Matterhorn

“Maybe it’s like a girl who wants you to see her sometimes and not other times. Maybe she is flirting? Or maybe it is like the swirl on top of the ice cream?”

“Whipped cream?” I hazard a guess.

“Yes, that’s what I mean!” she laughs in agreement.

We both look up at the mountain, this stranger and me.

Both of us gape playfully into the distance; revering the presence of something that all at once elicits personification and completely defies all categorization.

My mom and I are on a trip through Switzerland. It’s charming, expansive, and beautiful. The water in the lakes is a vibrant glacial blue. The kind of blue that looks like the dyed blue of the mini golf place near my mom’s house, but this is just the color it was made. The air is fresh. The kind of freedom from pollution that only comes from many hilltops and valleys of undisturbed wandering wilderness. There was a moment - on the cherry red train car that brought us here, that the air smelled sweet. 

The trip to the little alpine town of Zermatt involved the cherry red train of the Glacier Express, another train, a bus (which was required after a landslide that rendered some of the tracks impassable) and then another train – something to do with cog wheels necessary to match the steep incline.

Once secured in the little cozy hug of the dark wood and melted cheese and beer town of Zermatt it was time to rest and survey the mountains on either side. This is a process. It does not happen all at once. 

We sleep a cozy sleep under billowy blankets in the mountain town and then in the morning we shuttle up to the entrance to the gondolas in a little e-taxi.  Seven people clown-car into a vehicle meant to take us to the top of the town proper. The driver is Italian and is either talking to his mother or his girlfriend. He is maybe upset. I think he needs a cigarette. It’s hard to tell.

Everyone here looks like they have old money and also like they stepped out of a REI 3 months ago, perfectly outfitted and then walked with their boots and hiking poles and lightweight backpacks for three months. At the end of those three months, they returned and carried with them a breath of mountain air, casual and distant Swiss satisfaction, and sat to have a frothy brew with the picture of the great mountain on the bottle at a fancy café – still in their hiking gear. 

This is how the people look. Impossibly cool. It is infuriating; that so many people could exist like this and that I just found out about it.

I am clearly a tourist who did not read the itinerary closely enough and am in my fashion sneakers and windbreaker. This is sometimes how we approach the great moments of our lives – unprepared and in silly stretchy floral pants that we found on the clearance rack at Marshall’s and usually wear to our office jobs.

We get our tickets and push through the turnstile.  Mom and I board on our own and the efficient blue shell of the gondola encloses around us. There are windows at the top that pull down a few inches to let the mountain air sweep in. Doing so helps to release the feeling that we are just watching a green screen projection of this place and actually in the place.

The grass grows tall and blows and swirls in the wind. The dancing blades are accented by wildflowers and meandering goats with curved horns. Every cow and goat looks like a paid extra that was placed there by a Hollywood props department to look like Switzerland. I realize how sad a shadow my everyday life is - because what I am seeing so far reminds me of things that have been marketed to me. Mountain air meant to sell a candle, mountain spring - an enticing scent of soap. 

You get the idea.

We continue.

Upwards.

Dark wooden alpine cabins are dotted up the landscape – holding on at a steady and jagged incline. I use the time lapse of my mind and imagine the buildings with snow piled all around and smoke coming out of their chimneys. These are the places where people come to get a hot meal and a beverage when they come in from the snow and cold. These cabins are the lighthouses of the mountain.

I am a simpleton here and have only the ancient Appalachian Mountains of the American Northeast to compare. I know nothing of mountains like this. The gondolas are not just cute little rides. This is major machinery – muscle and steel and cable as thick as a tree limb. Suspension and acceleration over the dizzying pitch into pure abyss. Swiss engineering at its finest. Every stop on the mountain is more like a stop on major transit. Like the NYC Subway or a London Tube ride. We are covering ground. We are changing altitude. We are quickly beyond the tree line.

Let’s consider for a moment that there is a specific goldilocks zone where our planet exists. It’s just right to sustain life. And within that zone of “just right” there is a height that diminishes the chances of life. The supply of oxygen is too tight. The air is too cold. Conditions are too harsh. It is such a fine line – this place where we sustain 8.2 billion of us.

And counting.

Expansive and existential thoughts come tumbling out of my brain and spill out onto my insufficient windbreaker and through the glass out to forever. It’s easy to think big thoughts when a snap of a cable would most assuredly be the end.

When I was a kid, my parents were in the attic of our house and the pull-down access ladder was extended down into my sister’s bedroom and onto the plush carpet. I needed to ask them a question and summoned the courage to make the climb to maybe the 3rd step of the ladder before bursting into tears. It was too high off the carpet for me. It was just too close to the clouds and ceiling and much too far from the safety of the carpeted floor.

I acknowledge my inner child as the cable continues to pull us further up and up and away. 

We've come a long way, kid.

 We’ve come a long way.

Once we’ve made it several stops up to the main observation area, Trockener Steg, we take a few pictures and then I hike down to the lake on the mountain; just under 10,000 feet. It is strange that the rocks are so gray and red and rust and burnt orange. It reminds me of the coal mining rock in the western part of my home state of Pennsylvania and yet it looks like no planet I know – not really. I take it slow – so as not to stumble and make an example of myself.

