Chamonix Ever After

This is about the point where I found myself climbing what looked and felt like a near vertical grade booby-trapped with embedded boulders, tree roots, and loose rocks (and a bunch of gravel for good measure), and I thought to myself, wait, I just paid this guy to make me bike up this? I hit a nice large root with a thump and put my foot down. Where the hell is this guy?

Tuesday night I rode the Swiss trains for three hours and the French mountain train (Mont-Blanc Express) for one hour up an amazing grade to Les Bossons, where I am staying with two English guys who are running someone else’s chalet and a Swedish guy who asked me if I wanted to go ice climbing on Friday. The chalet is typically filled with fifteen or more mountain bikers, although for some reason no one showed up this week. The whole place is littered with mountain biking paraphernalia, some deliberately placed there, like maps and magazines, and some just strewn about – part of a disc brake on a window knob, chains hanging on the tree branches outside, helmets, gloves, shoes, everything everywhere. These two English guys, (Curly and Moe, I’ll call them) don’t look like they could be more than 21 or 23, and yet in their own domestic way they are running this chalet, setting the table and making us breakfast (which does entail putting out boxes of cereal and making those PIllsbury instant croissants, but hey, it beats my expectations) and entertaining me with their mountain biking and mountain climbing stories. In the summer here you either mountain bike hardcore or you climb mountains with the same enthusiasm, otherwise you’re a Japanese tourist. And when I say climbing mountains, I don’t mean putting on your hiking boots and walking up the nearest trail. I’m talking crampons (big metal spikes on your boots), ice axes, ropes, tents buried in the snow, the whole bit.

Pascal, (yes, that’s his real name, and yes, like the programming language) is one crazy French dude. Pascal works at a bike/ski shop called Zero G in Chamonix Mont-Blanc. I found a phone number on the internet, called, and this guy answered. I wasn’t really sure what he was saying, but this morning I showed up at the shop anyway, very unSwiss-like (read: late) and he couldn’t have cared the slightest. I can’t really tell you what possessed me to take the train to Chamonix and sign up for mountain biking lessons. I just needed to get the hell out of Zurich (and yes, I’m aware of how completely spoiled that sounds from the outset). I had been IMing Ringer about a week before and said, “Quick, give me somewhere to go on the train that doesn’t take more than five hours to get there.” She said Chamonix, and off I went. I’d done a lot of hiking two weeks before in Zermatt, so while I wanted to hike again, I also wanted to vary the itinerary a bit. So I did a tiny bit of research and discovered that most people who come to Chamonix in the summer mountain bike.

This is a funny thing, really, because I’ve always been of the opinion that I can’t mountain bike. Sure, I can ride a road bike, but that has never required me to really inspect where I’m going (other than to avoid the random pinecone or rock) or to make any sharp, insane turns, or to vary my speed every five seconds depending on the terrain, or to check to make sure my pedal, foot, or derailleur isn’t about to be smashed to bits between a tree and a boulder. “A lot of road bikers have no bike skills to speak of,” Moe said at the chalet. I wanted to be offended, but this was nigh impossible seeing as how I could barely balance myself enough to squeeze between two parked cars without grabbing the wing mirror of one of them.

Mountain biking is this whole other animal I’ve never completely understood. Now, I understand when people say it’s a “technical” sport. This doesn’t mean I understand what the techniques are, just that I can appreciate that something is technical. For example, showjumping horses is actually highly technical, but if you don’t ride horses you’ll have no idea what I’m talking about, nor can you even come up with some possibilities using your very vivid imagination. If you’re open-minded enough just to accept that showjumping horses is technical, then you’re probably one step ahead of the majority of the universe. Understanding what technical means through practice, well, that’s something else entirely. That’s something I got to try out today, when Pascal said, no, I should not be going up all the hills in granny gear. I should always have one gear left as a backup. Well damn, no one told me this before. And not only that, but he said you have to go slow up the hills. Everyone goes too fast to start, and then they have no reserves. And just when I want to call him on that, because I’m passing his old, slow ass up the hill, about halfway up he burns me, but not because he’s going any faster than he was at the beginning. Just because my old, slow ass had to stop halfway up the hill for a breather.

Pascal actually talks a lot about my gears and how and when I should use them, which is a good thing since the only gears I ever use are the ones under my right thumb. He explains the gears in front, and says that the big gear (#3) is for going downhill and riding on the pavement. The middle gear (#2) is good for flat trails, and the small gear (#1) is good for climbing. Of course, none of this seems to be a science, since he appears to change it all around at will, but he always tells me to do the same thing. In fact, I screwed up my shifting in the middle of a climb and he made me get off and lift the bike up and fix it. Ok, so not being able to shift properly is nothing new with me, not even with road biking. Ask FatTire, he knows.

