The Alps

by Stephen O'Shea

  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 Neuchâtel. 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.

  At last we rejoin the Great Alpine Road down in the valley. The happy, verdant town of Cluses spreads before us, surrounded by towering peaks. There are several mega-chalet retirement residences under construction on the steep slopes outside the center of town, leaving one to speculate on the agility of the French elderly. As this is the spectacularly rugged region of Savoy, perhaps spryness has to last well into old age.

  A sign flashes past: MUSÉE DE L’HORLOGERIE ET DU DÉCOLLETAGE. Once again I am flummoxed. The translation in my head—Museum of Watchmaking and Plunging Necklines—seems an unlikely pairing. I contemplate turning back to investigate, but the Dutch camper has decamped somewhere, so I can now barrel down the broad road running through the valley of the River Arve. On both sides are solid walls of green, punctuated by thin, linear cascades of water, unspooling downward like strands of white lace. The effect would be far lovelier were the floor of the valley not blanketed in furniture factories and workshops.

  And a lot of signs use the word décolletage. I see EDELWEISS DÉCOLLETAGE and ARVE DÉCOLLETAGE competing for the eye in a grimy industrial district, not the type of neighborhood usually associated with a woman’s cleavage. Knowing French truck stops to be equipped with wi-fi, I pull into one to seek enlightenment.

  Aha! My cell informs me that décolletage has a double meaning in French. One conforms to our English adoption of the French word, but the other means “machining,” as in the making of precision parts for clockwork mechanisms and the like. The Arve Valley, it turns out, is teeming with machining plants, hence the museum back in Cluses.

  Finally, when I round the next bend, there it is, in all its blinding Cyclopean menace, blocking a good portion of the sky. There are eighty-two peaks in the Alps taller than four thousand meters, but this is the tallest of the lot, the monarch, standing at 4,808 meters.

  Mont Blanc.

  HORACE-BÉNÉDICT DE SAUSSURE was a man on a mission. A native of Geneva, he made pioneering studies in geology and dreamed of standing on the summit of Mont Blanc. As a Genevan, he would have been familiar with the view Sisi turns her back on: the green pre-Alps looming over the lake, and behind them, the ghostly goliath reaching for the sky. Saussure became obsessed with the mountain, sponsoring a reward for anyone with the temerity to make the ascent. In 1760 and the years that followed, flyers were regularly printed up and posted in the villages near the base of the monster, yet the locals did not take up Saussure on his offer. The great scientist from Geneva must be daft, went the reasoning, why in the world would anyone want to do such a thing?

  Local interest in the reward perked up as the first trickle of tourists came to the valley in search of the sublime. Hostelries cropped up, businesses blossomed, and the Chamouniards finally took up the vocation that they perform to the present day: mountain guides. Repeated attempts to rise to Saussure’s challenge at last began to be made in the 1780s, but it was only on 8 August 1786 that the great white beast was summited. The climbers were Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard, both locals, who performed the feat with only one overnight bivouac. Balmat was an unlettered fellow, prowling the lower slopes to hunt chamois for their hides and horns and to dig up crystals for the collections of wealthy amateur geologists. Paccard was the town doctor—not a folksy quack but a learned man who published papers in the medical journals of Turin (the Savoy region was then part of an Italian kingdom). But, as the news of the achievement spread across Europe, a funny thing happened on the way to legend.

  A writer of some talent from Geneva, Marc-Théodore Bourrit, had it in for Paccard. The animus may have been spurred when the two men unsuccessfully tried for the summit a few years earlier, the expedition having come undone thanks to Bourrit’s physical frailty. Whatever its cause, the dislike Bourrit felt for Paccard resulted in the popularization of a story, written by the polemical Genevan, that had the good doctor as a pitiful liability on the historic climb, an inept mountaineer who slowed the exploit and needed repeated rescue by the doughty Balmat. Bourrit may also have been jealous that a fellow bourgeois—Paccard—had made the climb, so he portrayed Balmat in the role of the man of the people, then the hero persona in vogue with the Romantics. The story stuck, and Balmat did little to dispel it. Whether or not the doctor ever spoke to the chamois hunter about this unfortunate fiction may have been complicated by the awkward fact that Paccard married Balma
t’s sister.

