Aix, Montreux, Villa Triste

Reading Patrick Modiano

The melancholic refrain of an alpine resort: always a lake and mountains, hotels like grandes dames of another century with their velvet curtains, the casino, the lake shore boulevards, the Café de Quelque Chose, the beauty pageants and summer open-air concerts, old world grandeur no longer in fashion. Alpine resort towns with their aspirations to fading glory nestled all along the mountain chain, replicated on a smaller scale with a certain oppressive provincialism, always a café with its regulars, always a hotel de ville, always empty rooms, always a train leaving.

Last summer in Aix-les-Bains: the casino we never visited, the now-gaudy facades of the blocky grand hotels with their Italianate ornaments. The marble floors and pillars and mirrored foyer of the residence where we rented a basement. Fresh boule from the bakery, cow cheese of deep butter hue. The myriad steps up steep hills, gardens overlooking the lake, a late-night Tango convention in the bandshell. A small lakeshore beach and milky waters, dusk fading over the chain of hills, pines of late summer, a Moroccan restaurant in someone’s backyard.  

Five summers prior, an inn with a little balcony in a town on Lake Geneva. That time we did visit the casino, its interior bleak and discordant, the carpets not unlike Las Vegas’ most off-strip gambling dens. Here the error was the existence of windows, late afternoon light pouring in and bringing out the dark mustiness of the interior. We had already been drinking white wine on the tiny balcony of our pension, so we went back out along the lakeside promenade, the water an otherworldly turquoise. The promenade bustling with summer tourists, a lot or Middle Eastern families, and us on the bench drinking the remnant of the wine out of water bottles, lulled into the stupor of old world aristocratic locales, their perpetual draw, where beyond the aerobic activities of the day there was little tradition besides drifting into a drunken daze as the lake water turned to ink and lights on the hills glimmered in the distance. 

My mother and I, off-season at a lakeside motel in Avigliana, not far from Turin. The lake was green, though under clear skies it could reflect a blue hue, and nearby were the Alps, though the mountains surrounding the town were still modest. On one was perched San Michele, the monastery on a high cliff that inspired Umberto Eco’s fictional necromantic fortress in The Name of the Rose. Our motel room had a little balcony, just slightly above ground level, but it did look over the lake. We tried to look for an open, decent restaurant, but ended up having cheese and bread and supermarket food out of mugs. It was somewhat like catching a summer camp off guard, when it hasn’t yet been infused with the pretense of life, everything a little abandoned. The boat clubs looked off limits. My mother started observing intensely, over days, what she insisted were the same trio of ducks, in the throes of a love triangle.

First memory of its kind: I was six. My aunt’s alpine ski chalet. Interiors of warm wood, the freezing snow outside, wood logs and spiders, the older girls sneaking off at nights, a beauty pageant had been happening in town then too. Did they attend, did they participate? I cannot remember. Only that during that time there were circles on my hands, a strange fungal infection that had stumped the dermatologist in Alès, the mining town where we’d lived then, from where we’d traveled to this alpine chalet. I had skied a hours every day, and loved it. I have never quite skied again in my life. If there had been a pinnacle of my time on the slopes, it was then, though at the time it was only the beginning of a possibility. 1999, a six-year-old Asian girl in a purple ski suit, her mother watching, her hands ringed with fungus beneath her mittens, clenching ski poles, and in the chalet all the adults were drunk, and a millennium was about to turn. 

Dispatch from the Pacific

DISPATCHES

Loose observations, loose occurrences

“The tale of a place is the tale of its water.” –Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

15 minutes. That’s the measure of time I carry here, the one printed on motel front-desk pamphlets and educational placards along the beach boardwalks: how long it will take for the giant wave to arrive after the ground starts shaking. 15 minutes to reach high ground–if you can find it. Run east across the flat land, away from the Pacific, and soon you’ll come across another uncrossable barrier: water. 

Long Beach Peninsula, a narrow strip of land on the southwestern edge of Washington State, is 28 miles long and 1.5 miles wide. Formed from sediment build-up from the Columbia River, this land is a place where the roar of the ocean is never too far. Here, the Columbia River meets the Pacific. Theodore Winthrop, in The Canoe and The Saddle, called the Columbia mouth the “Achilles of Rivers” for the enormous concentration of shipwrecks in this zone of confluence, deadly currents coursing under the vast, muddy expanses of “foul marshes” and “oozy delta.” 

The roar is white noise. To inhabit this land strip means learning to tune out the white noise, as one often does with a perpetual existential threat. The peninsula is slated to be hit by a gargantuan tsunami–not a matter of if, but when, and by most scientists’ accounts, any minute now. The Cascadia Subduction Zone, which lies 70 miles off the Pacific Coast, is itching for a massive earthquake. When that happens, the death toll will be the largest of any natural disaster in U.S. history. In this state alone, the New York Times estimates that “about 70,000 people would likely be within the lowlands that could be engulfed by a large tsunami, and 32,000 of them would have no nearby high ground to escape to within 15 minutes.” 

The tsunami warnings are everywhere– I see them as I bike along the sparse networks of roads gridding the peninsula, road signs showing a stick man running towards higher ground, chased by a series of gigantic waves. The same image is tattooed in blue ink on many a coastal resident: with humor, perhaps, or defiance, or a philosophical reminder that around this rock-solid, immutable scientific fact of demise, life flows on. 