Climbing sucks hairy mountain goat balls. It’s the hardest climbing I’ve ever done in my life, and I’ve climbed some ridiculous hills on my road bike, first try, didn’t even have to stop. Of course, I did find myself fairly amazed that these “easy” trails Pascal had taken me on had me crashing or stopping to get off and push my bike up or down or sideways literally every five minutes. I was starting to think that this sport was one of those sports to add to my list of sports for which I have no God-given talent. That list isn’t as long as you’d think it would be, but it does include some gems like swimming, snowboarding, and flying stunt kites.

He then took me on some ridiculous single tracks through the woods, where every thirty seconds or so I managed to bash some part of my bike or myself on a boulder or tree. Finally he stopped and pointed at his derailleur. “You don’t want to smash deese,” he said, then got back on his bike and continued pedaling happily along. The fact that I made it through any of this is really quite unbelievable in itself, for a variety of reasons. First, I’m totally not in shape for this sport. For example, my right arm is killing me at this very moment and my right leg is somehow covered in chain grease that’s embedded in various cuts all over my calf. Second, not a single one of those trails, it turns out, was an easy trail. In fact, they weren’t even the “intermediate” trails. That’s right, they were all marked as the most difficult trails on the little map I picked up. So now I’m feeling slightly less bad about a number of things, most notably the fact that I made it up to the top of any of these hills at all when I’ve never ridden a mountain bike in my life.

Pascal, like any instructor who wants to actually have students, was patient and upbeat. While I couldn’t always understand what he was saying, he explained where I should hang back and where I should accelerate over rocks and tree roots. I mostly understood the concept of acceleration, it’s just that my body in its current state isn’t always generous enough to give in to my demands. The first few downhills were on what I’d call the scary side – steep, narrow single tracks full of pointy rocks and a sheer cliff face on one side. The good part though, is that I got to use my favorite technique of the day that Pascal taught me – standing up on your pedals and throwing your hips back. I didn’t get this right away, as I kept wanting to bend my knees like a pansy, but by the end of the day I was standing up all over the place, even where he said that wasn’t necessary and I needed to sit down. “Are you sure? I can stand up again here, it’s really no problem!” I love going down the hills and standing up with my weight back. At the end of our uphill battle, we had a long, not too steep downhill that we stopped at right before setting off. “Now we go faster, ok?” he said. Pascal phrases many of the things he says as questions, but they aren’t questions at all, they’re more like statements informing you that we’re going to do this thing whether or not you’re still on your bike at the end of it. This basically meant, now you are going to stop using your brakes every five seconds, and you’re also going to pedal, to keep up with me.

Pascal started off down the hill, and I followed leisurely after him until I saw he really meant it. In fact, he wasn’t even looking back as often as he had been before to see if I was still alive. So I shifted up and started cranking, flying over rocks and roots and things that earlier in the ride had freaked me out or made me tip over so that I had to put my foot down. And of course, I got to stand up a lot, since much of it was downhill, which made me quite happy. There were various narrow wooden bridges going over some streams on the way down, and every bridge had a huge lip on it or started at the top of a small hill of dirt. The first time I saw this I of course panicked, but I managed to get over it without stopping. The second and third times I started to accelerate up the lip, until the fourth time I caught a tiny bit of air. This is that defining moment when you’re trying out a new sport for the first time that you go, “Yes, this is all mine, forever and ever, I shall have this and own it, and it shall own me.” And you’re hooked.

It probably helped that they gave me this kickass rental bike. Full suspension, disc brakes, everything. I’ve never ridden anything with suspension in my life, let alone full suspension. My horse has more suspension than any of the bikes I’ve ever owned. What is this? You mean, I can literally ride over anything? It was a revelation on par with the one I had when my swim instructor let us use fins one day to swim. What are these magical pieces of plastic attached to my feet? What is this magical bouncing sensation when I hit a bump? By the end of the ride, when we were back on pavement, I was starting to look for things to ride over. The sidewalk, someone’s landscaping, a Japanese tourist’s foot… “No, come here,” Pascal demanded. I was mopey like the kid who’d just had his skateboard taken away. “We lock the suspension now, and ride on the road.” Nooooooo not my suspension. Wah.

“Now we ride, just like road bikes, you know?” I guess, I thought, resigned. But I had told him I was used to my road bike, so I guess he assumed I’d just fall into line based on that statement. Suddenly he took off, down a hill, in his highest gear, cranking like he’s being chased by wild bandicoots or other retarded people he might have to teach later in the day. Holy crap. I sped after him as best I could and eventually caught up to his back tire and rode on it. Even there, I was in my highest gear, front and back, leaning forward and pedaling furiously. Is this guy on crack? Whenever the road leveled back I’d pretty much have to use every ounce of energy to stay on his back tire. When the downhill returned it was better, but I still never stopped pedaling. Every so often he glanced back to see where I was. When we finally stopped, he exclaimed, “Gooood!” Although he was mostly the one doing all the huffing and puffing, I was surprised at how hard I was breathing when I’d probably done half the amount of work.

