Switzerland is udderly fantastique! 2007, 2008, 2005 & 2009 reports

Switzerland 2007 - the cows

[hermit heaven]

I’m writing this from atop a mountain where I’ve been a hermit for over a month. No caves, animal skin robes or long white beards have been involved. But I do carry a long walking stick and can tell you the meaning of life, well my version of it, 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, or Wallis auf Deutsch. (There are 26 Cantons in Switzerland. They are like U.S. states but have more autonomy.) Italy is just over the mountains from here. Every morning I see the sun gathering strength behind Aosta’s snow-capped peaks only 30 kilometers away.

To get here you fly to Geneva, collect your bags then go through the green nothing-to-declare exit. Exchange money into Swiss Francs in the reception area of the airport then follow train signs to the adjacent building where you buy your train ticket, get a train schedule and ask the track and time of the next train to Verbier. Walk downstairs, board your train then an hour later change trains in Martigny. You board a red local train headed for la Châble, 30 minutes later at the la Châble train station you board a yellow bus. La Châble, at the base of the valley, lies at 800 meters (2400 feet). The bus winds around a circuitous road as it climbs up the mountain to Verbier. Some corners are sheer drops so if you’re scared of heights don’t look over the sides of the road from the bus window. The bus chugs past little hamlets that are no more than collections of dark wood and white stucco houses. At 1500 meters (4500 feet) you reach Verbier. The bus drives into a garage behind the post office. You’ll have passed the old, original village of Verbier further down. The post office is in the commercial part of the town, which rests in a kind of bowl and is surrounded by chalets. Ski lifts are at either end of the business district. Above the chalets are fir trees and grazing pastures then the rocky mountain peaks.

This chalet belongs to my ex-partner J-E with whom I spent 7 years. He’s still my closest friend and let’s me stay in the chalet in the summer when it’s not rented out. J-E’s dad built the chalet in 1954 when Verbier was just starting to make its mark as an international ski resort for the jet set. On the ground floor there’s a black and white picture of this four-story chalet shortly after its completion. It’s funny to see how void Verbier was back then of bushes, trees, fences and other chalets.

Things have changed in the past 53 years.

Like mushrooms in the neighboring pine forests after a drenching spring rain, chalets have popped up everywhere. Just as the long-time homeowners have done in Cape Town, another gem that has very limited space due to mountains and ocean, owners of old properties sell off sections of their big lots, which here either contain little guest cottages or sprawling yards full of firs and small boulders. Around the center of Verbier, where the original chalets were built with an idea of spaciousness, new chalets are going up practically on top of old ones. Like a grazing herd of long-necked brontosauruses, yellow construction cranes can be seen in all directions slowly swaying, dipping and rising.

The last time I stayed in this chalet was two summers ago for three weeks. Since that makes me an expert on Verbier, I must say that I miss the old Verbier! In only two years, four new chalets have appeared in this little neighborhood alone. And I tell you these are not slap-dash numbers like they’d build in the states. No, these structures are built with Swiss quality and precision.

I’m currently writing this at 7:30 in the morning. Two trucks continuously lumber 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 hauling dirt and rock while having to maneuver through streets that are narrower than a typical U.S. alley and steeper than a New York escalator. The amount of work that goes into laying a rock foundation, pouring the concrete walls, shoring everything up with cement and rebar is stupefying.

A chalet built here will last a long time. But then again, for something to survive in this climate it has to be built like a Berlin bunker. Due to the harsh elements at 1500 meters (over a mile and a ¼ in altitude), the few buildings here that have survived 100 winters look more like they were contemporaries of da Vinci than Monet.

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 I entered the town on the night before a major 120km, six-valley bike race with over 4000 participants. It was very strange to see the usually dead quiet summer streets teaming with hot bodies.) In the weeks since I arrived I’ve experienced nearly freezing nights, awakening to see low-lying mountains powdered with snow. I’ve also had a glorious week when the temperature pushed 80°. The beauty of Verbier is that you can have the most dense, gray, Jack-the-Ripper-London type fog that doesn’t move for two days and smells like a farm cellar, then be awoken one morning by warm beaming rays of sunshine surrounded by cloudless skies as blue as an alpine gentian flower.

Weather like this is hard on any type of structure. I’ve been in Verbier in winter and you’ll witness enormous icicles hanging like crystal stalactites from the eaves of 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 stomp on the roofs of houses then slide down with an avalanche onto powdery mounds of snow below as they try to relieve the pressure of all that weight.

J-E’s chalet has weathered over half a century of alpine elements and remained in fine shape. It’s been renovated a few times and is very comfortable without being pretentious, which fits in with Swiss culture as a whole. Down the street from the chalet is Verbier’s main church. It’s an ugly white and brown structure built in the modernist manner of the 1950s. It has an unattached soaring belltower that rings every day at noon. I make it a point to drop whatever I’m doing and daily go out onto the top balcony to listen to the bells. Though the neighborhood is getting more crowded with chalets, it is still the nicest place in town. This chalet has 7 bedrooms (each with two beds), 2½ kitchens, 5 full baths, 2 showers, a huge living room with a fireplace, a dry sauna, two large balconies and a 3-vehicle garage.

This is different than New York City living.

[calgon, take me away]

Someone once told me that New York City is only survivable if you leave it. “You stay in New York too long without taking a break, you’ll go crazy,” a NYC-seasoned friend confided in me. He wasn’t kidding.

New York brings to my mind the planet Gideon from the original Star Trek series. Due to a germ-free environment and long lifespans, Gideon is woefully overpopulated. In the “The Mark of Gideon” episode Kirk is hoodwinked and beamed onto a mock-up version of the Enterprise while outside, unbeknownst to him, the planet Gideon is teeming with people shambling around. Beautiful Odona, daughter of Gideon’s Ambassador Hodin, is the only other person on the ship and tells Captain Kirk that all she remembers before arriving on the Enterprise is being in an auditorium so overcrowded that she struggled to breathe. She says all this empty space on the ship is a dream. I remember how creepy it was when Kirk discovered he was actually on the planet and looked out a viewport to see crowds of people streaming past with hardly enough space to move their limbs.

For me five months is my limit in New York. After 20 unbroken weeks the city becomes my Gideon. My mind turns into a fragmented laptop that’s sluggish and barely computes anymore. It needs to be defragmented, rebooted and returned to default.

Although I’ve been coming to Verbier since 1999, each time I arrive here I’m always stunned by its idyllic beauty and serenity.

To leave cramped apartments, bustling streets, long grocery and ticket lines, packed subways, and swamped public venues, then endure a chaotic airport, a packed arial pickle jar, crowded passport control and money exchange lines, full trains and packed busses, then suddenly be dropped off in this village of 2500 peeps near the top of a mountain is like plucking an agribusiness-raised chicken from its crappy, suffocating cage and plopping it in the middle of a meadow.

From the bus station, inside the post office, I lug my rollerboard up a steeply inclined narrow street to get to the chalet. Not yet acclimated to the thinner air, I’m winded by the time I reach the door. I say a little prayer, hoping there are no glitches like the front door doesn’t open or there are unknown lodgers inside. Once I’m in and sure the coast is clear, I drop off my stuff in “my” room: a simple little bedroom on the ground floor that has a window opening onto the slanted yard. Then I hustle to the store and get groceries before the stores close. Back home, I turn on the frigerator, put the food away, unpack my bags, make a tasty Swiss dinner, brew some Chinatown tea that I bring with me, then take a hot soothing bath. That’s when it sinks in. I’m alone.

Solitude as sweet-smelling as freshly mowed grass. Luxurious aloneness. Time to do whatever I please. A chance to catch my breath, to think, to mentally unnest all those thoughts and ideas that have been buried under thick layers of everyday survival concerns and stress.

For the next 4 to 6 weeks, I’m secluded from the world’s mayhem. I have my own private Valhalla. In that time I talk to maybe five beings: a few women at the grocery store check-out counters (“Bonjour!” “Merci!”), a dairy cow in passing, a fleeing squirrel or marmotte, and mainly to myself. I occasionally talk to is J-E on Skype to update him on the chalet and report little excitements that happen during the day – I saw a paraglider sail over the roof, a dog pulled a girl on a skateboard on the street in front of the chalet, there was a great sale on jam.

It’s frightening how easily I take to being a recluse.

[the write stuff]

I came to Verbier to write a memoir. To at least complete a manuscript I started two summers ago when I was here. On September 10th at 4:40 AM I completed the first draft of aforementioned manuscript. It was like giving birth. It weighed 1.2 ounces and came in at 140,000 words. Now I’m furiously trying to give it a global edit before I leave in a few days.

I’m fascinated by the writing process of authors.

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) a man who spent four years writing his book then threw 90% away, cranking out the entire book in the fifth year by forcing himself to sit in a blackened office, wearing a blindfold and earplugs. I’d rather try memorizing the bible in a coffin. I’m closer to a Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm) only allowing myself corporal pleasures, like heat and food, when I write. But … I cheat.

My ideal writing day is to get up at 6AM, just as pink morning twilight is stirring, eat my oatmeal, sip a steaming cup of green tea, listen to iTunes and watch the sun’s rays spotlight the crowns of the towering snow-covered peaks across the valley then slowly work their way down the mountains, chasing away all nocturnal shadows. By 2PM, after having squeezed out 4000 words, I eat a quick lunch then go hiking till early evening. I come home, take a hot soaking bath, prepare a delectable dinner of bratwurst and mashed potatoes or tortellini sprinkled with gruyère, and enjoy the violet afterglow of the day on the top balcony. In bed I do some edits then read until I fall asleep.

That’s the theoretical perfect day. They have happened, but due to my night owl tendencies they don’t occur nearly as often as I’d like.

I work at a preposterously long pine table that can seat a dozen. In the middle are wild flowers stuffed inside an empty Coke Light bottle. At the opposite end of the table are several maps of Verbier and Valais that I consult every day before and after my hikes.

Next to my computer is a crystal that I bought from a very poor Damara man in the outback of Namibia in 2003. It is quite amazing. There are several water bubbles inside that roll up and down as you turn the crystal. How many millions of years have those bubbles of air been trapped inside that crystal I wonder, and how the hell did they get in there? Sasha, a Ukrainian friend, reads stones and can tell the future. If you have a special stone he will cleanse it under running water while saying a prayer, then take a small tuning fork and tap it. While the fork tings he closes his eyes and starts reading you. He read me using my Namibian crystal. He said it had great power and would help me get things done. It’s worked quite well for me in the Alps.

Around my bouquet of wild flowers on the table I’ve constructed a little shrine to Verbier. It’s composed of a pinecone, a bleached-white seashell and three rocks. I picked these things up on hikes, which I take every day after writing, weather permitting.

When I reach a sticky point in my writing, I’ll gaze at my shrine and think of the day found each object.

Sometimes when I can’t write another word, I’ll just read. I’ve had a delightful time reading the obituaries of famous people in my personally autographed book, “Farewell Godspeed” by my friend Cyrus Copeland. (My favorite obit is the succinct one read by Gilda Rabner’s partner.) Currently I’m reading and thoroughly enjoying Augusten Burrough’s harrowing tale of alcoholism in “Dry.”

==Lake Geneva nearing the castle at Montreaux.==

==Lots of smokestacks just after you leave Lake Geneva. I like their industrial look.==

==The local train from Martigny to le Châble where you catch the bus up to Verbier.==

==Le Châble train station.==

==Reunited with my lost luggage ... where the hell did my rollerboard go with all those tags??==

==Back of the chalet, where main entrance is. Looking south towards Italy.==

==Various views from chalet's top balcony. Every day is different weather.==


==Front of chalet, church steeple is at end of the block.==

==Balcony off main floor of chalet, on a sunny day and foggy evening.

==Entrance of chalet on sunny morning & foggy evening.==

==View of 4000+meter mountains from top balcony of chalet. The light on these mountains is always beautiful.==

==Other views from chalet.==

==My work area and my shrine to Verbier.==

==Inside the chalet.==

==Leaving New York Gideon and landing on the planet Switzerland.==

====THE KEN HANDHELD PERSPECTIVE OF SWITZERLAND====

====FLEURS====

====MY TRAVELING FEET====

====ME, KIND OF====

====JET TRAILS====

====VERY VERBIER====

==Note the boot and rock display behind the vegetable and fruit scale at Migros grocery store. Magnificent art and a special on bananas!==

[not flawless]

Although it might sound a little like Paradise here, I must make clear that Verbier is not perfect.

