But Enough About You: Essays (7 page)

I wrote back, “
What
news about Aaron Eckhart?”

She e-mailed back: “He’s been cast in the lead in your movie.”

Shortly later arrived an e-mail from David: “Pigs are flying, snowballs are forming in hell!
Thank You for Smoking
is finally in production!”

Each day brought more cool news. They’d signed Rob Lowe. Robert Duvall. Sam Elliott. Katie Holmes (much in the news then, what with her fiancé Tom Cruise leaping up and down on Oprah’s couch). Maria Bello. William Macy. Actors of the first caliber. I
was
impressed.

I serially relayed these names to my teenage children. They were . . . politely enthusiastic.
That’s nice, Dad
.
(Yawn.)
Until another e-mail arrived, announcing that someone named Adam Brody had been cast. Upon hearing this, my sixteen-year-old daughter, Caitlin, began to hyperventilate. In the medical sense.

“Adam Brody?! Oh my God.
Oh. My. God.
Adam Brody!”

I had to look him up. He was in a TV show called
The O.C.

A year later, I found myself at a dinner at the Toronto Film Festival sitting next to Adam Brody. One of the nicest young men I have ever met. Gracious, poised, natural, unassuming.

I told him how my Caitlin had ho-hummed at the names of the other cast members but that his had caused a call to 911. He smiled self-effacingly. He’d heard it before, surely.

I am by nature reticent. I would sooner chew off my right arm at the elbow than accost a celebrity or ask for an autograph. It took three martinis to screw up the courage. I reached into my pocket for my cell phone.

“I . . . don’t suppose . . . ?” He nodded, sure.

I dialed and got Cat’s voice mail. My heart sank like a Tom Clancy submarine. But it turned out even better, for now Cat could play the message for her friends: “Hi, Cat, this is Adam Brody. I’m just calling to say hi.” God bless him, he did not add, “Your dad is drunk and totally annoying.”

So it was all worth it in the end, even if it took twelve years. Sometime later, at one of the movie events, I was prattling on to an industry person about how Hollywood had certainly taken its time
making the movie, blah blah blah. (Looking back, I wonder: Was this an unconscious attempt to bore him in just the right way?)

He listened patiently, then said with perfect deadpan, “It took over a hundred years to turn
Moby-Dick
into a movie.”

To which all I could think to say was “Good point.”

—
Time
, March 2006

You need to do something when you turn fifty. What made me think this was losing three friends in the space of one month: one to AIDS, one to cancer, another to Lou Gehrig’s disease. The eldest of these sweet souls was fifty years old. And now, weirdly, sadly, as I type these words, comes the phone call that my cousin Lee has died. She was fifty-one.

My father celebrated his demicentennial by sailing a schooner across the broad Atlantic. One friend of mine celebrated his by climbing the Grand Teton. Lacking a schooner and uneager to dangle from rocks, I sought a kinder, gentler way of marking the occasion.

Mulling this, I came across a piece in
The New York Times
about hiking the Tour Monte Rosa: a roughly eighty-kilometer oval trek around the Matterhorn. The article described how, with a bit of advance planning and a detour here and there, you could do the trek in comfort and style and not have to sleep in the spartan mountain huts alongside a lot of smelly Swedish backpackers. (As you approach fifty, other people’s sweat becomes less appealing.) It takes seven or eight days, with just one longish thirty-kilometer day. I wouldn’t
return home with a tale to rival Jon Krakauer’s
Into Thin Air
. But I would come back.

I proposed to my friend and fellow soccer dad Elan that he come along. Elan is superb company and can say “My friend has fallen into a crevasse, please dispatch a rescue helicopter” in five languages. “Why not?” he said.

We made multiple trips to the outfitters. I showed him the seven-dollar emergency space blanket that the prudent hiker brings along. He looked at me as if I had just presented him with a nuclear-biological-chemical-warfare suit.

“You never know,” I said.

I urged on him a headlamp.

“Are we going
mining
?” he asked.

“You never know.” I shrugged.

When I showed him the collapsible walking sticks, he became convinced he was the victim in a bait-and-switch exercise. What next? Ropes and crampons? In fact, we would need those for the short schlepp across the glacier on the first day. I decided to let the guide explain about that when we got there.