  A generation later, when a writer of genius arrived in Savoy, he met up with the then-seventy-year-old Balmat. This was in 1832, five years after Paccard’s death, so Balmat had the field to himself (his time would come two years later, when he fell off a cliff prospecting for gold). The writer, Alexandre Dumas père, lyrically amplified Balmat’s role in the historic climb, calling him “the god of the mountain” and cementing in the European imagination the story of a pathetic Paccard. The truth had to wait until the early twentieth century, after scholars unearthed diaries of eyewitnesses—a crowd had followed the pair’s ascent through their long-views—completely debunking the orthodox version of the ascent. Paccard and Balmat had spelled each other, each taking his turn leading the way upward, and the doctor had calmly conducted several scientific experiments on the summit itself. Thus was mountaineering born, in a stew of backbiting and second-guessing that flavors it still.

  Saussure finally realized his dream of summiting Mont Blanc, the year following the ascent of Balmat and Paccard. Saussure’s huge expedition, laden with numerous scientific instruments and copious amounts of booze, was immortalized in his Voyages dans les Alpes. It became the first bible of the new pastime of mountaineering.

  Women wasted no time, either, in making their mark on the mountains. First up Mont Blanc, in 1808, was a local girl, Marie Paradis, who later admitted that she had undertaken the climb on a dare, which makes her achievement all the more charming. Unlike Paccard, Paradis did indeed have to be dragged up the final few hundred meters—and by none other than Jacques Balmat. Others followed; an eccentric French noblewoman named Henriette d’Angeville caught the imagination of many for her mix of commonsense innovation (she wore trousers) and flamboyant femininity (her equipment included a compact mirror and cucumber pomade). Her account of her climb also raised eyebrows, as it fairly reeked of Eros. In the weeks before the ascent, Mont Blanc changed in her mind into a “frozen lover.” She wrote, after a rain delay: “I was late for my wedding, for my marriage … for the delicious hour when I could lie on his summit. Oh! when will it come?” But when she reached the summit, d’Angeville was a blistered wreck, in no mood for any transcendent hanky panky, but made it she had, nonetheless, impressing local guides with her pluck. Back down in the village, d’Angeville met with the pioneer female mountaineer, now an old lady whose lovely Paradis name had been changed to Marie de Mont-Blanc. Although the two women must have had absolutely nothing in common except the summit of Europe’s tallest mountain, they shared a snack.

  THE AIGUILLE DU MIDI—the Needle of the South—is one of the most celebrated outcroppings of rock in the Alps. The mountain soars to a height of 3,842 meters, on the southern slopes of the Mont Blanc range, and the summit of the Great White One can be seen from its lofty perch. Nearby stands another peak, Mont Maudit (Cursed Mount), its name an indication of the lack of affection once accorded these rocky giants by the locals.

  In 1955, a lift system was erected to facilitate travel up to the Aiguille’s thorny peak, upon which a tourism complex had been constructed. The journey is made in two stages. The first goes up to the Plan de l’Aiguille, a flattening of the slope just above the tree line. From there, visitors board a second gondola for the final ascent.

  I cannot say that I enter the far too well-windowed gondola with joy in my heart. About three dozen of us stand silently in expectation, exchanging the equivalent of nervous giggles and empty bravado in six or seven languages. Then with a whoosh we are off, at surprising speed. Almost immediately there come mewls of terror; a teenager is having a meltdown. “Nein! Nein!” his father hisses murderously, holding the boy in a viselike grip with his two large Prussian paws. But the kid is having none of it; the mewls become sobs and the tears flow.

  Uncomfortable like everyone else within earshot, I unwisely turn around to look out a window. A sea of green, the tops of countless larch trees swim beneath us. Then we traverse a support pillar and the cable car sways back and forth like a drunken pendulum. Sullen muttering greets this movement; for his part, the teenager sounds as if he has just been stabbed. Beads of sweat form on my brow. It’s not that I’m afraid of heights, I just don’t like larch trees.

  Seeking relief from any quarter, I turn to a woman I had earlier heard speaking English. I ask her if this is her first time up the mountain. “Good heavens, no!” she says. “We come up here every time we’re in Chamonix.” What follows is a nonstop soliloquy on her life, her son, her grandchildren—it’s as if she’s an electric egg-timer and I have just flicked the switch. “We’re from Oxfordshire, have you heard of that? … My son’s a carpenter, does a lot of joinery in the valley … lives in Les Contamines…. I don’t know why…. The children should come home for the schools…. Nothing like a good English education.”

