Quatre Pattes

I have been thinking much about life recently, I have indeed had much to think about, as my partner was recently involved in a very bad car crash. Here in the mountains you learn to take nothing for granted. Especially the conditions of the roads in winter. He was very lucky and survived intact with only a broken rib and concussion, unfortunately our beloved car was very much the worse for wear. After four complete rolls, one side-on and one head-on collision with trees, you don’t expect the best outcome. I am just grateful that our car saved my partner’s life. That she certainly did.

And coming back down the cable car yesterday from skiing up at 2000 metres I became deep in thought about the beauty and the treachery of a place like this. We seem to live life on the edge sometimes, up against the power of nature with an inability to control it, constantly at its mercy. What is it that makes us want to live here? Most people think we are crazy to live under such conditions, until they witness for themselves the breath-stopping beauty and seductiveness of the place. We hear often of friends of friends who have died up in the mountains, yet this fascination continues. This place is the most vital, most powerful, most unsettling yet comforting place I have ever lived.

And I thought about the people around here who are compelled to rock and ice-climb, to ski and board these dangerous heights and come back year after year, entranced by the snow’s power - there is something that urges them to connect with this danger - they hear its call. And when these people are hearing this call, it is like they are involved in a beguiling dance, a relationship with Her - Nature Herself. They slow-dance with the rock, the snow, the ice, the sky. They enter into a compelling love affair which is never satiated.

I am not one of those people who dance this dance, though I know many who live here who do and my partner has heard this music many times - the greatest song came to him when he fell 20 feet down a bottomless crevass five years ago (wedging himself by hands and feet managed to save him until his skiing party winched him out). But I catch glimpses of this song in my day to day life - whilst skiing on the edge, whilst driving in treacherous conditions, in the middle of the night when gales blow up the valley and push the trees horizontally over the chalet. Living amongst a raw nature like this, gives one a huge sense that we are indeed part of an amazing wholeness, small and inconsequential, yet part of it all the same.

I, myself have just returned this morning from a very treacherous journey down to the girls’ school and back. A simple thing - a school run, yet fraught with huge dangers in the new snow-fall of last night. Deathly beautiful, and deathly. But as I drove, concentrating so completely and without distraction on the task in hand - staying on the road and on the correct side of the road, trying to drive fast enough to make it up the hill, yet slow enough not to skid or stall, I realised that this all made absolute sense. Again, something I have difficulty expressing in words and I feel that words cannot do it justice, but at the moment this is the only medium I know how to manipulate well enough to get some way to explaining it.

I suddenly felt ancient, very ancient. Not old, but timeless, in a strange way - touched by the trials and challenges that faced people many years ago before the comforts of modern life. In a flow of life that was using every sense to the full - and praying on a sixth sense to get me through it. I felt part of a timeless struggle and by overcominging it - seeing that precarious edge and managing to evade it - put me in touch with something very basic, primal and essential. I understood how a “Feel the Fear - and Do it Anyway (’cos you got no choice)” moment can put us in touch with the rawness of life.

I know that for most of my 38 years on this planet I have lived a comfortable and easy life - certainly with huge and sometimes crippling challenges of the personal and social kind: all of society’s making, but never exposed to the flow of life in quite this way. Since living here I have never felt more alive, more out of control or more protected by a force of nature that is so real and potent - and that is the key - with beauty comes power and with this comes danger and ultimately, all wrapped up in the same force, comes protection. It is all part of the greater flow of life; to experience one, you must involve yourself with the other. Perhaps this is why people actively seek out the danger.

I believe this love affair, this slow (and sometimes quick) dance with the forces of nature around us is the way we as humans, are meant to live - after all, much of the surviving expression of the ancients, be it wall art, skin art, song, dance, medicine or story illustrates this eternal dance - of man/woman, animals, plants, rocks, the earth and the stars. Life in the modern world has been deadened by our pathological need for comfort, for ease of living - what sacrifices have we made in the name of this faceless, facile way of life?

Where did I hear about an ice storm that brought down power lines in an East Coast American State? For the first time in years, people pulled together as communites, relating stories whilst standing round campfires, pooling resources for food and cooking, staying local, walking, breathing fresh, unpolluted air. If people found inner comradeship, community, even peace through hardship and danger then - why did they clammer to have the power turned on again??? I felt this too here when last July a landslide flooded the valley below us and cut us off for four days. The mountains forced us to create this way of life.

Each day during the winter, I wake up to look out at the conditions on the roads and the surrounding hills - dangerous for driving, fantastic for skiing. Better to stay at home or face the treachery of the roads and try to get to the school/the slopes? These may seem like tame questions at times; at least I know where my next meal is coming from. Many don’t. But in my privileged world, I now understand this dance of danger and although I hate to step out onto the dance floor and expose myself and my family to this Nature that lies outside my door, at the end of the day, it brings me closer to my essential self, something that might have remained buried if I had never moved here.

About the Author...

I am an english mummy living in the french Alps, I am a nourisher to my dear other half and two girls of five and two. I am just about to start homeschooling the girls and we aim to travel around Europe with them next year. We follow the WAP diet and live a slow life up here in the mountains.