Free But Enough About You: Essays by Christopher Buckley

take our tea there and plan our leisurely days. I couldn’t remember when I had last had ten full days with no appointments or To Do list. No BlackBerry, no iPhone, just the clunky computer in the hotel foyer with intermittent Internet access. Bliss, truly. Elan called the trip our piccola pausa —little pause—the Italian term for the interval between courses.
    Being unrushed, I began to notice things that might ordinarily have escaped my attention, such as the hotel’s flower planters. They were old chamber pots. I wondered, Might this one have been Whymper’s? Altitude does strange things to a man.
    One afternoon we hiked to a glade by a small waterfall and made a picnic of crusty bread, Côtes du Rhône, luscious plump tomatoes, Gruyère and Trockenfleisch (slices of air-dried beef), and a bar of Toblerone. We hiked back into town and went to pay our respects at the Alpine Museum.
    I was last there in 1962—before you were born—and remembered seeing the famous rope that had parted, sending Croz, Hadow, Douglas, and Hudson on their fatal plunge. It’s still there. I was no less enthralled standing before it as I had been as an innocentlymorbid boy. I could find no reference to the Controversy. Whymper may have been nicht beliebt in Tal , but he still packs them in. One exhibit is a chair he sat in while having his hair cut.
    There’s a sad display of dried leather boots that belonged to climbers who never lived to unlace them. A photograph of a breathtakingly beautiful young Englishwoman who died on the Matterhorn in a terrible storm. Near the exit is a framed account by Teddy Roosevelt of his ascent of the Matterhorn in 1881, age twenty-two. (Winston Churchill also climbed it. Everyone seems to have climbed it.) Young TR wrote to his sister back home, “One of the chief reasons I undertook the ascent of the Matterhorn was to show some English climbers who were staying at the same hotel that a Yankee could climb as well as they could.” Standing before this document, I realized that I, too, must make my ascent of the Matterhorn. National pride was at stake.
    It was going on two in the afternoon when the next day we achieved the base of the mountain. Here would begin our path to the summit, 1,500 meters above.
    I checked my water bottle, marked the spot on my GPS, and applied another coat of SPF. Whymper and the others had started from this very spot, as had so many others. Elan would remain behind. He had to call Barry Diller on his cell phone about some deal they were doing.
    Thus I set off solo on my ascent of the north face. Ten minutes into it I had reached 60 meters up the trail. I thought of Michel Croz and The White Tower and Third Man on the Mountain and the seventeen-year-old who had chosen to climb. A helicopter buzzed by overhead on its way to the Hörnli hut to deposit climbers. It was a brilliant sunny-cool day. I felt superbly alive—not a day over forty-nine.
    I began my descent. Elan was still on the phone with Barry Diller. It took Hugo eight hours to make it up and back. It took me fifteen minutes. Now, for the rest of my life I could say, “I climbed the Matterhorn.” (Not with a bang, but with a Whymper.)
    We hiked back down into town. I slept through until dawn, undisturbed by the Grampi’s revelers. I didn’t even have to get up in the middle of the night, which as you hit fifty, becomes another of life’s accomplishments, along with conquering the Matterhorn.
    — Forbes FYI , October 2003

SUBURBAN CRANK
    For years, I lived in cities, where my conversation consisted of world events, politics, literature, art, science, and, to be sure, the latest gossip.
    Now I live in the suburbs, and my conversation seems to consist of complaining. We had guests over the other night—solid, interesting people who could hold their own in any conversation about the latest developments in Europe or Mali, or John Irving’s new novel, or the upcoming exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Pre-Columbian