In a packed schoolhouse, I attend a talk by a local geologist along with a roomful of elderly peninsula residents. The talk is part of a series on navigating science, finance, loneliness, and pain as an elder. The room is a sea of white hair and age spots, flannels and baseball caps. “What is the biggest risk of living on the Long Beach peninsula?” The geologist asks. 

“Tsunami,” several voices around the room immediately join in. The geologist cracks a joke: no, it’s backing your car out of Jack’s, the local country store. The room erupts with laughter. But the language of the talk is punctuated with a certain determined finality: when the tsunami comes. If it’s during our lifetime. A 37% chance in the next 50 years.  

It’s a 430-year cycle, on average, between these major quakes, and even that is a blink of an eye in “deep time,” a phrase John McPhee used to evoke a timescale of epic geological proportions. The last 9.0 earthquake off Cascadia was 322 years ago. Yet, even if the peninsula is a wrinkle waiting to be smoothed out on the earth’s topographical fabric, life has taken root here in whatever way it can. Centenarian trees have gnarled themselves over this pinch of earth, a temperate rainforest humming with growth and decay. Tree branches are covered by a dusting of rich green, clumps of moss swaying like cotton candy. Fern, spruces, firs, cypresses, alders, maples feed off a soil rich with corrosion, wetness, and mold. Jeff, taking us around the forest, talks of the “rivulets” of tree bark. The pine-needle ground has bounce under my feet. A car whizzes by not far from us, but even the concrete roads here have streams of green tendrils running down their cracks. Other mud tracks along the bay are paved and filled with ground oyster gravel, the shells still glistening from a recent rain.  

*

Chris takes us to the tide pools at Cape Disappointment State Park. The morning starts out stormy, a nearly wintry dark and cold rain. On the vast Pacific Beach, at the foot of mossy black cliffs, the wind roars. This is but the slightest taste of “raw” weather. The outcrop of rocks is covered by mussels, gooseneck barnacles, and sea anemones. They look like a thousand grey-green gaping orifices, and when poked, some shrink ever so slightly, while others feign indifference. There are also fat starfish, and kelp so large we first mistake it for a rubber hose.  

Another day, Jeff brings us into the bay, on the other side of the peninsula, clamming. Mud squelches under my rubber boots, an uneasy suction. I squat down and rake the mud until the metal clinks against something hard–a clamshell. Later, I find an oyster, enormous and black and dead. The oyster beds here used to line the bay, making Oysterville a boomtown with businesses disproportionate from its apparent quaintness– hotels, restaurants, brothels, thriving canneries where fortune-seekers came to find work. They overfarmed this aquatic terrain, and now the village is a smattering of bucolic cottages with trim trees and elaborate gardens, many the second homes of wealthy Seattleites. 

Indigenous people of the Chinook tribe have long inhabited this land, which was then parceled out and exploited with abandon by white settlers. With the Chinook salmon population reduced to a sickly trickle, the otters near-decimated for their pelts, and the once teeming oysterbeds overfarmed by waves of boomtown laborers, the peninsula is now home to a great concentration of RV parks and a resource economy in full transition to a resort economy. The Chinook Nation is still fighting for federal tribal recognition, a status briefly granted by the Clinton administration before it was revoked by Bush. 

The bay may be depleted, but the mud still offers treasures: clams and other mollusks, and the fabled oysters. Even today, around this bay, they amount to around 10% of the U.S.’s total oyster harvest. Across the peninsula, the sea still brings an abundance of razor clams– in 1940 the world’s largest clam fritter was cooked in Long Beach in the world’s largest frying pan, greased by girls skating in butter. The biggest town on the peninsula, Long Beach exudes no-frills kitsch with a downtown of brightly-painted businesses, an espresso drive-thru, a taco shack, several horse-riding offerings, a go-cart course, the Neptune movie theatre, ice-cream parlors, and Chang’s Chinese Restaurant and Cocktails, among others. There is no shortage of country stores, and, naturally, a MacDonald’s. 

Nearby Seaview has a haunted hotel and antique stores that house ever-expanding universes— cloisters after cloisters of household items and eerie dolls peering from nooks and crannies. Ilwaco, a port city just on the border with Oregon, is a bleak collection of shuttered stores and peeling facades, and a man is swaying on the sidewalk, legs covered in scabs. Meth addiction on the peninsula is bad, another man on the beach tells me. When I meet him, he’s roaming the beach with his dog, staring at the waves. He’d just lost his camper and is sleeping in his car, sober only because he is broke. The next time I see him, he’s making walking sticks out of driftwood, and holding a beer can. The last time I see him, he’s lost his car, and is sitting under a bus stop awning, with only the dog, a bag, and a stick. “You probably won’t see me again,” he says. The bus doesn’t come, and the last image I have is of him limping away on foot, southward along the Pacific highway. 

*

On an evening when the wind howls, I come to the Pacific beach with a photographer. Under the low, cloud-laden sky, this shoreline feels truly endless, a dark grey sea fading into an inky horizon. Tonight, we see none of the usual pick-up trucks cruising along the edge of the tide. A whale carcass that had washed up here earlier, feasted upon by gulls, crows, and eagles, has now been reclaimed by the sea. The light is flat, the photographer says, objects lack contours, have lost their shadows. We find a shallow mouth where a current has carved a wide passage in the sand, toward the ocean. I kneel down in this water, and my body, instinctively, faces west. The tide pulls, the wet sand rustles around my sunken knees. The seafoam leaves lace-trims of brown, and the water is not bone-piercingly cold, as I’d feared. The horizon line stretches on, fading from visibility, placid, for now.