The people here tend to be a little starched – preppy pink polo shirts with turned-up colors, stupid hats worn by wealthy men playing golf, tennis sweaters walking pure-bred dogs. 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 $5000 bikes, $7,000 paragliding parachutes, and $20,000 motorcycles.

Also the roads, streets, paths and walkways in Verbier are a mess. Only 10% go up and down, the rest go sideways. Unlike Greece or beaches in California where you can always find a public staircase that goes up and down, here vertical staircases are strictly private and rarely connect one horizontal road to another. It sucks when you want to quickly scurry up the mountains and there’s no access. My solution? I say fuck it and just hike up through people’s yards. I hate following paths (and rules in general) so I go up in a straight line until it gets too steep. If anyone has a cow I’ll act like I don’t understand whatever language they’re speaking. I’ve honed that skill with years of practice living overseas. So far, nobody’s said a thing.

Also it’s expensive here! You can easily drop $70 for a few days of groceries. But there are four small supermarkets in Verbier and I know which store has what at the best price. I’m the Swiss June Cleaver as I get my tomatoes and apples at Migros, my pasta sauce and soy milk at Co-op, my packages of instant Flädli soup at Pam, and my sausage and yogurt at Denner.

On the positive side, there’s practically 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 backyard garden. 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 salty and fresh. And yogurt – especially my favorite, hazelnut – is so full of flavor that your mouth actually waters while your spooning it into your cakehole.

For me Verbier is about as perfect a slice of Paradise as I’m gonna find at this point in my life.

[hiking madness]

One other flaw to mention: Verbier has no gym. There’s a swimming pool, which would be nice on rainy days, but it is only open a few times a week during the summer and costs $8 a pop, which is a day’s worth of food for me. I hike on the good days. If it’s nice out and I’m inside, I start feeling anxious, like a dog that hasn’t been walked all day.

For cardio nothing beats hiking up a Swiss alp (or a red Namibian sand dune). My hikes, however, have become problematic: I start out too late and I get too ambitious.

Often the sun is dropping (now around 5:30) and I find myself light years from the chalet. Luckily the sunsets here are as slow as slugs so I can arrive home at late as 8:30 and still have enough glowing twilight to see where I’m going. I swear every day that I’ll only be out a few hours, but I rarely hike less than four hours. Six hours is my usual time out exploring the mountains.

Before I leave the chalet I gather my camera, a map, a notepad, two pens, two apples, a sandwich, two bottles of homemade green tea, a handkerchief, a hoodie, an extra T-shirt and stuff them into my backpack. Because of my Nebraskan friend Gwen, who upon informing her Grandma that she was pregnant was told: “Don’t get fat; here’s some bananas and 20 bucks,” I always make sure to carry a little cash with me in case of an emergency. I guess if someone dragged me to a safe spot after I broke my back in a remote area I should at least offer them 20 francs. I also carry my driver’s license and have Jean’s chalet and New York information on the front page of my Moleskin notebook in the case someone finds my weathered backpack next to a pile of scattered bones next spring.

Outside the chalet, standing in a corner, I keep my pride and joy: my walking stick.

I used to huff under my breath about how retarded people looked using their walking sticks. But then one day on a very steep slope with knee-high grass I picked up a large staff by a fence and, voilá, I discovered how much easier and quicker it was to ascend and descend a mountain with the aid of a stick. I still deride people who use aluminium walking poles as nerds. They need to be like me and use wholly natural branches from a pine tree.

My walking stick is the Tom Hank’s version of Wilson the volleyball in Cast Away. After a while your walking stick becomes like a beloved bike, car or T-shirt. It’s worn in, you have your imprint on it, and you can’t function without it.

The top of my staff has been rubbed smooth by the movement of my sweaty palm. My six-foot walking stick has just enough flexibility to bend when I need a little give, yet is stiff enough to firmly hold me when I feel like I’m going to slip off a rock. You hold the stick closer to the middle as you go up a mountain and farther towards the top when you go back down.

Once I have all my gear I set out for a new adventure. After I get away from all the houses and begin my hike in earnest, I love finding out what’s over the next mountain, boulder, or hill. So what if I look like Yoda clutching my walking stick, all hunched-over and panting for dearlife as I go uphill.

It amazes me how many things there are to discover; just when I think I’m completely familiar with this place I find something new and realize how little I actually know.

Taking a break from a climb one afternoon, I noticed an engraved stone in the middle of a stream. Some skier in 1957 wrote that he had a serious spill at that very spot, twice. On another hike I ran into a pair of eerie gnomes guarding an abandoned school building. And forging my way through waist-high pink, blue, and yellow wild flowers, I’ve seen small, magnificently colored butterflies. I’ve even shamelessly photographed a pair of butterflies, one black with red spots, the other iridescent blue with pink spots, having sex on a purple clover.

When I hike my mind is allowed to think freely. I mentally review stuff I was writing in the morning and jot down notes about things to change and subjects to write about in the next chapter.

I’m allowed to indulge all my senses.

I’ll walk past some dry reeds and the pleasant smell will remind me of my uncle Kelly’s barn and how, with my six cousins, my brothers and sisters and I would swing between two towering haystacks on a milkcan lid tied to a rafter with a rope. The second the sun disappears behind the mountains, dusky scents arise. Of forest. Of musk. Of cellar. Of musrooms and freshly dug potatoes.

I’ll look up at the planes crossing the sky and be amazed. I see these silver streaking comets and think of the people that are inside them and the destinations they are headed to. I wonder what they see from their aerial portholes at that same instant. There are so many jet trails, over the mountains and pine trees, most on similar flight paths. The short-lived pink jet trails seen in the early morning and late evening are especially mesmerizing.

I’ll hear nearby voices and look up to see people very far away, realizing that sound is carried great distances in these mountains.

By being observant on my hikes I sometimes feel like a native American Indian. I can tell the difference between trails made by cows, deer or seasonal brooks. I know that dry streambeds are great paths up and down mountains, and that if you look down at the ground as you climb, it makes the journey seem faster. I recognize the difference between the yip of a marmotte, the squeal of a chipmunk and the screech of a hawk.

My mind will often drift and I’ll ponder odd things. Like since I’m wearing a bright red hoodie, do dairy cows have any bull in them. They are after all heavy and do have horns. I wonder what happens if you breathe a bug into your lungs after I inhale a fly.

After I’ve finished my hike up, I love going into deep concentration as I jog down a mountain, only looking at the ground under my feet, instantaneously studying where best to place my feet and walking stick without slipping or tumbling down. Few things are nicer than to reach a warm home after an arduous early fall hike.

[reindeer?]

One day I decided to head for a place I spotted from the chalet. Above the treeline and lush with green grass, it looked like a perfect place to explore. I hiked in its direction for an hour and as I was climbing over a whalelike hill my eyes, clearing the top, beheld something wondrous. Spread out in front of me, on a sloping grassy plain, was a herd of grazing antelope!

There must’ve been 40 of them with several little ones in tow. These beautiful creatures, no more than 20 feet ahead, had dark chocolate stripes along their bellies and russet-colored fur. Their faces were white except for large brown circles that went around the eyes and met at their snouts. I studied them remaining motionless but they sensed danger. A few began to twitch their tails nervously and nudge their snouts up in the air. My bright red GAP hoodie didn’t help.

The moment I raised my camera to photograph them it was over. They began to stampede. Like a Neanderthal, I gave chase.

They ran to the top of a slope then disappeared behind a line of pine trees. I snapped pictures as I was running, fancying myself as some top National Geographic photographer capturing priceless images of rare Sumatran rhinos. Then WHOA!

The heels of my tennis shoes dug marks in the dirt under the moist grass. I discovered that behind the pinetrees was a km-long drop off.

I sat on a little grassy ledge and watched the herd scatter below, nimbly springing over crumbly, rocky slopes as sheer as a church steeple. I was like, chill out dudes, I ain’t gonna follow you. This mountain range was an odd sight: it simply ended. It was like a giant hand had grabbed a clump of mountain and removed it. Far below the cliffs of caramel-colored dirt and gravel was a verdant valley of rocky deltas and pine trees.

Near this precipice I saw a perfectly formed pinecone under a hearty pine tree. I picked it up, stuffed it in my hoodie pouch for my Verbier shrine.

Nearby I grabbed a huge branch. I looked around – the coast looked clear – then whipped the branch over the side of the mountain with all my might into the ravine below to get an idea of how far down it was. Answer: very, very far.

I’ve no idea what the term might be but I’m like a pyromaniac, except instead of being captivated by flames, I’m fascinated by falling things, like large stones tumbling down mountains. Rolling rocks and flying pine trees wouldn’t be bad if there weren’t so many hikers (such as myself) crawling around.

Standing on this perilous escarpment, I noticed a big stone underneath my Merrell’s. I took my big walking stick and began to tap the stone. When the rock, about the size of my Uncle Bill’s bowling ball, loosened itself from the dirt of the mountainside, I gave it a final blow. It did a vertiginous freefall then bounced and rolled like a motherfucker until it disappeared. I still heard crunching stones a mile away then observed a roiling cloud of dust rise up from the valley and drift into the sunset. Time to beat it! Although in an isolated area, you never know who may be lurking around, and I didn’t need no witnesses narkin’ me out to the Swiss fuzz.

When I get home I skyped J-E at his Manhattan office and breathlessly gushed about my amazing wild herd sighting. “Antelope are in Africa,” he sniffed. “What you saw were chamoix.” (pronounced sham-WA). Who knew?

Everytime I look at that pinecone on the table I remember that amazing day of discoveries as I explored a new area of Verbier.

[the fairy]

I did have one visitor while I was here.

My friend Thomas Iff drove up from Bern to visit me for the day. After a coffee I suggested we take a hike. Though Thomas is a strong swimmer and a Swiss native, I kept on bouding ahead of him. I was pretty by this time, but mainly I was anxious to reach a spot that had thus far eluded my attempts to reach it.

I was headed for Pierre Avoi, the highest peak in the western range above Verbier. The name comes from Pierre Avoua, which means “petra acuta” in Latin (sharp stone). Pierre Avoi juts out of the earth like a butcher knife. It’s a 170m limestone tower that tops out at 2500m (a mile and a half).

Two years ago I hiked up to Pierre Avoi trying to reach a cross at its pinnacle. I wasn’t able to climb the final 10 meters because it involved a ladder and chain-handrails that zigzagged to the top. As I was studying a few silhouettes next to the crowning cross, a small frumpy woman passed me and scaled the ladder anchored to the mountain. How dare she pass me! I grabbed the side of the ladder and stomped my right foot on the first rung. The left foot refused to leave the earth.

My heart raced. I was drenched in nervous sweat. Clouds of excuses appeared over my head: You’re alone. It rained all day yesterday, the rocks will be slippery. You don’t have a cell phone. You slip and fall down the back of the mountain, who’s gonna call your next of kin to collect the body, a chamois? I released the ladder and, defeated, hiked back down to the chalet, muttering all the way.

I had tried again this year to surmount Pierre Avoi, but similar story. I reached the ladder as some guy was coming down. Again I stood there studying the cross at the top. Again a woman passed me, this time an elderly gray-haired one, and scrambled up the ladder. And again I still could not dispel the vision of me sliding off the round boulder-like peak, disappearing into the valley 1000 miles below.

So I lead the way to the foot of the ladder, then turned to Thomas, “Go ahead, you go first.” He climbed up as if it were a stepladder for painting the kitchen ceiling.

No guts, no glory. I concentrated on Thomas’ ascending tennis shoes as I climbed up the ladder. Once I got off the top rung and clenched the handrail chains I was OK.

Thomas had never been to Verbier, so I was happy he enjoyed this. At the cross I had a Leonardo-Di-Caprio-on-the-bow-of-the-Titanic-King-of-the-World moment. Wo-ow! You could see the wide, flat Rhône Valley stretching for dozens of miles to the east. Like a milky-green ribbon, the Rhône River thread its way between clusters of villages far below, continuing to Brig, 40km away. The checkmark-shaped valley begins at Lake Geneva, near the city of Montreaux, 20 km in the other direction.

Thomas explained that all Swiss school children are required to learn how glaciers affected Switzerland’s topography, then he went into moraines, cirques and ice fields. “I could tell you exactly how this valley was formed and the name of every different layer of rock if you wanted,” Thomas offered. I thanked him, saying it was enough to reach the top of Pierre Avoi for me.

