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Fwd: It was Vladimir Nabokov ... NABOLORE
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----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 17:47:51 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: It was Vladimir Nabokov ...
To: spklein52@hotmail.com
------------------ [1] Head for heights
Telegraph.co.uk - London,England,UK
... Years later Gertraud saw his photo in an obituary. It was
VLADIMIR NABOKOV. Next morning Gertraud is sanguine about the
previous day's climbing tragedy. ... [2]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/main.jhtml?xml=/travel/2005/07/13/etzermatt13.xml&sSheet=/travel/2005/07/13/ixtrvhome.html[3]
Head for heights
Janette Griffiths feels on top of the world in Zermatt - until the
challenge of a Matterhorn hike.
(Filed: 12/07/2005)
Essentials[4]
As my friend Gertraud and I sit on the balcony of her chalet close
to Zermatt on this early summer afternoon, two climbers are freezing
to death on the Breithorn mountain thousands of feet above us.
Helicopters weave through the summits but we do not yet know why.
Summits up: The Matterhorn is popular with climbers
Gertraud was born in Chicago but, beguiled by a photograph of the
Matterhorn she saw at the age of 10, she vowed to move here when she
retired. Fifty years later she came to this house in Furi, 6,000 feet
above the town. She has climbed all the great peaks around Zermatt and
been up the Matterhorn four times. Now that the years have relegated
her ice axe and crampons to the basement cupboard, she is happy to
sit in the summer twilight and watch the evening red deepen on those
familiar peaks.
Over supper that evening I look down through the wooden boards of
the chalet and wonder how many different Alpine flowers have squeezed
themselves into the square foot of meadow below our feet? And how many
different species of butterfly hover above them?
Oh those butterflies! On my way down the path into Zermatt on the
first morning, I am puzzled by all the dust I kick up, only to
discover on closer examination that the "dust" is tiny butterflies:
dozens and dozens of them, swirling around my boots.
On the same walk into Zermatt one day, Gertraud mety an old man with
a butterfly net. He told her all about one species to be found only in
that valley. He said he was afraid that, with more efficient mowing
methods, the flower that the butterfly fed on would soon disappear.
He went on his way, feeling anxious and threatened by contemporary
times. Years later Gertraud saw his photo in an obituary. It was
Vladimir Nabokov.
Next morning Gertraud is sanguine about the previous day's climbing
tragedy. She respects but does not fear these heights, and she is
determined that I should know the joys of the summits. After an
excellent lunch at the popular Zum See restaurant on the path to
Zermatt, Gertraud and I take the funicular to Sunnegga. We walk the
hour or so across the moraine to Fluhalp. This is a bare, vast,
top-of-the-world type of walk. We are well above the tree line. I
feel the need for walking sticks and oxygen. Next day Gertraud
casually suggests that I do the walk to the Matterhorn hut, where
climbers stay before they tackle the summit. The first hour involves
a climb through a moraine - up, up where no trees, no grass, not a
gentian or an edelweiss would venture.
"You'll know you've reached the final stretch when you get to the
switchbacks," Gertraud had said before I left. "That's when the path
gets real narrow and twists back and forth with a big drop below. I
counted about 33."
I manage just two of these switchbacks. Ahead of me four Austrian
grandmothers are striding along the path - one of them is actually
singing. Above me people are sunning themselves on the hut's terrace
but I now know this "walk" is really part of the Matterhorn climb,
and that these happy hikers are all quite, quite mad. Even in July
the narrow path over the plummeting void has several patches of thick
ice.
I slip and lose my grip. Then I start to cry and can't go forward
but I can't go backwards, either. I wonder what you have to do to
qualify for Swiss citizenship, because I think I'm going to be stuck
up here long enough to need it. I do know that it is difficult to
obtain, so I cry some more. Everything goes black. And then a dry,
warm, slightly calloused hand grasps mine and a bearded face appears
through my tears and says that he is a mountain guide and if I would
just forget everything in the world but putting my feet where he puts
his, he will lead me down.
Mountain guides are miracles on legs. One minute I cannot move and
then with that man's gentle voice to follow I can actually persuade
first one foot then the other to go forward. We even jump - jump! -
across a small gap. I have never concentrated so hard on another
human being's feet in my life.
Gertraud chuckles and makes me a pancake when I arrive tear-stained
and trembling on her doorstep. She sees that walk as an afternoon
constitutional. I know that it is the closest I have ever come to
death and recuperate by watching Dallas on German television.
