The Alps

by Stephen O'Shea

  Strictly speaking, the system used to carry us up to the Aiguille is known as an aerial tramway. The technology dates back all the way to 1644, when an engineer in Gdansk, Poland, constructed one to move earth over barriers for the construction of a defensive system. That tramway was powered by horses. Some two centuries would have to pass before the device became commonplace, usually in mining districts for transporting ore from higher elevations down to the mill in the valley. People finally got a lift at the turn of the twentieth century—first in Gibraltar, then in Hong Kong. As that century progressed, pylons, cables, and gondolas sprang up like weeds, especially in the Alps when the boom in winter sports came of age. Today, the Germans, Austrians, and Swiss are the experts in constructing these amazing systems.

  We get underway with a jolt, and the rock and snow scurry beneath us. Unfortunately, I have done my research on aerial tramways and know of the disasters to which they have been prey. Perhaps the most disgusting occurred in Cavalese, Italy, in 1998, when joyriding US Marine fighter pilots, flying at a lower altitude than permitted, severed a cable and caused a gondola containing twenty people to fall eighty meters to their deaths. I try to forget my reading.

  Some multicolored stick figures can be made out on the glaciers and in the gullies in the distance, a handful of the twenty-five thousand climbers who try to summit Mont Blanc annually. Sadly, at least a dozen or so have to be hauled back down to the valley in body bags every year—victims of bad weather, exhaustion, or, more likely, inexperience. I turn from the vista to look at the young man operating the gondola. Last night’s Swede in the Mexican cantina told me to watch out for these operators of the second stage of the journey. Given the repeated, punishing changes in oxygen supply, air pressure, altitude, and temperature undergone daily, they usually last only a season before going off their heads, at least temporarily. Our young cable-car guy seems normal enough to me—until I see what he is reading: a French translation of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. He is smiling broadly. This does not inspire confidence.

  Evidently, relief is not going to come from him, so I turn to the window. Bad idea. An avalanche rumbles down the slope, kicking up clouds of snow and smashing against exposed rock faces. This is not sublime, this is terrifying. Yet the thought of the old Romantic word gives me an idea: Why not test out the theory of the effect of titillation on the libido? I survey my fellow aerial cabin mates. Sure enough, those coupled off are now engaging in the preliminaries of serious primate interaction. As widened eyes stare out at the horror of Mont Blanc, hands stray, bodies press, lips nuzzle lobes, hair is stroked. I’m no longer a sightseer, I’m a voyeur. A young French couple beside me locks pouts, for a good breath or two. They then disengage and behold the rock and ice wall nearing at the end of our ascent.

  “Canada in the summertime,” he says.

  She laughs; I do not.

  HIGHLINER. Base Jump. Baselining. Extreme Sliding. Speed Riding. Paragliding. The exhibit in the Aiguille’s Espace Vertical is devoted to the death-defying variants of present-day mountaineering. These involve young people taking risks that would have horrified the athletic snobs of the British Alpine Club and caused their muttonchops to burst into flame. Tiptoeing along 2.5-centimeter-diameter rope slung between needles of rock, hanging out in hammocks suspended thousands of meters in the air, hurtling into the void with nothing but a billowing suit and a prayer, taking steep slopes headfirst, scuttling around seracs, running up and down mountains—such are the images in the Aiguille du Midi’s unsettling showroom. The fastest ascent and descent of Mont Blanc took only four hours and fifty-seven minutes, a feat achieved in 2013 by Kílian Jornet, the Catalan superhuman with many world records to his credit. I pause before the pix and the vids—and think that these extreme mountaineers and I are quite possibly from entirely different species.

  When I was last in Chamonix—a visit darkened by the news of the Challenger disaster—the complex atop the Aiguille was a fairly undistinguished affair, needing a makeover to escape the 1960s. That need has recently been met, several new attractions having opened, sightseeing terraces built, and constant renovations added to the multistory structure.

  One new attraction is a diabolical novelty called Le Pas dans le Vide (Step into the Void). Inspired by the Grand Canyon Skywalk, the feature consists of a glass cube jutting out from the uppermost section of the Aiguille’s tourist complex. As with the Skywalk, you stare down past your feet at a sheer well of emptiness. And whereas the Skywalk gives you about five hundred meters of dizziness, the drop at Chamonix is well over a kilometer.