Besides geology Thomas also taught me many other things about Switzerland. He told me about the Wunschfe (Wish Fairy) who you confide in and earnestly request something which she grants to you if you believe in her and in yourself. Thomas pointed out the different grasses we slogged through: magrewiese (thin grass) in dry areas, fettwiese (fat grass) in wetter parts. When we passed the famed edelweiss he explained that the heart of the dried-out flower is edible but not allowed to be harvested.

Near a little pine forest on one of the spines leading down from Pierre Avoi, I spotted a little fox. Its long bushy red-and-white tail danced behind it as it gingerly trotted away, behind a group of boulders. That was pretty cool; I’d never seen a fox in the wild before. I looked then down at the ground a spotted a white seashell. I bent down and picked it up. It made a great addition to my Verbier shrine. It’ll always remind me of the perfect day I spent with my friend Thomas.

==Taking a pause during a long hike.==

==Going up an expensive ski lift.==

====HIKING====

====THOMAS IFF & JVP====

==This is on top Mont Fort, the highest accessible mountain in Verbier, 3400m.==


==Lacs des Vaux==

====LES VACHES====

====PARAGLIDERS====

====SCARY PIERRE AVOI====

====LA CHUTE DU BISSE====

====LE SENTIÉRE DES SCULPTURES====

====BEHIND PIERRE AVOI====

==A cross I made out of pine sticks and tied together with a violet stem and put in this little religious altar.==


==Little overnight cabin with New Years Eve message left in chalk.==

====SAINT CHRISTOPHE CHAPEL====

==This table has pictures of people who have died. Very sad.==

[rock neighbors]

Coming from the barren, flat prairie of Nebraska, I find Swiss geography fascinating.

There are gently-inclining grassy slopes, treeless due to grazing summer dairy cows and winter skiers. You find desolate rocky tracts, strewn with van-sized boulders that seem more like Mars than earth. In some places pine trees and white stones descend from mountains like steps of a giant castle.

Millions of years ago, when the bubbles in my lucky Namibian crystal were captured, sediment on the bottom of an ancient sea built up, sunk into the earth, became rock, then by tectonic plate movement was pushed back up to become a Swiss mountain of slate. This slate here comes in varying shades of gray and densities, some brittle, some steel-hard. In the sun, slate glistens like a sword, especially the rocks you find under waterfalls and in streams. I love stones and, to the chagrin of J-E, have a started a little collection of them at the chalet.

The other ubiquitous stone in Verbier is black granite with thin layers of white quartz interspersed. My Verbier table shrine contains some pieces of slate and a black, white-streaked, granite rock that resembles an Oreo cookie. I found it under a cobalt summer sky next to a swath of stubborn snow that refused to melt even though it was August.

While Pierre Avoi rules the slatey Western ridges above Verbier, the king of the granitey eastern kingdom is Mont Fort.

Mont Fort is the highest mountain in the area reaChâble by cable car. Mont Fort’s reaches 3327m (2+ miles) into the ionosphere. It makes Pierre Avoi, far in the distance, seem like a runt in comparison. To summit Mont Fort from Verbier you must take four different cable cars. It’s not cheap: 42 Swiss francs, $38. But it’s worth it if you want an aerial view of the lay of the land without actually flying.

J-E came to Verbier one weekend and we rode to the top of Mont Fort. There’s a large metal cross up there (the cross on top of Pierre Avoi is made out of wood). Mont Fort’s cable car station is balanced on top a steep, pointy mountain peak; definitely one construction job I would’ve passed on as a construction worker. It was a hair over freezing when we arrived at 4PM.

The temperature drops on average 8°F every 500 meters you climb. So today for example it will reach 63°F in Verbier village which is at 1500m. It will be 52°F at 2000m, the height of Croix de Coeur (Cross of the Heart), a landmark slope from where local paragliders set sail. At 2500m, the peak of Pierre Avoir, it’ll be 45°F. And at 3000m, the altitude of the cable station below Mont Fort, it’ll reach 37°F. As long as you’re in the sun and moving around you don’t get cold. In fact when I climb in these altitudes I sweat like a skitting marmotte. (Marmotte are lovable, large scurrying groundhog-like creatures that dig and live in large holes in the mountains. They make loud yipping yells whenever they see something strange (like me) approach.

J-E told me you can’t hike up to Mont Fort due to the glaciers and steep unstable rocks. I’m skeptical and hate the word ‘can’t.’ I’m sure I could find a ropeless, gearless way, I thought to myself.

Having hiked to about every major point you can reach within a matter of hours around Verbier, I’ve come to consider the place (like Cape Town) my second home. When I view Verbier’s soaring natural landmarks from the windows or balconies of the chalet, as the morning or evening sun highlights different facets of them, I feel like I’m checking on old neighbors. It’s like being back on 21st Street in Columbus. Oh wow, look at the purple 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 this weekend? Miss Ebel needs to get a new fence. That damn dog of those Mexicans across the street shit in our yard again.

[tweety bird]

One thing to remember about the Swiss Alps is that water always accompanies rock.

If you climb all the way up to Attelas, the enormous ski station at 2725m in the eastern part of the mountains cupping Verbier, you’ll be greeted with a spectacular view: alpine lakes. The Lacs des Vaux (pronounced Lock day VOH), left by a receding glacier, have been tucked away in their 2500m-high bowl for over 10,000 years. Although only ice-free 12 weeks a year, fish live in the glycerine-clear water. There are even fishermen at the lakes.

In my rudimentary 2-year-college, 7-year-dating-a-Belgian French, I asked a pair of fishermen one afternoon if they’d caught anything. One replied, “Oui! Truite!” which sounded like ‘tweet,’ as in Tweety Bird. My brain did a French memory scan. 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 Alps. On the muddy shores of the main lake is an expanse of tiny flowering plants with white cotton heads, a veritable meadow of miniature Andy Warhols.

Another aqueous landmark in Verbier is la Chute du Bisse.

A bisse is a man-made mountain stream. An idyllic bisse runs along the entire length of the mountain range above Verbier. Villagers from Lévron, 20 km away, dug the tiny channel in the 1460s due to water shortages on account of receding glaciers.

Verbier’s main bisse begins with a glacier near Mont Fort, then winds between boulders, along grazing fields, under mountains, and through forests before ending a dozen kilometers away at the Chute du Bisse. Here the water passes under a little twirling wooden paddle then serenely enters a wooden shaft that juts far into space from the corner of a mountain. The water then freefalls and crashes half a mile below into a rushing gray stream full of churned-up sediment which continues to Lévron.

You can’t see the water hit the rocks because the Chute du Bisse is on an overhang. But you can hear it.

Along the edge of the mountain around the Chute is the eerie, winding and dense pine forest of the Forcles. A sign on a trail that leads to the forest mentions the legendary giant Wouivre who inhabited these parts. Wouivre, I discovered, was a Divine Spirit that crawled on the ground like a snake and lived beneath the earth bringing Life and Fertility. Wouivre was like a sacred stream and when it reached the surface it created a link between Sky and Earth. In some mythology Wouivre gave birth to winged dragons. The Celts called snakes “wouivres” and by extension rivers (which snake along) as well. Interesting.

Above the forest of the Forcles are the grassy patches where I found my pinecone and saw the chamoix. This Western edge of Verbier is my favorite because it gets the warm rays of the later afternoon and early evening sun. Even when the temperature dips down into the 50°s I know soft grassy coves, as warm and cozy as a sleeping bag, where I can sit sheltered from the wind and watch the sun set over this rocky part of Europe on its way over the Atlantic to America.

[the swiss, my kind of folks]

Manmade wonders are also to be discovered on hikes.

A route from the Chute du Bisse to the chalet is through the pristine, Hanzel-und-Gretl forest. One trail, called the Sentier des Sculptures, features two-dozen sculptures carved from the bases of pine trees. Among the artworks are the back half of a milk cow, a squirrel, a bear, a wolf, a set of golfclubs with real golfballs on the bottom, skis with skipoles, a huge snail, and a hunter peering through binoculars while a crafty rabbit goes unnoticed below him.

There’s a little shrine to the Virgin Mary I found one afternoon next to an obscure path lined with boulders. The small brick-and-stuccoed shrine lies in the valley behind Pierre Avoir. If you keep forging forward from the shrine, following a sketchy trail, you cross over two vertiginous gorges then run into an isolated dark wood cabin on top a hilll.

I peeked through a dark window in the cabin then put my ear to the door made of boards. Not hearing anything stirring inside I tried the door handle. It was unlocked. I lightly pushed the door open with my forefinger.

I found a fully habitable cabin with a stove, firewood, pots and pans, a table, cups, dishes and a big bunkbed with pillows. Against one of the walls was written in chalk on a blackboard.

Team Freeverbier

Paul Bruchez

Léo Fisch

Guillaume Simon

HAPPY NEW YEAR

2003-2004

I paused. How great that a bunch of guys trekked through the snow to spend their New Year’s Eve here in this little cabin.

That’s another thing I find very refreshing about Verbier and Switzerland in general: the camaraderie between men. I’ve observed that men here do things together – paraglide, hike, bike, dine – all perfectly straight, all perfectly fine with the intimate companionship of other males without worrying about being pegged as homos.

I also sense a free-spiritedness in the Swiss that in some places I’ve lived would be unimaginable.

Sometimes I’ll be hiking when it suddenly dawns on me that the sun is getting low. I become nervous: I shouldn’t be this high up in the mountains so late in the day. I’m going to be the modern day Ötzi the iceman and my mummified carcas will be discovered by mortified hikers in 5000 years. Then I’ll spot some young blond woman hiking on a nearby peak who’s not even carrying a backpack. I’ve met Germans who would consider hiking alone in the mountains virtually unfathomable without an Everest-strength rucksack, food and water to last a week, boots with crampons, a lighted helmet, and longlife cellphone with GPS.

I also appreciate that the Swiss are not sign-happy control freaks. I’ve only seen a few signs in Verbier. One sign is on top of Pierre Avoir, below the cross. It reads: “THROWING ROCKS is very DANGEROUS – ROCK CLIMBERS BELOW.” Notice, the sign does not say “Felsenhinüberwerfen streng Verboten!” (Throwing rocks over the side is strongly forbidden), it just tells you not to be a dumbass and throw rocks. I like that mentality.

[et finalement]

I must leave Verbier in a couple of days, and although summer is gone, I’d love to stay longer.

The sun now sets behind the Attelas ski station far up the mountain ridge instead of just behind Verbier as when I arrived over a month ago. Fall is at its peak, flaming out in yellows, oranges, reds and brown, which have spread over the mountains like a rash and overtaken the greens, pinks and purples. The other afternoon I went out on one of my last hikes. The faint sun barely warmed the mountain. I walked through faded alpine roses, yellowing grass and freshly fallen dry leaves. The earth had a musky smell. At one point the diffused autumn light, the dying brown bushes, and dewey grass gave me déjà vu. I momentarily experienced a deep sadness. I recalled my Nebraskan childhood and how I dreaded autumn because it meant the onset of another long, harsh winter. I walked a little farther and shook off the foreboding feeling, realizing that back in the New York it was still 80° and sunny.

Speaking of which, I’m 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. 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 a computer screen.

And remember these words, sung by a crescendoing choir, that I listen to on my ipod every time I come down from hiking among the peaks: 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

==Rock formation near Pierre Avoi. It looks like a seated queen.==



==On top Mont Fort.==

==Cabine de Mont Fort.==

==Damn skittish chamoix and the crazy terrain they live in.==


==Chamois poo.==

==Whipping a branch down the gravelly canyon below Pierre Avoi.==


==Lacs des Vaux, clouds, rock, reflective water.==


==Andy Warhol wigged flowers.==


















==Old ski pole used as fencepost - love it.==

==Fall in Verbier. Mid-September.==







==Leaving the chalet for another year.==

==Oh God, I can't wait to come back. Until next summer!==

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Switzerland 2008 - the dead

Last year when I was in Switzerland, hiking up the mountains with my staff, drenched in sweat, hunched over, puffing, huffing and gasping, I compared myself to the always erotic Yoda (sans burlap hooded monk robe). Well, guess what. He’s baaaack.

For the past three weeks the townsfolk of Verbier have been able to witness once again Yoda with his trusty stick scaling and descending the hallowed peaks that surround their fair village.

Before I leave the day after tomorrow, I want to share some images and words with you about Verbier.

[12 juin 2008 06h37 • from 100° to 50 in 9 hours]

I’m looking out the large windows of the balcony on the top floor of this chalet owned by my ex J-E. I’m sitting at the limo-length wooden table thinking of what I need to do today and my eyes are locked on the natural cinematic event occurring several miles away.