“Now,” I said, “you’ll want a knife.”

“Why?”

“You’ve seen
Deliverance
, haven’t you? It’s even worse in the Alps.”

Finally we arrived in Zermatt. There we arranged for the guide, bought more maps, entered emergency rescue numbers (Swiss and Italian) into Elan’s cell phone, immersed ourselves in local knowledge, packed and repacked our backpacks, bought energy bars and extra batteries for the GPS. I’d been practicing my GPS navigation all summer. A year after we had first discussed the idea, we were ready.

The night before we were to set off, Elan announced, “I can’t feel anything in my big toe.” He said this was the familiar prelude to a spinal disc that periodically herniates. Manfully, he offered to press on with Plan A. I imagined the scene, somewhere at 10,000 feet along the Tour Monte Rosa, kneeling beside him as he was wrapped in his shiny space blanket like a ball park hot dog, telling him, “The radio says there’s a storm moving in, so the helicopters aren’t flying. Is the Advil
working yet?” I imagined explaining to his wife and three children why I had crippled him for life with my insistence that we stick with Plan A.

There are few crises that cannot be improved with multiple bottles of wine. So it was that we hatched Plan B: Stay in Zermatt, sleep late, hike by day, swim afterward at the health club, then sauna and steam, followed by leisurely dinners, followed by Armagnac and Cohibas and billiards. Wake up the next morning and do it all over again, for ten whole days. Plan B actually sounded pretty good.

I hadn’t been to Zermatt in forty years. This is one disadvantage of being fifty: being able to say, “I haven’t been here in forty years.” To the pretty young women behind the desk at the Hotel Monte Rosa, I wittily said, “Why, you weren’t even
born
when I last stayed here!” Being professional, they reacted as if I had let loose an Oscar Wilde–level
bon mot
. This is one advantage of being fifty: young people humor you.

The Hotel Monte Rosa has been around since 1855, when it belonged to a man named Alexander Seiler. It was from this hotel that the twenty-five-year-old Englishman Edward Whymper and his six companions set off, at 5:30 on the morning of July 13, 1865. (Not July 14, as the bronze plaque on the front of the hotel proclaims. But then, bronze typographical errors are expensive to correct.) Seven of them made it to the summit. It was the first successful ascent. Three of them made it back to Zermatt alive.

In Whymper’s book,
Scrambles Amongst the Alps
, he describes the scene: “Seiler met me at his door, and followed in silence to my room. ‘What is the matter?’ ‘The Taugwalders and I have returned.’ He did not need more, and burst into tears; but lost no time in useless lamentations, and set to work to arouse the village.”

Our rooms on the second floor had balconies with flowers and looked out onto the main square and the little splashing frog fountain across from the Grand Hotel Zermatterhof. If it hadn’t been for the casino they were building, I’d have been able to see the alpinists’ cemetery next to the church, where Michel Croz is buried. Croz was one of the men killed on the way down on July 14. I remember as a
child standing in front of his gravestone and reading the inscription on it, marking

the loss of a brave man, beloved by his comrades

and esteemed by travelers. He perished not far from here,

a man of stout heart, faithful guide

It’s only a matter of time before they put slot machines and a craps table near the grave of a man like that. This is a disadvantage of turning fifty: coming back to a fairyland of your youth and finding that they’ve added a casino.

But the Matterhorn has not changed. It still takes your breath away when on the train ride up into Zermatt you look out the window and bang, there it is, the world’s most recognizable mountain. Horace Bénédict de Saussure, a scientist and Alp-scrambler from Geneva, gave it its modern French name in 1789 when he crossed the St. Théodule pass into Zermatt and described in his book “the great and superb pyramid of Mont-Cervin which rises to an immense height in the form of a triangular obelisk of living rock, and which has the appearance of being carved by a chisel.”

This living rock has killed almost three times more climbers than Everest, about five hundred, by one estimate. This sounds like a tragic accumulation, and of course it is, though the figure is equal to about five days of U.S. auto deaths.

I remember as a child being fascinated by the mountain, by Whymper, by Gustave 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 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 to
inexplicable bad vibrations. It might have been the
foehn
, the warm wind that causes mood changes.