Skiing the Psychological Alps

It is an easy 15 hours of mountain driving from Salzburg's Grosses Festspielhaus (altitude 1350 feet), where Bach's Christmas Oratorio is swelling toward intermission, to St. Niklaus, Switzerland, where the skier boards a train that climbs toward Zermatt, where he carries his skis a mile and a quarter, ascends by a series of three cable cars to the Matterhorn's Theodul glacier and arrives at the Trockener Steg shelter (altitude 10,000 feet). There is a nice balance in going directly from the Festspielhaus coat rack to Zermatt; the amateur at glacier skiing and cross-country Bach discovers that his two passions mortify the flesh in similar ways.

What is involved, I think (although I am the patient, not the doctor), is an oddly agreeable contrast between piteous hardship and gross self-indulgence. It takes five and a half hours to perform the Christmas Oratorio properly. The listener has bought his ticket because he likes Bach; a man will sit through an hour of Haydn to win the approval of his fellows or the silence of his wife, but the distance events take honest dedication. Nevertheless, the first 20 minutes are not truly enjoyable. The chorus inquires, "Wie soll ich Dich empfangen, Und wie begeg'n ich Dir?" and then repeats the question a number of times, and the cataleptic tingle of a crossed leg brings doubt: Has the listener overestimated his stamina?

But the next time the Bach lover thinks to make the sly wrist movement that allows him to look at his watch, an hour and a half have passed. He discovers with some pride that he is enjoying Bach, and himself. Self-approval takes on substance, rises from woodwinds to strings to brass, and ramifies, returning always to the resolving chord: The listener is strong enough, after all; he is making a passage not everyone has the cold nerve to attempt. Moreover, he is about to be rewarded. Two of the oratorio's five and a half hours are allotted to a languorous dining pause, and a kind and prosperous friend has invited the listener to join him at the Osterreichischerhof Hotel, renowned for its Kalterer See wine, oxtail soup, fillet of roe deer and delicate apple tort.

• • •

The mood of honest self-admiration dissipates ever so slightly during a night and a day of jouncing in the skier's Volkswagen bus (Austrian friends suggested the train, but Americans do not take trains). A night in a Gasthof at Zermatt repairs only the body. Next morning, for no clear reason, the skier's spirit is too feeble to climb out of his coffee saucer, and the Theodul glacier is humbling.

It is gray cold. There is a thieving wind. In the thin air of 10,000 feet, it is a dizzying job to clamp skis to boots. The skier straightens, short-breathed, and there, briefly free of clouds, is the Matterhorn. His reaction is fretful: Huh, Matterhorn. He turns to the descent. The glacier runs are not steep, but boot-deep new snow muffles the skis and light snow still falling blurs the face of the hill. The skier holds back, grayed vision only an excuse, refusing to accept the run's easy speed. What he does is scraping, shameful, not skiing; and after a mile and a quarter, his obsession with skiing, which had him sharpening edges in August, is remembered only as something forgotten, like the list of Latin prepositions that govern the dative.

In this way, the skier arrives at the lift shack jangled and furious and so out of phase with his own body that he tangles his skis climbing the slight rise to the T-bar. The comedy is familiar; the performance of the marginal amateur athlete skids from day to day up and down a curve sharp enough to be called manic-depressive. This is true of any sport--the six-handicap golfer shoots 97 and curses hideously--but the wildest dips and rises are those of skiing.

It is not only that a skier must travel nearer the edge of exhaustion, with less in reserve, than a golfer or even a tennis player, nor that his mistakes are punished by wearying falls; it is that he never knows what sort of court he will be playing on. Snow can be hard, soft, deep, scraped off, wet, dry, new, old, crusty, glare ice or a condition known as hard-boiled eggs; and it can be most of these in the same quarter mile. Light, in addition, can be clear, hazy, snow-clotted and flat in the same five minutes. A variation not noticed, or not sufficiently allowed for, can catch a skier on his psychological downcurve and drive him toward something near helplessness. Skiers do a lot of muttering.

Change comes especially fast in the air of the high mountains, and Zermatt is high for skiing. In December, it is generally change for the colder and grayer. As the skier rides the long T-bar (expressively called a Schlepplift in the Alps) up the Theodul glacier, his nose freezes numb and he applies the customary New England remedy: Mash nose flat against face with ski glove and rotate clockwise. He can expect to repeat the indignity a dozen times before the day ends.

And yet, there is an omen low in the sky above a ridge of snow called the Furggsattel. Seen through a dust devil of blown ice crystals, it has the complexion and warming ability of a subway token, but it is the sun. For another 200 yards, gray mist tears off in patches and blows down the valley. Then it is gone altogether and the sky has cleared to a hard blue. The skier's face burns hot and now he is far out on the manic curve, rising.

