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

sound as I’ve ever heard in Switzerland. The entire valley became a tympanum. In the distance, the hikers paused and waved.
    After lunch we climbed another 300 vertical meters, until we came to a ridge under the Weisshorn, some 1,000 meters above Zermatt. Here we found enormous steel gates: avalanche barriers to protect the town below. Next to plunging 1,200 meters down the cheese grater of the Matterhorn, “Buried Under Avalanche” is right up there on my list of Ways I Would Prefer Not to Die.
    Elan rushed on the long hike down. I could barely get him to pause for a photo beneath a spectacular rainbow. I wondered if this was another 9/11 homage, but at the bottom he confessed toinexplicable bad vibrations. It might have been the foehn , the warm wind that causes mood changes.
    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 toLord 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