The mountain watches
Mark Palmer
Half the point of skiing, I always used to think, was to reinforce the notion that life is not meant to be comfortable. Enjoying yourself comes at a price. As children in the 1960s, we used to set off to catch the sleeper on the way to the Alps for our annual holiday abroad (summers were spent in Scotland) wearing leather ski boots tied so tightly that the blood must have stopped somewhere just above the ankles.
‘You need to wear them in and make sure they mould to your feet,’ my mother would tell us in response to the mildest of complaints from my brother and me. ‘And, anyway, it’s much lighter wearing them than carrying them all that way.’ And even lighter to rent boots in the resort, but perhaps it wasn’t possible in those days. More to the point, I imagine my parents didn’t trust the Swiss to produce proper boots — after all, what did they know about winter sports? So for almost 24 hours — from Reading to Paddington and Victoria to Zurich and then on to Zermatt on a rickety train that wound its way higher and higher into the mountains — we wore our boots and looked forward to our hols. It wasn’t painful. It was torture.
‘Isn’t it lovely?’ said my mother as we arrived in the bustling little town and got our first sighting of the Matterhorn. Even as a 10-year-old I appreciated the imperial power of this extraordinary mountain, but I came to associate it with suffering in silence. Each morning we would set off from our hotel to make the 20-minute trek to the lifts leading to the Schwarzsee ski area. Cars weren’t allowed in Zermatt, so you either walked or hired a horse and cart — and the latter was out of the question. Our skis were heavy; our boots had failed to mould to our feet and still felt like chunks of concrete and, because it was early January, it was cold. Meanwhile, my mother’s dodgy knee meant that she didn’t ski — so she got to wear sensible shoes and would come up to meet us for lunch once the morning rush hour at the cable car had subsided.
For us skiers, arriving at Trockener Steg was a defining moment, our happiness determined entirely by the length of the queue waiting for the T-bar. Often it stretched for 30 yards and required battling to the front, especially when the Germans were in town. The Matterhorn just stood there watching.
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