But Enough About You: Essays (8 page)

But now the late-afternoon sun was blazing as we click-clacked over paved streets to a garden restaurant where we sat and drank cold beer. That night we ate pasta and drank red wine at the Chalet da Giuseppe, which is where the locals eat when they want to have a good meal out. Giuseppe has been there for almost thirty years, smiling and shouting,
“Buona sera!”
at you when you walk in, and kissing and hugging the clientele, who, being Swiss, do not generally go in for a lot of public kissing and hugging. Giuseppe has deep smile lines, but his eyes looked exhausted from three decades of jollying local Lutherans.

Lord Byron fled London to Switzerland after an incest scandal. His verdict on Helvetia was that it was “a curst, selfish, swinish country of brutes.” Having Swiss blood in my own veins, I do not subscribe to the Byronic position. I’ve known many Swiss, with great fondness. But there is a certain stolidity in the Swiss soul. We met an Italian woman who had lived in Zermatt for many years. She gave Elan her perspective, in Italian: “They survive, but they do not live.”

On the way back to the Hotel Monte Rosa, we smoked cigars in the cold moonlight and found ourselves on the Hinterdorfstrasse, a narrow street lined with ancient chalets. We heard a preternatural screech from within and witnessed a ferocious engagement between bellicose cats. I dozed off to sleep with
War and Peace
on my chest and
A Clockwork Orange
dubbed in Spanish on the TV, and woke at 3:30 a.m.—a nightly event—to the sound of drunks spilling out of Grampi’s Bar and Pizzeria. One night, Elan and I prepared water balloons to launch on the raucous hearties from our balconies, but we never did get a clear shot.

On the second floor of the Hotel Monte Rosa is a quiet wood-paneled room hung with etchings and photographs of men who either made the Matterhorn famous or died on it, or both. Here are Whymper, Charles Hudson, Lord Francis Douglas (he was related to
Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover), Douglas Hadow, Michel Croz, and Peter Taugwalder and his son.

There’s also a photo of Sir Arnold Lunn. The face looking out is of an old but still spry man, carrying skis over his shoulder, grinning and squinting through small round spectacles. If you ski, you owe Sir Arnold thanks, because it was he, perhaps more than any other single person, who made it into a sport.

He was a remarkable Englishman. In his early twenties, climbing in Wales, he fell 30 meters and broke his leg so badly that for the rest of his life he walked with a limp on a leg three inches shorter than the other. Yet he climbed every mountain in the Alps, skied down some of them, and invented the slalom. He also wrote dozens of books—on mountaineering, the Swiss, and Catholicism.

He was a friend of my father’s. Every year we would visit him in Mürren. (The town got its name from Hannibal, who was apparently impressed by the immense cliff on which it perches. You may have seen it in a James Bond movie.) Sir Arnold and Lady Phyllis lived in a grace-and-favor apartment provided by the Swiss government in recognition of his contribution to their national economy. When I was eight years old, I taught him how to use the elevator in his hotel. When Sir Arnold was eight himself, in 1908, he met the great Edward Whymper. So I shook the hand that shook the hand of Edward Whymper.

I brought Sir Arnold’s book
Matterhorn Centenary
on our trip. It’s a fascinating, unsparing account, and from it I learned the intriguing fact that Whymper, the Englishman who did more than anyone else to make the Matterhorn and Zermatt famous, was more or less detested in these parts. The reason had to do with the aftermath of the July 14 tragedy.

In Whymper’s telling, here is what happened. Michel Croz was helping the Englishman Hadow place his feet securely when:

I heard one startled exclamation from Croz, then saw him and Mr. Hadow flying downwards; in another moment Hudson was dragged from his steps, and Lord F. Douglas
immediately after him. All this was the work of a moment. Immediately we heard Croz’s exclamation, old Peter and I planted ourselves as firmly as the rocks would permit: the rope was taut between us, and the jerk came on us both as on one man. We held; but the rope broke midway between Taugwalder and Lord Francis Douglas. For a few seconds we saw our companions sliding downwards on their backs and spreading out their hands, endeavouring to save themselves. They passed from our sight uninjured, disappeared one by one, and fell from precipice to precipice on to the Matter-horngletscher below, a distance of nearly 4,000 feet. From the moment the rope broke it was impossible to help them.