  My inner debate about whether or not to venture into the cube is silenced when I see it occupied by a pregnant Filipina. She and the fellow I take to be the future father are jumping up and down and squealing in delight. I realize that now I have to go take a look; the only thing stronger than fear is shame. When my turn comes, I gingerly step into the cage and keep my gaze level at the panorama of spiky rock needles and battered white mountaintops, dozens and dozens as far as the eye can see. It occurs to me that the Alps form the water tower of Europe. From this sky-­touching chaos of snow and ice stretching as far east as Slovenia, several of the Continent’s great rivers—Rhine, Rhône, Po—take their source, as do scores of their tributaries. Without the glacial melt, there would be no risotto, no baguette, no schnitzel, not much of anything except the acres and acres of beets and potatoes that cover so much of northern Europe.

  Some singsong Slavic laughter interrupts my thoughts and I turn to see two Poles, to judge from the flag insignias on their fleeces, making their way down the approach corridor to the cube. They cannot walk side by side, as they appear to be vying for the title of fattest man in the European Union. My faith in structural engineering goes only so far, so I vow to be out of the cube before these two guys park the human equivalent of a pickup truck on the glass floor. Quickly, grateful for the excuse of haste, I peer down at the vista beneath my feet. Nothing. There’s nothing there, far too much of nothing. If the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, were somehow to be transported here from Dubai, I would still be well over sixty stories above its pinnacle, looking down on the puny strivings of mankind. But the Burj is definitely not here, nothing is—and I feel the familiar twinges of vertigo in my viscera. I make a quick exit.

  Once outside, all is well. The weather is beautiful, the only blizzard on the viewing deck coming from an incessant flurry of selfies. The people smiling into their phones differ from their predecessors in that those who long ago wielded a Claude Glass strove to keep themselves out of the picture. The selfie requires the opposite, which may or may not say something about our progress toward the annihilation of a world separate from our screens. Still, the cruel majesty of the panorama cannot help but stir feelings of belittlement, so perhaps the urge to self-aggrandize can be justified here. Of particular menace to the observer, aside from the ghostly height of Mont Blanc nearby, are the Grandes Jorasses, one of the six great north faces of the Alps (the others, from west to east, are Le Petit Dru, the Matterhorn, the Eiger, Piz Badile, and Cima Grande di Lavaredo). Beyond the multispiked behemoth of the Grandes Jorasses in French territory lies—or rather looms—Monte Rosa, which rises more than 4,500 meters above the plains of Piedmont. This peak, clearly visible from Turin, inspired Leonardo da Vinci briefly to take up the study of mountains.

  A thumpa-thumpa-thumpa fills the air. I look up to try to catch a glimpse of the culprit, then realize, with a start, that the sound is coming from beneath me. Leaning over the railing, I can see a helicopter some one hundred meters below, a distinctly odd sensation. Its markings identify it as a Chamonix medevac copter, charged with plucking the imperiled from the snows. I think of the avalanche and the many parties of climbers visible on the ascent in the aerial tramway. The helicopter moves at great speed, carefully giving a flock of leisurely paragliders a wide berth. Unfortunately, the sight of such racing copters is common on the mountain, at all times of year. A first responder named
Emmanuel Cauchy, a physician from the mountain rescue unit of the local hospital and an adviser on various action films (including those of James Bond), has mined his experiences to write a series of adventures about one Docteur Vertical, a character as high flying as his creator. His crime stories—smart, sexy whodunits in French—are must-reads for his large following. As of yet, though, Docteur Vertical remains a local hero.

  The pleasant giddiness from the thin air has changed into a nagging headache. Mal di montagna. Höhenkrankheit. Altitude sickness. I am one of the unlucky to experience the symptoms at non-Himalayan heights: dizziness, pins and needles, and a sense of oncoming nausea, all because of a drop in barometric pressure and a relative scarcity of oxygen. I realize that I must head back down to the valley floor.