Pascal actually took me out for drinks when we were done. He is French, after all. Whenever he wasn’t busy giving me tips, he was checking out every female jogger who passed us on the trail, and sometimes even had enough time to chat them up while I was making my slow, pathetic way up some hill. He showed me photos of his “baby” on his cell phone, a 20 month old little boy. I didn’t ask about “mom” since he never mentioned her, and he said the kid was in a “nursery” while he was working, so those were all good tips not to ask. He even showed me a magazine in a pile on the shelf under the table we were sitting at, that had an article about mountain biking in Chamonix in it with photos of him throughout. “This is me, and this is me, and also, that’s me,” he said, turning the pages. “Wow, you’re a regular celebrity around here,” I commented. He lifted his beer glass in the air with his cigarette dangling out of the same hand.

Pascal asked what I was doing the rest of the day. I hadn’t really planned it out, but I thought I might go up the gondola to Aiguille du Midi, a peak 3,842m up with a viewing station at the top and some kind of weird copper-colored metal structure that looked like a 1950s rocket ship. I did do this, although my first day I was slow to figure out the bus schedule and by the time I got to the base of the gondola station it was already 4:30 p.m.

I’m not sure if they’re just more efficient with their gondola system in Switzerland or if there are simply more people trying to go up the gondolas on Mont-Blanc than in Zermatt, but getting up Aiguille du Midi tested both one’s patience and claustrophobia tolerance. The gondolas were those large, 75-person style boxes that swing after passing every support beam causing the contents to scream in fear and delight. When we finally reached the top, we were given green tickets informing us that the next available time to go back down the mountain was 7:00 p.m., two hours from now. I didn’t quite understand this at first since it seemed totally absurd, so I went back and asked the guy handing out the tickets to clarify. “You can’t go down until 7:00 p.m.,” he said, then leaned in towards me. “But if you are by yourself, maybe you can tell them that and they will let you go early.” That’s when the nasty French sailor guy with three long, yellow and black teeth snuck up next to me and said, “Maybe if you wink like dis, they let you go,” he said, and winked while baring his three long, yellow and black teeth. Help. I sometimes fear I am an unwitting participant in some kind of horribly staged sitcom filled with stereotypes and cliches, but in fact, these things actually happen to me. “Like this?” I asked, winking and clucking my tongue. “Yeah!” he said, cackling, then walked away. WTF was that?

After riding the elevator to the very top, as close as you can get to the scary 1950s rocket ship structure, I met a couple from Toronto who couldn’t operate their little Canon point and shoot camera. I showed them how to force the flash with the sun overhead and took their photo in front of Mont-Blanc, which is how I got this photo of myself, taken by them.

From this viewing deck you could see all the mountaineers making their way across a narrow peak and down onto the glacier, as well as their tents and gear embedded in the snow far below. One of them had climbed up onto a peak not far from the viewing deck, and various tourists were trying to get their attention as if they were in a zoo so they could snap a photo. Ok, I took a photo of the guy in all his gear too, but I wasn’t making whistling and clapping sounds like he was a chimpanzee who I wanted to look my way.

While I was standing in line at the elevator with the Toronto couple to return to the gondola, I asked them if they knew what the big rocket ship was all about. They didn’t, but a French guy whose family had purposefully cut in line in front of us suddenly started speaking in English and told us that it’s an electromagnetic tower and that it’s actually very unhealthy for you to spend much time up here at all so close to this thing. Good thing they told us this before we came up here! I hope my third eyeball shows up in an opportune location.

So, I had more than one reason for wanting to wink my way back down the mountain early, which I successfully did. I have an English acquaintance/friend here in Chamonix who used to run a ski chalet in the winter and contracted at Google in the summer, and who I was looking forward to seeing this evening. I met Brox last October when I was visiting Zurich in preparation for my move, and everyone was still working at the old office on Freigutstrasse. Brox had since purchased a flat in Chamonix and when he wasn’t doing UI design he was climbing mountains with the best of them.

“No worries about the time,” he said when I got to his place an hour after I said I’d be there, “one of my climbing buddies had an accident up on the mountain and had to be airlifted to a hospital. My friends are at the house now.”