So perished our comrades! For the space of half an hour we remained on the spot without moving a single step.

The accident caused headlines and controversy. There were letters to the
Times
. Queen Victoria demanded of the lord chamberlain why mountaineering couldn’t simply be prohibited by law. Taugwalder was accused of cutting the rope. Whymper defended him against that charge, but leveled others, implying that Taugwalder had deliberately tied himself to Douglas, an inexpert climber, with a weak rope. He also said that the Taugwalders had asked him to say publicly that they had not been paid for guiding, in order to arouse sympathy for them and to stimulate future business. But most damningly, Whymper told the inquest that as they huddled miserably through the long night, the Taugwalders acted so menacingly toward him that he kept his rock and ice ax at the ready. The implicit charge was that they were seeking to increase their notoriety—and guide business—by becoming the only survivors of the first successful ascent of the Matterhorn. Grim stuff.

The two Taugwalders were tainted by the odious charges until Sir Arnold Lunn published an article in the
Alpine Journal
exonerating them eighty years later. It wasn’t until then, he wrote, that one Swiss confided to him,
“Whymper war nicht beliebt in Tal.”
(Whymper was not liked in the valley.)

So there you have the dirty little secret of Edward Whymper, Great Man of the Matterhorn: the locals hated his guts.

Sir Arnold wrote, “He was a friendless, and in many ways a pathetic man, and there was little, if anything, admirable about him excepting his mountaineering, but in spite of defects which I have not attempted to conceal, there was something great about the man. Many eminent mountaineers have contributed to the history of the Matterhorn by forcing new routes up its cliffs, but the Matterhorn remains Whymper’s mountain, partly because he himself had something of the indomitable character of that great peak . . . To the end, he remained astonishingly tough. At the age of 62 he walked from Edinburgh to London, averaging 55 miles a day.”

I spent some pleasant hours with Sir Arnold’s book in the little room on the second floor of the Hotel Monte Rosa. There’s a small library in the hall, donated by a New York lady. There I found a reissue of Whymper’s own book,
Scrambles Among the Alps
(Dover Publications, New York).

After breakfast, Elan and I would take our tea there and plan our leisurely days. I couldn’t remember when I had last had ten full days with no appointments or To Do list. No BlackBerry, no iPhone, just the clunky computer in the hotel foyer with intermittent Internet access. Bliss, truly. Elan called the trip our
piccola pausa
—little pause—the Italian term for the interval between courses.

Being unrushed, I began to notice things that might ordinarily have escaped my attention, such as the hotel’s flower planters. They were old chamber pots. I wondered,
Might this one have been Whymper’s?
Altitude does strange things to a man.

One afternoon we hiked to a glade by a small waterfall and made a picnic of crusty bread, Côtes du Rhône, luscious plump tomatoes, Gruyère and
Trockenfleisch
(slices of air-dried beef), and a bar of Toblerone. We hiked back into town and went to pay our respects at the Alpine Museum.

I was last there in 1962—before you were born—and remembered seeing the famous rope that had parted, sending Croz, Hadow, Douglas, and Hudson on their fatal plunge. It’s still there. I was no less enthralled standing before it as I had been as an innocently
morbid boy. I could find no reference to the Controversy. Whymper may have been
nicht beliebt in Tal
, but he still packs them in. One exhibit is a chair he sat in while having his hair cut.

There’s a sad display of dried leather boots that belonged to climbers who never lived to unlace them. A photograph of a breathtakingly beautiful young Englishwoman who died on the Matterhorn in a terrible storm. Near the exit is a framed account by Teddy Roosevelt of his ascent of the Matterhorn in 1881, age twenty-two. (Winston Churchill also climbed it.
Everyone
seems to have climbed it.) Young TR wrote to his sister back home, “One of the chief reasons I undertook the ascent of the Matterhorn was to show some English climbers who were staying at the same hotel that a Yankee could climb as well as they could.” Standing before this document, I realized that I, too, must make my ascent of the Matterhorn. National pride was at stake.

It was going on two in the afternoon when the next day we achieved the base of the mountain. Here would begin our path to the summit, 1,500 meters above.

I checked my water bottle, marked the spot on my GPS, and applied another coat of SPF. Whymper and the others had started from this very spot, as had so many others. Elan would remain behind. He had to call Barry Diller on his cell phone about some deal they were doing.