  HAVING CAUGHT MY BREATH and cleared my head, I take a cog railway from Chamonix back up the western flank of the mountain to view its other main attraction, the Mer de Glace (Sea of Ice) glacier, France’s largest. The Mer de Glace was so christened in the mid-­eighteenth century by English travelers who astounded the locals by their eccentric outlook. One, an amateur Orientalist named Richard Pococke, fresh from journeys in the Middle East, took to dressing as an Ottoman pasha and smoking a hookah under the bemused regard of his mountain guides. Pococke’s companion, William Windham, an aristocrat given to drunken fistfights, is credited with giving the great glacier its name. Then a heaving sea of frozen ice spilling down a valley floor almost all the way to the town of Chamonix, the Mer was known for its ghastly crackles and detonations as tons of ice clashed in their slow-motion descent of the mountain. Mary Shelley, who visited in 1816, saw fit that this “most desolate place in the world,” as she termed it, should be the setting for Doctor Frankenstein’s fateful reunion with the monster he had fashioned. Mary’s soon-to-be husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, after recovering from slipping on the ice and knocking himself out cold, would write “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni” about the vista.

  The trip up the mountain to the hamlet of Montenvers takes about twenty minutes on the train. Opened in 1909, the cog railway uses a third, serrated rail in between the two conventional ones—the locomotive seizes this third rail with a specially designed undercarriage and hauls itself up grades out of the question for a normal train. There are few passengers aboard today. When we arrive, there seems to be no glacier to greet us.

  But yes there is. A slurry of gravelly pebbles is hiding a sullen glacier below. Soon it will be out of sight, around a corner, as the ice recedes forty meters every year. A promised Ice Tunnel is closed—the lift down to the moraine/glacier is out of order. Climate change is triumphing here, as it is in much of the Alps. Glaciers have been halved in size in recent decades and are not expected to survive into the next century. Their disappearance will speed warming further, as the ice reflects sunlight away from the earth. The people of the Alpine countries are worried about the future. As for tourists to the Mer de Glace, the experience is akin to visiting a seaside resort closed for good.

  I was forewarned about the tamed ice monster and have come up here to see something else—namely, a scary rock outcropping on the other side of the glacial moraine. The Drus, the big and the small, are the most terrifying mountaineering challenges in this already terrifying range. Le Grand Dru resembles a menhir hoisted on the back of Obélix, if Obélix were a thousand meters tall. It is smooth and relentlessly vertical. Even the spiky Grandes Jorasses, skewering the horizon, look more hospitable than the Petit and Grand Dru.

  The Drus are unforgiving. They offer few footholds, little purchase, no mercy. They have been summited, of course—people are crazy—but the ephemeral routes marked out by daredevil climbers are regularly erased by rockfalls. The sheer awfulness of these peaks has inspired many to write of them. The most distinguished in English is James Salter, whose exquisitely wrought novel Solo Faces, features a troubled protagonist working out his existential funk by climbing a Dru on his own. Of more global renown is Roger Frison-Roche’s Premier de cordée (First on the Rope), a stirring story of the confraternity of Chamonix mountain guides. The Grand Dru figures prominently in the adventure tale, particularly in a breathtaking passage where an experienced guide is struck and killed by lightning near its summit. His client, an American who had rashly insisted they continue the ascent despite the worsening weather, promptly loses his mind after the accident. As he is brought back down the mountain by the surviving guide, the addled American is reduced to singing, over and over again, the lyrics to “Ukelele Lady.” Thus, generations of French secondary school students, for whom Frison-Roche’s 1941 novel was required reading, got their introduction to Chamonix by way of Tin Pan Alley.

  The music continues on the way back down in the cog railroad. A few dozen very jolly Belgian retirees belt out Walloon folk songs in the two cars they occupy. Their tour guide, a French government employee charged with promoting the area, falls into conversation with me, as he is evidently not interested in joining in the singalong. He is a fit fellow in middle age, obviously at home in the mountains—and in despair at their degradation.

  “Put in your book that Chamonix is situated in the most polluted valley of France,” he says. “It’s a bottleneck, and the exhaust of the thousands of trucks going into the tunnel every day has nowhere to go. There are a lot of respiratory illnesses in the valley.”

  The tunnel in question is the Mont Blanc Road Tunnel, an eleven-­kilometer affair that links Chamonix with Courmayeur, Italy. In 1999, a catastrophic fire, killing thirty-eight people, closed the tunnel for three years. I ask my new friend about the event.

