I’m walking my kid to the library in Chamonix, holding hands, or rather, he’s holding my middle finger in his hand.
I get a tug on my finger every few steps, because he’s looking down as he jumps from seam to seam on the sidewalk, and I am looking up at the Aiguille du Dru, one of the six classic north faces of the Alps, 850 meters of steep granite, trying to remember the history of climbing routes on it.
It’s almost a mile and a half straight up from where we’re shuffling along, on our stroll to the library, where I hope to find some puzzles and toys to entertain Jay. Jay is three years old, and doesn’t care about mountains as much as his dad does, or really, much at all, which is pretty normal for a three-year-old, I imagine.
I brought him here because I wanted his mom to see this place, because like me, she loves mountains, and Mont Blanc is a pretty good one, as far as mountains go. Someone said in conversation yesterday that there’s no other town on earth that’s this close to a mountain this high and this steep, and that seems legitimate, I think, standing here looking up at it.
At this moment, as Jay and I walk through Chamonix, thousands of people are running around Mont Blanc, or will soon be, in one of the UTMB races. This is something that 3-year-old Jay can’t really conceptualize—all he knows is that there are a lot of people here, everywhere. And that we are letting him eat a lot of croissants.
I might call his perspective naive, but I also I understand it, and even sometimes share it, because part of me realizes the ridiculousness of the whole thing—ascending and descending for hours without sleep, pushing yourself to your physical limit, training for months or years to run while you’re not being chased by anything. But another part of me, the part that loves mountains, thinks it’s one of the coolest things you can do in your life, if you’re able and have the means to do it.
One time I asked my friend Gregory to tell me what bicycles meant to him, because I was making a film about the bike shop he started. I was hoping to get some sort of soulful quote from him since he was a true believer in bicycles, having raised two kids as a car-less family, riding rain or shine.
So, with the camera pointed at him, I asked, what does bicycling mean to you? and he said, “It’s a way to get from Point A to Point B that’s faster than walking.”
This was not at all what I was expecting, but I had to admit that what he said was inarguable.
I look up at mountains sometimes and I know they’re just folds of the earth—places where things crashed together, or a volcano erupted, or whatever geologic event happened. Sometimes I can be as reductive as Gregory and admit that yeah, that mountain over there is, really, just a place where the ground is higher than it is here.
But I can’t really square the time I’ve spent in the mountains with the reductive definition of them: they’re just another landform.
But still, my toddler doesn’t get it. And with a full day to solo parent him a few days later, I pushed him in a stroller over to the kids’ amusement park here. In full view of the snowy summit of Mont Blanc, I shelled out way too many euros, feeling maybe a tiny bit guilty or at least a bit self-conscious, so he could operate a kids’ excavator, a crane, a digger, drive go-karts, ride on tiny trains, and squeal with delight on the alpine slide.
I never understood why these types of businesses seem to exist adjacent to places of natural beauty, like in national park gateway towns in the United States. And of course I get it now, now that I have a toddler to entertain: Mountains are beautiful, sure—plenty of adults would agree, and maybe plenty of kids too.
But the beauty alone doesn’t really set the hook in you, not like it has with me, and my friends, and the mountain folks I know, and the people running these races.
The kind of hook that pulls you to rearrange some or all of your life so you can spend more time in the mountains, on trails, on summits, trying to capture whatever magic it is you think is up there, or out there.
That, I believe, requires a story, or stories, about the mountains or about the people who come here to discover something. And I think you might need to be a little bit older than three for those stories to resonate with whatever part of you needs them, or to fit in you like a key in an ignition, turn and fire up your engine.
We watched a few minutes of the golden hour of UTMB on Sunday, the final 60 minutes as people ran, trudged, limped, through Chamonix toward the finish arch, every one of them (hopefully) believing it was worth it. I didn’t know any of them, but I’m sure every single one of them heard about this race somehow, in the form of some story, somewhere, and the hook set in them. You don’t spend 46 hours through the dark of two nights, in the rain and cold, grinding it out, up and down, up and down, by accident. Every one of those people had been on a journey.
Jay sat on my shoulders for a few minutes, not very interested, while I tried to soak up as much of the human experiences as we could see in a handful of minutes, the crowd cheering everyone on, regardless of where the runners were from, what language they spoke, whether they were moving well or looked like they were near death.
I don’t know if Jay will remember any of this, the runners digging deep, the cheers and the cowbells, or the view of the Bossons Glacier and the summit of Mont Blanc backdropping downtown and the whole scene. I’m trying to not push anything on him, or assume he’ll love the same things I love, and want to do the same things I love to do.
But standing there in the sunshine, with him on my shoulders, I thought: I hope you like mountains when you grow up, but I don’t hope that hard, honestly. I hope you find something that fires you up, something that you tell stories about, something that means as much to you as the mountains mean to your dad.
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