The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond(9)

My hysteria was not misplaced, I think, while driving through the streets of Morzine. In the nineteenth century, the heyday of hysteria, with Blessed Virgin sightings by real virgins so numerous as to amount almost to a coming-of-age ritual for girls, Morzine stood out for its demonic decade and a half of possessed maidens. Ten-year-old “Peronne T.” kicked off the craze in 1857, her convulsions and gibberish aimed at the local priest to be imitated and outdone by dozens of local girls in subsequent years. The then-remote village became something of a tourist attraction—the spectacle of young women pleasuring themselves on altars and in chapels apparently a sight not be missed. On one occasion, a bishop invited in to calm the flock was surrounded by more than fifty hysterics doing their obscene best to let him know that he was not welcome. In many ways, Morzine was the anti-Lourdes—Bernadette Soubirous had her visions in the shadow of the Pyrenees in 1858, the year after Peronne’s—for the afflicted Alpine townswomen turned their ire on the Church. There is no sacred grotto in Morzine, no pilgrimage church attracting hundreds of thousands, no nearby airport capable of handling the biggest of jumbo jets—only a very large skeleton in its closet. The phenomenon disappeared in 1873, as mysteriously as it had appeared.

The only other skeleton connected to the town concerns the misfortunes of hometown hero Jean Vuarnet, the skier-turned-entrepreneur whose shades have adorned, among others, the Dude in The Big Lebowski, skier Bode Miller, Jake Gyllenhaal in Everest, and Daniel Craig as James Bond in SPECTRE. Vuarnet’s nonbusiness experiences, sadly, proved considerably darker. Sometime in the early 1990s, his wife, Edith (née Bonlieu), another ski champion, and their son, Patrick, secretly became members of the Order of the Solar Temple, a lunatic group of medievalist would-be world-changers based in Switzerland, France, and Quebec. The cult became notorious for its murder-suicide pacts: From 1994 to 1997, seventy-four of its members met their deaths in the three places where it was active. At the winter solstice of 1995, Vuarnet’s wife and son died along with fourteen others at a remote campsite in the Alps near Grenoble, the bodies laid out in a star formation on the ground. Vuarnet maintained in the years following that his loved ones were murdered, but uncertainty still hangs over what exactly happened.

The glorious day has turned gray, at least in my mind’s eye, and I have no one to blame but myself. Fortunately, the road from Morzine to another ski resort, Les Gets, distracts me from my thoughts by presenting the challenge of negotiating hairpin turns. I get lucky with the first few, though I know there will be hundreds more to humiliate me in the months ahead. As with many things, French and English disagree completely on nomenclature. In this instance, we go for the head, as in hairpin, whereas the French go for the foot, calling them lacets, as in shoelaces. Whatever the name—“switchback” is another—I find that taking a right turn is preferable to taking a left one on these downshift-upshift Alpine treats.

However they’re characterized, everyone agrees that building hairpins is considerably cheaper than drilling tunnels, hence their ubiquity in mountainous terrain. When a slope is too steep to take directly up and down, it is necessary to wind one’s way to the top and bottom, making these 180-degree inducements to whiplash a necessity. They slow traffic, which is a good thing, given the cliff-hanging nature of the roadways, and they are extremely dangerous, which is not so good. Losing control of the car is always a distinct possibility, especially if the driver has been riding the brakes on a downhill stretch, always the most perilous stage of crossing a pass. Hairpins separate the good drivers from the bad and constitute the most irrefutable argument for the advantages of manual over automatic transmission.

Given the way valleys close off and slopes rise to impede progress, the grinding zigzag is the only way to make forward progress. Alpine locals, especially in France, French-speaking Switzerland, and the Aosta Valley of Italy, made these slopes amusing by inventing an entirely imaginary animal to inhabit them. The dahu, a fictitious goatlike being, may have been inspired by a real creature, the chamois, a small horned antelope once a very common sight in the mountains. The dahu differs from the chamois in one notable respect: The legs on one side of its body are shorter than those on the other. This allows for it to stand laterally on steep slopes and move comfortably around a mountain, albeit only in one direction. A dahu with shorter left legs, laevogyrus dahu (or dahu senestrus, according to which scholar you consult), goes counterclockwise around the mountain; one with shorter right ones, dextrogyre dahu (or dahu desterus), clockwise. Perhaps still sore at being called crétins des Alpes by lowlanders, the Savoyards, in the early days of mass tourism, would sometimes take gullible visitors on dahu hunts. These entailed all-night vigils out in the open, where the would-be trophy hunter had to crouch and hide so as not to be seen by the sharp-eyed dahu.

Of course, the locals would not tell the visitors that the easiest way to capture a dahu does not involve such dedication. It requires two hunters: one with stealth, the other with a bag. The stealthy hunter has only to sneak up on a dahu while his partner remains down at the bottom of the slope holding the bag open. When the quiet hunter gets close to the animal’s rear, he should clap loudly, startling the dahu and causing it to turn around suddenly—and thereby lose its balance. It then rolls down the slope into the waiting bag below.

Every schoolchild in the French-speaking Alps knows that this is the way to capture a dahu. When I asked at three different bookstores in France for works on the dahu, I was led by the salesperson, unsmiling and professional, to a shelf devoted to the animal, usually in the children’s section. There I perused picture books tracing the dahu as far back as Cro-Magnon times. The dahu was depicted at Lascaux, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in Renaissance paintings. But, alas, la chasse au dahu—the dahu hunt—is a thing of the past. Nowadays, with most tourists hip to the hoax, the dahu is—quite literally—a standing joke.