Good Morning Peeps,
I’m writing you from atop a mountain where I’ve been a hermit for about a month now. Before you ask, no it’s not a cave, I’m not wearing a simple knee-length robe, and I don’t have a white beard. But I do carry a long walking stick though, and can tell you the meaning of life if you wish.
I’m holed up in a chalet in Verbier, Switzerland.
Verbier is in the French Alps, which lie in the southernmost Swiss Canton of Valais/Wallis. (There are 26 Cantons in Switzerland. They are like U.S. states but have much more autonomy.) Italy is just over the mountains. Every morning and evening I see the sun rising and setting on their snow-capped peaks some 30 kilometers away.
The chalet belongs to my ex and best-friend, Jean-Edouard. His dad built it in 1954 when Verbier was just starting to make its mark as a ski resort. There’s a picture of the chalet on the ground floor. It’s so funny to see how void Verbier was of bushes, trees, fences and other chalets.
Well a lot has happened in 53 years.
Like the mushrooms in the pine forests surrounding this village, chalets have popped up everywhere. As do old homeowners in Cape Town, which only has a limited amount of space for houses due to being hemmed in by mountains and ocean, owners of old chalets here sell parts of their big lots, which either contain little guest cottages or are simply large yards with firs and rocks. So in the older parts of Verbier where there is a feeling of space, chalets are being built on top of each other. There are big yellow cranes all over town.
I stayed in this chalet two years ago for three weeks and, I miss the old Verbier! In only two years there have risen four chalets in this neighborhood alone. And I tell you they’re not slap-dash numbers like we would build back in the good ol’ U.S. of A. No these things are built with Swiss quality.
As I’m writing at 7:30 AM two trucks continuously go back and forth from a new building site down the street where they’re digging a hole to lay the foundation. Imagine these massive trucks moving dirt and stone while having to maneuver on streets that are not only more narrow than a normal U.S. alley but are as steep as a New York City subway escalator. The work that goes into laying a rock foundation, pouring the concrete walls, shoring everything up with more concrete and steel is amazing.
A chalet built here will last a long time. But then again for something to survive here it has to be built Superman tough. The elements here make the few buildings that are 100 years old look more like 400 years old.
A summer in Switzerland is on speed, literally.
Summer begins in June, explodes in July, starts shutting down in August, then coasts into fall in September. I arrived in Verbier on August 17th. (Unwittingly the night before a major 120km bike race over 6 valleys that has over 4000 participants – talk about hot bodies all over the place!) In the weeks since I arrived I’ve experienced nights that were 45°F, awakening to see low-lying mountains powdered with snow. I also had a glorious week when the temperature pushed 80°. The beauty of Verbier is you can have the most Jack-the-Ripper-London type fog, that’s dense, gray and smells like a farm storm cellar, which won’t lift for two solid days, then have a loving sun beat down through clear skies and illuminate every crease and boulder in the surrounding mountains.
Weather like this is hard on buildings. I have been in Verbier in winter and you’ll see icicles as big as logs hanging precariously off buildings. The roofs here are made of slate – not tar, not red clay tile, but rock! – and they support snow nine feet high or more. I’ve seen kids slide off the snow on their roofs into snow hills in their yards as they try to scoop off the snow to relieve the pressure.
Jean’s chalet is four stories high. All told, it has 7 bedrooms (each with two beds), 2.5 kitchens, 5 full baths, 2 showers, a huge living room with a fire place, a dry sauna, two large balconies and a 3-vehicle garage. It’s different than New York City living.
I came here to write the next great American memoir, or actually complete a manuscript I started two summers ago when I was here. I finished the manuscript on September 10th at 4:40 AM. It was like giving birth. It weighed 1.2 ounces and came in at 140,000 words. I’m now furiously trying to give a global edit before I leave in eight days.
I love reading about author’s writing processes.
