Alpine for You (10 page)

"I
n medieval times it was thought the ghost of Pontius Pilate haunted the slopes of Mount Pilatus." We were gathered around Sonya in the welcome center at the top of the mountain. Outside, sunlight was streaming down onto the scantily clothed bodies of Swiss sunbathers, which meant our travel brochure hadn't been entirely wrong. There
was
sun in Switzerland. You just had to climb seven thousand feet to find it.

"Fearing trespassers would so enrage the ghost, he'd send violent storms thundering down into Lucerne, the city fathers forbade all foot traffic up the mountain. The ban wasn't lifted until centuries later, and in 1868, Queen Victoria proved she wasn't afraid of ghosts when she made the excursion up the mountain herself."

You had to admire the queen. Unlike our tour group, she didn't just slap her money down at the ticket counter and ride a couple of cable cars through the fog and clouds to the top. She made the hike on foot. And in a dress! Come to think of it, that's probably the way my ex-husband would have done it, too.

"Say, Sonya," Dick Rassmuson called out. "How much would it set me back to spend a night in that hotel over there?"

All heads turned toward the elegant building that was nestled against the sheer rock face of the mountaintop. It was fronted by a wide terrace beyond which was a drop-off into nothingness.

"You've already paid for the hotel in Lucerne, so you've no need to know how much this one costs. Any more questions?"

Wally joined Sonya in the middle of the circle we'd formed around her. "We'll be up here for about four hours, people. There are plenty of trails for you to follow and several restaurants in the Hotel Kulm and one here in the Hotel Bellevue where you can have a leisurely lunch. We'll meet back here at two o'clock to take the cog railway back down to the bottom. I think you'll enjoy the ride. The railway has a slope of 48 percent and is the steepest cogwheel railway in the world."

Nana tugged on the sleeve of my raincoat. "Bernice and me are gonna look for souvenirs, so we'll catch you later."

"Small
souvenirs!" I called to their retreating backs. "Souvenirs you can pack in your
own
suitcases!" I walked out into the sunshine and stood for a moment with my face lifted skyward, soaking in the warm rays.

"You really should be wearing sunblock if you're going to do that," Shirley Angowski cautioned. "Though the foundation I gave you has an SPF of six, so that'll be some protection. And where are your sunglasses? Crow's-feet, Emily. You'll get them if you spend endless years squinting into the sun."

I opened one eye to regard Shirley. She'd been nice enough to give me an entire makeover on the nine-mile bus ride to Kriens, so I probably owed it to her to stay out of the sun. I owed it to myself, too. She'd plastered so much makeup on me, if it got too hot, I'd have serious meltdown.

But I looked good. Really good. With a few strokes of the proper pencil and brush, she had given me eyebrows like Catherine Zeta-Jones, lips like Angelina Jolie, and cheekbones like Bo Derek. My eyelids wore a sooty smudge, my mouth a gleaming polish, my cheeks a blushing glow. I was gorgeous. I felt taller, thinner, more confident. I was sporting the kind of face that caused men to stare, or walk into walls, or off cliffs. I eyed the guardrail that was perched at the lip of the hotel terrace and worried it might not be high enough.

Shirley extracted a pair of dark glasses from her Triangle Tour bag and slid them onto my face. "I always carry an extra pair. Maybe the sun will stay out long enough for you to wear them a while."

Dick Stolee approached, panning his camcorder from right to left. "Top of Mount Pilatus. Hotel on top of Mount Pilatus." He angled the lens into my face. "Swiss babe wearing a red raincoat on top of Mount Pilatus." He held the camera in the same position for several seconds before adding, "Correction on the Swiss babe. It's Emily wearing sunglasses and too much makeup."

Ordinarily, a comment like that would have ruined the moment, but today, it rolled off me like water off a duck's back. I figured it had something to do with the altitude.

Shirley, however, took exception. She snatched a small automatic camera out of her bag and aimed it at Dick. "Top of Mount Pilatus." CLICK. The film advanced. She aimed again. "Rude old geezer wearing a cheap toupee on top of Mount Pilatus." CLICK.

"Cheap toupee? I paid three thousand dollars for this rug!" Dick bristled. "And who are you calling rude? Hell, I'm being honest. She is wearing too much makeup."

