The Outlander
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By ANDY ENRIGHT

Nobody knows me here. I arrive every year for one week, ski the same runs and eat at the same gauffrerie. Every season the kids in the shop are a little taller and the gauffres remain mediocre. I fancy that the battered-looking woman serving behind the counter recognizes me as a regular, but each time there's that same unregistering nothingness. I peer into her contusion of crow's feet for a glimmer of familiarity but back come a handful of euros as her eyes turn blankly to the next customer.

It's Saturday. Besides ordering food, I haven't spoken to anybody since Tuesday. Right now, in the lowest of low season, the resort is almost dead. I'm just another piece of jetsam lost in the anonymity of a big French resort. Good. I don't like crowds. I glance back at the woman behind the counter. She's looking for something to do. Guilt flickers briefly as I register the weakness of my failed attempt at human interaction.

There's a certain ascetic austerity to spending a week in a concrete cubicle with nothing but walls for company. You tune in to the ebb and flow of a town barely at tickover. You walk streets at night you never knew existed. You retract into obscurity. Don't speak; just observe. Watch as the baker fires his oven standing in the same pair of pants he was wearing the day before, as the amber lights of the piste machines wink their way up Les Jeux right onto Couloir and then high onto the Dôme des Petites Rousses until they cluster like a lazily twinkling nova nestled beneath Orion's belt.

Outside, it's snowing. The drifts build up against the window like a greying shroud, the wind wailing tunelessly between the buildings of Alpe d'Huez, the tourists huddling against the graupel as it pings their eyeballs and weasels into every vulnerability of their ill-fitting, cheap skiwear. It's been snowing for three days and the weekend crowd from Grenoble has decided to stay indoors and do whatever French people do at a weekend in these antiseptic tower blocks. My car rests inside a sarcophagus of snow, the only car left on Avenue des Jeux since the nervous mayor sounded the underground parking siren. I watch as the ploughs shovel snow onto it, not really caring, and turn back to lazily swirling cream in my coffee cup.

Here, nobody nods a greeting or knows my name. Nobody calls me out for skiing on the wrong skis, for wearing the wrong gear or for choosing a route never skied. Oh well, no friends on a powder day and all that. Right now I'm going to take both stages of the DMC gondola and then the cable car to the perfect pyramid of Pic Blanc, some 4,500 vertical feet up where the maelstrom will be raging and the grey men will emerge—hunched, shadowy figures diving into the eye of the storm, this leviathan Atlantic low disgorging itself over the spine of the Grandes Rousses. No one will complain to me about the conditions, or that they'd rather go somewhere safer, less vicious.

Being a "flatlander" enforces a certain sang-froid. The 600-mile journeys result in take 'em as you find 'em swatches of a season and become effective antidotes to becoming too spoiled. Today is what I'm here for. The Pic Blanc cable car is blasted with a carapace of rime, sheets of glaze shearing off as it enters a tram dock storm-battered into submission. I ski with undisguised joy, singing into the howling tempest. I can vanish high on this massif, I can disappear into the anonymity of the cloying clouds, obscured in the high, monochrome world where the elements unite in a demented rage. The words of Sir Robert Grant replay ad infinitum in this high cathedral, a stirring hymn from childhood: His chariots of wrath the deep thunder-clouds form, and dark is his path on the wings of the storm.

Streaming roostertails of spindrift detonate from the summit ridge at particle accelerator velocities, aiming at the shark's tooth of Monte Viso invisible on the far horizon, way beyond the Italian frontier. A swaddled wraith emerges from the murk and takes refuge in the mouth of the ski tunnel. A statue of the Madonna gazes benevolently into the gloaming from the tunnel mouth, a wizened beard of ice cementing it to the granite wall. I leave the tunnel behind and ascend toward the saddle, barely discernible as a ragged, blurred shadow looming from the great brooding embrace of nimbus cloud.

The wind-loaded avalanche slope beneath the col creaks like thousands of tons of chalk. It's too cold to think about how long it would take before anybody realized I was missing. My beacon peeps in well-intentioned futility as I try to walk light, nervously creeping across the drum slope, my jaw muscles tensely grimaced. The safety of the rock buttress emerges from a wreath of mist and the battering relents momentarily as I huddle directly below the ridgeline. The banshee shriek of the wind picks clean the summit ridge’s spires and crenelations, rising to a crescendo like the crack of a bullwhip. I breathe deeply and attempt to gain some composure before departure time.

The outlander stood and turned into the teeth of the jetstream. Nobody knew his name, nobody knew where he was going. As soon as he left, his tracks were covered by the windblown snow...


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