Green and Gray

Those seem to be the colors of Courmayeur right now, not surprising given the season. It wouldn’t be any different at home in Vermont. Yet somehow it caught me by surprise, mostly, I think, because I have been so accustomed to shockingly blue skies and stark white mountains framed beneath them. Lately the mountains have lost their mantle and started turning new-life green, slowly at first but lately with a more powerful insistence. Entreves, where we live, was one of the last strongholds, a fact that we noted with pride while riding down the Mont Blanc tram. It held snow longer than the town of Courmayeur. It also was the last to get significantly green. Now it’s a moot point. The entire valley has given over to the other side, allowing flowers to bloom profusely. As much as I enjoy it, it’s one more reminder that winter is gone.

The gray is another new development. Today it’s raining, not the flirtatious young spring showers of yesterday that teased the sun but a persistent, mature downpour that’s not going to give up until it gets what it wants. From our balcony I can see the river running out of the Val Veny, fed by the Miage and Brenva glaciers, among others. It’s busy moving rocks the size of small houses in it’s rush downhill. The once-snowy chutes across the valley on the side of Mont Chetif, the same chutes we looked at longingly every day from the tram, wondering if they were skiable or not, are long white ribbons of runoff slowly melting away at the avalanche debris piled at the bottom.

Everything is slowly moving downhill, it seems.

Louise and I spent the last few days in Chamonix. While sitting at one of the cafes near the main roundabout in town, we saw more than a few cars with British plates, loaded down like college students after graduation, heading back to their island. Our favorite bar, a shockingly pink art-deco place perched above the Arve river in the center of town, was celebrating its last night, the English waitress told us. Les Grands Montets had their closing party, complete with pond-skimming, and then shut down. Most of the shops had end-of-season sales on just about anything you could want. Snell Sports, the biggest store in Chamonix, had moved all the skis to a miserable little room upstairs from the main floor, climbing rope hung where skis once stood stacked four pairs deep.

Maybe the Chamoniards understand how I’m feeling. In Courmayeur, far fewer do, I’m sure. Far fewer of them know what it means to really live by the seasons. They, like many others, conceptualize seasons as something abstract and economic: winter season in Courmayeur is a time to make money, followed by a spring shutdown and then a brief revival for a couple months of summer. They’re not so much living by the seasons as making a living by the seasons. But I think many of Chamoniards know differently. They know what it is to spend the rest of the year making a living so that they can live by the seasons. Winter’s end for them as well as for me, means one step closer to the return to the quotidian. Many of them will probably put it off and go climbing up high on the massif, as I’m doing, prolonging winter through elevation. But even that can only last so long before inevitable reality sets in. I’ll have to go back to wherever I’m supposed to belong and find something to do with my time, waiting for winter to set in again.

I’ll have to move downhill as well.