I hunted Amin for a week after watching him trundle up the slope of our green valley on a collapsable bike, his knees jutting comically akimbo as he strained to ascend the driveway very slowly past our hostel and up further into the mountain where I knew there was a meadow in the forest. Allison and I were spending two weeks in the village of Fügen in the foothills of the Alps in Austria, and I wondered what could possess a man to ride such a tiny bike up such grueling slopes. Our host Eliška said all she knew was he was from Singapore.
Between teaching classes and twirling in the meadow like I was in The Sound of Music, I managed to interview the Japanese family spending a year traveling the world fulfilling the promise Hitoshi made his wife when they got married, the empty-handed Belgian gold digger Orry whom I will forever love for teaching me the word for the smell of soil stirred by fresh rain, “petrichor,” and the anthropologist Eric who witnessed his friend fall into a voodoo trance in the Dominican Republic. Haus Sonneneck was fertile hunting grounds for stories.
It wasn’t until the last night that I caught Amin as he folded his bicycle and I followed him into the common room with all the wooden skis on the wall. He had thin facial hair and a nervous smile. He said that he was a trance DJ but had just quit because of his Muslim faith. He felt guilty about all the drugs his lifestyle included and had made the hard decision to cut his passion, music, out of his life so that he could get closer to God. He had come to the mountains for rebirth.
In a quavering voice he said he played his last show a week before, a festival in the jungle in Sri Lanka. He didn’t tell anyone his plan to quit, not even his friends, and as he looked out over the crowd, tears just streamed down his face the whole time.
