The Alps

by Stephen O'Shea

  All these refined associations seem improbable, given the ruggedness of the return to the main highway. There seems to be no part of Savoy willing to lie flat. Although the Savoyard nobility gained wealth by levying tolls at the great Alpine passes to and from Italy, the same could not be said of the common folk. This is rough country, scarce in arable land and plentiful in unforgiving rock. Indeed, the detour I have just completed led me atop a ridge far into the sky. One can’t feed on scenery, however, so for several centuries many Savoyard youngsters had to migrate north to Paris for a few years, living in boardinghouses run by French Fagins and working hard at menial jobs. The Savoyard chimney sweep became a fixture of the capital, the scrawny boys scrambling up and around the flues of the well-to-do. Their earnings were usually sent to their families back home.

  Snow, once the bane of the region, eventually came to its rescue. L’or blanc (white gold) caused the Savoy to become blanketed in tony winter resorts, as ski slopes went from being the preserve of the prosperous to the playground of the masses, in much the same way that Thomas Cook’s package tourists to the Alps swamped the summering nobility of the nineteenth century. Not all class—and price—distinctions were swept away, however, as the next town I encountered, Megève, amply proves. Its transformation from a sleepy Savoyard hamlet into the first turnkey Alpine ski resort was the brainchild of Baroness Noémie de Rothschild (or Baroness Mimi, as she was called) in the early twentieth century. The story goes that Baroness Mimi, while in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in the 1920s, was aghast at being forced to tolerate the presence of a fellow vacationer, Gustav Krupp, the German industrialist whose munitions had just mowed down a generation of Frenchmen in the Great War. Mimi vowed to establish a “French St. Moritz,” where such murderous Huns would not be welcome and where her moneyed friends could empty their wallets patriotically. Thus was born Megève, the resort.

  Its success grew. After World War II, the smart set of the French capital regularly descended on the place, with nonstop rounds of partying orchestrated by Jean Cocteau and his coterie. Cocteau called it “Paris’s twenty-first arrondissement.”* Regulars in the 1950s included Brigitte Bardot, Charles Aznavour, Juliette Gréco, Josephine Baker, and Françoise Sagan. Their hangout, the Hôtel du Mont Blanc’s bar, named Les Enfants Terribles (after Cocteau’s breakout 1929 novel), is still plastered with artwork and frescoes executed by Cocteau.

  Times have changed, but not the town’s taste for the pricey. The traffic roundabouts have lamp standards adorned with fluttering banners portraying the town’s handsome chefs, their Michelin-star ratings dutifully noted beneath their names. The banners look somewhat like online dating profiles, destined for the digestively amorous. Après-ski in Megève apparently entails more than just flirting over mulled wine.

  I decide to overnight in Albertville. The town must be quaint, I reason, as it hosted the 1992 Winter Olympics. Those Olympics, the first to be held after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, arrived on the world scene with a sense of expectancy. The long-­oppressed nations of eastern Europe appeared now as recently minted democratic entities, and, most important, a newly reunified Germany made its debut on the global stage. Add to this a sense of homecoming. The Winter Olympics, after a sixteen-year hiatus, were coming back to the Alps. The competition is intimately linked with these mountains, the list of resorts to host the Games before Albertville a testament to the role of the Alps in pioneering winter sport: Chamonix (1924), St. Moritz (1928, 1948), Garmisch-Partenkirchen (1936), Cortina d’Ampezzo (1956), Innsbruck (1964, 1976), and Grenoble (1968). The chance for Albertville being a bit odd also influenced my decision—it delivered easily one of the most outlandish Olympic opening ceremonies on record. Performers marched in and out of giant alphorns, aerial devils pranced through the air, and elaborately bedecked couples spun through ballroom-dancing routines as weird electric music filled the arena.

  Once again I am dead wrong. Albertville got the Games because of its central location near picturesque winter sports venues—Les Arcs, Courchevel, Les Menuires, Méribel, La Plagne, Pralognan-la-Vanoise, Les Saisies, Tignes, Val d’Isère—and most definitely not its beauty. The visitor is greeted by a ruined and rusting Olympic Hall, once blue and white, its mantle of weeds safe behind a chain-link fence. The heart of the town is not much of an improvement, consisting mainly of a long commercial avenue dotted with optician shops, one-horse cafés, pharmacies, and storefronts displaying remarkably ugly lingerie, the last being the rarest of sights on any French high street.