Of course I hate the Alexandra Fullers who write their books (Don’t Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight) every morning from 3AM to 7AM before their families get up – goddamn over-achievers. I’m surely not a Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections) who spent four years writing 90% of his book then threw 90% away and in the fifth year cranked and finished the book by forcing himself sit in a blackened office, wearing a blindfold and earplugs. I’d rather hang out in a coffin. I guess I’m closer to a Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm) who only allows himself corporal pleasures, like heat and food, when he’s writing. Although I cheat ☺
My perfect writing day is getting up at 6 as morning twilight is stirring, eating my oatmeal, having a hot cup of green tea, putting on the iTunes of my Mac and watching the sun’s rays spotlight the tips of the snowy peaks across the valley then slowly work their way down the mountain as the bottom parts escape the shadows of night. Then queeze out 4000 words by 2 or 3PM, eat a quick lunch, then scadaddle for a hike till early evening. Come home have a nice hot dinner, as I enjoy the afterglow of the day. Do some edits then read in bed until I fall asleep.
(I had the most delightful time reading obituaries in my personally autographed book, “Fareweel Godspeed” by my friend Cyrus Copeland – my favorite is the succinct one read by Gilda Rabner’s partner. And now I’m thoroughly enjoying Augusten Burrough’s harrowing tale of alcoholism in “Dry.”)
The above, mind you, is the perfect day and due to night owl tendencies they don’t happen as often as I’d like.
I work at a long pine table that fits four chairs on each side. I have wild flowers in an empty Coke Light plastic bottle in the middle of the table and several maps of Verbier and Vallais at the end of the table that I consult every day.
Next to my computer is a crystal that I bought from a very poor local man in the outback of Namibia in 2003. It is an amazing crystal that actually has several water bubbles in it that move up and down as you turn the crystal. How many millions of years have those bubbles of air been trapped inside that crystal and how the hell did they get there?! Sasha, a Ukrainian friend I know through my Russian friend Larissa, reads stones and can tell you your future. He will cleanse your stone under running water while saying a prayer, then will take a small tuning fork and tap the crystal. While the fork tings he will close his eyes and start reading you. He read me using my Namibian stone and told me my crystal was very powerful and will help me get things done. So far it’s worked.
Around the wild flowers on the table I’ve constructed a little shrine to Verbier, composed of a pinecone, a white snail shell and three stones. I pick these things up on hikes, which I try to take daily after writing.
The problem is I get too ambitious and I start too late so I always find myself a gazillion miles away from the chalet as the sun starts setting, which is about 5:30. Luckily the sunsets are sloooow and I can come home at 8:30 and still have a lot of glowing twilight to get home. Before I leave the chalet I always say, I’m only leaving for a few hours. But depending on the hour I leave, I am usually out anywhere from 4-6 hours in the mountains.
I picked up the pinecone a few days ago when I went walking in one direction to see how far the mountains went. Imagine my surprise when I discovered the range suddenly ends in a mile long drop-off. It’s the weirdest thing, the mountain just disappears and you see nothing more than crumbling beige dirt cliffs and rock debris the fall straight down into a valley of rocky deltas and pine trees.
I did something very bad after I picked up my pine cone by the edge of the precipice.
I don’t know if there’s a term for it, but I’m like a pyromaniac except instead of being fascinated by flames I’m fascinated by falling things, or to be more exact rocks that roll down mountains. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if there weren’t hikers like me all over the place. Well when I stood at the edge of this perilous yet beautiful precipice, lined with sturdy, hearty pines, I took my walking stick, a massive thing that I found in cow field one afternoon, and tapped on a big stone just under my feet until it loosened itself from the mountain. It wasn’t a boulder mind you, just a rock about the size of my uncle Bill’s bowling ball. Well that thing began to freefall then bounced then rolled and it didn’t stop! A mile down I could still hear it. A huge cloud of dust came arose from the valley below up to my face then drifted into the sunset. Oh-oh. Better scram before someone calls the cops.
I saw something else, something amazing, in this secluded part of Verbier. A herd of antelope!
Well I told Jean they were antelope and he said on the phone from his office in Manhattan that antelope are in Africa and what I actually saw were Chamois (pronounced sham-WA). Well whatever they were, I must say they were beautiful creatures – russet colored fur with dark stripes along their bellies and white faces with brown around the eyes that met at their snouts. There were lots of young ‘uns. Obviously they don’t like Nebraskan’s with Red GAP hoodies because those things looked at me from a distance and when I made a couple of steps towards them they stampeded along the grassy slopes on which they were feeding and disappeared below the line of pinetrees. That’s when I discovered the mile drop off because I ran after them, snapping pictures all the way, then said, WHOA! I sat on a little grassy ledge and watched those suckers gingerly spring over slippery rocky slopes as sheer as a church steeple. I was like, don’t worry babes, I ain’t gonna follow you.
