Read Online But Enough About You: Essays by Christopher Buckley - Free Book Online

Doré’s engraving of the tragedy. I remember reading James Ramsey Ullman’s The White Tower under my blanket with a flashlight and seeing the movie Third Man on the Mountain . My dashing uncle Reid—a four-pack-a-day smoker at the time—actually climbed the mountain. One of the people in his group refused to leave the summit, and remained, a suicide.
    One day Elan and I were lying on our backs in the shale at the base of the mountain and looking up at the north face, thinking the identical thought (“No f— way”). Through binoculars, we made out two human flyspecks four-fifths of the way up, making their way to the top v-e-r-y slowly.
    Wandering amid the tombstones in the alpinists’ cemetery where the noble Croz was buried after they reassembled his remains, I came across the grave of a seventeen-year-old from New York City. He was killed on the nearby Breithorn in 1975. His ice ax is mounted on his gravestone, along with the words I CHOSE TO CLIMB .
    Later that same day, as Elan and I strolled Zermatt’s main street, we heard the buzz of a helicopter. People craned their necks upward at the cliffs looming above the town. We watched a man being lowered by a cable from the helicopter 500 meters up and leap— leap —onto the cliff face, where, through binoculars, we made out three more bright dots clinging to the rock face. For the record, my tombstone will display not an ice ax but the TV remote control changer and the inscription I CHOSE NOT TO CLIMB .
    We did, on the other hand, choose to hike. Over ten days our aggregate came to 55 kilometers and 6,700 vertical meters. It doesn’t sound like much, but we returned sweaty every day. We calculated our vertical as amounting to about eighteen Empire State Buildings, which sounds a bit more impressive.
    The trails around Zermatt take you through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. To the little village of Zmutt, to the Schwarzee (Black Sea, an immodest name for the pond near the base of the Matterhorn), the Mettelhorn, the Gornergrat. Soon the click-clack of our collapsible walking sticks on the rock seemed as natural as breathing.
    One day we hiked up to Edelweiss (population: 2), perched on a cliff almost 360 meters above Zermatt. It’s a bit of a hump. Before you reach Edelweiss, you come to a sheer vertical rock face. At the foot of it are little shrines, with battery-operated votive candles. One crucifix bears the words,
    Zum andenken
    OTTO GENTINETTA
    Geboren den 25
    August 1892
    Hier verunglückt
    Am 20 Juni 1900
    Elan translated verunglückt : unlucky. He was only seven years old, poor little guy.
    A few days later we hiked up to Edelweiss again. This time, Elan didn’t stop. He’s in much better shape than I, so I didn’t catch up with him until I got to the restaurant with its porch overlooking the valley.
    “You were moving fast,” I said.
    It was September 11, 2002. He’d done it without stopping, as a token anniversary tribute to the firefighters who went into the two towers. Looking down from the terrace, the thought was there between us. The people trapped in the upper floors who leapt to their deaths fell for ten seconds.
    We finished our cups of Hakenbutter (hot, reviving red tea) and pushed on up another 300 meters to Trift (population: 3). It was foggy and windy and cold, which made us grateful for Hugo’s hot potato-leek soup at the inn. Hugo and his wife and six-year-old son, Sebastian, run the place. Hugo used to guide on the Matterhorn. “Ninety times,” he said, with that matter-of-factness that in the Swiss denotes pride. “Four hours up, four hours down.”
    Flaxen-haired Sebastian insisted that we play with him as we slurped soup and drank iced tea–lemonade. The fog cleared and Hugo produced an alpenhorn, Switzerland’s second most conspicuous icon after the Matterhorn, and blew a haunting air called “Luzerner,” which he aimed at a dozen hikers nearly invisible on a path 2,000 feet above. It was as soulful a