  At dinner, the salade savoyarde I eagerly order boasts a brick of fried cheese in batter plopped atop a mountain of bacon bits soaked in a creamy vinaigrette that conceals the wilted lettuce and unripe tomato slices lurking at the bottom. As I walk back to my hotel, I think forlornly of the hunky chefs of Megève.

  “Monsieur!”

  I look up and see a woman across the street gesturing at me.

  “Please, we need men.”

  She crosses the roadway, her colorful Caribbean garb flowing in the warm evening breeze. I assess the situation. After all, given my resemblance to an elderly Thomas Jefferson having a bad hair day, I hardly seem to be an obvious mark.

  She sees what I am thinking, smiles devastatingly, and says, “Men. For dancing.”

  Within a few seconds, I am led down a side street to a block party. A bearded DJ blares music from a powerful sound system and wine flows from tapped casks. A French kegger, in progress.

  The rest of the evening passes giddily. People of every generation come by, to dance, kibitz, and drink. The air warms with the glow of French camaraderie, never much on display in ordinary life but always lurking as a mischief-maker whenever people get together. Laughter is ever present, as are kidding, flirting, and snippets of world-weary wisdom. As an alien being from America, I am welcomed with wide-eyed cordiality. The night wears on and the festive atmosphere remains infectious; perhaps it is no coincidence that the Olympics opening ceremonies here were so memorable. And there is indeed a shortage of men, so my dance card never empties. My partners come in all shapes and sizes, all ages. As I gamely attempt jitterbugs, salsas, slows, solos—and we drink—my opinion of Albertville undergoes a radical revision. The characterless main street is now hazily remembered as a racy boulevard, the cruddy cafés as literary salons; even the bad lingerie and the salade savoyarde seem now to be creations of unspeakable beauty. When at last the witching hour rolls around, the time when rowdiness becomes tapage nocturne—disturbing the peace—the party goes indoors to a bar, but without me. At least not immediately—I go in and confess to no longer knowing the location of where I’m staying the night, the Hotel Million. Hoots of laughter greet my befuddlement, and a couple from Guadeloupe agrees to lead me home through the darkened streets. When we part, the young woman—the one who first accosted me—leans in to give me a kiss on each cheek.

  THE ALBERT in Albertville comes not from Schweitzer or Camus, but from a king of Sardinia who doubled as a duke of Savoy, a certain Charles Albert who consolidated two towns into one and had the result named after himself. If this sounds confusing, that’s because it is. Savoy and its aristocratic leaders, whose family lineage stretched back to the year 1003, specialized in territorial trading. At one point in the eighteenth century, they inherited the island of Sicily. Scarcely ten years later, they bartered Sicily for Sardinia, creating an entity that was only slightly less jerry-rigged. Added to this was their suzerainty over Piedmont, on the other side of the Alps, with Turin as their capital.

  Events grew progressively more head-scratching as the nineteenth century unfolded. The forces of liberal democracy forced the House of Savoy to grant parliamentary power to the rising bourgeoisie, and the impetus of nationalism drove the movement of Italian unification known as the Risorgimento (Resurgence). The leaders of Savoy–Sardinia–Piedmont, especially their ministers, allied themselves with the unifiers and soon became seen as the spearhead of Italian nationalism. When modern Italy coalesce
d, the duke of Savoy became its king.

  In the latter half of the nineteenth century, as part of the geo-political jostling occasioned by the Risorgimento, it was crucial to form alliances of convenience with foreign powers in the struggle to boot other foreign powers out of the Italian boot—and to keep these foreign allies from profiting from the confusion and invading Italy yet again. Foremost among these outside meddlers was France. So a deal was struck: In exchange for French military assistance against the Austrians, the duchy of Savoy and the county of Nice would be ceded to France. A lion of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Garibaldi, born Joseph Marie Garibaldi, was furious at his allies for giving away his hometown of Nice (Nizza, in Italian). As a sop to international public opinion, referenda were held—which many observers claimed to be rigged—and in the 1860s these regions joined France.