Through a cobalt window in the morning clouds, the sun is illuminating a ridge of snowcapped mountain peaks, which according to an overpriced topographical map I bought last year, is the northern fringe of the Italian Alps. The Brenner Pass, used by everyone from Hannibal to the Visigoths to fat German tourists, is a mere 20km away from here.

The same mountains that I viewed last August and September, which were then only tipped with snow, are now half covered with the white stuff. It makes you wonder.

Here I am at 1500 meters, a mile in the sky, looking at mountains that shoot up 4000 meters (2½ miles) into the ether. I’m in Switzerland, a country wedged between chilly northern Europe and the sun-baked lands in the south. Only eight days before the summer equinox there’s plenty of snow to be seen. With the ice sheet at the top of the world breaking into pieces and floating away, and glaciers all over the world receding quicker than an icecube in a glass of Dubai Coke, I ask myself how cold the world has to be in order to avoid global warming. I like heat, but if the oceans are rising and Manhattan turns into a modern day Atlantis then I guess current warming trends aren’t a good thing.

Actually, I find the speed that rising temperatures change U.S. weather patterns alarming.

Nebraska for the week I was there in June was a meteorological version of the movie “Groundhog Day.” Every morning it was sunny and pleasant then by early afternoon clouds would encroach upon the blue and build. By 6 PM – the hour that Nebraskans of a certain age call “suppertime” – there were severe storm and tornado warnings. At around 9 PM there’d be a ceaseless downpour accompanied by a generous portion of multi-forked lightning and rumbling thunder. Fields were so waterlogged that not only were the tiny grass-green shoots of corn either washed away or rotted, but in some spots all the vegetation had turned black, like some prehistoric Scottish bog.

The day I flew out of Omaha, June 10th, and landed in New York, where I had a three-hour layover before Geneva, I was surprised to discover the city was suffocating under a heat wave pushing the 100° mark. 100° in Namibia is paradise. 100° in New York is one of the deepest circles of hell in Dante’s L’inferno. Few things are more miserable than slogging around the urban jungle where heat-emitting black asphalt is softened by relentless solar rays, heavy immobile air is fetid with the stench of urine and trash in poorly tied garbage bags heaped on curbsides, and the humidity is so high your skin feels like you’ve just been rolled over a syrup and butter-laden pancake at Denny’s.

So I’m not complaining sitting here at this table wearing my woolen cap and a sweater with a thermal long-sleeved shirt and two more layers underneath. To be this cool and dry when others are sweltering is a blessing.

And it’s peaceful here.

Birds are chirping. Meltwater cascades down a stream nearby. A few distant engines of dirt-moving trucks and heavy building-equipment try to cram in as much work in these precious few weeks of agreeable weather before the gray drizzle and wet snow return.

But how am I supposed to fall asleep without the sound of garbage trucks and ambulances?

[1 juilliet 2008 20h50 • springtime in alps]

Last year I arrived in Verbier to work on some writing on August 17 and left 6 weeks later on Sept. 26. I got to see the end of summer and beginning of fall, which happens rapidly in the mountains. One week a mountain was covered by a verdant carpet, the next it was transformed into a shroud of red, brown, yellow and orange.

Well this year my seasonal experience was the opposite, arriving during full-blown spring.

The weather was warm on June 11th. I wore a T-shirt as I dragged my luggage uphill from the bustop to the chalet. I passed lilacs, peonies and irises, which had already done their business a month earlier in NY and Nebraska.

The day after I arrived low, gray clouds full of rain moved into the valley and the temperature plunged to 6°C at night, which is 43° Fahrenheit. I wore three layers of shirts underneath my hoodie, had a space heater running and was underneath a comforter and two heavy wool blankets and I was still chilly.

One afternoon a young guy came to the chalet to hook up the wireless. In my appalling French I asked him if this chilly weather was normal for spring. He said that it had been the coldest spring they had ever experienced. (At least I think that’s what he said. Otherwise he said, ‘The time it takes to press clouds is added to cold in life.’)

Crap, I thought. With Greenland melting and the Missouri River inundating the Midwest, summer may not even reach the Swiss Alps this year. Yeah yeah, there are worse things than being holed up in a 7-bedroom chalet with a sauna for 3 weeks, but as a non-native New Yorka, I want it awl.

I have never been to Verbier at this time of year, so what surprised me most was to see the mountains bedecked with snow.

My usual schedule when in Verbier is to write and edit until 3PM then take a hike. With this rainy, cold weather I started feeling like a caged-up poodle that hadn’t walked in a week. One afternoon I had to get out. I put on 5 layers of clothes and ventured into the elements. What a tonic. The grass and flowers were slick with moisture, the ground soft. Muddy shoes and sopping clothes were well-worth the privilege to be climbing the mountains again.

I had a purpose as well: to find a new walking stick since Yoda lost his beloved staff last year after an 8-hour trek took the tar out of him.

I went up to a forest at the western end of the mountain range around Verbier and found myself an adequate pole. It had a bend in the bottom, but I do too, so I figured it’d be fine. By the time I got back to the chalet my hands were two bricks of pink ice. I was unable to make a fist yet I still managed to take some pictures outside with my knuckles.

As if the weather were set to a perfectly calibrated celestial egg timer, the day before the summer solstice the clouds dissipated, the sky dried out and the sun’s rays beat down at full intensity. It has stayed that way ever since. Today is July 1 and we haven’t had a day without sunshine since.

And with the sun has come LOTS of light here.

We are at the same latitude as Walla Walla, Washington, so before 5 AM the sky behind the mountains starts to shimmer silver and pink. I know this because of a jet-lagged, screwed-up internal time clock.

I was so new-agey when I went to the edge of the western ridge of Verbier’s mountains on June 20th to watch the sun set over the Swiss Alps on the longest day of the year. How many opportunities in a lifetime does someone have to do that. At 8:30 PM I found a nice patch of soft grass to sit in. I sat on an edge of a cliff that overlooks the mountain range to the west. I was ready to be meditative and think about life. I even heard my first coocoo bird. I didn’t see him but he sounded just like a Bavarian coocoo clock. I had no idea they existed. (Now I really want one!)

A gamey-looking guy hiked past me. 20 minutes later he was followed by a young couple. I guess I wasn’t the only one who planned on being kumbaya this evening. So I sat there and started to think. And you know what came to my mind? I’m getting pretty frickin’ hungry and cold, and the sun is taking foreeeeever to set. It’s like chop chop and set already, it’s still an hour’s hike to the chalet.

I got up. The couple saw me heading back down. I think they thought I might know something they didn’t about seeing the summer solstice sunset as I watched them talk animatedly. It was still bright when I got home at 10PM. In fact it doesn’t get fully dark here until 11 PM.

Yoda likes long days.

==Self portrait of me and walking stick.==

==God, I love to touch snow in June.==

==Yo, come join me on my rock.==

==Have you ever seen such blue flowers as those at my feet?==

==Flies checking the time on my wristwatch. The one bad thing about climbing in the mountains are the aggressive, salt-loving flies that swirl around you as soon as you begin to sweat. I feel like Pigpen from Charlie Brown as the swarm of flies stick to me in a trailing cloud. They usually taper off when I reach high-altitude and rocky terrain. It’s usually 15° cooler a kilometer up, so I stop sweating and they lose interest. Those bastards.==

==Sentimental centipedes do it, over-educated fleas do it, even lazy snails do it…==

==Let the marmottes eat clover.==

==The back of the chalet. The window on the side is “my" bedroom.==

==The view from the back of the chalet where, incongruously, the front door is located.==

==The front of the chalet.==

==Predawn glow, view from top balcony of chalet.==

==A day so clear that all you see in the sky besides blue are jet trails.==

==An early morning view with the moon.==

==Same mountain range in early evening.==

====LES FLEURS====

==Purple and blue are big colors of alpine flowers. Pink and white and yellow come in second.==

====LES ARBRES====

====LES CHEMINS====

==








==Choices, choices.==

==A pesky fly buzzing around my hand as I block the setting sun on the longest day of the year.==

==Looking east as the longest day of the year disappears.==

==Looking as far east as possible on the longest day of the year as the sun sets. You can barely make it out, but there’s a huge wall of water back there held up by Mauvoisin dam. It’s about 12 stories high.==

==Verbier in the evening. The white stick in the left-hand side of the picture is a church steeple and is where the chalet is.==

==How you’re able to turn on the lights a mile in the sky.==

==One of the cablecar towers at the main station called Médran.==

==Privacy, give me privacy.==

==Oh, heeeey.==

==My, what big horns you have!==

==A curious chamois just before he hightails it down the back face of the mountain.==

[capricorns and sabre-toothed tigers]

I’ve seen two pretty amazing things since I’ve been here. Snow is the first one.

For me there’s just something fascinating about seeing snow in the summer. You can have two weeks of hot weather and it’s still there, still accessible if you want to climb up to it, and you wonder, how the hell long does it take snow to melt? And how come the Arctic ice cap is melting when there’s still snow on the mountains in Valais (the canton of Verbier) on July 1st?

The second amazing thing I’ve witnessed is alpine wildlife.

On my hikes I’ve seen deer, fox, hares, chamoix and the always entertaining marmottes, those supersized groundhogs that live in dirt warrens underneath the mountains. They stand on their hindquarters and make high-pitched yips if an intruder enters their domain. They then scurry along the grass and nosedive into their holes. Some are more sedate and when they reach their front door they pause and sit back on their haunches, twitching their muzzles in the air to try to get a whiff of intruder, while studying you with their little black eyes. Once they’ve decided you stink they pop down into their holes and join their cohorts.

But what takes the cake is an animal I recently witnessed with the biggest horns I’ve ever seen, even in Africa.

I had been on a hike for 2½ hours. I was disappointed because after I climbed up into the mountains the trail I was on was mainly level with lots of switchbacks. I like to feel the burn, experience those endorphins, sputter all over my Yoda staff gasping for air as I hike and this wasn’t doing it for me.

I was trying to find the source of the “Bisse de Lévron,” a narrow, shallow 20km-long canal dug high across the mountains of Verbier in 1465 by villagers in neighboring Lévron because their slopes were drying out as the glaciers receded. This had looked like a fun hike on my map but in reality following the bisse was taking forever.

I rounded one mountain and found that the bisse changed from a small dug canal into something more natural. I viewed an expanse of flat land with low, level grass and a little navy blue stream cutting through the middle. The area was so prehistoric looking that I could almost see mastodons snatching up large chunks of the pristine vegetation with their hairy trunks.

As I kept hiking the font of this damn bisse didn’t seem to be getting any closer. I usually turn around at 8PM to head back home no matter where I am so I get back to the chalet before it’s dark. My watch said 7:45. I was wondering if it was worth continuing this quixotic hike when I saw in front of me on a rocky hill a magnificent creature. Wildlike here like chamoix are extremely skittish and usually hightail it to safety over cliffs the second they see a human. But this magnificent creature just watched me. I walked a little closer. I heard something and looked up. Wow! There was an even bigger and more magnificent counterpart above. The horns were at least five feet long.

It was like that scene from “The Queen” when Helen Mirren, needing some time to think, rides into the Scottish outback and while sitting on a rock espies a magnificent stag just staring at her, backlit by the sun. Same thing except I wasn’t wearing a gray wool skirt and sensible shoes.

I moved closer.

I expected them to dash off. Instead, they continued to watch me. As I stood there taking pictures they became bored and went back to munching moss. I moved in closer to get a better shot. The big one stopped eating and raised his head. That’s when I thought about it. If I were an animal that big with horns that massive, I wouldn’t let anything annoy me. I decided to back away in case he thought of charging.

Shortly afterwards I found the beginning of the bisse. Total buzzkill. The source was three sketchy waterfalls that you could hear more than see. I laid down my backpack to drink some tea when I noticed a track in the mud. I bent down and inspected it. They were claws and they were HUGE. They looked fresh to boot.

That has to be a mountain lion. Even a bear! I wonder if that animal is following those two big horns. Maybe it’s behind one of these rocks, hungrily watching me.

My stick started a-peckin’ the ground as I scurried up out of the valley back to the chalet.

The magnificent animals turned out to be Alpine ibex, which are related to goats (same genus, capra). Their Latin nickname is Capricorn and in Dutch and Afrikaans are called Steenbok. I saw their relatives in Southern Africa. (That used to be fun, by the way, going through a wild gamepark with an animal booklet and freaking out whenever you saw something, then ticking off the animal in the booklet, and anxiously waiting for the next beast to appear.)

