The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond(8)
Once my hearing returns.
I have just come from a bakery in Thonon-les-Bains, where a French form of speech, the shopkeeper budgerigar, deafened me. This vocal tic occurs in all retail businesses in France. A French saleswoman is expected to talk to her customers in a pitch an octave or two higher than her normal speaking voice. If these customers are female, they then respond in kind. The budgerigar gave a glass-shattering performance at the bakery.
The small shop was crowded with about half a dozen women customers, a stout boulangère, and her willowy assistants. Upon crossing the threshold, I was assaulted by what could pass for the soundtrack of Picasso’s Guernica. It was as if I had somehow stuck my head into a particularly solicitous jet engine. “Et avec ?a, madame?” “Et ?a sera tout, madame?” “Merci, madame. Passez une bonne journée!” By the time my turn came and I asked for my take-out ham-and-Gruyère sandwich, I was so stunned I could barely catch the polite shriek of reply.
Still, it turns out to be a delicious sandwich. I sit on a very long park bench savoring it—and appreciating the view, as the park is situated on a height overlooking the lake. Opposite, in the distance, I can see Lausanne and the terraced UNESCO vineyards of Lavaux. Beyond them rise the low brown peaks of the Jura, a chain of well-behaved mountains, like the Laurentians of my childhood in Canada. I believe these are what mountains should be, undulations giving visual variety to the horizon, not the horrorshow heights of the Alps hovering at my back. Thonon-les-Bains, I had thought, would be a sort of B-list spa when compared to its famous neighbor, Evian-les-Bains, but its charms are fully on display this morning, and I like it. Mercifully, the ringing in my ears has subsided, and I close my eyes in contentment.
A camera-toting elderly couple in T-shirts and shorts stop to admire the view. The man walks over in my direction and offers a jolly “Bon appétit!” At this, he steps up onto the bench and aims his lens at the lake. The bench is very long, about thirty feet or so, yet the man stands so close to me that I can see the follicles of his leg hair. There is, it should be added, no tree or structure obstructing the view from anywhere on the bench, yet there he stands, the threat of leg dandruff landing in my sandwich looming large. I scoot over a couple of butt-widths and resume chewing.
He looks down at me in surprise—or is it disapproval?
I think of the nation the French most like to ridicule. I can’t help myself.
“What, are you Belgian?” I ask.
His wife laughs; he does not.
I get up and go to my car. The vehicle’s GPS system features another French female speaking style as common as the budgerigar: the whispering model. I put up with her on my first days around Lake Geneva, but I decide I don’t want to be bossed around the Alps by a voice sounding like Carla Bruni’s. I switch off the device.
Irritation soon gives way to exhilaration. As I head down the Great Alpine Road, I am driving into a heart of green, as tall forested slopes stretch thousands of meters in the air on both sides of the roadway. It’s as if the International Style skyscrapers of Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan were smothered in ivy—and if Sixth Avenue had a riotous, roaring stream thundering down its middle. At times, the lush foliage obscures the view; at others, especially at bends in the road, a staggering perspective of gigantism assaults the eye. At one point, I behold in wonder what I had not thought possible: a sugarloaf peak that, contrary to its siblings the world over, conjures up menace rather than marvel.
I pull over at a touristy shop advertising a nearby attraction: Les Gorges du Pont-du-Diable (The Gorges of Devil’s Bridge). I know there are a lot of Devil gorges, bridges, tunnels, peaks, forests, lakes, ridges, and whatnot in this part of the world, but this one well earns its name. A metal and wooden gangplank, with blissfully sturdy handrails, snakes above the angry River Dranse de Morzine, which has carved a deep gash in the scarified limestone. I tread carefully, eyes fixed forward on a maddeningly fearless gay couple, who pause to snap photos of themselves leaning over the void. When these guys stop, I stop. When they move on, I move on. It’s not that I’m afraid of heights, I just like to watch people in love.
Back in the cozy cocoon of the car, my journey southward leads out of the trees and into grassier slopes punctuated with brutal chevrons of exposed rock. A traffic circle indicates that the town of Morzine has been reached. For the ski world, Morzine is famed for its high-altitude sister resort, Avoriaz, a car-free creation of jet-set entrepreneurs in the 1960s, led by an Olympic ski champion, Jean Vuarnet, who also lent his name to the must-have designer sunglasses. I smile as I pass Morzine, for Avoriaz holds two old memories for me. One, of being in an après-ski bar with a GI on leave who kept bewildering me by his mention of “Alvarez”—until I realized that was how he pronounced “Avoriaz.” The other was not my finest moment. At the time, I was married to a young woman who was an expert skier. We spent the day apart in Avoriaz—I, on the baby slopes; she, on the triple black diamonds. We met at the end of the afternoon and decided to ski together, foolish newlyweds that we were. I paid no attention as she led me to ski lifts, leading to other ski lifts—after all, I was in affectionate hands. When we finally turned our skis to the slope, I found myself looking down a cliff. There were so many moguls that descending it would be like skiing down the vertebrae of my GI pal standing at attention. I was furious. And, I’m sorry to say, I lost it. A stream of swearing at the universe at large befouled the clear Alpine air as my bride looked on, appalled at this display of cowardly distemper. When I had finished, she informed me that there was only one way to get off the mountain. Then she turned on her skis and vanished downhill.