Anyway, that’s where I found the pinecone for my shrine.
I also found a white snail shell from the same part of the mountain as the pinecone. The area lies under the highest peak on the western edge of Verbier called Pierre Avoi which is 2500 meters (a mile and a half) high. Pierre has a cross on its pinnacle. Two years ago I hiked up to Pierre Avoi but was unable to climb the final 10 meters/30 feet because the ladder and chains scared me … I was alone, it had rained the day before, I slip and fall down the back of a mountain and who’s going to call the nearest of kin? A chamois?
Anyhoo, I tried again this year to surmount Pierre Avoi. A guy was coming down, an older lady passed me and went up but still I wasn’t too jonesin’ to slide off the round boulder peak and disappear in the valley below. But then a friend from Bern, Thomas, came and visited me for an afternoon, and I dragged his ass up the mountain. I followed him as he climbed the ladder to the cross. Once I was on top Pierre Avoi, I had one of those Leonardo-Di-Caprio-on-the-bow-of-the-Titanic-King-of-the-World moments. Wo-ow! You can see the flat green valley far far below with its wide milky green river winding through the middle, the valley that goes from Geneva to Brig and beyond.
I tried to be clever, asking Thomas if he knew how that long valley in the middle of these mountains was created. “A glacier, of course. We spend three years in school learning about glaciers, moraines, cirques and ice fields. I can tell you exactly how this valley was formed and the names of every different layer of rock.” OK, OK, I was just askin.’ Geesh!
There are all types of terrain around Pierre Avoi.
Gently-inclining grassy slopes created by dairy cows in the summer and skiers in the winter. Boulders and rocks that make you feel you’re stumling around Mars. Pine trees and white rocks that descend the mountain like steps of a giant castle. It was in this little pine forest on one of the spines leading down from Pierre Avoi that I found my white snail shell shortly after spotting a fox with a long bushy red-and-white tail. I thought it was weird to find a shell a mile up so I kept it.
Millions and millions years ago, when the bubbles formed in my lucky crystal in Nambia, sediments on ancient sea bottom here in Switzerland built up, sunk below the earth, then came up as mountains. This slate stone comes in varying shades of gray and densities. Most of these stones glisten in the sun and under the ubiquitous waterfalls, and look silver when you pick them up. I love these stones and to the dismay of Jean have a little collection of them building up in his chalet.
There is another type of stone, black granite with white quartz in the middle, which you find on the other side of the Verbier valley where the glaciers are. I like this rock type as well because if you find the right one it can resemble an Oreo cookie. I have a really nice striped rock that I picked up when I climbed up to a bed of snow that I just had to touch.
On this Eastern side of Verbier when the granite and quartz rock are lies Mont Fort.
Mont Fort is highest mountain you can get to by cable car. Its altitude is 3327 meters, or a little over 2 miles in the sky. It makes Pierre Avoi far in the distance seem petit in comparison. From the village of Verbier, which is all clustered in a valley plateau, you take four different cable cars to get there. It’s not cheap: 42 Swiss Francs, $38. I went up to Mont Fort with another friend and it was worth it. There’s another cross on a peak just outside the cable car station that was built on a steep mountain peak … that would be one construction job I would have definitely passed up.
It was just over freezing when we were on top of Mont Fort. The temperature drops on average 8° every 500 meters you climb. So today for example it will reach 63° in Verbier which is at 1500 meters. It will be 52° at 2000 meters which about the height of Croix de Coeur (Cross of the Heart) which is the slope where most local paragliders set sail from. At 2500 meters, the peak of Pierre Avoir, it will be 45°. And at 3000 meters it will be 37° which is about the altitude of the cable station below Mont Fort. But as long as you’re in the sun and moving you never get cold. On the contrary I tend to sweat like marmotte, one of those big scurrying groundhogs that live in large holes in the mountains and make loud yipping yells when they say a stranger.