Wickipedia says ibex eat during the late afternoon and evening hours, descending from high steep cliffs into lower alpine meadows. They spend their bright daylight hours in high altitude cliffs and hills, which protects them from predators.

Predators. Like the thing that made that paw print. I checked out the footpads on line from the picture I took. They didn’t match a mountain lion, so maybe it was a wolf. I told J-E about the wolf. He says there hasn’t been a wolf in these mountains for hundreds of years; that goes for mountain lions as well.

Well as far as I’m concerned I found a man-eating saber-toothed tiger and I’ve the photographic evidence!

[this place is so dead]

If you want to know a community, take a stroll around its local graveyard, I always say.

For the past 9 years, every time I’ve come to Verbier, I’ve seen an ancient stone church in the valley below. A walled cemetery is next to it. I imagined there were equally ancient graves there, so one afternoon I decided to check it out.

Le Châble is a village of 444 people at 820 meters altitude. When you take the train from Geneva to Verbier, you stop in le Châble to transfer to a yellow postal bus that chugs up the winding road to Verbier.

If I could install a slide between this chalet and the church it would take maybe three minutes to get there. Hiking down took an hour. Since le Châble is 700 meters below Verbier it was 10 degrees hotter, so I was sweatin’ to the oldies by the time I arrived at the church. The gray stone church was your standard medieval vaulted structure built in 1438. Inside dark paintings adorned the bare walls. Nothing special. I was sure the graveyard would hold real treasures.

The church bell rang away at 7 PM as I laid down my walking stick before entering the cemetery. I love the sound of bells tinkling in the valleys below, so this was pretty cool to hear it gonging just above me.

There were four people in the cemetery, watering flowers. Where we put plastic flowers on the graves, the Swiss plant real ones. Mainly red ones. The graves seemed pretty uniform and surprisingly non-anciet.

I met a 50ish redhead named Elizabeth who explained to me that plots are bought on either 40- or 30-year installments. That explained why there were few headstones older than the 1970s.

“What happens to the old headstones and the remains after those 30 or 40 years?” I asked Elizabeth in mangled French.

I think she said they burn the bones and throw the remains into a mass grave. Regarding the headstones she made a motion that they just toss them out. Their tombstones aren’t engraved as much as ours are, instead the letters and pictures are adhered to the stone, so I guess throwing out such a gravestone would be easier. Yet, the Swiss are so economic, you’d think they’d incorporate the old tombstones into something useful.

I explained to Elizabeth that in America when you buy a plot it’s for perpetuity and that your remains are never touched. She shrugged.

“After you’ve been buried for 40 years everybody who ever knew you is gone, so why keep the grave there?” she said.

Very European in her realism. But I’m an idealistic American and I like the fact that I can still go to Humphrey, Nebraska and visit my great-great grandfather Cornelius’s grave from a 100 years ago.

The first time I encountered one of these modernized cemeteries was in the Netherlands with Dutch uncle Louis. He explained that there is no space for cemeteries to expand, so after World War II they began to remove all the graves and start over.

When I heard that I couldn’t help thinking of the Nazis pulling up the Jewish cemeteries and building walls with the headstones. I like old tombstones. When I go to a graveyard I try to find the oldest headstones. I like to read how old people were when they died, what time of year they died, see how many years they were preceded or followed by their spouse, find patterns, like people with same names, or people dying around the same time. In my very Catholic town of Columbus, I was surprised one afternoon to find some Jewish gravestones in the city cemetery. They were long dead by the time I was born. I often wished my town had been more diversified when I was growing up instead of our only minority being the Lutherans.

Talking about Nazis and Jews, a few years ago I was strolling around the graveyard in a small Bavarian town called Wertheim. I found a part dedicated to foreign soldiers, mainly Russians and Poles, who died in the winter of 1944. It was hard to picture this peaceful little town being ravaged by war. Most of those in the 60 graves in the section died in their early 20s. Many died on similar days. The ones that died on Christmas Day were the saddest for me.

Well the cemetery in le Châble was nothing like that.

First of all World War II (as well as WWI for that matter) never entered this neutral country. Most of the tombstones were boring. Dowdy old farmers and villagers in their 70s and 80s who had oval pictures of themselves attached to the stones.

But there were a few graves that were interesting.

A picture of a very nice-looking chap was on top of Sébastien Gay’s tombstone. He was born in 1978 and died only in 2006.

I found one old tombstone. It was white marble that was engraved with the names of François Troillet (1850-1898) and Celestine (née Filliez, 1846-1936), and below that Maurice (1880-1961). There were other tombstones with that last name. In fact there were lots of similar last names. It brought to mind a little bone dry graveyard I visited in Tulbagh, South Africa. Small community, small cemetery, small gene pool of last names.

I liked seeing this old white marble Troillet tombstone because it had history. Here was a man who died at only 48, a wife who was born before him and lived to be 90 and a son who made it to 81. Already an interesting story in my book.

Elizabeth came up to me. I asked her why there was a row of old gravestones. “Because they have history,” she said. I guessed she meant they were important people with noteworthy headstones. She motioned for me to follow her. “Look at this here,” she said bending over and pulling back the branches of rosebushes to reveal the name of François-Xavier Bagnois, 1961-1986. There was a black-and-white picture of a very handsome blond man above the name.

With two years of college French under my belt I understood from Elizabeth that this F-X died in the sand (“la sable”) somewhere in an African dessert, in a plane, and that he was related to Prince Rainer of Monaco.

“And Grace Kelly?” I asked.

“Mais oui! Grâce Kel-LY, l’americaine!” Elizabeth exclaimed, as if an American wouldn’t know European royalty that was originally from America.

“I never see so many flowers!” she exclaimed in English, making a big sweeping motion with her arms.

“So it was a big funeral, huh?”

“Oh! I never saw so many people. Many English.” She looked down at the headstone and picked up a dead flower. “They wanted to build a …” she paused, and put her arms up.

“A mausoleum?” I interjected.

“Yes, Mausoleum!” she repeated, smiling. “They wanted to build a mausoleum, but we said no. You see all the graves here. They same. We can’t permit someone to be different, to be more special.” Well he at least got a large plot.

I told Elizabeth I had to get on my way, as I had to climb back up the mountain. She offered to drive me. She and her husband own a rental agency there, “We rent to English, many English!”

I politely declined. “I need the exercise.” She smiled and said it was nice to have met me. I said likewise.

Before I started back up I checked out the little chapel. Inside there was a figure of Jesus laying in a casket against the wall opposite the door. On either side of him were two ruffled ivory-colored satin-lined wooden open caskets with that morbid six-sided elongated hexagon shape you see in old Dracula movies. Death would be so much better if they outlawed those goddamn ruffled ivory-colored satin linings. I’d rather be thrown on top a pile of donkey manure than in ruffled ivory-colored satin.

One casket had a wax dummy in it. Probably a local saint. But why would they make such a horrible wax effigy of a holy person?

Then I looked a little closer. I noticed the picture of a woman on the shelf above the casket. Oh crikey. Whoever embalmed that poor lady should be shot. She looked horrible! Not anything approaching a former human. I was getting nauseated so I slipped out the door and headed for the hills.

• • •

When I got home I did a little research on the three people I met in the cemetery.

The life of Francois-Xavier Bagnoud was adventurous.

He was the youngest professional instrument flight rated (IFR) pilot in Europe in the early 1980s of both airplanes and helicopters. His mother is the Countess Albina du Boisrouvray, which sounds pretty impressive to me. He was the cousin of prince Albert, down Monaco way.

On the evening of January 14, 1986, F-X was in Mali piloting a helicopter with some very high profile people on board: the creator of Dakar Rally, Thierry Sabine, a famous journalist, a singer, and a radiophonic engineer. They were all in Africa for the Dakar Rally and were on their way to a bivouac in a place called Gourma-Rharous. Night crept up on F-X so to navigate he followed the Niger River. He had gone only 25 km when a sandstorm arose. Having almost zero visibility he set the helicopter down. Sabine ran into a competitor in the race and asked him to give their position to the bivouac when he arrived so they could dispatch a vehicle to pick them up.

Everything seemed settled when “pour une raison inexpliquée” for some inexplicable reason, F-X decided to take off again. Closely following the tailpipe flames of one of the cars in the race, he flew the helicopter very low in a straight line. He didn’t notice the terrain suddenly rising and slammed full-speed into a sand dune pulverizing the helicopter and instantly killing everybody inside. It was shortly before 8 PM. He was 8 km from his destination.

Nothing came up for François Troillet when I googled him, but I think I found his brother, Joseph H. Troillet who was “born December 21, 1843, at Bagnes Valais, Switzerland, of French parents.” Bagnes is the traditional name for le Châble.

The reason I mention this at all is because this Joseph ended up emigrating to Kansas, just below Nebraska, in 1873. He was one of the original pioneers to settle his county.

The article I found said his first business venture was a tailor shop that he opened with his brother, “Francis.” This is probably François. The article goes on to say that Joseph later opened a French restaurant (I wonder how that flew in Kansas), which he “conducted until 1887.” He then opened a cigar factory and a “confectionary store on Forest Avenue, opposite the post office, in a building which he erected in 1876.”

This pioneer bio, which my county in Nebraska also did with all its original settlers, was written before World War I. It says his wife died in 1908 and he died in 1911 (age 68). These Troillet’s had money. Engraved on the le Châble gravestone under François’s name are the words “JUGE ET DEPUE” (Judge and Deputy). In the Kansas bio it says Joseph was one of the original organizers and directors of the Citizens National bank and also one of its largest stockholders.

Joseph and his wife had three daughters, the article goes on to say. “The Troillet girls, Lillian, Alma and Elsa are well fitted to look after the different business interests left by their parents. Lillian was married in July, 1912, to Ernest Frey. The girls are among the best known in the younger society set of the county, all of them being accomplished musicians, Lillian being a singer of exceptional ability.”

Wonder what ever happened to that singer Lillian Troillet.

Regarding the person, what I found out about the life and death of Sébastien Gay’s was nothing less than fascinating. It offered great insight on Verbier.

When I googled his name nothing came up. But when I added the word “mort” the whole tragedy was revealed.

For 28 he had already done a lot in his life.

At 21 he was a ski guide and extreme skier, he was married to one of the top female “snowboardeuses” and “speedflyers” in the world, and with his best friend since childhood Claude-Alain Gailland summited all 330 peaks (18 of them over 4000 meters) along the entire border of Valais (the canton we’re located in). It took the duo 78 days to accomplish their 640 km long feat that had never been done before. With his wife, Géraldine Fasnacht, he had just made a film about creating art in the snow by snowboarding and skiing on nearly vertical slopes and making purposeful lines of “graffiti” in fresh snow.

In 2004 he went to the Himalayas with a world famous guide, Jean Troillet, a great-great grandson of François I would surmise. Troillet, who was 20 years his senior, also invited Sébastien’s friend, Gaillard, to accompany them to summit the 8000m Broad Peak, next to K2. They tried three times but never got above 7000m.

Speedflying is what cost Sébastien his life.

It sounds like a retarded sport to me. In South Africa I saw people windsurfing with skis and kites. Speedflying is similar but you do it on the snow. You have a pair of skis and small paragliding parachute and you spring off the side of mountains with your skis.

If you wanted to think of a worst time to die then you might come up with Sébastien’s last day: Saturday afternoon on December 30th. The perfect time to make funeral arrangements, on a weekend, the day before New Year’s Eve.

The write-ups in French and German both say the same thing. “Il s'est écrasé contre un rocher” and “Er knallte in vollem Flug in einen Felsbrocken,” He crashed full speed into a boulder.

(A year later, in November, another speedflyer, Mathias Roten, 29, would also die speedfliyng, during a practice flight. After his death the authorities required licenses for speedflying.)

Sébastien was helicoptered to a hospital in the nearby capital of Sion where he died.

There was an in-depth article devoted to Sébastien, which was very touching. His friend Claude-Alain said Sébastien loved good food, good wine, and laughing; he was like a brother to him – they grew up next to each other and their parents were friends.

«Il ne faisait pas les choses à moitié. C’est ce que je garde de lui, ce à quoi je me raccroche: il a vécu à fond, généreusement, la vie qu’il voulait, chaque minute de ses 28 ans. Il est mort en volant sur la montagne, comme un ange en ce monde.» He didn’t do things halfway. There’s something about him that I hold on to: he lived life, every minute of his 28 years, generously and to the fullest, just the way he wanted. He died flying on a mountain, like an angel of this world.

