The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond(10)

INEXPLICABLY, the traffic slows to a snail’s space. We are near no big city, or even a small town, yet here we are, crawling up hairpins. I look up the slope for an explanation. There he is, leading the procession: the Dutch camper. The scourge of European roads during the hot months, the Dutch camper especially prefers taking his crawling motorcade of like-minded fellows with yellow license plates into the Alps. All who drive southward in the summer know the camper and his much-feared rules of the road: (1) No matter whether the road be straight and flat, always drive at 40 kilometers an hour in an 80 kilometers-an-hour speed zone. If the speed limit is lower or higher, do the math (i.e., divide by two) to determine your Dutch camper speed; (2) Never, ever pull off the road for a minute or two to allow the backlog of normal drivers to overtake you and continue their journey with lowered blood pressure. In fact, those other drivers do not exist, because you do not see them.

He is everywhere. Perhaps the camper’s ubiquity stems from some well-meaning but disastrous directive dreamed up by the Eurocrats of Brussels. Or perhaps he favors the hardest places to drive—the Alps and the Pyrenees—for the novelty of their non-flatness, so unlike the vertical-free monotony of his homeland. He also seems to travel roads with as many blind curves and as few places to pass as possible—thus, to induce foaming at the mouth in other drivers requires little effort.

To me, it is his obliviousness that mystifies most. The Dutch, to be fair, are the tallest people in the world, and a head floating high in the air often cannot notice the goings-on of us little ones far below. Yet sitting in a car eliminates that height advantage. At the steering wheel, we are all groundlings, but this demotion seems not to faze the Dutch camper. Regardless of how many dozens of cars trail behind in fury, in his mind he and his fellow campers are always all alone, or in convoy, traveling at jogging speed on an empty road leading through a countryside devoid of humanity.

I sigh and realize that I must play along. I open the windows. Cowbells. Somewhere, out on the high meadows, herds of dahu-like animals cling to the slope and graze in peace, their milk (and that of their fellow herbivores elsewhere in the Alps) rendering such delicious cheeses as Gruyère, Comté, Appenzeller, Beaufort, and Emmentaler. These cows, sheep, and goats travel in their grazing habits—down at the bottom of the slopes in the spring, then moving to the upper mountain meadows, in a husbandry technique known as transhumance, to munch on the altogether different flora at higher elevations. This variety of fare leads to a richness in their cheese—sometimes nutty, sometimes fruity, spicy, floral, or buttery. The hard cheese produced is perfect for melting in fondues and raclettes. Among cheese lovers, the Alps constitute the promised land. It is perhaps fitting, then, that these cheese-producing upland meadows—alps or alpages, as they are known locally—gave the surrounding mountains their name.

A sign appears: DéVIATION. First the Dutch, now the detour. I grumble and turn the wheel. The slow pace of the detoured traffic has lessened my resentment toward the Dutch camper ahead. The secondary road is very narrow, and the climb is steep, so speeding is not an option. As every now and again my rearview mirror kisses a mirror of an oncoming car, I think back to where I live, a small city in New England. There, the drivers are so clueless when gauging the width of their own cars that a street with cars parked on both sides, but with enough room for two cars to pass each other, is a theater of panic, or, worse still, of road-hogging acceleration right down the middle of the street. I’ve often wished I could transport those drivers to teeny European roads, just to watch their heads explode. But you should be careful what you wish for—although we southbound cars of the ascent have the slope to our right and don’t have to worry about being bumped over the cliff, the scene to our left has become aeronautic. We are far, far above the valley floor.

Unbelievably, there is a fork in the road. Arrows point in each direction. One reads DéVIATION V.L.; the other, DéVIATION P.L. Although fluent in the language, I am not French and thus do not possess a passion for acronyms. SDF? A homeless person (sans domicile fixe). TTC? Taxes included (toutes taxes comprises). IVG? Abortion (interruption volontaire de grossesse). HLM? Project/Council housing (habitation à loyer modéré). And on and on and on. Reading an acronym-rich French newspaper requires the mind of an Alan Turing, the man who cracked the Enigma code. I brake to contemplate my choice: do I want the VL Detour to the left, or the PL Detour to the right? And what the hell do they mean? Veronica Lake? Peter Lorre? The honk of a horn concentrates my mind and I choose Veronica Lake. There will be no turning back, as there is absolutely nowhere to turn around.

We start the descent. The green pastures deep in the distant valley seem to rock and sway. The road narrows even more. The hairpin turns are now adorned with road signs showing an old-fashioned Klaxon, of the type that blasts “ah-oo-ga.” Apparently, we are supposed to honk our horns and hope for the best. This does not inspire confidence.

At a hamlet that is really no more than a woodlot, I turn a corner around some logs and come face to face with a Jaguar bearing plates from the Swiss canton of Neuchatel. We cannot get past each other. The Suissesse at the wheel smiles angelically and spreads her tanned arms in a gesture of helplessness. Since she has the right of way as the person going uphill, I hit the hazard lights, put the stick in reverse, and gingerly back up around the woodpile. The guy behind me understands and does likewise. Eventually, there is a break in the oncoming line of traffic and we leave the chokehold hamlet behind us. I wonder if the Peter Lorre Detour held a similar trap.