"Emily's face is a work of art," Shirley fired back. "And applying makeup is an art form."

Shirley was probably wasting her breath talking about art. From my experience with men, it was obvious they knew only two things about art. During their college years, they knew all the bottles in their beer bottle pyramids had to match, and later in life, they knew the wood grain on their big-screen TVs kinda had to match the wood grain on their coffee tables.

Shirley seized my arm. "Come on, Emily. I don't like the view from here anymore." She whisked me away, and when we were out of earshot, she said, "That man is just like my first husband. Criticize, criticize, criticize. As if any man in all creation ever knew the first thing about what kind of makeup best enhances a woman's features."

"My ex-husband was pretty good with makeup," I said, recalling the two short years of my marriage to Jack Potter.

"Was he a makeup artist?"

"He was a gay stage actor."

"Wow." I could hear the respect in her voice. "They have a real gift for cosmetology."

"Yeah. He could apply eyeliner thin as a dime, and in a single stroke. And I won't even begin to tell you the miracles he could work with lip liner."

"Is he still acting?"

"He called me last year and said he was installing kitchen countertops and tile for a company in upstate New York."

"That's nice you've stayed in touch, but what a waste of talent."

"Not really. I guess he's dynamite with a caulking gun. And it's a really big one, too."

"Well." Shirley patted the camera bag that hung from her shoulder. "If we only have four hours, I'd better start snapping some pictures. I bought a new five-hundred-millimeter zoom lens, a kaleidoscope attachment, and a fish-eye lens, and I'm dying to try them out. If I can catch the right light, I might even be able to use my sand grain and split-field filters."

I'd brought along a disposable Kodak FunSaver Outdoor camera with twenty-seven exposures. I'd thought about splurging and buying the panoramic version, but I didn't want to be too showy. "You know how to use all those filters and things?"

"Oh sure. I used to be a photographer for
National Geographic
years ago."

I tried to mask my shock as I imagined Shirley Angowski traveling around the world on photo shoots for
National Geographic.
I wondered why she quit. Probably ended up in the wrong country too many times.

"If I'm not back when it's time to leave, will you come look for me, Emily?"

"You bet."

She headed off on a trail that circled behind the hotel. I wouldn't have any trouble finding her if she was late. She was wearing a raincoat that was Tweety Bird yellow and hung down to her ankles. It'd be pretty hard to lose her in the crowd.

I longed to grab a table on the hotel terrace, order a fattening pastry and cup of coffee, and relax in the sun a while, but since every table was occupied, I decided to do some exploring on my own.

I skirted around the sun worshipers in their bikini tops and shorts in the front of the hotel and ended up on a narrow pathway that hugged the craggy rock face of Pilatus's summit. The trail was surprisingly isolated and overlooked a deep valley where evergreen forest, brown gorse, avalanched rock, and fractured sandstone sloped downward into a vast sea of cloud. In the distance, range upon range of saw-toothed mountain peaks punctured the cloud cover, while closer in, a jagged island of rock rose from the snow-white sea like a great spiny-backed reptile.

I removed my camera from my shoulder bag and looked through the viewfinder. The valley. CLICK. The mountain ranges. CLICK. The spiny-backed reptile. CLICK. I walked farther along the trail, snapping more photos of fractured rock, zigzagging trails, alpine huts nestled on tiny triangles of grass between impossibly steep inclines. The vista was so spectacular, I wished I
had
sprung for the panoramic camera, no matter how showy. But I kept well back from the guardrail because I found the view rather dizzying. Understandable, considering the highest point in Iowa is probably the top of Lars Bakke's grain elevator, and I'd never even climbed that.

I strolled leisurely down the path, pausing every so often to ooh and ahh to myself, to snap more pictures, to stand and listen to the quiet. After rounding a blind curve, I was surprised to find a storage area cut into the rock with the doors thrown wide open. It was a huge cave of a room that tunneled through to the other side. Inside were coils of rope dangling from pegs in the wall, shovels, picks, snowblowing equipment, fencing made of orange mesh, wooden barriers painted red and white. A sign on the door read
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
. I wasn't "authorized," but if I wanted to catch the sights from the other side without hiking all the way around the mountain, this would be the perfect shortcut.

