You are always alone atop a mountain, even in a crowd. At a beach _ any beach _ a solitary figure standing at the edge of your vision can make you feel intruded upon. On the summit of an Alpine mountain, a chairlift dumping out bystanders six at a time will offer you no companionship. I stand next to my wife at nearly 11,000 feet of altitude, in the St. Moritz region of Switzerland, on the highest skiable peak of the formidable Corvatsch massif. I have known my wife for over a quarter century, but she has momentarily become a phantom of herself, unable to interrupt my solitude with even the best of our mutual intentions.
Everywhere in view, lesser white-spiked peaks chip at the cloudless blue sky. Ski boots clang on the gray metal walkways of the observation deck overhead, and somewhere within, souvenirs are offered for sale. All encounters with great mountains are confrontations with lifeless grandeur, even on the fairest of days, and so it is now. I must face this mountain as I have all the others, with respect and on my own.
The oceans brought life to the earth, a truth underlying the primal call made by Botticelli's Venus and every other fertile woman, caught, in fact or in imagination, rising from a blue, fecund sea. Climb an Alp and you will cross a geological line above which trees cease to grow; go higher still and the ibex no longer leave their tracks in the snow. Only a small percentage of deaths on Mount Everest occur on the ascent; it is in their attempts to find their way back to the living that most climbers have succumbed. When you ski the Alps, it is never about going up, which is someone else's mechanized concern; getting back down is when your skills and a bit of luck will see you through.
My way down from Corvatsch is conventional: a pair of parabolic skis, rented to me with unceremonious care and a hat-tipping respect for my personal safety. I do own my ski clothes _ bought over time at Bogner shops across Central Europe. That includes the branch in town, where the woman who sold me my favorite down jacket six years before has just replaced the lost signature "B" clasp of one of the zippers with a pair of needle-nose pliers. She has used a different color clasp and put it on backwards, apparently knowing she did and pleased with the results just the same. That makes it all the more enjoyable for me. It is a mistake to imagine, in a rugged place made glamorous, that quality is about perfection.
Problems at work, problems with love, unexpected problems such as the delivery van that backed into me the day before on a pedestrian path: you recognize, when you are skiing, the moment you lapse into letting your troubles bother you. That is when you lose focus and you fall. Skiing is pleasurable because it forces you to concentrate with the right side of the brain, to free yourself from language, to see and to feel rather than to think. You empty your mind of words and you take in space and movement, position and balance. When you traverse down, in control, you lose your consciousness to the mountain. There are no tricks, no deviations. You can only go where the mountain wills for you to have a chance of succeeding.
