paths into a dense personal record: black marks his father’s routes, red accompanies Pietro to the four-thousanders, and green represents Bruno. The overlapping lines reveal that his father and Bruno walked together repeatedly, correcting Pietro’s earlier picture of his father as someone who went into the mountains alone.

A summit notebook provides another, more specific record. On the barren mountain above Pietro’s house, he finds his father’s 1997 entry: “Climbed up from Grana in 3 hours and 58 minutes. Still in great shape! Giovanni Guasti.” The water-blurred ink preserves both a time and a trace of his father’s humor. Pietro imagines him hurrying to reach the summit in under four hours, then leaves the page in the notebook rather than tear it out. The entry makes a past climb tangible without turning the record into a possession.

Later Seasons and Lasting Change

Pietro’s returns also register changes that cannot be reduced to seasonal recurrence. In 2010, after time in Nepal, he finds a mobile-phone mast beside the tower ruins and a cement dam interrupting the river; an excavator removes thaw mud from a reservoir where its tracks damage the meadows where Bruno once grazed cattle. Beyond Grana, however, an old sawmill clearing and a cable around a larch remain as material traces of childhood. The contrast between development in the valley and the neglected places farther up the mountain gives Pietro a sense of returning to himself.

By the winter of 2014, the calendar carries a more dangerous weight. The Western Alps receive exceptional snow: three meters at high ski resorts by the end of December, six by the end of January, and eight by the end of February. In March, Bruno cannot be found at Barma, which has been buried beneath the snow; rescuers dig through the roof but find neither him nor tracks outside. This later crisis is distinct from the August source-finding expedition, yet the contrast is telling: the summer journey follows water to where it vanishes beneath scree, while the winter search confronts a house and its inhabitant erased from view by snow. Across these episodes, time is made legible through changing seasons, remembered paths, and the records people leave behind.