  Thus it was that the Kingdom of Italy was ruled by the House of Savoy, even if Savoy was not part of Italy. The battle cry of Italian soldiers in the Great War was “Avanti Savoia!”—which, on reflection, would be similar to American soldiers on the attack in Vietnam crying, “For Mexico!” The Italo-Savoyard monarchs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became similar to their counterparts elsewhere in Europe—sidelined into ceremonial irrelevance and living out comic-­opera existences. One Savoyard king of Italy was so short—nicknamed Re Sciaboletta (King Little Sword)—that the minimum height requirements of the Italian army had to be lowered so he could don a uniform and play commander-­in-chief. A queen was immortalized by lending her name to a pizza, the Margherita. The new tricolor flag of Italy was immortalized in its red tomato sauce, white mozzarella, and green basil. The Kingdom of Italy was supplanted by a republic after World War II, and the House of Savoy was banished from the peninsula. They have been allowed back in recently, one scion of the line making headlines by fatally shooting a German tourist off the coast of Sardinia, and another, Emanuele Filiberto, by becoming a dreamboat vulgarian of Italian television.

  AVANTI SAVOIA! The road south of Albertville becomes an expressway. I fly past factories, warehouses, lumberyards, and box stores for the home handyman. Mountain ranges loom close to both banks of the River Isère, but the pastoral and picturesque have disappeared. This is the lower Tarentaise Valley, an industrial anomaly. Knots of high-tension electrical wires entwine overhead, the offspring of some unglimpsed hydroelectric work supplying juice to Grenoble and Lyon. My skull thrums from last night’s excesses, so I decide to exit the motorway in search of a truck stop that serves espresso by the demijohn.

  The town of Moûtiers eventually appears, which I know is the signal for me to bear left and continue following the River Isère upstream and eastward. I pass the town’s train station, somnolent now, but febrile and frantic in the winter months, for Moûtiers is the gateway to Les Trois Vallées, supposedly the world’s largest ski area. The valleys—Saint-Bon, Allues, Belleville—saw much of the action of the 1992 Olympic Games and continue to draw snow lovers with their six hundred kilometers of slopes. A brochure states that the area’s 183 ski lifts can hoist 250,000 skiers skyward every hour.

  The valley narrows dramatically and the road hugs the meanders of the River Isère. We are in an Alpine heaven, the green meadows with their chalets overlooked by snow-tipped gray mountains. Somewhere to the north, I know, stands the peak of Pierra Menta, a jagged, toothlike summit in the midst of a treeless wilderness. Every March for the past thirty years, a four-day burst of lunacy takes place on these heights. Pairs of racers scale cliffs, ski down glaciers, and pitch camp in the howling winds as part of a cross-country, high-altitude scramble through the clouds. The Pierra Menta event has only two peers in the world of extreme Alpine ski mountaineering: the Patrouille des Glaciers, held in the Valais canton of southwestern Switzerland and the Trofeo Mezzalama, the arduous, so-called white marathon that takes place on the Italian side of the Monte Rosa massif.

  The charming village of Aime comes next. Famous for its Romanesque monastic church (locked today) and historic center, Aime is also the gateway to the Vanoise National Park, mainland France’s first and largest. Had it not been designated thus in 1963, the avid developers of the Trois Vallées would have doubtless gobbled up the Vanoise and formed the largest ski area in the solar system.

  Aime snoozes peacefully under the hot June sun—the heat wave has continued—although prominent signs for the Born to Burn Motocross suggest otherwise. Fluttering, inexplicably, from a bridge on the outskirts is the blue-and-white flag of Quebec.

  The road climbs. The gigantic ski complex to the south is partly hidden by an intermediate mountain, while to the north the roadway is carved into a vertiginous slope far above the flowing blue ribbon of the Isère. In a few pastures near the scarily distant river, I can make out brown dots slowly moving about, most probably the Tarentaise breed of cow whose cheese is so prized by fondue fans. My knuckles whiten on the wheel. It’s not that I’m afraid of heights, it’s just that I like my farm animals at eye level.