I gleaned all this information from a measly half hour spent in a rinky dink cemetery in a little cow town in the middle of the French Swiss Alps.

==A section of the Bisse headed for the haunted forest of the Forcles!==

==Along the western edge of the Bisse is a path of wonderful wood carvings.==

==LOVE this gnome.==

==How creative is this tarantula?==

==The squirrel that crawled in through the hole in the boot sole is too cute.==

==A paddle wheel just before the Chute du Bisse.==

==The Bisse stops here.==

==The Bisse after it drops half a mile into the rocky valley below.==

==Levron is the town in the middle right-hand part of the picture where the Bisse ends up. Last year I hiked around the back of the mountains of Verbier and thought I was in Cries, the village at the bottom left-hand part of the picture, which lies at the foothill of the mountain to get back to Verbier. Oy gewalt, when I found out I was in Levron and still had to hike down to Cries before I could start back up to Verbier I thought I’d need to call a helicopter.==

==On the eastern end of the Verbier mountains.==

==Le Châble is at the bottom of the valley on the left-hand side.==

==Following the Bisse to its source.==

==A scene from the last ice age melt.==

==The Bisse widens and now leads to a small cascade.==

==The friendly alpine ibex, aka Steenbok, aka Capricorn, munches on moss.==

=Two males. Must be dad and son. The female has little horns.==

==The fresh paw print of a killer mountain lion, I mean sabertooth tiger, surely waiting nearby to tear me to shreds.==

==My foot next to the print to show its size.==

==Part of the asshole contingent in Verbier. This sign says that not only is the staircase private, but you can give no excuses to even try to walk on it, because it’s “sans issue,” without discussion. A true blue asshole if I ever saw one. I say let’s throw a kegger on those cheaply made wooden steps.==

==If you have horrible taste in art then Verbier is your place.==

==After losing my beloved H&M aviator sunglasses, all I could get here to replace them were Swiss Army sunglasses.==

====VERBIER VILLAGE (OLD VERBIER)====

==The shadow of a heating pipe on the roof of an old chalet in old Verbier.==

==The name of this charming little chalet is “Piccolo.” Love it. This is old Verbier. I’m in the new and higher part of the village, built after the war when Switzerland got rich and people started pouring in to ski.==

==The old church of Old Verbier.==

====LE COTTERG====

==On a scorcher of a day these three kids in bathing suits ran from the bathtub-shaped ancient stone fountain that you see in the old villages here. They filled up plastic buckets and pitchers with water and were planning on throwing them on each other. When they saw me, I thought they might try to be mischievous and douse me, like German kids would do, but instead, they said, “Bonjour!” Ach, these Swiss. What manners!==

==Jesus in Cotterg.==

==Mini barn.==

==A young farmer and wife were putting up hay into their barn.==

==In the heart of Le Cotterg, which lies at 880 m. Yellow signs are all over and tell you how long it’ll take to hike up or down to your destination. This sign says it’ll take 2 hours to get to Verbier. Poo on that. I do it in less than an hour, a climb of 625 meters.==

==I like the Attention aux Enfants sign in Cotterg.==

==The sun sets as I trudge up the mountain to Verbier from Cotterg.==

====THE CHURCH & GRAVEYARD OF LE CHÂBLE====

==The old church of Le Châble. I’m thinking the year is 1438. If the first the lines are an ‘M’ meaning Mille which means 1000, and the four following lines are a 4, then the next line is a divider, and the next 3 lines mean 3, then that would give us 143_. I know the last digit is 8, a v following by two i’s and a final j which in medieval times was the letter they used to show it was the end of a number. ==

==Inside the old church of le Châble.==

== A typically boring gravestone in the graveyard of the Le Châble church.==

==A recent grave with the picture of a handsome young man, Sébastien Gay. Looking up his story became a really fascinating look into Verbier.==

==The oldest stone I found in the graveyard Belonging to Francois and Celestine Troillet.==

==My graveyard friend Elizabeth showing me the most famous person in the cemetery François-Xavier Bagnoud.==

====LE CHÂBLE====

==Le Châble at sunset.==

==On the side of a barn in le Châble hung a whole hung of scalped cows. Ghastly.==

==La Châble, looking a lot like France here.==

==High on the edge of a mountain overlooking the valley is the little chapel of St. Christophe. It is not locked so you can go inside. There are eight rows of pews there to kneel and pray. Elizabeth was saying that “the English” get married in this chapel, although she said it wasn’t really allowed. After I helped her with the English words, she exclaimed that the trains of the English brides are so long that they can’t fit all the way in the chapel and hang outside the door.==

==A table in the chapel is dedicated to recently departed. A couple of pictures are new since I was there last year, such as the young guy on the right end.==

==View from St. Christophe, looking over le Cotterg and le Châble.==

==The chapel of St. Christophe is on top this berg.==

[et finalement]

Congrats and thanks for making it this far.

A few final discordant musings:

I LOVE the smell of European soap and cleaning products. It’s a scent we don’t have in the states. I was hiking up through Verbier one afternoon and passed a ground level-window that was ajar. Someone was taking a shower and the scent of the soap was deee-vine.

I hate European tour busses. They’re oversized and filled with old German, French or Italian tourists and bored tourist guides. They crowd parking lots near pristine sights and smell like cabbage.

Soccer is big this time of year and there were lots of Portuguese flags in Verbier. Who knew that so many of them live here?

I polished off three books here, all memoirs. 1) “Survival in the Killing Fields” by Haing Ngor (about living in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge, a 515-book that I read in 2 days; I couldn’t put it down.) 2) “A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah, about a boy who was a soldier in Sierra Leone during the civil war. Very brutal, but a nice message. 3) “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson, about a guy who stumbled accidentally into a small Pakistani village after failing to summit K2 and ended up starting a new life building schools in remote parts of Pakistan then Afghanistan. It was a very uplifting book.

One recent morning I was awoken by a persistent knocking sound. I waited for it to disappear. It did. Then it returned. I sat up in bed, pissed off, and looked at the window, from where the noise was emanating. There was a stupid bird pecking at the window with its beak while in flight trying to get into my bedroom. What the hell he was thinking?

Finally, I spent my birthday here, just the way I wanted, by myself and like any other day. I didn’t want to think of another birthday. But I got a lot of nice messages from friends wishing me a happy one, so thanks.

One email I received was from an old friend of mine, Amy Summers. We were exchange students in Germany in the 80s (1880s). I spent my 19th Birthday with Amy and her friend Holly on the Alster Lake in Hamburg. We drank two bottles of very cheap Italian wine that came in those bulbous-bottomed green bottles wrapped in straw … I think they cost maybe 3 marks ($1.25). Anyway Amy and Holly proceeded to have a hicky war on my neck to see who could make the best love bite. Amy won because she was able to make a heart-shaped hickey on my throat by doing two separate sucks.

The following year, on my 20th Birthday, I cut out of work in Omaha (and subsequently lost my job as a waiter's assistant) so I could meet Amy before she moved to Bellingham, Washington for college and we could celebrate one last time the 25th of June. I drove my ’73 Buick Regal to Lawrence, Kansas where her family lived. Amy’s Mom bought me a cake which had a small Jawa on top. (A Jawa is a little hooded scavenger from Star Wars that combs the deserts of Tatooin for scrap. I don’t remember for sure, but I think Yoda was on top the cake as well :) In the evening Amy and I motored 60 miles to Kansas City to party. We had maybe $20 between us. We went to one of the ritziest joints in town, a rotating lounge high above the Hallmark Card building. I wore a suit, she a dress. We had both been back from Germany for a year. The exchange student experience was a very defining moment in our lives. We both were still very fluent. In fact, we conversed the whole evening in German, so nobody would know what debauchery escaped from our mouths. Whenever the cocktail waitress came over we spoke English with bad German accents. I don’t think she ever caught on. We ended up only ordering two big Weizenbiers as we couldn’t afford more than that. It didn’t matter. After so many years I still recall that birthday as one of the best.

So thanks Amy and the rest of you guys for thinking of me. xxxken oooron

==A lake of clouds outside my bedroom window one morning around 5:30 AM.==

====SCENES OF VERBIER====

==A very Todd Hido photo if you ask me. (as in toddhido.com)==

==Denner is the cheapest store in Verbier. If you get a gift from me it’s probably from there. ☺==

==Snow hindering passage to les lacs des Vaux, glacial lakes at 2544m. They are only ice free for 12 weeks a year.==

=Lac des Vaux all slushed over with snow and ice.==

==View from the grassy western slopes of the Verbier mountains where the skittish chamoix graze.==

==Some Rock Monster that I didn’t see last year on the top of a back mountain in Verbier.==

==Places to ski in season. According to the sign they’re all “ouvert”! Hurry get your skis.==

==One of the highest views of Verbier.==

==Fences on steep slopes keeps Polocs from falling too far in the summer and snow from avalanching skiers in the winter.==

==Attelas is the highest ski resort hang-out in Verbier. I have never seen it hummin’ in the winter.==

==You gotta love the Swiss for marking out their trails so well.==

==Under the road that goes up to Verbier. This channel gushing down the mountain never stops. Makes you wonder why those people from Levron went through all that trouble to dig a 20km Bisse when the could’ve just tapped into this stream.==

==The cat in the middle of the wall underneath the Tibetan flags refused to be intimidated by my Yoda staff.==

==The sun sets over Verbier and for me for another year.==

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Switzerland 2005 - the squirrels (1st time staying at chalet alone)

Today is my last full day in Verbier, Switzerland where I’ve been for over two weeks. Here in the French Swiss Alps my ex has a chalet that remains unoccupied during the summer, so since I was working next door in Germany, I took the opportunity to come here and work on a book project.

The funny thing about Europe is that although things look close together on a map, compared to the United States, the truth is, nothing is near or easy on this continent. Europe is so dense with people, towns and traffic that you can’t just breeze from one place to another. Also roads, train tracks and subways are all curvy and end in weird places.

For instance, to get to Verbier from Frankfurt, a distance of 340 miles, I had to take the subway to Frankfurt train station, change trains in Mainz, Basel, Lausanne, Martigny, then in Le Châble, take a yellow postal bus to up the mountain to Verbier. A trip that took all day.

In Frankfurt I was working for my former host brother Gregor, AKA Gogo, who I met when I lived in Germany as an exchange student. The original host family AFS gave me sucked, so I left. On a school trip to Italy I met Gogo and he said I could live with his family, so I did.

Gogo now owns an import/export business and during trade shows at the Frankfurt Messe (Exhibition Fair Grounds), he helps clients from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, receive their merchandise, and then after the shows he either ships it back or helps them store it.

I needed money and wanted to bone up on my German, so when Gogo offered the job I took it.

It’s hard work. I “unstuffed” (unloaded) 40 and 20-foot semis, sorted out boxes, loaded them on pallets, shrink-wrapped the stacked boxes with large spools of industrial-strength Saran Wrap, then with a hand truck carefully manoevered the behemoth loads, sometimes 12 feet high, to the proper hall, floor and booth of the clients.

While I actually enjoy manual labor, my mind continually works. I thought it would make a great photo essay to photograph each of the elevator operators, who are all characters, and underneath each other their pictures list 10 questions that they all answer like name, age, place of birth, number of years in Frankfurt, number of years at the Messe, what their expectations were for life when they were 20, how they got their job, what’s the worst and most memorable elevator rides they’ve ever had.

Doing this work in the summer is cake, compared to the winter, which is where I cut my teeth on this kind of work. It took a long time before I learned how to operate a Hubwagen (hand truck) with finesse inside a packed truck and through tight lanes in crowded chaotic exhibition halls.

While the actual trade shows were going on we had some time off to do some things.

I jogged down to and around the Main River which was gorgeous in some places. I visited the Jewish Holocaust museum in Frankfurt located where the former main city synagogue was burned to the ground on Kristallnacht in November 1938. A Jewish market existed there for hundreds of years before the Nazis came to power. Behind the museum is a small graveyard surrounded by a wall made with thousands of metallic bricks, each with the name of a Frankfurt victim of the holocaust.

Walking through Frankfurt I laughed when I came across old haunts that I hadn’t seen in 22 years. Life goes so fast, things change at meteoric speed and yet there is the same restaurant you had your first bratwurst at when you were 18, the same statue you made fun of because it was so ugly, the same bakery in the U-bahn (subway) you purchased your beloved Mohnschnecken (a poppy-seed and cinnamon roll).