There is enough new, light snow to practice the subtle swallow flight of powder skiing. One of the marvels of powder is that in combination with warming sun, it produces exactly the condition of mind--insufferable smugness--that the skier needs to ski it. The skier's mind is drawn first to the huddled masses yearning to be free but not successful in wangling winter vacations. Then the skier thinks of the undiscriminating wretches who have vacations but who booked accommodations at the wrong mountains. After that, he finds fault with everyone else on his own slope: This one, who has fallen, is a bumbler; this other, who has not, flashes a cheap and shallow skill. Thus, the number of skiers in the world worthy of this snow and this bright noon is neatly reduced to one. This "Viva yo!" or "Hurray for me!" (James Michener supplies the phrase in his book Iberia) is embarrassing to set down in type but wonderfully enjoyable to feel on a ski run. Viva yo is undoubtedly the reason that middle-aged nonathletes pursue a sport that leaves them bruised, numb and shaking with fatigue. It is the peak of the curve.

The skier wastes half a run trying to remember--powder is a rarity--and then it all begins to work. The loose, easy swing starts at the back of the neck and drives downward. As the skis bank through one soft long turn, the shoulders coil into another. It is a trick. Moved gently in the deep snow, the skis are free; moved abruptly, they are caught and the skier pitches over them in a blind, drowning fall. So, gently, gently, fade one turn into the next, clean and free. In the rush of chill air, there is a realization close to panic: It is really happening.

The run ends and the skier stops. Watch, sometime, a skier curling down through powder. The flow of motion leaves a flow of quiet; and at the end of his run, he will stop--always--and look back at it. The curved track is a beautiful thing and the skier regards it with something simpler than adult vanity. The fascination goes back a long way, to back yards and snowsuits and snow angels made by lying down and flapping the arms and legs. This rarest kind of skiing comes, in the end, to an innocent, idiot pleasure in making patterns in the snow.

It works for two more runs and half of another, and then there is no strength left to fight the altitude: 10,000 and 11,000 feet are too much for a flatlander the first day or so. If the skier is merely tired, he is lucky; it is not uncommon to see a newcomer gagging with nausea at the end of an easy run, as if he had just stayed with Jim Ryun for three fast quarters.

The cafeteria at the Trockener Steg shelter is an unlovely vault, suitable for storing oil drums, in a corner of the high cable-car station. It suits the skier's fantasy; he is tired, tough, a survivor. A terse word or two and a survivor's lean grin produce a companion for lunch--a lank-haired, long-bodied public-relations chick from Berlin, whose fantasy is tracking the same way and who is happy to barter perfect English for War-movie German. There are a few tables, some goulash soup, bread, cheese, hot rum. Goulash soup, full of paprika and sausage, is the only soup fit to be eaten at 10,000 feet. The rum is light-colored and strong. It is poured out of unlabeled two-liter bottles into a hot-water-and-spice mixture. Rum at the lunch break is always a bad idea, because it leaves the skier rooted and content; but it is one of the world's best bad ideas. Beyond the shelter's frosted windows, ravens wheel in a light wind.

Zermatt owes its special character to the interaction of two powerful forces in a mountain valley. The first is the glacier, shouldering down toward the valley floor. The second is the hotel business, advancing inexorably toward the glacier. In time, they will meet and the glacier will be destroyed; but now, although 10,000 skiers may crowd in during the high season, Zermatt seems small and--perhaps because cars are not permitted--securely walled off from the world.

Certainly, the second impression is correct; Zermatt is a "closed" village, whose mountains, forests and ski lifts and many of whose hotels are owned by a syndicate called the Municipality of Zermatt. One requirement for membership is that the candidate's family must have lived in Zermatt at least since 1618. The town, like the rest of Europe, gets its chambermaids from Spain; but most of the other jobs are held by members of its ancient, interrelated families, who share not only profits but the same four or five faces. The faces, in turn, share a single expression, the Alles in Ordnung look of the Swiss hotelier.

What the visitor feels as he buys a paper, or orders Glühwein in a Bierstube, or rattles in unbuckled ski boots up the middle of the town's narrow, winding main street is, of course, the oddly businesslike coziness of Switzerland. Zermatt has its own flavor, however, at least part of which depends on the visitor's knowledge that seven years ago, at the beginning of a profitable ski-race weekend, the village withheld the news that typhoid had broken out. Guests were permitted to arrive, contract the disease and carry it away with them before the town's elders admitted that the illness spreading in town was typhoid. (Not surprisingly, a spirit of historical revisionism is now prevalent in Zermatt. "The newspapers made too much of our little typhus," a boutique manager said. "It's true that some guests died after they left, but we had only three deaths in Zermatt. Yes, my mother was one who died, but she was old. She would have died anyway.") Zermatt now spends adequate sums for plumbing and for public relations. The memory of the town's business error fades.

