VISITING THE OTZI MCDONALD'S
After a few hours' climb we crossed a plateau and, summiting a ridge, were greeted by the pleasing sight of lighted windows and the familiar red and gold sign.
After a few hours' climb we crossed a plateau and, summiting a ridge, were greeted by the pleasing sight of lighted windows and the familiar red and gold sign. Our minds had been focused on the climb, the sometimes treacherous ascent of the snowy trail and, of course, on the sweeping beauty of the valley, and consequently we had tried to forget our rumbling bellies. But as we paused for a moment atop the ridge our appetites rallied and we exchanged a look and smiled at each other. We began to shuffle down the slope towards the Otzi McDonald's.
On its exterior the Otzi McDonald's was clad in white painted boards with brown crossbeams and accents. A shallow pitched roof, of brown tiles in the traditional alpine style, held up the iconic golden arches. Snow collected on the gables. Large and gleaming triple-glazed windows afforded a glimpse of the sleek, modern restaurant within, while nearby the Otzi Memorial stood: a small obelisk of piled stones commemorating the discovery of the Alps' oldest child. A small line of brightly jacketed mountaineers queued politely near it for their turn to take a selfie.
We stepped through the sliding doors, our cheeks flushing in the sudden warmth. A smiling young woman in a stripy uniform took our jackets and hung them up. A non-traditional touch. Inside, three broad steps led down to a wide, open floor area. A melamine counter fronted the kitchen and, to the right, rustic wooden beams held up a split level dining area. The lower level was cosy, with booth seats and warm sconce lighting, while the higher level featured small tables and an expansive view of the Otzi Memorial and the valley beyond. High walls were painted white and decorated plainly - alpine style, again - with a handful of mountaineering mementos sharing wall space with photos of hikers in red and gold jackets kneeling in groups for the annual McHappy Day Otzi Hike.
In the centre of the floor was the reason why so many ventured up the long, steep trail to this far-flung franchise. A shallow pit bored into the glacier was bounded by steel struts, insulated, lit up by cool LED lamps and covered with thick, clear perspex. It was the hole from which Otzi the Iceman had been dug on a bright Autumn afternoon in 1991. It took up roughly nine square metres in the centre of the floor, and around its border visitors stood and squatted, quietly taking in the excavation. Small signs fastened discreetly to the corners of the perspex pointed out grains of 5000 year old einkorn and barley in the rough earth that had been confirmed to an impressive 70% likelihood to have tumbled from his bag at the time that the arrow, fired from high ground by unseen assailants, had struck his shoulder and he had fallen and tumbled down a slope. The fall had broken his ribs and knocked him unconscious and, as an hour passed, then two, his warmth had ebbed. Then night fell. On the spring night three thousand two hundred years before Jesus Christ was born the air was not its coldest but the ice crept up all the same. The glacier surrounded him. Near the hole a replica of his axe had been placed. "Copper of 99.7% purity," the sign read. We squatted with the others and imagined what we might have done if we had stumbled down a mountain path to find a yellow skull and chicken skin rib cage poking out of the rock. The Simons who found Otzi thought he was a recent death and called the gendarme. Tired and worn down, a grizzled 45 years of age with arsenic in his hair and whipworm in his gut, lungs caked with soot, Otzi was carried down the mountain to the labs. There was a replica copper age jacket in the hole, complete with a little slit and a bloodstain by the shoulder. "Did You Know?", another sign read, "Bone analysis has revealed Otzi may have been a shepherd!"
As we stood at the edge of the perspex a muted gasp rippled around the room. Hands pointed at a tiny crevice at the edge of the pit, near where a steel strut met brickwork. We peered down. Nothing... No. A tiny nose. Twitching whiskers. From the crevice a mouse’s head appeared.
Concerned murmurs spread around the room. The mouse stretched and squirmed until it had its front paws through. Then its back paws. A young woman in a McDonald’s uniform appeared from behind the counter and stared at the mouse, frozen in indecision. The mouse crept cautiously over the rocks towards the debris. Towards the ancient grains. As the crowd realised the mouse’s intentions, panic broke out. The young woman dashed off and returned accompanied by a tall boy in an apron wielding a mop. The mouse - seemingly oblivious to the audience watching it - scurried over to a grain of the 5000 year old einkorn, grasped it in its tiny paws and nibbled. The tall boy in the apron hammered on the perspex with the mop handle but the surface was so thick it made only a muted tapping sound. The mouse carried on unperturbed. He hammered on. “You’re leaving marks!” the young woman in the uniform gasped. The tall boy shuddered in a comical double take, flipped the mop around, and continued to bash the surface with the soft end of the mop.
The mouse finished the grain of einkorn. It raised its nose, sniffed, hopped cautiously towards another grain. An anxious silence settled over the room. The tall boy jabbed ineffectively at the ground with the mop head, paused, made an exploratory stomp with his foot. Not a sound.
“There must be some way to shoo it?” A German mountaineer with a neat white moustache enquired. “We must not allow it to continue its feast?”
“Go call Innsbruck,” the young woman in the uniform told the tall boy. “It’s supposed to be completely safe,” she told the German mountaineer with a note of bewilderment in her voice.
“What should I say?” the tall boy asked.
“Ask if there’s a way to open the Otzi display,” she said.
The mouse, having finished a couple of grains of barley, cleaned the husk from its whiskers. It suddenly, as though hearing something clearly, raised up on its hind paws, looked around, and then scurried purposefully towards one of the spotlights. It squeezed its way into the metal bracket that held the light, turned around once and went to sleep.
The tall boy re-emerged from behind the counter dragging a large quilt. “And what did they say in Innsbruck?” The German mountaineer asked.
The tall boy said nothing. He spread the quilt over the perspex and retrieved from a hidden closet by the lower seating area four signs that read “ACHTUNG! NASSER BODEN” and placed them in the corners of the quilt.
“Hey,” another mountaineer spoke up. “What about the mouse?” The tall boy ignored her and disappeared into the kitchen.
The McDonald’s staff returned to the kitchen and resumed shovelling french fries and working the grill, and after some time the crowd around the covered display just dispersed. We remembered our hunger and ordered Quarter Pounder Meals with large fries and Coke with McNuggets to share plus Toblerone McFlurries and took our seats in the elevated loft section. From our position near the railing we looked down on the quilt covering the pit. We ate quietly, imagining a different lunch of meat and bread, eaten from a wooden bowl handed to us by a dull woman dressed in skins, finishing as the sun climbed high over the valley. Climbing wearily in search of - what? A missing lamb? - before, high in the peaks, the arrow was loosed and we came to rest in the gully to sleep for 5000 years, through freeze and melt and freeze again, through copper and iron and steam and modernity, a tiny grain of barley in the great thresher of time and empire. We deposited our trays by the bins and retrieved our jackets. Under the awning outside we gazed at the drop of the glacier at the restaurant's edge where the lip of the gully had protected Otzi for so long. In all of the mountains in all of the world we may never find another Otzi. In the foothills our hire car was in a metered bay and we didn’t want a fine. We began our descent.