Then I go to Zermatt cemetery and sit amid the purple petunias and
the tombs of all those souls who didn't stop on the path and cry, who
couldn't help themselves but just kept going up. The graves in this
pretty cemetery seem to cluster in groups of friends. There are
graves of Cambridge friends, Oxford friends, American friends. There
are Spaniards and Yugoslavs. Many are heartbreakingly young.
And yet Zermatt continues to have us believe that she's auditioning
for a revival of The Sound of Music: the balconies are laden with
geraniums; the river burbles and the mountains shimmer.
But all the time the helicopters weave between the peaks. Sometimes
they carry pipes, and girders, sometimes they carry stretchers and
the wounded. Sometimes they carry corpses. Despite the many gentle
walks, the bucolic sights, the edge cannot be smoothed off Zermatt.
When I weary of walking I ride the Gornergrat, the highest cogwheel
railway in Europe. There is a special dawn train that takes visitors
to the hotel on the summit to watch the sun rise while they eat
breakfast.
"I wonder what folks do down in those there chalets?" muses a Texan
on the way up. "Weep, eat pancakes and watch Dallas in German," I'm
tempted to tell him.
Essentials
GETTING THERE Crystal Lakes and Mountains (0870 403 0543;
www.crystallakes.co.uk) offers three nights' half board in Zermatt
from £299 per person (seven nights from £419), including flights and
transfers. Inghams (020 8780 4433; brochure line 09070 500500, calls
cost 50p per minute; www.inghams.co.uk) offers seven nights'
self-catering in apartments five minutes' walk from the centre of
Zermatt, from £372 per person, based on five sharing. The price
includes flights, rail transfers and a half-price card offering
reductions on most railway, cable-car and boat excursions.
Links:
------
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/index.jhtml
[2]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/exit.jhtml?exit=http://www.naturesouthwest.co.uk
[3]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/main.jhtml?xml=/travel/2005/07/13/etzermatt13.xml&sSheet=/travel/2005/07/13/ixtrvhome.html
[4]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/main.jhtml?xml=/travel/2005/07/13/etzermatt13.xml&sSheet=/travel/2005/07/13/ixtrvhome.html#es
----- End forwarded message -----
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 17:47:51 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: It was Vladimir Nabokov ...
To: spklein52@hotmail.com
------------------ [1] Head for heights
Telegraph.co.uk - London,England,UK
... Years later Gertraud saw his photo in an obituary. It was
VLADIMIR NABOKOV. Next morning Gertraud is sanguine about the
previous day's climbing tragedy. ... [2]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/main.jhtml?xml=/travel/2005/07/13/etzermatt13.xml&sSheet=/travel/2005/07/13/ixtrvhome.html[3]
Head for heights
Janette Griffiths feels on top of the world in Zermatt - until the
challenge of a Matterhorn hike.
(Filed: 12/07/2005)
Essentials[4]
As my friend Gertraud and I sit on the balcony of her chalet close
to Zermatt on this early summer afternoon, two climbers are freezing
to death on the Breithorn mountain thousands of feet above us.
Helicopters weave through the summits but we do not yet know why.
Summits up: The Matterhorn is popular with climbers
Gertraud was born in Chicago but, beguiled by a photograph of the
Matterhorn she saw at the age of 10, she vowed to move here when she
retired. Fifty years later she came to this house in Furi, 6,000 feet
above the town. She has climbed all the great peaks around Zermatt and
been up the Matterhorn four times. Now that the years have relegated
her ice axe and crampons to the basement cupboard, she is happy to
sit in the summer twilight and watch the evening red deepen on those
familiar peaks.
Over supper that evening I look down through the wooden boards of
the chalet and wonder how many different Alpine flowers have squeezed
themselves into the square foot of meadow below our feet? And how many
different species of butterfly hover above them?
Oh those butterflies! On my way down the path into Zermatt on the
first morning, I am puzzled by all the dust I kick up, only to
discover on closer examination that the "dust" is tiny butterflies:
dozens and dozens of them, swirling around my boots.
On the same walk into Zermatt one day, Gertraud mety an old man with
a butterfly net. He told her all about one species to be found only in
that valley. He said he was afraid that, with more efficient mowing
methods, the flower that the butterfly fed on would soon disappear.
He went on his way, feeling anxious and threatened by contemporary
times. Years later Gertraud saw his photo in an obituary. It was
Vladimir Nabokov.