The landscape is severe and stark and devoid of most life, but strikingly beautiful. The Matterhorn, the famous and staggering mountain peak in front of me is somehow getting bigger, more imposing the closer I get to it and yet I am somehow no closer.

 No closer at all.

It’s like every time I zoom into the picture a whole expanse opens. The distance and scale reveal itself in stages almost as if it knows that humans like me could not comprehend its greatness all at once. The mountain is ancient and wise. The mountain is very much right.

I stand at the lake and succumb to my humbling disbelief. Surreal for sure. I kneel and pick up a gray rock flecked with metallic chips and hold a piece of the mountain in my dominant hand. We stand and observe each other. The mountain and me. 

The mountain knows it will outlast me, but that we are made of the same stuff. The same atoms and elements of stars that exploded a long time ago. I know I am not the main event here – I am a blip on the mountain’s timeline. I nod in agreement at the silent sentiment portrayed wordlessly by the mountain that is before me and behind me and under my feet. I am a blip acknowledging forever. I am more than ok with that.

When I take a final sighing breath and decide to hike back up to the visitor’s area, I take it slow. It’s not that the air feels thin like they told me it would. It feels more like I have an insatiable hunger for oxygen. I am gulping the air down. I am wheezing. I’m feeling very mortal. The mountain knows I am grappling with my humanity, but it is ok. We take it slow, the mountain and me.

Once I get back to the observation deck, Mom and I decide to continue to the second gondola ride to the Glacier Palace. The cable ride is impossibly steep. The first gondola could carry a handful of people in each car. This monster of machinery could carry 28 people at a time. Stone cold Swiss engineering.

We ride with an effortlessly hip Spanish family.

The Spaniards have an open countenance as a group and ask for their picture to be taken and then offer to take ours. Their picture is framed by the mountain face. Ours captures the backdrop of where we have been. Dropping endlessly down and disappearing into the distance.

At the Glacier Palace there are underground hallways to the glacial cave of carved ice sculptures, the elevator to the observation tower, to the café, or out onto the snow. 

I choose the door to the elements and the first bright gust of snowy air summons an immediate gasp in my chest. Winter in the summertime. Zero degrees Celsius with a wind chill. I walk out and down onto the icy slope until the ground levels out. The people on the ski lift in front of me are being carried away and melt into specs in the distance. It’s still so far. I look down at my silly sneakers and laugh, then I crouch down and make a snowball and walk back up the hill into the main building with a mission in mind.

When the doors open there is a medic giving a day tripper like me oxygen. The medic is crouched next to the tourist who is sitting back to the wall with an oxygen mask strapped to her face, hugging her knees in front of her. I’m thankful I took the walk back at my turtle pace.

Inside the café I buy an overpriced jacket and find my mom amongst the bustling crowd of families drinking soda and coffee and eating snacks while looking out of the massive picture windows in all directions.

“I got you a souvenir, but it won’t last long” I say to my mom. “Put out your hands”. She cups her hand like I am about to present her with a baby bird and when I put the snowball in her hands she tosses it around with chilly delight. We belong to the mountain now. Baptism by snowball.

For lunch, I order rosti, which are crispy hash-brown like potatoes and sausage with caramelized onions. The dish is prepared by an impossibly handsome cook and of course it is delicious, and I wonder what it is like to be that handsome and work on top of this mountain and cater to bewildered tourists every day. Mom and I dig into the skillet of fried sustenance, and it is exactly what the altitude requires. It sticks to our bones.

A final pilgrimage in mind, I walk back down the tunnel to the lift to the observation tower. It’s the highest observation tower in the world at a little over 13,000 feet. The wind whips with the icy determination of an endless winter and swirls with glints of snow in all directions.

Klein Matterhorn to my back is veiled in mist, but the peak to the far side of the observation deck is clear of cloud cover. A party of climbers are visible on the next ridge, and they are so far away that they appear to be ants. Impossible distance. Unperceivable height. Within minutes the climbing party is wrapped in a cloud, and I am sure their visibility has vanished into whiteout. I close my eyes and think of the humans with spikes attached to their feet, backpacks and pickaxes and ropes all a fury. They are somehow the same species as me. On the same mountain as me. Living a completely different reality. Right now.

I could have stayed forever. Perhaps it is nirvana. Perhaps it is a precarious and dependent relationship with oxygen. Eventually it is time. I descend the clanging metal steps and back down the lift to the tunnels. We visit the glacier ice palace carvings before we go – It’s Elsa’s castle, but real life and i'm getting used to the surreal unfolding in a continuous procession in front of me. This reality is so unreal.

On the way back down the mountain I feel lighter. Buoyant and effervescent and satisfied. Probably the only thing grounding this experience is the sausage and potatoes. And of course, the snowball. And the persistence of humanity inhabited by the climbing party on the distant ridge.

Our last gondola ride we are alone until a little Swiss family joins us. A mother and father and toddler son. The boy is wearing thick round  glasses and a tiny backpack equipped with a stuffed animal. I hear their talking and know what they are saying. Not because I understand their language, but because I know they are talking about the animals on the mountain and the sounds they make. The boy mimics the baying of the sheep, and we all laugh. 

Suspended in the moment. 

On the mountain. 

Descending back into the goldilocks zone of life.

The sheep watch as we disappear over the hill and go back to their chewing.