Much of the early action takes place around Lake Geneva, the haunt of the troubled scientist Victor Frankenstein. After fashioning his hideous monster abroad and then fleeing from it in horror, he returns home to Geneva to find that his creation has preceded him there and murdered his younger brother. Distraught, Frankenstein takes to the mountains—and this is significant—to find solace. Of Shelley’s many prose passages devoted to the sublimity of the scientist’s surroundings, one in particular stands out as a sort of manifesto for mountain lovers. The narrator is Victor Frankenstein:
The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy wall of the glacier overhung me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial Nature was broken only by the brawling waves, or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the avalanche, or the cracking reverberated along the mountains of the accumulated ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands. These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling; and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillised it…. I retired to rest at night; my slumbers, as it were, waited on and ministered to by the assemblance of grand shapes which I had contemplated during the day. They congregated round me; the unstained snowy mountain-top, the glittering pinnacle, the pine woods, and ragged bare ravine; the eagle, soaring amidst the clouds—they all gathered round me and bade me be at peace.
Mary Shelley was all of eighteen years old when she wrote those lines. She, along with her times, had come a long way from Goethe’s “zig-zags and irritating silhouettes and shapeless piles of granite.” Frankenstein, although published to mixed reviews, instantly garnered popular success and is now regarded as a pioneering work of Gothic and Romantic literature, as well as an avatar of the science-fiction genre.
I double back from Chillon to take in one last sight in Montreux. The town is dotted with grand old hotels and art boutiques selling all manner of bric-a-brac. I head toward the floral lakeside promenade, through a semipedestrian district, until at last I reach a dead end. An elderly cop is perched on a stool there, indicating that I must turn into an indoor parking lot. I frown and wave him over.
“I just want to take a picture of Freddie,” I plead.
He considers a moment—his job is obviously to prevent people like me from littering the waterfront with automobiles—then notices my muscle car.
Sensing a weakness, I say, “It’s a limited edition.”
He nods and I spring from the car, leaving him to look at it.
In a few steps, I have rounded a corner and confronted the glowering wall of the Alps across the lake once again. I have company. A ten-foot-tall statue of Freddie Mercury, the Tanzanian lead singer of Queen, looks out over the same view. He is no Sisi, disdaining the mountains.
Mercury lived for many years in Montreux and recorded his last album, Made in Heaven, here. I study the monument. Freddie’s left hand grips a mike, while his right forms a fist, pointing skyward defiantly.
I look out at the view, then at the statue. The Alps, then Freddie, then back at the Alps.
It could be the heat, but I have the distinct impression that the singer is egging me on, telling me not to be such a wuss.
I return to the car and bid farewell to the Swiss cop. It is time to drive into the mountains.
2. MONT BLANC
LA ROUTE DES GRANDES ALPES (Great Alpine Road) was traced out in the 1930s. It leaves Thonon-les-Bains, a town on the south shore of Lake Geneva, and winds up and down and up and down southward seven hundred kilometers or so until reaching the Mediterranean resort town of Menton, crossing sixteen passes, including all the tallest ones of the French Alps. It is one of the world’s great drives. I shall be traveling only a portion of it, in the Savoy region, but the passes promise to be very, very high.
Mont Blanc is the destination of this stage of my journey. There is no way it can be ignored, not even from distant Geneva. In some ways, its mammoth white dome announces the disruptive vocation of the Alps, appearing insurmountable, blocking the path for the wayfarer. Mont Blanc and its mountainous siblings merit inspection for the role they have played in human history, creating divisions and fostering differences. I look forward to exploring the sights and sounds of the Alps.
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 ça, madame?” “Et ça 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-Diabl
e (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.
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.
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.
The Alps Page 3