You cannot hike up to Mont Fort because glaciers and steep unstable rocks surround it. Well, my friend who went up there with me said you can’t hike up there, but I’m sure I could. I’d find a way. I hate following paths. I hate rules in general. (No wonder I loved Germany so much.) I like going straight up a mountain until it gets too steep. It’s the best cardio work-out in the world. It’s equal to climbing up one of the red-purple-pink sanddune mountains of Namibia.
My month in Verbier will have been quite the enriching and educational experience.
I will have finished my book and learned more about the mountains surrounding this village than most people. I’ve gone to about every major point that a person can hike up to in a matter of hours. When I look at these scenic points in the morning or evening as the sun highlights different facets of them, I feel like I’m looking at old friends or my neighbors’ houses back in Columbus on 21st Street. Oh wow, look at the clouds around Pierre Avoi. Look how the setting sun turns the Attelas ski lift station gold. I can’t believe how pink the snow on Mont Blanc is; just a minute ago it was the color of a marigold. Hmm I wonder where the Nosal’s are. I hope Miss Ebel don’t mind us screaming in the backyard. That damn dog of those Mexicans across the street shit in our yard again!
I have witnessed some amazingly beautiful sites and oddities most of which I was usually lucky enough to capture on my camera. A stone carved by some skier in 1957 in the middle of a stream. 2 eery gnomes in front of an abandoned school building. The most magnificent small butterflies, one black with red spots, the other iridescent blue with pink spots, having sex on a purple clover.
I’ve seen an expanse of tiny plants with white cotton heads along the shores of Lacs des Vaux (pronounced Lock day Voh), lakes tucked away behind the mountains left 10,000 years ago when the glaciers receded, with water so fresh that people actually fish in them. (In my rudimentary 2-year-college, 7-year-dating-a-Belgian French, I asked the fishermen I saw there if they caught anything. One said, Oui! Truite!” which to me sounded like Tweet, as in Tweety Bird, then I understood, ah-ha, trout! How big I asked. 30 cm! he said. One foot. That’s not bad for a lake that’s a mile and a half up in the mountains.
I’ve seen the Chute du Bisse.
A bisse is a man-made mountain stream. It’s like a little canal that runs across a mountain. The idyllic bisse that runs along the entire length of the mountain range of Verbier was dug in the 1460s by villagers from Lévron, 20 km away. The glaciers had begun to receded from the valleys, which created water shortages (I’m sure my friend Thomas can tell you all about the process of the melting glaciers and the type of rocks that were left in their wake).
As in English the “Chute” in Chute du Bisse means a shaft that convey something to a lower level. In this case the Chute du Bisse is at the end of the canal. It terminates with a little wooden paddle twirling slow around, then a fence with a red-rimmed triangular sign that has a cautionary exclamation point on it, then a little channel that leads to a level wooden shoot where the water the freefalls and crashes half a mile below. I couldn’t actually see where the water ended when I scaled the fence with the caution sign on it and looked over the edge but I could hear it. This is that part of the mountain which suddenly ends in steep cliffs of crumbling dirt and rock. It’s my favorite part of Verbier now. It faces west so it gets the warm rays of the setting sun.
When you walk back to Verbier from Chute du Bisse you go wind down a pristine forest that is totally Hanzel and Gretl. There a trail you can take called the Sentier des Sculptures. Along this trail some incredible person has carved from the bases of pine trees two dozen sculptures that deal with Verbier: the back half of a milk cow, a squirrel, a bear, a wolf, a set of golfclubs with real golfballs on the bottom (did I mention that there’s no crime or theft here), skis and skipoles, a huge snail, a hunter looking through binoculars with a crafty rabbit unnoticed below him.
I’ve seen things that few people would see unless they looked for them, like a little shrine to the Virgin Mary tucked in the middle of nowhere in the valley behind Pierre Avoir. Not too far away from the shrine, after taking a sketchy trail and crossing over two vertiginous gorges, you find a cabin, also in the middle of nowhere. I pushed the door open with my forefinger after discovering the door handle unlocked and found a fully habitable cabin with stove, fire wood, pots and pans, table, cups, dishes and a big bunkbed with pillows. Written in chalk on a blackboard against one of the walls:
Team Freeverbier
Paul Bruchez
Léo Fisch
Guillaume Simon
HAPPY NEW YEAR
2003-2004
How great that a bunch of guys trekked here through the snow to spend their New Year’s Eve in this little cabin.