For two more days, an incredible cycle continues: four or five inches of new snow at night, hot sun all day. The Matterhorn's rock spire is lit like a great bent flame. Smugness is epidemic. On the easy glacier slopes, the skier (continued on page 150)Skiing the Psychological Alps(continued from page 136) is now an expert (the area's racing trails, cut through forests below the glacier, still have too little snow to be used). He finds it enormously funny to read a sign announcing, in four languages, Do not forget that you are skiing on a glacier, that is, on a mass of ice that is alive and cracked. The most dangerous crevasses are those that are still covered with snow. The bridges can break at any moment.... He discovers a small cable car leading to nowhere in particular and a restaurant at the other end, where, on a drowsy day, he can sit, eating excellent trout au bleu and drinking white wine.

There is no possibility of drowsiness at night. From the soothingly expensive Zermatterhof Hotel and the stark, zany Bahnhof Hotel (one bath and cook your own in the cellar; mountaineers, students in beggary and lovely wails in stretch knickers crammed under the eaves), everyone emerges to prowl the car-free main street, which is the town's meeting place. In the shops (middling to costly), the skier can wear the shine off his American Express card. In a dozen shirtsleeve joints, he can get hamburger steak, onion rings and a great slosh of beer for a dollar or so. The Walliserkanne is splendid for cheese fondue and easy table hopping. The regulars are young, affluent and have wrinkles at the eye corners that tell of skiing seven months a year.

Outside--what the hell is going on? The Walliserkanne slowly empties. In the street, his back to the forming crowd, is a young, kilted, six-foot-five Scot, let loose from medical studies in Edinburgh. He wears no coat in the bitter cold. No matter, he warms himself, and loosens roof slates, with his bagpipes. From a nearby bar pops another Scot, this one also kilted but a foot shorter. He says, "Jock, lad, two minutes of Bonnie Dundee," and disappears into his bar, where, given the carrying power of bagpipes, he can hear with no difficulty. Zermatt goes this way, and a skier who remains solitary either likes it like that or has never really left Kankakee.

At last, there is a day when the weather breaks, and the skier spends an hour at the Furggsattel, looking toward Cervinia, Italy. A fine mist blows across the sun. A moment before, the watcher had a postcard view of mountains 100 miles away. Now it has faded; first to hazy incandescence, then to thick gray blowing in chunks past the skier's feet. Now the gray thins. In no more than five minutes, Cervinia appears again, hot with sun, and then the air itself becomes visible as mist forms once more and nothing with an edge or shape can be seen.

That afternoon, the skier joggles to St. Niklaus on the train, retrieves his car and drives down to the real world. Two days later, a friend still in Zermatt phones to say that three feet of snow have fallen and an avalanche has rumbled through the Zermatt train station, upsetting a freight car, hopelessly blocking the track and marooning everyone. His cheerfulness is in the worst possible taste.

• • •

After a couple of days of phoning to find out who has snow--and most of the Alps have less just now than the Chevy Chase golf course--the early-season piste crawl continues in France. The first view of La Plagne, a six-year-old ski resort in the French Savoy, is not inviting. The impression during the winding ascent by auto is of a vacation factory for middle-level Soviet technicians. A very tall apartment building, apparently, has been sawed in sections and the sections have been stuck here and there in the snow. All of the sections are faced with orange-varnished wood. One of them is 19 stories high. Everything is wrong, visually; wood nailed higher than any tree looks not warm but absurd, and high-rise shapes seen against the Alps are both puny and presumptuous.

There is no place to turn the car around, however. The skier persists and is rewarded. For a visitor within the walls, the feeling of La Plagne is exactly the opposite of the deadening distant view. The building complex does not become beautiful, but the sense of an inhabited place comes as much through the ears and the skin and the soles of the feet as through the eyes (which is why even a faithful architect's model tells nothing). The sense of La Plagne during a holiday season is a happy confusion of motion, color, clatter, beat. The pulse is strongest in an unlikely underground plaza, fed from several levels by corridors connecting the hotel and apartment blocks and leading by escalator to the main aerial ski lift.

