Pilatus Kulm
by Joe Palmer
[ places - april 02 ]
Finally we found her. Aunt Ernestine Davis was curled up in a plastic chair at the new Leonardo da Vinci Fiumicino Airport asking passersby how to spell "toilet" in Italian. She was hungry too, hadn't eaten since leaving Indianapolis the morning before, was too frightened to eat on the airplane, her first time, and her first trip away from home, the farm where she lived with Uncle Silas, and nursed at the hospital and raised kids. She was breathless too.
We had waited most of the day for her at the wrong airport, Ciampino, the old airport where we had arrived the day before. We had all gathered there in Italy in 1967 to see the sights before going on to Switzerland - Jane and I and the four little boys, her parents Lowell and Elsie Muehler, and his sister Aunt Ernie.
Aunt Ernie found the espresso coffee in Rome vile, and the Somalis haunting the YMCA where we were staying, with their cold, black, beautiful faces, frightening. The sweets were too sweet, the food sauced in ways never tasted in Indiana. A cold artichoke in olive oil, a piece of smelly cheese, and a crust of hard bread did not a meal make. Of course, to those of us who had spent much of a year out on the savannah in East Africa on a dusty camel track, we were in pig heaven. Fresh food, not canned, dried, salted, pickled, or dripping blood; food from farms with vegetable gardens, chickens and pigs; food not from a commissary or a CARE package: these were all around us in Italy; rest and recreation, indeed.
Amid the general discomfort and personal euphoria, we took the bus tour to Pompeii, and looked around the ruins. There a tour guide took the grown men off to one side to see for their edification a vulgar mosaic, a representation of a man with a huge phallus that was kept hidden behind shutters. When the guide opened them to show us, Lowell exclaimed "Gee Whiz!"
We crossed Switzerland by train at night, hardly a memorable trip, except for my accidentally shutting baby John up in a folding berth. He yelled until we found him. Sleeping on a train is no way to see mountains, so as soon as we settled in at our hotel in Zurich, I booked a bus tour to Lucerne so that we could climb Mount Pilatus and look out at much of the Bernese Oberland to the south.
I'd been quite relieved to find the Alkoholesfrei Kurhaus in Frommer's Europe on $5 a Day, a place where we could park the relatives in relative comfort, without their having to do anything un-American, like drinking a glass of wine, eating an onion, or (Heaven forbid) a clove of garlic, or taking a nap after lunch, all violations of the Wonder Bread/Velveeta cheese diet and practices that simplicity and purity demanded. The Muehlers had had no experience with people not of their social class, and especially not of foreigners, and further, Lowell had a manic aversion to alcohol. Once he had poured a Christmas gift of a fifth of good whiskey down the drain, so as to do good. A second-generation German, his vestigial Dutchiness included his painting a decorative row of swastikas around the kitchen table in 1934, and an inability to look anyone in the eye. His wife Elsie Addis had reduced the practice of cooking to a default position of boilage, which she seldom ventured beyond.
At the Alkoholesfrei Kurhaus, a sanitarium for boozy ladies who were being dried out, we were assured that there would be no drinking of alcohol. They also prohibited tasty or spicy food, lest one thing lead to another.
In the evenings, in desperation, I would soon take a trolley down the hill to the Burgstrasse and there on the sidewalk eat sausages with hot mustard, standing on a corner waving a plastic cup full of lager at the whores in their white boots, like the dissolute epicure I had become living in the Somali desert.
The menu at the Kurhaus was purposely restorative, of course. There was plenty of milk and butter and cream and cheese and eggs, and more milk. The boys had not had fresh milk for eight months, since we had arrived in Somalia. Now they were spawning salmon in a river of cow sweat, crackers floating in oyster stew, Milk-duds.
In Somalia, the milk is either camel's milk that has been allowed to go sour in the desert heat, or cow's milk that is squeezed out into woven baskets that have been cured over open fires to make them watertight, whose smoke permeates the milk. The Somali do not use jugs or pails; there is nothing there to make them from. The few rangy cows the local women milked gave thin milk that tasted like an old campfire that someone had pissed on.
Camel's milk is kept in raffia bags hung on the sides of the nomads' camels, the beasts it came from in the morning, and it is kept there all day long so that it turns properly sour in time for the evening meal. That way the Somali can digest it. They are lactose-intolerant people; if they ingest fresh milk they vomit and have diarrhea. Camel shit is green. So is the milk.
So the Milchfrei Katzenjammer Kids in the Alkoholesfrei Kurhaus had echte Milch from Milchkühe in Milchkannen.
The best thing the Kurhaus had was plenty of fattening drinks to replace the customary libations of the evaporating ladies who went there to restore their livers.
It was a paradise of hot chocolate and milkshakes.
The first evening, we adults went to the opera to hear Carmen. After the first act, Elsie accompanied Jane to the restroom where she vomited. Elsie tipped the attendant woman with an American nickel coin. The woman shook her head in amusement and gave the coin back to her.
That night baby John vomited in his featherbed.
The tour guide and bus driver Hans Schweizer picked us up at the Kurhaus, and those who had not recently vomited boarded the bus to see the sights of Switzerland. Hans was an earnest sort, neatly dressed in a suede jacket and wearing a little cap with his badge of authority. He was a licensed tour guide who charmed his customers, seating the ladies as they wished and joshing with the children. We motored across valleys on our way to the city of Lucerne above whose lake stands Mount Pilatus.
Hans had taken an instant liking to son Christian, then five years old. Or perhaps Hans's sixth sense told him to watch out. Hans told Chris to stand immediately behind the driver's seat, his arms around Hans, watching the cows and fields pass by. Suddenly the chocolate milk from breakfast spewed all over Hans's back. He stopped the bus on the roadside, and went into a nearby farmhouse. Soon Hans with two women bearing mops and pails approached. They cleaned up the bus and tried to get the effluvium off Hans' new jacket. I gave him a five dollar bill to have it cleaned and apologized. He no longer was smiling.
Pilatus is a towering fortress with two hotels at the peak, Pilatus Kulm, seven thousand feet high. It is reached by cog railway and by an aerial tramway, a téléphérique, suspended over the void on huge cables that are pulled up and down the mountain.
We all eagerly crowded into the gondola, except for Aunt Ernie, who still had to be cajoled even when it was explained to her that the only other way to go up the mountain was by hotel taxi at an exorbitant price. The doors were locked tight and we drifted up into and through the clouds. Blackbirds and kites flew by the windows of the gondola. We could see for miles, silently looking for passing angels. And then Aunt Ernie fainted. Another passenger tapped on my shoulder and pointed to Ernie slumped in the corner, apparently asleep with a smile on her face. I grabbed Hans by the sodden jacket and we laid Ernie out flat on the floor as the other passengers made way. When we reached the top, Hans fetched the porters from the hotel with a stretcher, carried Ernie to the Red Cross station, called a hotel doctor, and revived her. A hotel taxi took her back to the bus stand at the bottom. We enjoyed a drink at the top and the exhilarating ride down the mountain on the suspended tramcar.
On the way back to Zurich, we stopped to rest at a park beside the Zugersee and to watch the hundreds of swans swimming there. After we had filed off the bus, I saw Hans walk over towards a bunch of his cronies, other bus drivers who had discharged their passengers, and were having a smoke.
One of them said "Wie geht's, Hans?"
Shaking his head in self-pity, Hans slowly said, with emphatic pauses:
"Erst der Knabe... Und dann... die alte Frau!"
