But something about this hairy German and his butchy partner rubbed us the wrong way—especially for my German wife. We’d tried being friendly (in German) as they were the first climbers we’d seen. In return they snubbed us coldly.

Thus, over a dinner of culurgiones and a bottle of cannonau, the wife and I had a long discussion about the Fatherland. Or more specifically why it is that Germans become aloof when they’re outside the borders of their country. Because in Berlin, the Germans I’ve encountered couldn’t be nicer, friendlier people as a whole. It seemed an odd paradox.

We didn’t reach a lot of conclusions that night but we did manage a few broad generalizations. Like Americans, Germans have a desire to see themselves as individualistic. Of course Germany doesn’t have large swaths of open land where you can pretend to be a cowboy. But many Germans like to get out and explore the world nonetheless with a decidedly adventuresome bent. Climbing is the perfect venue for this. So when they run into other Germans their individualism must go down a notch.

And then we opened another cannonau and went all the way back to the student movement of 1968 in Germany and the differences and similarities to the late 1960s in America (of which we both experienced as young babes), and you could say the discussion became sort of hazy by the next morning. But one thing became clear over the week in Cala Gonone. Nearly every time we ran into a group of German climbers they, in turn, gave us a look of angst.

We conjured another theory: Perhaps it had more to do with the way they insisted on excessively challenging themselves on climbs that were way over their heads. They climbed a few moves, yelled mach mal zu (“take”) then hung for ten minutes studying the route above. Then a few more moves, take, hang, climb, take, hang, climb. It’s like one long frustrating boulder problem with clips, the rope a crash pad. The influence of Kurt Albert’s rotpunkte (red points) at the Frankenjura goes out the window. Above all, they probably just needed to find some Sard flow.

In all fairness, we did manage to meet a couple of fine German climbers at the Arcadio crags above town. The mistral winds were blowing hard, hard enough to blow your balance off. But this didn’t keep them from almost red pointing an overhanging 7a climb nor did it diminish their humbleness. They were nothing short of sweet and friendly. For the rest of the week we hoped to run into them again. But as fate would have it, we never did.