I got to see Bad Homburg, an ancient village with Roman ruins and a medieval centre, that became a 19thC casino and spa town frequented by Dostoyevsky and Kaiser Wilhelm II. B.H. lies at the foothills of the Taunus Gebirge, a hilly mountain range that is stunningly beautiful, filled with hundreds of biking and hiking paths. The only thing I personally saw was a tacky 70s Vegas type casino purportedly modeled after one in Monte Carlo. I had to wear a rented natty jacket due to a dress code.

I also went to a lake with an old friend, Berndt, his wife and kids. It was the first time I ever dove into a lake which was more scary than fun since I can’t swim. With another old friend, Mark AKA Snow White, and his girlfriend Yvonne we spent an afternoon in the country drinking Appelvoi a Hessisch (the state in which Frankfurt lies) specialty. I love apple wine. Too bad you can’t buy anywhere outside of Hessen.

Finally I spent a weekend with my hostparents, and Gogo’s wife and kids at an 18thC farmhouse near a small medieval village in Baden-Württemberg called Bronnbach, an hour south of Frankfurt. I rode a bike up and down mountains there which was a blast and went with the kids to a farm where they fed wild pigs dry corn kernels (50¢ a bag). The nearest town is Wertheim, another medieval jewel with fountains and castles.

While Hurricane Katrina was raging I was packing my bags for Switzerland.

Once settled in Verbier I found a rhythm: Get up around 6:30 AM, make breakfast, take a bath, write until around 2:30 PM then take a hike in the mountains if the weather’s agreeable. I take pictures and write down notes when I go on my hikes. My backpack is packed with a bottle of tea, apples, an extra t-shirt, a hoodie, my camera, notebook and two pens.

The first time I came to Verbier, in September 1999, my partner at the time, Jean, and I were walking up a mountain path, when I suddenly dropped to the ground, feeling vertigo and refusing to go any higher. He couldn’t get me to budge, so we returned to lower ground.

Since then I lived in South Africa a few years where I overcame a lot of my fear of heights and climbed lots of mountains, I enjoyed hiking although I had to get my mountain legs back.

I find it more fun to freeclimb than to follow trails. I’m fine until the mountain becomes too steep to stand up then I begin crawling up on all fours, grabbing clumps of grass or little scraggly juniper bushes. If I can no longer see the earth below me but instead see an overhang I DO freak out: I’m afraid of sliding off a ridge to a painful death.

When I reach a steep part of an unfamiliar mountain and everything inside of me is yelling to turn back, I sit down until my light-headedness goes away and my heart stops pounding like a drum. This can happen several times on a hike. One afternoon when this happened I was about to turn around when I saw the ground level out. My legs were more shaky than stable when I proceeded to a little ridge. There was fog past the ridge, so I got down and crawled to the edge. I shuddered when I looked over a rock and saw there was a sheer drop off, a void into nothing except gray clouds. I held my arm out over the ridge and took a picture then split. Once I was back on safe ground a felt an exhilaration, happy that I had continued to the end.

Sometimes if I’m really high up on some unknown mountain I take comfort when I spot a dry cow pie. I figure if a cow can walk up here, so can I. Cows keep the grass down, which makes it easy to wander around the mountains. Their heavy trampling hooves make paths you can follow and cut steps into inclined mountains which makes it easier to climb.

I tried to conquer Pierre Avoi, the mountain that crushed me in 1999. Since I was climbing by myself and didn’t know the trail, it started seeming sketchier the higher I got: steeper, slanting away from the mountain. It was also damp due to rain the previous three days. Vertigo, jackhammering heart, don’t look down, don’t trip! The trail seemed interminable, but as I got closer I noticed there was a cross at the peak of the mountain. There two silhouettes of people next to it. I looked down and Verbier was a mere smattering of tiny boxes. I reached a wooden staircase. Terror. Panic. The abyss calling me into its hungry maw. It took everything I had, but I kept going.

I reached the final ladder, a flimsy looking aluminum thing. Go up 10 rungs then step onto a little platform bolted into the rock while holding onto a chain railing connected to thin rusty-looking poles bored into the rock. One misstep, slip on the two-foot square platform, slide on the rock under the chain and I could fall 100 stories. It was 6:30 PM, the sun’s rays were very low on the horizon and it would take at least 90 minutes from where I was to get back to the chalet. I saw a plaque bolted into the mountain next to the ladder dedicated to someone who fell to his death in 1950. That was it.

OK, Pierre Avoi, you win… this time, but I’ll be back. Unfortunately, when I looked down I suffered a fit of vertigo. Oh God, I need a helicopter to get back down. The sun was quickly dropping. I just concentrated on my shoes, making sure not to trip on a shoelace or slide on a steep, muddy part and that’s how I got back down.

Another day I was on a very safe flat peak called Croix de Coeur watching 20 paragliders taking off, landing and wheeling around the pleasant wind currents of this perfect, cloudless day. Sometimes I’ll be hiking and a paraglider will come out of nowhere overhead then disappear slowly into the distant cobalt blue of the valley below. On a flat spot in the road where it crests the mountain 25 cars were parked. I thought that was quite an engineering feat to build a road up this high. I could see the flat valley far below on the other side of the mountain and thought how fun it would be to explore all the towns down there.

I took a walk up to a ski lift station called Savoleyres which was surrounded by aromatic patches of clover. I got a good look at the trail I climbed the other day to Pierre Avoi. From this angle it looked hopelessly steep and narrow with a deadly drop off only a few feet away from the trail. Good grief.

While at this chalet I completed half a manuscript. I was really cranking. Who knows what would’ve happened had I had two more weeks.

And I could easily stay here. I love the weather in Verbier because every day is so different. One day thick rolling fog, the next clear and warm.

Opening up the bedroom window in the morning you fill your lungs with cool mountain air so fresh it makes your alveoli tingle. Every day at noon I go out on the top balcony to listen to the bells of the church down the street. The church is modern and white, built around 1960. You can see its bell tower from every surrounding mountain peak. It’s Verbier’s World Trade Center – I always know how to get home as long as I can see the bell tower.

The town of Verbier itself seems like it was thrown up one day in 1968. The little town doesn’t have much of a personality. But this is a sleepy time of year. When I was here last in February 2000 with Jean, my friend Sydney and my brothers Ritchie and Greg the town was jumping. Currently the only things stirring on this block are a young couple and their little blond 2-year-old son and two black squirrels in the pine tree across the street.

Since I have no one to talk to here I like to observe these neighbors during writing breaks. The mother is pregnant and her son is adorable. The other morning he was wearing red jimmies, trying his best to chase their tortoiseshell kitty with a yellow tennis ball. He could hardly walk up the grassy incline in the backyard with his little shaky legs.

The squirrels live in a nest in a towering pine tree. They eat the seeds out of pinecones. They cut them off the branches with their teeth then use their two paws to hold them while the dig in. The flakes of the pinecones fall into a pile on the driveway pavement below then down plops the spent pinecone.

I also like to watch the marmottes high in the mountains. They’re as big as badgers, and have black button noses, almond shaped dark eyes and wide bellies. They live in warrens burrowed into the earth, usually on grassy hills where they have a clear vista of predators. They are skittish and when they spot a predator they give a warning yip, then all members stream towards they holes. They pause in a circle, standing on their back haunches, then dart inside their homes.

All your sense are engaged in Verbier.

I love to hear the tinkling of far-away cowbells. The copper bells are sturdily strung around the cows’ black furry necks with thick leather straps. Close up they’re very loud. I wonder if that drives the cows crazy as they eat all day and hear that damn bell ringing around their necks. Farmers rope off grassy sections of mountain for cows to graze in. They sometimes they use old ski poles as stakes then on them string a synthetic fiber band that conducts a light electrical current. At twilight the cows are led from their pastures to barns and if you look up you can see what looks like a long row of dinging navy beans drifting across the darkening gray of the mountain.

Next to Jean’s chalet is a brook. Streams and brooks are the veins of a mountain. It’s so pleasant to sit on the balcony at night and listen to the steady, soporific sound of cold flowing mountain water cascading down rocks to the valley of Le Châble half a mile below.

Wild alpine flowers thrive here and their profume when you climb is, as they say in South Africa, divine. Purple and yellow seem to be the prevalent colors. Other smells that I will never get enough of is that of burning pinewood drifting from chimneys, and also the fresh, musky, damp earth smell that arises as the night begins its shift.

I love watching bikers whizzing by at 100km or 2 km an hour depending on the direction of their route on the mountain. And it’s nice to see the Swiss French sitting outside their mountain chalets at simple tables enjoying the sunset with wine and bread. I sometimes have a notion to get on my knees and beg them to let me join. The local people here are so polite, uncomplicated -- kids say Bonjour! without being awkward, and farmers don’t care if you walk through their cordoned-off pastures.

The colors you see reflected in mountains are mind-boggling. Rays of light slanting horizontally as the sun dips behind the Vallaisannes mountain range create a rainbow of shades in the snow from paper white to rose pink to tangerine to turquoise to lilac lavender.

As for the palate, the food here – cheese, meat, fruit, vegetables, bread – burst with taste. You’ll remember what a plum or Gruyère cheese taste like when you come to Switzerland.

I think it’s cute how each chalet has a name and that it’s written somewhere prominently outside. One of my favorite names is on a black-painted chalet that has brooms hanging upside on the porch: La Sorciére (The Witch).

A few quirky things are are little windowless log cabins that are receptacles for garbage. You just open the door and a lay your black bag of trash inside. For dog dung there are yellow metal boxes with a picture of a dog on lightposts all over town. Inside are plastic bags. How nice if they had those in New York.

My Moses-goes-to-the-Mountain solitude ends tomorrow. Back to Frankfurt, then Manhattan. I’ll miss the sound of the cowbells and real babbling brooks, and waking up to snowcapped mountains while black squirrels scamper up and down the pine trees across the street.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Switzerland 2009 - the slugs

==The fire hydrants of Verbier series.==

==I shaved my head and beard when I arrived at the chalet then took daily pictures showing my hair growing back.==

[not my flavor of switzerland]
This year my month-long writing sabbatical in Switzerland started in Zürich. By chance I was on the “Inaugural” Delta New York to Zürich flight. Big f’ing deal. It turned out to be a 757 (you know, that one aisle (narrow body) long crowded plane that we used to call the Slave Ship Without Oars when I worked as a flight attendant at American Airlines). They made such big deal about their Inaugural JFK-Zürich flight in the boarding area, cutting a red ribbon with the crew and passengers, yet in spite of all the fanfare they still charged for cocktails.

The first thing I noticed about the flight attendants was their age: they were old, as in ancient. A few of the women had to know Orville and Wilbur personally. Sad: you fly domestic all those years then when you finally have enough seniority and can fly to great international destinations you’re ready for a walker with tennis balls on the feet.

Zürich is nice but not really my thang. First of all when I go to Switzerland I want towering snow-capped mountains and ancient valleys, not some tall hills and rolling fields. If I want that I’ll go back to Frankfurt. Second of all, it’s so prohibitively expensive that if you wanted to live it up, like a tourist should, you’d need to pull off a bank heist and carry a briefcase stuffed with francs. I’m used to poor developing-world prices where you can get a full meal for a few dollars.

I attended the Basel Art Fair, which had a very high caliber of work. I got in with a free pass, otherwise it would’ve cost $45. (Were they serious?). I chatted with a few gallery owners and they said the art was moving well despite the Great Recession. I discovered that gallery owners who don’t pay for premium booths are allowed to display the art of only one artist.

The art crowd was the same you see everywhere: duschbag guys with long slicked back hair, gay Prada slippers, designer shirts and casual $1000+ jackets. Women in haute couture, tall and thin and uninteresting for the most part. They all have such a haughty air about them and think that by attending an art show they’re divine. I say, go save a life in Sudan and then build a bridge and get over it.

Only slightly more palatable was the poor student contingent with their thriftstore threads, and the heavily-bearded, chapeaued, thick Vietnam-era bespectacled artistes. I don’t know why there can’t be simply normal-looking and acting people with manners at these types of events. But then I guess there’d be nothing to complain about … except the art.

Yes the art was of a high caliber compared to other art fairs I’ve seen. Basel is said to be the world’s premier art show. But so much of it is still shit. Vacuous, mindless, stupid shit. I just don’t understand the significance or beauty of interest in piles of paperclips or black paint spilled over a broken chair. If there were some message – patent or otherwise – I’d be very open to the artwork, but when it’s just made to shock or be cool, then I pretty much hate it.