Thus I set off solo on my ascent of the north face. Ten minutes into it I had reached 60 meters up the trail. I thought of Michel Croz and
The White Tower
and
Third Man on the Mountain
and the seventeen-year-old who had chosen to climb. A helicopter buzzed by overhead on its way to the Hörnli hut to deposit climbers. It was a brilliant sunny-cool day. I felt superbly alive—not a day over forty-nine.

I began my descent. Elan was still on the phone with Barry Diller. It took Hugo eight hours to make it up and back. It took me fifteen minutes. Now, for the rest of my life I could say, “I climbed the Matterhorn.” (Not with a bang, but with a Whymper.)

We hiked back down into town. I slept through until dawn, undisturbed by the Grampi’s revelers. I didn’t even have to get up in the middle of the night, which as you hit fifty, becomes another of life’s accomplishments, along with conquering the Matterhorn.

—
Forbes FYI
, October 2003

For years, I lived in cities, where my conversation consisted of world events, politics, literature, art, science, and, to be sure, the latest gossip.

Now I live in the suburbs, and my conversation seems to consist of complaining. We had guests over the other night—solid, interesting people who could hold their own in any conversation about the latest developments in Europe or Mali, or John Irving’s new novel, or the upcoming exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Pre-Columbian Erotic Ceramics.

Instead, I treated them to a diatribe on my property taxes. Then it was on to the heron—or, as I call it, the “f— ing heron”—that has turned my koi pond into its private sushi bar. I can go on at length on that topic, let me tell you. And would have, if the memsahib hadn’t shot me a glance that said, Dear, why don’t we move on from the heron?

So I moved on, to another subject worthy of Socratic discourse: the third-floor fire detector. See, it’s right outside the bathroom door, and whenever someone takes a steamy shower and opens the door—
weeeoooo
weeooo
—it goes off. And if someone happens to be using
the phone and the alarm company can’t call us, the next thing you know, there are six hook-and-ladder trucks and two ambulances wailing up the driveway, with sirens going and—

“Darling,” memsahib interjects, “I think our guests need more wine. Why don’t you go down into the basement and get some?”

“Yes, oh light of my life,” I say huffily, feeling like Homer interrupted in mid-epic.

But as I reflect on my current conversational repertoire—the traffic on I-95 (don’t get me started); the so-called weed remover that seems to promote weed growth (an outrage, really); the mole holes in the lawn (you could break an ankle); the dryer fan in the basement that no one ever remembers to turn off after the dryer is finished (it makes this
rrrrr-rrrrr
sound); the fireplace that every time you light turns the TV room into a smokehouse despite the new $700 chimney fan. . . . The evidence is, I stipulate, starting to mount: I have become a suburban crank.

I also talk about the weather. I never used to talk about the weather, unless it involved a hurricane or tornado. Then the other day, I was going on about the water bill and caught myself saying, “I’m seriously considering writing a strongly worded letter to the editor of the local paper.” Memsahib said, “Good idea, darling. Why don’t you?” I caught the look of pity on her face, oh yes. (Or was it . . . self-pity?) She has started to humor me. That wasn’t supposed to happen for at least another twenty years.

How did this happen? Okay, so I moved to the suburbs. But there’s some undistributed middle at work, surely. I keep up with things. I do. I read the papers every day—three, including the
Financial Times
. I admit I skim that one, since I don’t understand most of it. To be honest, I don’t hang on Angela Merkel’s every word, try as I might. But that doesn’t stop me from saying with a straight face, “The
FT
? Indispensable. Read it every day.”

I read books—quality books, too, not trash. I can do the Sunday
Times
crossword, so long as memsahib is at my side. I went to college. I know stuff. Do
you
know the derivation of the word
mayonnaise
? Were you aware that it is one of the few words in the English language of Carthaginian origin? Didn’t think so.

So, anyway, the other day, I drive over to Galt’s to pick up some more three-quarter-inch river stone for the edging around the fishpond. Because the lawn guys, when they do the leaf-blowing, always blow the smaller stones into the fish pond. Which totally freaks out the koi. I mean, one minute they’re hanging out doing koi stuff, the next there’s this underwater avalanche. And of course we wouldn’t want the f— heron to think that his sushi bar has a badly edged border, would we? Nooo. So I tell the guy at Galt’s—