The danger in such an arrangement is that it seems to be what it is--a valve system for shunting pedestrian traffic. La Plagne avoids sterility by being unreasonably French. A four-table restaurant is ridiculously inefficient in terms of rognons au beurre noir produced per hour, but it is pleasing to eat in and satisfying even to those who happen not to eat there. The skier passes it several times a day, sniffs the air critically and nods to the proprietor and kitchen staff, a Frenchwoman. He may or may not stop in for an aperitif some evening, but he plans to do so. It is part of his neighborhood, and so are two or three delicatessens, a clutter of boutiques, a Whiskey-à-Go-Go and any number of other tucked-away bars and restaurants, including one that serves nothing but crepes.

For some reason, only the French have found La Plagne, or perhaps only the French have found its jazziness not jarring. The result is that a wandering American is a curiosity. Perhaps half of the French at La Plagne want nothing to do with him, on principle, and half of the rest don't care one way or the other. But the youngest and brightest are fascinated by the U. S., and the skier is captured and led off for Scotch, brie and argument to a room for two that an impressive number of grad students and young university instructors have turned into a coeducational dorm.

La Plagne's owners say they want to open the resort to an international crowd, but it's hard to imagine it anything but French. The inhabitants now are a father and his 14-month-old son, both wearing sunglasses, sitting in adjoining deck chairs; a Sorbonne Barbarella in a plastic après-ski-le-déluge suit talking soberly with a sideburned student in cowhide vest and corduroys; a red-faced fat lady eating pâté, with a paper napkin on her head to ward off the sun. On the mountain, a cheerful, snow-mad young government fonctionnaire skis in a ferocious rush toward an overhang, jumps 60 feet and continues in a mad schuss, totally out of control, scattering beginning skiers with his whoops. Everyone cheers. Last year, a friend says, he broke his leg doing the same thing.

In the morning, the skier, shaken from his large hotel like a corn flake from its box, lands at the foot of a considerable lift system. La Plagne has the most beautiful ski lift in the world, a télécabine carrying six passengers at a time in elegant glass-sided steel cars. But télécabines are expensive and the mountain's other lifts are cheap disk-on-pole monstrosities (French-made and the curse of French ski areas) that grab the skier between the legs and haul him up the hill in a series of back-bending jerks. Unfortunately, it is these that the skier has decided to use, because a series of them serve the Emile Allais trail, the most difficult at La Plagne.

Allais, a small, tough, courteous man of 57, was the world ski champion in 1937 and 1938 and is now one of La Plagne's developers. Because he laid out the area to make average skiers feel like Olympians, the run named after him is only difficult, not impossible. But it is long--almost two and a half miles, with a drop of almost 3300 feet--and the skier had decided on a desperate therapy. Yesterday, a spell of incompetence led to recurrent snow in the ears and humiliation in the presence of a demure (continued on page 198)Skiing the Psychological Alps(continued from page 150) lady press agent; and now some interior yeti mocks him with a vision of balance and speed. He intends to recover his carved turn and his self-respect with a no-fall, nonstop run of the Allais trail.

A good downhill racer, hitting 70 mph or more on the schusses, would clock something like three minutes for the Allais trail and he would be tired at the end. A good recreational skier (he can describe himself this way if he blots spells of incompetence from his mind) will take four times as long, expend more energy from a smaller supply and finish a good deal tireder. The virtue of the therapy is not merely self-punishment, although that is part of it. The point is that the skier, whose faults are stiffness and a tendency to clutch at shrub roots, lacks the energy to scrape for two and a half miles. There is nothing to do but let the skis run, use what ergs he has hoarded to keep speed somewhere near reason and ride loose. He reaches the lift terminal at the bottom, fluttery in the thighs but on better terms with himself, in just under ten minutes. There is no prize for this sort of performance, but the skiing has become more workmanlike, and as the skier rides up a long series of lifts, he begins to think the unthinkable.

He does it all again. The trail is dark and empty and the snow tends toward ice on the lower pitches. What develops, nevertheless, is a day nearly as good as the bright morning of powder at Zermatt. By nightfall, with time out for steak, salad and red wine, the skier has run the Allais nonstop four times.

That evening, after a long, curative dinner, he notices that the télécabine is running. Unwarily, he asks why. Night skiing, a friend tells him.

"I don't see the lights."

"Ah, no need for lights. There is the moon."

It would be fascinating to know what sort of policy discussion the La Plagne managers had before they decided to allow moonlight skiing. It must have gone something like, "You're mad; they'll fall off the mountain and the survivors will sue!" followed by, "It is true, but what fun...." It is characteristic of this mad place that the decision was in favor of what fun.