After two days of art I headed towards Verbier. Because there were people occupying the chalet, I had to stay in le Châble at a backpacker’s place. I paid $29 a night to live in a nuclear bomb shelter … seriously. The place, called Le Stop!, is inside a mountain, there are two one-foot-thick doors and then two sleeping areas with five rooms each containing six bunkbeds divided by a commons area with cage lockers. I thankfully was the only one there, since June is the low low season. Although hot in Le Châble (elevation 800m), the nuclear bomb shelter was chilly. Also there was no circulating air so it didn’t smell great.

Jean, my ex who owns the chalet I stay at, told me that in the 1960s and 70s it was mandatory in Switzerland to build bomb shelters in building complexes. I was crawling the walls after 4 days, I wonder how people supposed to live in these bomb shelters for weeks or months awaiting nuclear fallout. I was also to leave Le Châble, a can of tepid flat light beer compared to the bottle of chilled Dom Pérignon Rosé Champagne Verbier.


[the monastery]

The first thing I did at the chalet once I dropped off my bags was shave my head. I was really getting sick of long hair, which I hadn’t cut since Afghanistan 10 months earlier. In Le Châble, where the weather was in the high 80s, I was schwitzing like mad. I wanted to climb mountains without matted wet hair during every ascent. I also shaved my beard off, something I only do when no one sees me because I think I look gruesome without it. I documented my new look with my camera, every day snapping a self-portrait to follow my hair’s return.

It takes me a good week to acclimate myself to the mountains and solitude. I’ll be winded and panting like some WWII deathmarch victim when I climb my first mountain in the thinner air. But slowly my strength and lung capacity build. As far as writing & reading & concentration go, it’s very similar to a dog circling an area to find the perfect position and spot to sleep … or shit. And like a dogshit, writing can often be as painful as crapping, but then once you’re done it can be just as pleasurable. After a week I found my Zen and started cranking stuff out. Then, as every year in Switzerland, just when I’m really becoming productive and in the swing of things it’s time to head back to frenetic, distracting New York.

Every year I look forward to hiking in the mountains when I’m in Switzerland but this year I only went up half as much as last year due to unstable weather. Sliding around on slick grass and trudging in the mud isn’t my cup of kraüter tea. Also, rain in the mountains means cold! There were a couple of days where the high was barely 10°C (50°F) which is freezing. The chalet is warm but not toasty so on days when I couldn’t get warm, I’d sit in the dry sauna downstairs, which would bake me at 100°C (212°F).

I had planned to do some great treks this summer but because you couldn’t plan on a full day of sunshine and because my energy level wasn’t as high as previous years it didn’t work out. I wanted to visit a glacial lake, Lac de Louvie, renown for its beauty, then hike down the mountain to the town of Fionnay and take a bus 15 miles back to Verbier via la Châble, an hour trip, but the weather wasn’t cooperative.

On June 20th last year I sat on a mountainside and watched the sun set on the longest day of the year. This year I sat inside watching gray skies dump rain on the mountains. But I can’t complain because those rainy days are when I get a lots of work done: writing, organizing documents, sorting photos, getting to backlogged reading.

I polished off by the way three books during my stay. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini - I thought it’d suck but after Chapter 5 it picked up and by the end my heart was racing and my eyes filled with tears. Magical Thinking, given to me by my wonderful friend James in Seville in 2005 (only took 4 years to get around to reading it) is by one of my favorite authors, Augusten Burroughs. I also didn’t think this book of true short stories could live up to Running with Scissors or Dry but it made me laugh a lot. I hate reading about gay men gushing about their lovers, such as David Sedaris, but this book in the end was good. Finally, South by Ernest Shackleton is not well written but it’s a story I’ve wanted to read for a long time, about the fateful adventure to Antarctica just as WWI began.

As every year I become a recluse and talk to nobody when I get to Verbier except the checkout gals at the grocery store. This year however at the beginning I talked to an Englander named Harold who owns the eponymous hamburger joint Harold’s in the middle of Verbier. From him and his two workers, George a 20-year-old red-headed biker from Scotland and Stefania a newly wed from Torino, I learned things such as all roofs in Verbier must be at a 45° angle, you can rent a helicopter to move stuff for $50 a load and 80% of foreign tourists in the winter are from England. Harold told me that Germans were odd when they came to the mountains because they were so asocial, always trying to rest. He explained that in England when you travel you party and the point is to come back home more tired than when you left. It was cool to hear some of the local gossip too; it made the summer wasteland of Verbier come alive.

Once I reached Ken Zen and wrote in the morning then hiked or read in the afternoon and evening, I was no longer in a talkative mood so didn’t go back to Harold’s except one day when during a walk I discovered there was 100km foot race between Verbier and Grand St. Bernard and back to Verbier. Grand St. Bernard is famous for its dogs, history and hospice that protected travelers in the days of yore when people crossed the wild mountains between Italy and Switzerland. When I saw guys running out of the woods carrying ski sticks, I stopped by Harold’s to find out what the deal was. He informed me about the race and the 400 men who were crazy enough to participate. It was a beautiful day for a race. That night it was warm and I saw lights flickering through the trees on a moonlit mountainside as runners were running down with lighted helmets.


[imperfections]

I must admit on the night of the race was one of the few times I suffered from the brief pangs of loneliness. I considered walking to one of the sleepy bars and ordering myself a couple of drinks and hanging out. But then I considered that the clientele would either be too-cool-for-school-20yearolds or Portuguese manual laborers who speak only Portuguese. I could’ve deal with that if I really wanted to go out but the thought of paying for a few drinks what I’d pay at a store for 2 or 3 days worth of food made the notion unpalatable.

Swiss prices are twice the price of what is reasonable. For instance a postcard costs $1.20. I’d pay 60¢, but not $1.20. The postcard stamp: $1.80. 90¢ would be reasonable. A hamburger platter – that is a small hamburger and a few fries since Europeans eat like birds – $14. Again, $7, I’d pay, but not $14. A 15-minute busride down the mountain from Verbier to le Châble is $5.50, a ski lift ride is $11, a coffee is $3.50. All should cost half as much according to moi.

I did find one bargain: cheap wine at Denner’s, the Wal-Mart of grocery stores in Switzerland. The wine is not corked but rather capped like a beer bottle, which is fine by me as long as it contains alcohol. At the other end of the spectrum I saw was a woman behind me in line buying a chunk of beef the size of a grapefruit for $60! You’d pay $15 for the same in the U.S. The woman though got the meat for half price because the Swiss are crazy about expiration dates so everyday there are “soldes” (sales) on food that’s about to expire. Food is usually marked down 20 to 50% in the latter part of the afternoon.

Businesses in Switzerland are open from 8:30 ‘till 12:15 and 2:30 ‘till 6:30, because like the Italians, the Swiss drop everything around noon for their extended 2+hour lunchbreak, a concept that is as foreign in the U.S. as bells around cows’ necks and yodeling milkmaids.

One thing that irks me in Switzerland other than high prices and long lunch breaks is the penchant of men for wearing ¾-length pants. It’s a look I embraced in 1986 and 87 then dropped like a bad bottle of hairspray. ¾-length pants simply scream I’m-a-straight-Euro-dweeb. I don’t understand long cumbersome shorts for the summer anyway. I say bring back the late 70s and early 80s styles microscopic sports shorts, Speedos and Daisy Dukes – those jean shorts cut off just below the pocket. The whole notion of wearing a baggy-ass “swimsuit” that’s below your knees because it’s “fashionable” is retarded. You might as well go back to 1911 and wear striped culottes and a cloth bathing cap to the beach.

But a touch of loneliness, exorbitant prices, and ¾-length pants aside, things would’ve been fine had I hiked more. Hiking less this year was due in part to the chilly weather but also, after 5 years, a touch of ennui had set in.

I’ve pretty much tapped all the places within climbing distance from the chalet in Verbier and now want to explore the valleys around Verbier and the mountains beyond. In order to hike distant paths, check out glaciers and different lakes, and explore new mountain peaks I would have to use ski lifts to get up the mountains in order save myself 90 to 120 minutes of climbing and exertion. I’d also need a good eight hours in order to have time to take pictures and do the hike right. Then I’d have to rely on the bus or train to get back up to Verbier once I’m finished. This year I didn’t have the money for the transportation or the time for long hikes so I guess next year will be the year.

Anyway the ski lifts don’t open up for regular service until July 4th. June is when Verbier becomes a ghost town as everybody takes their vacations between the slow point of late spring and full summer. The ski lifts were open during the June weekends but the weather was usually bad.

The weather was a lot cooler and unstable compared to last year. If it was sunny in the morning it’d be cloudy by 3PM, and a cloudy morning meant probably sun at 3PM. In fact the morning before I left I awoke to find it had snowed in the mountains above the 2000m zone (Verbier is at 1500m). I’ve only awoken to snow one other time in my four years of Verbier sojourns and that was in late September. This was July 8th. Very odd.

In the end I did visit most of my old friends, the familiar landmarks around Verbier that I’ve talked about in previous posts: Pierre Avoi, Chute du Bisse, le Sentier des Sculptures, Croix de Coeur, Savoleyres ski lift, Col des Mines, Lacs des Vaux, St. Christophe, Cabin de Mont Fort. I discovered additions to old buildings, a new coffee house, changes to paths, and quirky new things about familiar animals, such as slugs like to eat old dandelion stems.

I didn’t do anything special on July 4th or my (25th) birthday on June 25. I did consent to some 95¢ tall cans of Swiss beer, which I diluted with tomato juice and a dash of lemon juice to create Midwestern “red beers.”


[nervous nellie]

My final morning in Switzerland was glorious: clear predawn sky the color of a blue Bombay gin bottle then a splash of rose pink as the first rays of sun hit the 4000m (12,000 ft) snow-covered mountain peaks across the valley facing Verbier.

July 9th was the only day I actually woke up before sunrise during my month in Verbier. In the past I’ve tried as often as possible to awake before dawn when in Switzerland but this year jetlag then night owlness got the best of me.

I had no time to sit back and take in this spectacular final Swiss dawn because I was running around making sure everything in the chalet was clean, put away, turned off and closed up. I woke up at 5AM to make my 2:30PM flight out of Zürich, 300km (185 miles) away. This involved catching the 6:18 bus at the Verbier post office which travels down the mountain to le Châble where I have 5 minutes to catch a train to Martigny, 40 minutes away, where I again have 5 minutes to catch another train to Zürich’s airport, 3+ hours away.

Switzerland is efficient (as you might have heard) so there were no delays and everything went like (Swiss) clockwork. I arrived at the airport at 11:30 AM, 3 hours before the flight, but by the time the ticket counter opened and I had to answer pre-check-in questions (Bags packed by whom? Any items received from a stranger …), then go through passport control and two screenings, I only had 40 minutes before boarding. As I get older I’ve decided to save myself wear and tear: just get up early, be tired and get to the airport 3 or even 4 hours before your flight.

I’ll be tired anyway because I never sleep well before a flight.

I’m a nervous traveler. It’s always a miserable, fitful, handful of hours that I twist and sweat in bed before my cellphone alarm goes off. I have a phobia of missing flights, which has happened in the past, ergo the fear. Missing a flight is to me exactly like that Youtube vid from the Hong Kong airport where a lady wails, freaks out and becomes hysterical when she discovers she’s missed her flight. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbVw7entkxg Even when I was a flight attendant for 4 years I was a jumpy traveler until I was actually on the plane. Thank God for Xanax.

Once I was safely on the crowded Delta 757, reading a German magazine, I had time to summarize my month in Verbier. As long as I can have time to myself and get stuff done there I’m happy. When I locked the door behind me as I left the chalet on that gorgeous July morning, I was content. I would’ve liked to have stayed another month, especially since the town was starting to fill up with people who come for summer events, like downhill mountain biking competitions, endurance races, a weeklong annual musical festival, and this year, for the first time, from July 17 – 19 the pinnacle of bike races, Le Tour de France, which will make a stop in Verbier. The chalet though is rented out during this high tourist time. Oh well, maybe next year I can stay during the fun summer weeks.

==On the way to JFK from Manhattan.==

====ZURICH====

==Sausages covered in chocolate and sprinkles, like donuts. Ick!==

====BASEL====

==This guys is pulling an Italian coffee pot on a little wagon. He's so artsy.==

==BBQ on the river!==

==Goldfinger now works on a bridge in Basel.==

==J'adore condom shops.==

==The love affair between 2 ducks.==