  Two signs command my attention. One indicates that the towering spike of snow to the right is Mont Pourri (Mount Rotten), a competitor with the Cursed Mount of the Mont Blanc massif for the ugliest toponym in the Alps. The other sign shows the usual French graphic for a falling-­rock zone, only this time with the unsettling notice, DANGER EXCEPTIONNEL. This does not inspire confidence. My fears are allayed somewhat when the road becomes a ribbon running through a good dozen or so avalanche galleries and tunnels hewn out of the rock. When we emerge back into the sunshine, the sizable town of Bourg-Saint-Maurice heaves into view. Despite its liberal use of flowerpots on lamp standards, the town cannot disguise its role as railhead and poor sister of its fashionable ski-resort neighbors. But it does have a grandiose name. Maurice is the patron saint of Savoy—indeed of the defunct Holy Roman Empire—a black Egyptian general from Thebes of the third century CE who refused to have his legion persecute Christians of the Alps, despite orders from the pagan emperor. Or so the story goes. It all ended very badly for the Theban Legion, of course, but its leader’s name lives on in numerous monasteries and towns throughout the region. The most notable is St. Moritz, in Switzerland.

  I turn south from Bourg-Saint-Maurice, following the slash of the River Isère. Within minutes, the dam of Tignes can be seen, lying in curving majesty across the gorge below, its massive slab of rusted gray an odd contrast to the dominant green. Beyond it stretches the teal expanse of its reservoir, Lac Chervil, under which the original town of Tignes lies drowned. The new town became, as is only inevitable here, a resort, but its promise of year-round skiing is now compromised by the rapid melting of its glacier, the Grande Motte. Above it all rises the snow-capped Mount Rotten, impervious to such trivial matters as climate change.

  I arrive at last at my destination. Val d’Isère, renowned for its wintertime jet-set clientele, awaits inspection.

  THE ESPACE KILLY encompasses the countryside surrounding Tignes and Val d’Isère. The reference is not to the lethal pastime of France’s hunting lobby but to the region’s golden boy. In the 1960s, Jean-Claude Killy ripped apart the record books by ripping down mountainsides. In the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics, Killy scored an astounding hat trick: gold in the Downhill, the Slalom, and the Giant Slalom. The feat astonished the high-speed ski set of the day; it had been accomplished only once before. In order to shave off a few hundredths of a second on the descent, his innovative technique had him catapulting himself out of the gate, airborne, instead of beginning from a standing start. It worked—not only in Grenoble but also in non-Olympic competitions. Killy was a sensation, a handsome god to the French and to the world at large. But he had clay feet, or rather, a clay stomach—his contraction of a gastroenterological disorder while a French conscript in the Algerian War of Independence in the early 1960s plagued him throughout the decade and may have resulted in his untimely retirement.

  To my surprise, Killy’s towering presence is not ubiquitous in his hometown. In fact, in the sullen heat of June, I feel no pres
ence. Val d’Isère stretches before me as a ghost town, its hundreds of multistoried Alpine chalets standing shuttered in the sunshine, the only sounds the grind of construction crews building yet more picturesque rentals on the hillsides and the roar of the River Isère channeled beneath the main street. In the sole hotel open in town, I have breakfast the following morning in the company of a group of svelte and buff young adults wolfing down alarming amounts of protein. Given their beauty, I feel like a gnarly thumb on a manicured hand. The proprietress gently informs me at checkout that these exquisite specimens are members of the French national ski team, here to train in the summer snows far above the town, toward the Iseran Pass. I gulp, for this is the first of the many great passes I am to cross. At 2,770 meters, it is the tallest; in fact, the road is the highest pass-clearing stretch of asphalt in the Alps.

  The road up into the stratosphere begins innocently. I am soon greeted by the backside of a Dutch camper, but I decide to chill for a bit and enjoy the rush of cooling air flowing through the open windows of the car as we slowly make the ascent. The trees soon shrink to bonsaisize insignificance, then disappear altogether. The trombone-shaped turns give us views of what we are leaving behind, the teal teardrop of Lac Chervil and the lowering spike of Mount Rotten. Thoughtfully, French road builders have neglected to install a guardrail alongside the abyss, presumably so that the views can be unimpeachably terrifying.

  The Dutchman swerves slightly to the left and I instantly see the reason. Swarms of cyclists are laboriously pumping at their pedals, barely making headway up the climb, their straining upper thighs as broad and powerful as grasshopper legs. These men and women form, to my mind, a cardiovascular nobility, the thousands who take to the Alps every summer to scale the steep velodromes of the hairpins and to gasp through the thinning air until they reach, after hours of effort, the blessed level ground of the pass. And then the reward: the dizzying, dangerous coast downward to the next valley.