I had no idea I was walking into a disaster scene. Brox’s two friends were there, a Czech girl and a Chilean guy who was on the phone with the hospital in Geneva, frantically speaking in French and pacing throughout the house. Brox was able to point out the window at the exact place on the mountain they’d been climbing when their third friend had been hit directly on top of the head by a boulder. “It was a huge rock,” Pita, the Czech girl said, “and when it fell it hit another rock and broke into a hundred pieces and one of them hit Maxx on the head.” Even with his helmet on, he was bleeding profusely, and they’d called the helicopter rescue to evacuate him to Geneva. Jobo, the Chilean guy, came back into the room. “I don’t know what to do,” he said, “Maxx said that under no circumstances are we to tell his mother if he has an accident on the mountain.”

“You’ll have to tell her if they are going to operate on him,” Brox reasoned.

“His brother was killed in a mountaineering accident!” Jobo shouted.

“Maybe his girlfriend can give consent?” Pita offered.

There wasn’t a whole lot of logic to any of this, which was easy for me to see as an outsider, but as an outsider I also wasn’t welcome to give any advice. I sat in Brox’s leather recliner and watched as Jobo stormed around the house in a fury, still in half his climbing gear, a trickle of blood coming out of the knuckle of his hand in which he clutched the phone receiver. The phone rang again, and he walked back into the front room to take the call.

Pita looked sick, and Brox sat silently on the edge of the dining room table. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I asked Pita where she was from. This turned out to be the right question, because she perked up at the opportunity to talk about something besides Maxx. Pita was originally from the Czech Republic, but told me she had spent a bunch of time in California, working of all places, at a gas station outside of Yosemite and climbing whenever she could. She had climbed Half Dome, “Not the face,” she said, “that’s the hard part,” and had met Jobo while mountaineering in the park. They had gotten married, now lived in Chamonix, and spent their time traveling between the Czech Republic and Chile to visit family. These are the kinds of fantasy stories I only hear about here in Europe, yet, whenever I hear these stories, I am reminded of my own charmed life and how I’ve spent so many difficult years trying inexplicably to sabotage it.

Jobo came back into the room. “It’s very serious,” he said, covering the receiver with one hand, “they’ve had to take him into the operating room and drill a hole in his head.”

“Oh my God,” Pita said. Brox looked down at the floor.

“It doesn’t mean he’s not ok,” I said, almost surprising myself, “it’s standard procedure to reduce brain swelling. It just sounds scary.”

“I know,” Pita said sadly.

You always take a risk of coming across as the unfeeling asshole when you try to be Miss Logic instead of Miss Empathy, but luckily for me everyone in the room seemed to understand what I had said. Jobo hung up and sat down on the couch. Brox suggested we go to dinner, since there was nothing more to be done about Maxx except to wait for the doctors to call back. Brox took us to an Italian restaurant that he claimed was the best balance between tourist and dive establishment. It was a cute place along the edge of the L’Arve, the river that runs through town. I managed to get Jobo and Pita to talk about all things non-Maxx related for a while, about mountaineering and Chile and Yosemite.

“Once when we climbed up to one of those areas the tourists can get to,” Pita said, “a bunch of Japanese tourists wanted to have their pictures taken with us in our climbing gear.” It was, I guess, the Chamonix equivalent of Mickey Mouse appearing on Main Street, U.S.A. in Disneyland.

Dinner arrived and everyone sipped their wine languidly. “He’ll get better,” I said quietly, lifting my wine glass up in a hesitant toast. Brox caught on. “To Maxx getting better,” he said, and everyone followed suit, toasting to someone I didn’t know but whom they cared about dearly, and who I realized had not only affected their entire day, but their whole lives as well. The outcome of Maxx’s accident, whether good or bad, but especially if bad, would change these people’s lives forever, alter how they saw the world, how they made decisions in the future, and possibly, even who they were. Our dinner chit-chat was uplifting but not healing, and when we left the restaurant, Pita and Jobo clung to each other as they walked off in the late dusk beneath the black mountains.

“The mountains are really scary at night,” I said to Brox.

“Yeah,” he said, “but look at Mont-Blanc, it’s not dark.”

It wasn’t. It peeked over the top of all the other black mountains in a bluish-white haze. Taller than everything else, it was still illuminated by the moon as the sun disappeared. It’s never truly pitch black out, even when it seems to be.

I was grateful for meeting Jobo and Pita even under the circumstances; the intensity of their compassion and love for Maxx reminded me of everyone back home, everyone who my old English professor from undergrad, DocJ, said were “rooting for me,” and it was true. Maybe you can let people down because a rock accidentally falls on your head, but you should never let them down by standing under that rock on purpose, waiting for it to fall. Had I done that, how would I ever know who really loved me, whose lives I would irrevocably change besides my own, and how would I ever know that I could actually, of all things, mountain bike?