The top is the bottom

I’m so glad that Disney has not managed to rob me of the real experience of this fabulous mountain, as they managed to do when I went to visit Old Town Prague and blurted out, “Hey this looks just like Disneyland!”

Despite my tram going off in an unexpected direction this morning due to football route changes, I still made the 6 a.m. train and was into Zermatt by 9:15. I got really lucky with the hotel here (unlike in Rome) and I’m in a cute, skinny, green building with tiny rooms and free wireless. It’s not so small that I can’t turn around in the shower though. Now that’s some European luxury.

Let’s get to it though – the Matterhorn is awesome. It’s like the natural version of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, where everyone climbs up to the base just to sit and look at it. I’ll admit that I am sometimes (ok oftentimes) one of those people who’s running around shouting what’s going on, what’s so cool, let me see, c’mon I can’t see! And then I run up to the thing and think, wait, is this it? This is what everyone is looking at?

I’m a little slow, but I figured it out. I had to climb for about 45 minutes with barely any oxygen, crawling over loose rocks and nearly plunging to my death, but I finally got it. You have to climb to the top just to get to the bottom, and this is what it’s all about. When I finally got to the top of whatever it is I was trying to get to the top of, I saw it there clearly, in front of me, rising up out of yet another quarry of gray, loose rocks and melting snow that formed rivulets between the stones and streamed down the path out of sight. Wherever I had succeeded in reaching, I wasn’t even able to touch the mountain yet. It still looked nearly the same after an hour of struggling for air.

I climbed up around the abandoned stone house of an old ski lift and walked up a small hill where someone had built a ring of stones for what looked like a bonfire, but there were no ashes. A silver-haired man with a hundred sun lines streaking his face was sitting on the leftover foundation of a missing building, his backpack and walking poles lying on the ground next to him. He was simply staring at the mountain. I wasn’t sure if I should be quiet, or talk to him, or stare at the mountain too. So instead, I set up my boyfriend the tripod (who is a great photographer, by the way) and started taking some pictures.

He eventually turned to me and said something in German, but I shook my head. He then started speaking understandable but grammatically strained English, asking where I was from, etc. I told him, originally northern California, but now I live in Zurich. He started to expound on what a great city San Francisco was and how nice it was in California. “Yes, it’s quite lovely there,” I said, still finding this whole conversation about California being lovely while we were sitting at the base of the Matterhorn in Switzerland a little strange. I turned and looked over my shoulder. Yes, the mountain was still there.

I sat there for about twenty minutes looking at the mountain, then decided to head back down since the wind had picked up and was blowing straight through my jacket. I packed up my boyfriend and camera and tossed my backpack over my shoulder. As I started to slide my way down the rocks and rubble, he said, “Say bye to California for me.”

“I will,” I replied, then paused once I had gotten around the ski lift. I think what he meant was “Say hi to California for me,” but that’s not what came out, and that wasn’t what I had just agreed to. Does getting to the top only to find it’s the bottom mean starting all over again, or does it mean you’re at the bottom of the next stretch of mountain? Must I say goodbye in order to say hi again?

Stranger still is that when I got back into town two gondola rides later, I ended up showing some Japanese tourist how to bag her fruits in the grocery store, weigh them, push the correct number, and put the sticker on the bag. That’s crazy. You’d think I lived here or something.