A day to remember

Prologue

My original reason for coming to Switzerland was to climb Mt. Blanc and paraglide from the top with a handful of pilots from the Wings of Kilimanjaro expedition that took place last February. During my planning, I found out my college friend Whitney would be WWOOFing around Switzerland at the same time. After buying my tickets, the Mt. Blanc expedition fell through, so I decided to join up with Whitney and make a casual pack-and-fly trip of it. 

One of my favorite new friends from WOK was Phil Glutz, an Aussie now living in Zermatt, Switzerland to run a paragliding operation. 

After the porter mutiny and weather disaster on Kili, I had tried to pull together a low-budget, DIY para-safari in Tanzania with a choice few of the great people I'd met there, hoping to get in a little more flying and African adventure before heading back to our respective countries. Organizing anything in Africa is not easy, let alone on a budget. But Phil was the guy who pulled out his GPS and laptop before I knew it and set right to work helping us geo-tag potential flying sites to hunt down in our Land Cruisers over the next few memorable days. I was so impressed by his energetic, positive attitude, I eagerly looked forward to the day our paths would cross again. So Zermatt was the first place I headed after arriving in Switzerland.

Whitney tried to meet me in Lausanne so we could head up together, but she missed the train by a matter of seconds and had to take a later one. While I was waiting for her to arrive, I walked out of the train station into the tiny village square knowing basically nothing about Zermatt. Clouds trailed from the lee side of the Matterhorn, and the air smelled fresh and sweet.

Nearly adjacent to the train station I found the tiny paraglider shop, which emanated a distinct surfer vibe, sporting bamboo trim and populated by scruffy guys in their 30s and 40s chilling on the couch or fiddling with flying gear. A guy named Ronnie pulled out a map of the town and a blue pen and scribbled out for me the flying pattern, landing zone, and no-fly zone where choppers often fly. 

I thanked him and headed across the tracks to the LZ, a tight grassy spot wedged against the steep valley wall and practically on top of the train station. Before long Phil and a couple other pilots came spiraling down out of the sky and settled gingerly on the short grass. We exchanged a hearty hug, and he welcomed me to Switzerland.

The next two days I logged perhaps the most incredible flights of my life, soaring with Phil and the birds, just walking distance from the Matterhorn (videos to come).

Yesterday, though, was one of those stranger-than-fiction stories I can hardly describe with words.

The Villa

Friday night Phil, Whitney, and I headed to a local hangout with really good live music. Phil, who plays alto sax, said he had played with the drummer of the band we were listening to. 

"He tours with some really big names," Phil said. "A lot of famous artists play here because nobody recognizes them."

A wild-bearded guy came and had an enthusiastic chat with Phil that I couldn't hear, then leaned over to me and shouted over the music with a grin, "Whatever he asks you, just say yes!"

"Yes!" I shouted back to Phil. He smiled and explained, "I've got this friend Vince who's restoring an old villa over in Italy. He's a crazy guy. It's sort of a hippie commune, and there's a music festival going on in the town right now. I'd have to come back early the next morning to fly, but we could go over tomorrow evening and check it out."

While hippie villas aren't the first thing I go looking for when traveling, I smelled a really good story, one way or the other.

The amazing day began with Whitney and me hiking to the foot of the Matterhorn in the morning. We climbed to nearly 10,000 feet just to stare up in disbelief at it's otherworldly cliffs and sculpted point gouging the blue alpine sky above us. A glider swirled up a thermal against the horn, and a helicopter came to hover near enough to the summit to blast billowing clouds of snow down the cliffs. I kept reminding myself I was there, and it was all real.

We had just enough time after arriving back at Phil's top-floor apartment to grab our sleeping bags and head out the door. Phil grabbed his sax too. He'd never been to the villa during the music festival, but like a true musician, he was ready for anything.

We drove to a train, paid a toll, and then drove onto the train, which we rode like a ferry for 20 minutes through a tunnel in the dark bowels of the Alps into Italy. 

We emerged from the tunnel into a canyon punctuated by ancient, roofless ruins growing vines like flower boxes. As we entered the city, peeling paint clung to the scruffy stone buildings, and young punks in tight jeans smoked cigarettes leaning against their street bikes. The graffiti, which would have been obscene in Switzerland, seemed to belong there as much as the tall clock towers ticking away their fourth or fifth centuries. 

Twilight settled as we climbed a winding mountain road to a dirt road, to a grassy footpath that wound along the edge of a small, wild-looking hillside vineyard. There the enchanted white villa stood, tucked back into the trees like the other ruins we'd seen, but alive with an exciting rustic charm. 

