The sign beside the path asks visitors to keep off fields and meadows from 1 April to 31 October. Italian, English and Chinese follow the German. We’ve brought home quite a few pictures of churches framed by the Geisler peaks. We photographed the sign too. It was the Chinese lettering that first caught Angie’s eye.
I’d promised her a quiet half-day. I’d been reading about Slow Food in the Villnöss valley and drawn my own conclusions. In Ranui there are coaches. We see signs for parking at ten or fifteen euros a day. Anyone wanting to take the path across the meadow to the little church of St. Johann pays another five. The church itself is closed today.
From Ranui we walk towards St. Magdalena and on up to the viewpoints above the church. There’s the picture we came for. The church, the green meadows and the Geisler peaks behind them. We stand and look and take photographs. It’s a lovely way to spend our last afternoon. This late in October, the other people here hardly bother us.
Later, Instagram shows me a different valley. In the pictures people are sitting shoulder to shoulder in the meadows. The posts tell of angry residents and mountain farmers. My first thought is that somebody ought to do something. My second is to wonder what’s so terrible about a few people sitting on the grass. Angie and I can get a fair way into an argument just on the distance between “shoulder to shoulder” and “a few people”. We know about as much about a Sunday here in August as someone looking at our photographs could tell you about the car park in Ranui in late October.
We’re surprisingly quick with solutions all the same. A toll on the road into the valley, perhaps. The money could pay to rent a meadow where people are welcome to sit, put in benches, cover the cost of toilets. In our heads we’ve already installed the first bench before it occurs to us that we have no idea whether anyone there wants one. Even after our own visit we’d struggle to say who gets any of our money beyond the car park operator. For a farmer it presumably makes a difference whether a hundred people sit down in his meadow without asking, or whether he leases some of it and has a say in where they sit. The photograph would show the same hundred people.
At St. Johann in Ranui the farmer has come up with an arrangement of his own. There’s a turnstile on the path to the church and a vending machine selling farm produce beside it. Five euros to go through. We find ourselves working out how much milk you’d have to sell to match a good day at the turnstile. We don’t get far. We don’t even know how many people go through.
One of the two of us, anyway. Angie says straight away that she’ll wait outside. I pay my five euros and walk the narrow path to the church. Pasture fences on either side, the church shut. I’d like to step sideways a few paces for a photograph. No room for that here. Not even a bench.
I paid five euros to walk to the church. Funny how quickly I decide that ought to buy me a nice spot in the meadow too.