Next morning Gertraud is sanguine about the previous day's climbing
tragedy. She respects but does not fear these heights, and she is
determined that I should know the joys of the summits. After an
excellent lunch at the popular Zum See restaurant on the path to
Zermatt, Gertraud and I take the funicular to Sunnegga. We walk the
hour or so across the moraine to Fluhalp. This is a bare, vast,
top-of-the-world type of walk. We are well above the tree line. I
feel the need for walking sticks and oxygen. Next day Gertraud
casually suggests that I do the walk to the Matterhorn hut, where
climbers stay before they tackle the summit. The first hour involves
a climb through a moraine - up, up where no trees, no grass, not a
gentian or an edelweiss would venture.
"You'll know you've reached the final stretch when you get to the
switchbacks," Gertraud had said before I left. "That's when the path
gets real narrow and twists back and forth with a big drop below. I
counted about 33."
I manage just two of these switchbacks. Ahead of me four Austrian
grandmothers are striding along the path - one of them is actually
singing. Above me people are sunning themselves on the hut's terrace
but I now know this "walk" is really part of the Matterhorn climb,
and that these happy hikers are all quite, quite mad. Even in July
the narrow path over the plummeting void has several patches of thick
ice.
I slip and lose my grip. Then I start to cry and can't go forward
but I can't go backwards, either. I wonder what you have to do to
qualify for Swiss citizenship, because I think I'm going to be stuck
up here long enough to need it. I do know that it is difficult to
obtain, so I cry some more. Everything goes black. And then a dry,
warm, slightly calloused hand grasps mine and a bearded face appears
through my tears and says that he is a mountain guide and if I would
just forget everything in the world but putting my feet where he puts
his, he will lead me down.
Mountain guides are miracles on legs. One minute I cannot move and
then with that man's gentle voice to follow I can actually persuade
first one foot then the other to go forward. We even jump - jump! -
across a small gap. I have never concentrated so hard on another
human being's feet in my life.
Gertraud chuckles and makes me a pancake when I arrive tear-stained
and trembling on her doorstep. She sees that walk as an afternoon
constitutional. I know that it is the closest I have ever come to
death and recuperate by watching Dallas on German television.
Then I go to Zermatt cemetery and sit amid the purple petunias and
the tombs of all those souls who didn't stop on the path and cry, who
couldn't help themselves but just kept going up. The graves in this
pretty cemetery seem to cluster in groups of friends. There are
graves of Cambridge friends, Oxford friends, American friends. There
are Spaniards and Yugoslavs. Many are heartbreakingly young.
And yet Zermatt continues to have us believe that she's auditioning
for a revival of The Sound of Music: the balconies are laden with
geraniums; the river burbles and the mountains shimmer.
But all the time the helicopters weave between the peaks. Sometimes
they carry pipes, and girders, sometimes they carry stretchers and
the wounded. Sometimes they carry corpses. Despite the many gentle
walks, the bucolic sights, the edge cannot be smoothed off Zermatt.
When I weary of walking I ride the Gornergrat, the highest cogwheel
railway in Europe. There is a special dawn train that takes visitors
to the hotel on the summit to watch the sun rise while they eat
breakfast.
"I wonder what folks do down in those there chalets?" muses a Texan
on the way up. "Weep, eat pancakes and watch Dallas in German," I'm
tempted to tell him.
Essentials
GETTING THERE Crystal Lakes and Mountains (0870 403 0543;
www.crystallakes.co.uk) offers three nights' half board in Zermatt
from £299 per person (seven nights from £419), including flights and
transfers. Inghams (020 8780 4433; brochure line 09070 500500, calls
cost 50p per minute; www.inghams.co.uk) offers seven nights'
self-catering in apartments five minutes' walk from the centre of
Zermatt, from £372 per person, based on five sharing. The price
includes flights, rail transfers and a half-price card offering
reductions on most railway, cable-car and boat excursions.
Links:
------
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/index.jhtml
[2]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/exit.jhtml?exit=http://www.naturesouthwest.co.uk
[3]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/main.jhtml?xml=/travel/2005/07/13/etzermatt13.xml&sSheet=/travel/2005/07/13/ixtrvhome.html
[4]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/main.jhtml?xml=/travel/2005/07/13/etzermatt13.xml&sSheet=/travel/2005/07/13/ixtrvhome.html#es
----- End forwarded message -----