Whatever the case, the skier is too weary to prevent himself from getting back into his clammy boots and riding up the mountain. The descent is a mixed pleasure; the moonlight is peaceful and still, but the trail is hard and bumpy and vision is too poor to ski with appropriate grace. The skier finds himself thinking of what moonlight skiing might be on the soft snow fields of the Theodul glacier. Of course, he will never get the chance. "They'll sue, but what fun" does not constitute an argument in Switzerland. During the skier's second descent, the same young government fonctionnaire jumps 60 feet off an overhang and schusses out of sight, as before, totally out of control. Everyone cheers.

The next morning, on the way to the airport at Geneva, the skier meets Emile Allais, the great racer, who says it is too bad the skier must leave without trying La Plagne's specially prepared speed run.

"You are kind, but I am not a racer, only an ordinary skier," says the skier.

"But this is for ordinary!" says Allais with a happy smile. "The record is more than 87 miles in the hour."

• • •

On to Arlberg, and just in time. It is very Austrian, which is to say maddening, amusing and, in the end, oh-for-God's-sake enjoyable that the ski lifts at Lech am Arlberg shut for an hour at noon. A great many schillings are lost by the ski-lift corporation in this precious hour, but shutting for lunch is very important in Austria. Banks shut, stores shut, offices shut. Restaurants and police stations stay open only because of the geniality of their proprietors.

The daily transition from the active to the contemplative life is especially pleasant in Oberlech, a small salting of farm buildings and Gasthofs set 1000 feet up the Kriegerhorn from Lech itself. All morning, the skier has practiced large, lazy turns in the undemanding pastures of Oberlech, reassured to notice that while nearly every building is a barn at its dark end, each one evolves toward the west into a dwelling in the normal Austrian fashion and then makes one further change, so that at its sunny end, it is a hotel. When the lifts stop, the skier picks a hotel whose location will not require him to climb and aims himself toward it. He spears his skis in a snowdrift, walks to the terrace, sits facing the sun and orders goulash soup, hard rolls called Semmeln and beer. If he happens to have roots in New Hampshire, he may reflect, as he admires the décolletage of his waitress' dirndl, that he is sitting, in early January, at almost exactly the altitude of the weather station on Mount Washington.

All of Lech is lazy, and not only at lunch hour. This is unusual. The valley town is the center of one of the most elaborate ski circuses, or lift systems, in the world; and ordinarily, the skier would spend his day running from the Rufikopf cable-car terminus down to the Trittalm lift, riding that once or twice, then descending to take the Trittkopf cable car, skiing down for lunch to Zürs, a ski town two and a half miles from Lech, crossing the road to the Zürserseelift, skiing across the Zürsersee to the Mahdlochlift, riding that to the top of the Mahdlochjoch, taking the long run to Zug, another ski town, then riding by taxi to the Kriegerhorn, ascending it by a two-lift chain and skiing down through Oberlech in time for a five-o'clock Imbiss, or snack. But snow continues to be scarce in the Alps and what snow has fallen already has burned or blown off the exposed south faces. The Lech-Zürs-Zug tour can be made, and so can an even more ambitious one to St. Anton, nine miles away, but it is too rocky to be a pleasure. If the foreign visitor has the Austrian knack of admiring the virtues of the situation at hand, he skis the easy runs in the sun at Oberlech, takes lunches even longer than he is obliged to and invites his soul.

After several days of this lotus-eating, however, the skier's technique begins to fuzz at the edges. The powder cure of Zermatt is unavailable at the moment and the no-fall, nonstop nonsense of La Plagne strikes the skier's now-reflective mood as arduous. Fortunately, Lech offers a magnificent cure of its own. This is to ski to town and, weight well forward to balance a pocketful of traveler's checks, begin negotiations with Martin Strolz, Lech's custom bootmaker. Strolz and Haderer of Kitzbühel produce the best handmade ski boots in the world, and it is a moment comparable with the taking of holy orders when the barefooted skier stands first on an ink pad and then on an order blank, as Strolz himself notes any peculiarities of fetlock formation. "Are you a good skier?" asks Strolz, who won the silver medal in downhill at the world championship races in 1954. This is the winter's severest test, but the skier meets it. "Yes," he says, ignoring the giggles of the girl he has been skiing with. Strolz, impressed, suggests a synthetic boot of medium stiffness and arrangements are made for the delivery of a pair some weeks later in a heavily guarded train.

The next morning, there is time for two runs and an end to it. Time and money are used up. Mockingly, it has begun to snow. As skier and friends head back home to Salzburg, the view of the mountains is blurred. There is, perhaps, a sense of something not quite penetrated; and for a long time, no one says anything. The windshield wipers tick; the spiked tires ride quietly. The snow keeps coming. Then someone has an idea, one of the enchanted kind that enter the head perfectly formed and leave the tongue the same instant.

"Hey," he says, "how about Cortina in March?"