  “Nothing changed. Nothing at all,” he says with a shrug. “The next season was as crowded as ever. People acted as if nothing had happened.”

  “Surely there must have been some effect?”

  He smiles ruefully. “Well, yes. The casino almost had to close. The Italians don’t have gambling at home and they couldn’t get to Chamonix. But other than that, it was business as usual.”

  He looks out the window, blinking at the passing trees. The Belgians continue their singing. The trees become time-share chalet complexes.

  “Do you think there’s been too much development here?” I ask.

  He nods. “Far too much. And it can’t be stopped.”

  He asks me where I’m going next.

  “Savoy, Val d’Isère.”

  The cog train pulls into the station. He is about to corral his charges when he turns and shakes my hand.

  “If you want to see the Alps,” he says softly, “go to Switzerland.”

  _______

  * Stephen’s second marriage would produce four children, among them two remarkable daughters: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Wolff.

  3. ISERAN PASS AND SAVOY

  ON QUITTING sybaritic Chamonix, one might have the impression that civilization is being left behind. Nothing could be further from the truth. The heart of Savoy, the region to be traversed in the next few days, has been the handmaiden of European culture for centuries. If not as recognized as their cousins—the Italians—for the important role they have played in European history, the Savoyards remain that anomaly, a people who never coalesced into a nation-state in the modern period.

  I look forward to exploring it, but first I must deal with another detour. Miraculously, the acronym-crazy French spell things out: V.L. is Véhicules Légers (literally, “light vehicles”), which go one way; P.L. is Poids Lourds (literally, “heavyweights”), which go the other. So Veronica Lake is for a car and Peter Lorre is for, well, a lorry, as the British call a truck. The V.L. detour, which leads upward from the town of St. Gervais les Bains, quickly becomes a neurotic noodle of a road, more suited to dahus than miniature muscle cars. Ridiculously, there are speed bumps on the hairpin turns. Motorcyclists fill my rearview mirror, flashing their lights to make me move my sorry rear end over to the right. When I comply, I notice that the overtaking French bikers, alone among all the Harley boys living the dream, let their right foot
dangle from the stirrup for a few seconds, as a means of thanking the intimidated motorist. Such a civilized country, la France.

  And such a strange province, la Savoie. Now part of the French republic, for centuries the mountain region punched far above its weight, exercising influence throughout the Continent and beyond. In thirteenth-­century England, for example, Savoyard nobles had the run of London, as their incandescently beautiful niece, Eleanor of Provence, wed a besotted King Henry III and proceeded to form one of the most loving royal couples in the history of the English monarchy. Uxorious Henry (Eleanor bore him five children) lavished favor on his Savoyard in-laws, granting one an estate on the north bank of the Thames between Whitehall and the City of London, on which the lucky courtier constructed the sumptuous Savoy Palace, funded by revenues diverted from the local nobility. Naturally, such actions by these fashionable mountain men did not sit well with some—lovely Eleanor was once pelted with refuse when she ventured out onto the river—but by and large the Savoyards are remembered fondly in Britain. Yet the reason for that has nothing to do with the Middle Ages.

  Hundreds of years later, the land on which the old Savoy Palace once stood was purchased by Richard D’Oyly Carte, a theatrical impresario. He erected there the Savoy Theatre, the venue in which his protégés, Gilbert and Sullivan, premiered their operettas. With the proceeds from these wildly successful productions, D’Oyly Carte built a hotel, the Savoy, which by the late nineteenth century was recognized as one of the world’s most posh. The name of an almost impassable mountain fastness became associated with the acme of sophistication—and lives on in the numerous Savoy Societies, amateur theatrical troupes, the world over. D’Oyly Carte, perhaps in a nod to his hotel’s Alpine pedigree, hired as its longtime manager a Swiss, César Ritz, whose name would become as eponymous as the Savoy’s for luxury. Under Ritz’s stewardship, the dining rooms of the Savoy were a place where society ladies and gentlemen, contrary to their snooty forebears in the palace hotels of the Alps, came for the express purpose of being seen. And, just as important, to be seen eating, for manning the Savoy’s ovens was Auguste Escoffier, Europe’s foremost chef and the founder of modern French cuisine.