  The bath of domesticity calms me, as running it perhaps calms her. I knew in advance that the English would be here in force, but I hadn’t quite realized the implications of that. And, according to my sources, they basically own the place. At an Italian pizzeria the night before, my Transylvanian waitress put the number of English proprietors of Chamonix businesses at 80 percent. Then, later, in a Mexican bar, my Swedish server trimmed that to 50 percent. And at the tourist office, a young Irishwoman cut his number by half. Whatever the true figure, they all agreed there were too many foreigners in Chamonix.

  A local author, Dominique Potard, in his comic French-language novel confusingly entitled Welcome to Chamonix, claims that the ski resort still plays host to the Hundred Years’ War. It has long been thus. By the middle of the nineteenth century, more than ten thousand British tourists visited Chamonix annually. Many of them were moved to make the difficult journey by the supremely odd success of Albert Smith, a British charlatan and showman. In the 1850s, Smith had London eating out of his hand. His Ascent of Mont Blanc, a sound-and-light extravaganza that was narrated onstage by Smith and featured unfurling slide shows, busty girls in dirndl dresses, exotic animals, and specially commissioned “Alpine” music, played for years to sold-out crowds at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. The ancestor of The Sound of Music, Smith’s strange, gaslit spectacle fired the imaginations of Victorians itchy to escape the leaden monotony of routine. But not altogether. A canny entrepreneur and committed evangelist named Thomas Cook then created the all-inclusive package tour for such would-be travelers, his promises of an English bill of fare and regular religious services scrupulously kept in the heart of the godless Continent. Starting in 1851, these Cook tourists came in droves, carried along on the new railways, their crisp guidebooks and alpenstock walking sticks clasped in expectant hands, their sights set on bagging the elusive dahu.

  The aristocratic veterans of the old Grand Tour were aghast at the sight of these newcomers. Acute class consciousness emerged from a stream of correspondence deploring the middle-class interlopers. One incensed lady, writing to her sister in 1867, was brutal about the brutes, saying that her hotel was “swarming throughout with the most alarming sort of vermin … a wretched crowd of limp beings with alpenstocks tipped with chamois horns—such as I never saw before in real life.” When the world’s first Alpine club opened in 1857, in London, its membership was pointedly reserved for gentlemen. Leslie Stephen, an intellectual mountaineer, was president of the club in the year his first wife* penned that letter about the vermin swarming their hotel. He had a similar view of them: “Although the presence of this species is very annoying, I do not think myself justified in advocating any scheme for their extirpation, such as leaving arsenic about, as is done by some intelligent colonists in parallel cases, or by tempting them into dangerous parts of the mountains. I should be perfectly satisfied if they could be confined to a few penal settlements in the less beautiful valleys.”

  Yet to ascribe all this hostility to class would be oversimplifying. The Alpine old-timers deplored the newcomers because they were newcomers. With a reflexive disdain afflicting all generations in midlife, they thought a secret place known only to a
select few had been coarsened by marauding hordes. Things used to be much better, quainter, more authentic … the plaint is voiced about every destination on the planet, by every successive generation.

  In the Alpine context, a none-too-subtle apartheid was devised to address the problems of nostalgia and class. Clever hoteliers realized that rich Britons were willing to fork over any sum to avoid their countrymen. Thus was born the pricey “palace hotel,” with its lackeys, luxuries, and private dining rooms. These last can be explained by the reluctance of the British upper crust to eat in the company of strangers. Unlike the French, whose chefs to the nobility were turfed out onto the street by the Revolution and forced to make their living by experimenting with the Parisian novelty known as the restaurant, the Downton diners still preferred the embrace of privacy for the exercise of their mandibles. About the only thing that the Cook tourists and the moneyed elite could agree on was the need for an amenity that would be Britannia’s signature contribution to Continental culture: the water closet.

  OUR AIRBORNE PLEXIGLASS PRISON arrives at the Plan de l’Aiguille, a treeless expanse of gray rock and dirty snow. The woman from Oxfordshire stops talking, the egg-timer has run its course. I feel tempted to thank her for boring me to distraction, but I fear the compliment might be misunderstood. The second stage, up and up over a white vertical, comes next. From the boarding platform I can see the tourist complex atop the Aiguille, looking toylike and far off. My heart sinks.