I might add that one thing I find refreshing about Verbier is that you see men here who do things together – paraglide, hike, bike, dine – all perfectly straight, who can have the intimate companionship of other males without worrying about being pegged as homos.
Also what I like about the Swiss, as opposed to some of their anal-retentive neighbors up north, is that they’re such freespirits.
Sometimes I’ll be hiking and suddenly realize the sun is getting low. I’ll become nervous: it’s getting too late, I shouldn’t be this high up in the mountains. Then I’ll spot some woman hiking on a nearby peak with not even a backpack.
Such unsafe measures would be unthinkable where I lived in Hamburg. They would be dressed in the latest mountain gear, with Everest-strength rucksacks, enough food and water to last a week, and boots with crampons on them and probably a helmet with a light on it. I still get a lump in my throat whenever I think of all those thoughtful Hamburgers who screeched at me at dusk, “LICHT ANMACHEN!”. Translation, “Turn on your goddamn bike light before you run over and kill one of us sympathetic, precious Hamburgers!” I never bought a bike light for that reason. Ah yes, the good ol’ days.
I also appreciate that you don’t see signs that say everything is verboten. Instead you see signs like the one on top of Pierre Avoir below the cross that reads: “THROWING ROCKS is very DANGEROUS – ROCK CLIMBERS BELOW –“. The sign doesn’t say “Felsenhinüberwerfen streng Verboten!”, Throwing rocks over the side is strongly forbidden (and punishable by execution), it just tells you not to be an asshole and throw rocks. I like that mentality. It fits with my personality.
So before I sign off today I want to remind you that Verbier is not perfect.
The people tend to be a little starched – preppy pink polo shirts with turned-up colors, stupid hats worn by wealthy men playing golf, tennis sweaters worn by pure-bred dog walkers. You also have your too-cool-for-school types: guys with fashionably scruffy beards, high-end sunglasses welded to their tan faces, acting super masculine with their $3000 bikes, $5,000 paragliding parachutes, or $20,000 motorcycles. God bless them all.
Also the roads in Verbier are a mess. Most go sideways, maybe 5% go up and down. It’s not like Greece or the beach in California where you can always find a staircase that goes up. It really sucks when you want to go up into mountains quickly and there’s no access. So I say fuck it, and just hike up through people’s yards. If anyone has a cow I’ll act like I don’t understand whatever language they speaking. So far nobody’s said a thing.
And finally it’s expensive here! You can easily drop $70 for a few days of groceries. But there are 4 small supermarkets in Verbier and I know which store has what at the best price. I feel like June Cleaver as I get my tomatoes and apples at Migros, my pasta sauce and soy milk at Co-op, and my sausage and yogurt at Pam.
But look, there’s complete peace here. Unless you qualify mountain streams, chirping birds, clicking squirrels, and evening crickets as noise. You smell moss, wild flowers, and pine wood smoke from fireplaces instead of garbage, taxi fumes and urine. And although expensive, the taste of the food here can’t be compared to the States. A tomato smells like a tomato and tastes like the ones we used to raise in our garden in the backyard. An apple is actually sweet and juicy instead of woody and dry. Potatoes are naturally buttery and gold. Sausage is smoky and beefy. Eggs taste like the chickens ate natural grains, if it’s at all possible that a human can discern such a taste from an egg. And yogurt – especially hazelnut, my favorite – is so full of flavor that your mouth actually waters WHILE your spooning it into your cakehole.
I’ll be back in New York on September 21st. I’m shooting a wedding in New Jersey on September 29th then heading back to Nebraska on October 10th to shoot another wedding in Columbus. Then I’ve got some potentially exciting projects coming up, but I don’t wanna kill the muse by talking about them in advance so we’ll see.
I apologize that I’ve been out of touch but when you’re living the mountain life of Grizzly Adams, sometimes the last thing you want to do is sit behind computer screen.
And remember these words, sung by a crescendoing choir, that I listen to every time I come down from hiking among the peaks on my Ipod: Climb every mountain / Ford every stream / Follow every rainbow / Till … you … find … youuuuuurrrrr dreeeeeeeeam. Chokes me up every time.
Love ya! Ken AKA Ron AKA Ronnie