I looked left and right. The coast was clear. Everyone was still back at the hotel drinking coffee and eating pastry on the terrace. I entered the cave and scurried through to the other side, shivering when the temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees. And it wasn't any warmer when I walked out into the daylight. Unfortunately, I'd left the sun and all its warmth on the other side of the mountain. But this wasn't so bad. At least I didn't have to worry about my makeup melting.

Ahead of me was a wooden guardrail. I inched toward it, peering down into a crevasse that bored its way downward into total blackness. I felt the bottoms of my feet tingle and inched slowly backward.

"Hi, Emily."

I wheeled to my left and looked up. The trail ended at this point and gave way to a set of wooden stairs that laddered up the rock face to the summit. Shirley Angowski was standing halfway up the staircase, her right leg hooked over the railing in what looked like an impossible contortion.

"Oh my God," I shouted. "Don't jump!"

"Smile." She aimed her big honking zoom lens at me and clicked her camera. "I'll mail that to you when I get it developed."

I breathed a sigh of relief. I'd misread her acrobatics completely. No one about to commit suicide would promise to send me photos. I mean, film processing could take as long as two weeks with some discount companies. "Thanks," I called up to her. "Just what I need. Another picture of myself with my mouth hanging open. You don't look too safe up there. Aren't you afraid you'll fall?"

"I used to teach gymnastics. You want to see me walk to the summit on the railing? It's just like the balance beam."

I was delighted by the number of job opportunities open to people who were geographically challenged, but no way was I going to encourage this kind of suicidal behavior. "I hope you're not serious!"

Shirley laughed. "Just kidding. Balance beam wasn't my specialty anyway. I was better at floor exercise."

"Well, be careful."

"You too."

I'd seen enough for now. Anxious to check in on Nana and to monitor the whereabouts of Helen and Lucille and Dick, I headed down the trail that flanked the shaded side of the mountain and eventually found myself walking through another tunnel. Along the thick outer wall, huge windows had been cut into the sandstone like embrasures in a castle wall to allow hikers unimpeded views of the mountainscape beyond. I stood at one lookout point, amazed to find a church perched at the very edge of a precipice on a flat of land below me. On a scraggly peak behind the church stood a solitary cross, dark against the endless bank of clouds. I found the sight of a church seven thousand feet up pretty inspiring, but I did wonder if they had an occasional problem with attendance.

I arrived back at the visitors' center to find Nana sitting alone on a bench on the flagstone belvedere outside the Hotel Bellevue. I sat down beside her and whipped off my sunglasses so she wouldn't confuse me with the other hot Swiss babes on the mountain. "Did you find any souvenirs?"

She checked over both her shoulders before removing a small plastic bag from a security pocket inside her raincoat. "I got the stuff," she whispered.

"That's great," I whispered back. "What stuff?"

She eased one of her purchases out of the bag and cradled it in her hand. "The hair spray, Emily. Remember? I bought two. One for you and one for me. Travel size. Extra hold."

I regarded the container. The labeling was written in a language I couldn't read, but that wasn't the problem. "You bought a pump spray."

"Of course, dear. A pump is friendlier on the environment than an aerosol spray."

"But we can't stop a killer with a pump. If we spray this in his face, all we're going to do is give him a stiff upper lip. We need to blast him with an aerosol spray that has lots of chlorinated fluorocarbons to slow him down."

"I hadn't thought a that. Maybe I should try to exchange this."

I ran a hand over my hair, thinking that a shot of hair spray with extra hold wasn't a bad idea. "I'll tell you what. I'll pay you for both of these and you can go back to the shop and try to find the aerosol."

"My goodness, Emily, you don't need to pay me. I'm rich. Remember?"

I transferred the hair spray into my shoulder bag for later use. "Have you seen the Teigs and the Rassmusons by any chance?"

"I seen 'em in that little Swiss Express diner inside the hotel there. They were at a table beside the Stolees and Jane Hanson. They have a pretty tight little circle, don't they? Don't open it up to no one."

Yeah. And Dick Rassmuson had the gall to complain about the New Englanders not mingling. "I think Lucille might have opened up the circle to Andy Simon at some point in time, if you catch my drift."