Vince, Phil told us, crushed his own grapes there and made his own wine. He'd been "hired" to restore the villa for an absentee landlord, but Phil said it was probably more something done out of charity for Vince than for investment.

A lithe border collie bounded to meet us, and half a dozen guys milled around in the half-light by the giant, metal-studded wooden doors. They all began shaking our hands with happy Italian gusto, though accents and languages spoken spanned the globe. An older, wrinkled man stood shirtless in the evening cool with a long gold chain hanging from his neck. A very young guy with a strong Italian accent shook my hand and translated for the older man. 

Vince was a short character, with super curly hair and leathery hands that flew about with energy. Luna, the border collie followed us into the villa for a tour. Phil led the way with a headlamp since there was no electricity. 

It felt like a glorious museum someone had moved into--an odd mixture of architectural opulence wrapped around humble means but warmed by thriving creative energy. Someone told me Vince could hardly read and write, but nobody could do what he could do with wood. The floors and ceilings were newly restored, but still felt centuries old. We climbed the stone stairs to find rooms furnished with large cabinets and even wooden sculptures. My inner photographer screamed that I was experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but my camera was locked away back in the car, and the light was of that sparseness that scorns cameras and sets fire to the imagination. 

Vince took a candle and took us all down another stone staircase, beneath the earth to the cellar. He hung it from an iron ring on the wall to flood an arched alcove with sepia glow, then opened another pair of wooden doors to reveal an even smaller room with a gravel floor. The other guys crowded in and seated themselves on derelict wine barrels next to a photograph of Vince's 13-year-old daughter Olivia. 

"This is my club!" Vince proclaimed with satisfaction. Soon guitars, drums, and cigarettes were being passed around, along with a cracked ceramic bowl that Vince repeatedly filled with his homemade wine. It tasted delicious and totally uncouth, a perfect liquid leitmotif of the house he was nursing back to life.

Luna lay at our feet while songs echoed off the walls and flooded the smoky cavern like the candlelight. After a long time of singing and playing, they decided to start the night and head to the festival. 

The Shaman

We ambled through the forest in a trail of lights toward a cacophony of much louder music. Those of us there for the first time were surprised to discover a huge festival going on, complete with tent city, generators, and three separate stages. 

Another one of our companions told us that Vince was the mascot of the music festival, which was called "Il Clan dello Sciamano" (The Clan of the Shaman). He would dress up and dance around with a big, crazy bow and arrow. 

We joined the hundreds of people crowding around the main stage to hear an African band singing in Italian and playing totally unrecognizable instruments with admirable virtuosity. 

I'll admit that shaman clans are not exactly my usual scene, as much as I love music, but there's something really wonderful about being able to fling oneself so far out of the normal and predictable that it's almost like walking on another planet. Hours before, I wasn't even planning on being in that county, let alone crashing a music fest with everyone's favorite shaman.

My favorite moment of the night came in the wee hours of the morning down at the "jam" stage, a little hut in the trees next to a campfire where musicians passed the mic around and handled their own sound board. 

We stood listening to a long, minor-key reggae jam between some pretty talented musicians. One of our group had tipped them off that there was a sax player in the crowd, and they began urging him up to the stage, still weaving out their mellow groove. After some prodding, Phil finally succumbed and took his sax up to the mic. The whole place came to new life when he crooned out the first few notes.  He danced in and out of the rhythm and fanned the song into something fantastic it hadn't even approached. The guitar player and vocalists took interludes, but for the next 45 minutes or an hour Phil's sax carried the mood away into a place only he could take it. 

When sleep finally hung heavily on us, we wandered back through the forest to the villa. All around us the Italian Alps jutted up into the starry sky to frame the Milky Way between layers of dark forest and white strata, and the night was warm.

Phil and I slept in a tent on top of the grassy hill next to the villa, and Whitney slept on the folded down seats of Phil's Subaru. Four hours later, we packed up and started back toward Zermatt so Phil could make his 9:00 tandem flight. I had wanted to get a good picture of the villa in the morning, but we left in the same dim half-light in which we'd arrived. I guess it will forever remain a magical memory shrouded in shadow and lit from within. 

Back in Zermatt, I walked blearily through the streets with my camping stuff into the grocery store where a woman was just pulling the bread and pastries out of the oven to put in their bakery bins. I took a hot pastry and loaf of bread and warmed my hands with them on the way back to Phil's apartment, where I hoped to get a little more sleep before starting the day. The smell of the pastry engulfed me with the same warmth and richness as my sleeping bag when I drifted off into strange and wonderful dreams.