French Alpine Pastime
Being 57 Part 1
 

My 57^th birthday

In the morning I do some swing exercise at the Uriage golf club, between Grenoble and the ski and parasailing take-off resort Chamrousse. I have been advised to reduce the club lengths of my irons, take new woods and change my swing. Done it all. Feels very different and never to yield a smooth straight hit again, but this is more than giving it a chance, I really think they are right. It will need time to accommodate.

Photo: golf in Uriage, mountain spring resort, with its inevitable casino. Golf dress codes are remarkably relaxed: hot pants and mini skirts are popular with women golfers of all ages, men mostly wear shorts just over the knee. There is no fuss about socks. The dog company (lead tied to cart) on the golf stroll was not a usual thing, but nice enough to remember with this picture

In the club house a booklet by the F�d�ration Fran�aise de Golf is freely available: Je joue au golf. The invention of golf is called a mystery. If I read and understood correctly, the French were the first to start hitting with sticks also in cases there were no differences of opinion, but the Scots are chivalrously granted the honour of having invented the hole. Tee box is d�part, but after that it is just topp�y, bunc�re, dgopp�y, puutt�y.

The afternoon I drove up to the Chamrousse parasail take-off site.

Photo:  Chamrousse, Grenoble, 1850m. Here we wait (I behind my blue parasail) for the afternoon thermals (warm upward rising air), but we will not get much: there is a high pressure inversion. The warm air in the valley cannot rise above a blanket of heavy colder air that the high pressure environment wants to sink. See at the arrow the dirty brown smog above the valley. Above its borderline the heavy air blanket is completely clear as you see when you look right at the mountains.

Around 17:00 most pilots jumped and most of them managed to stay level in the weak thermals, some even gain another 300 m. I see lots of competition wings: thin, wide from left to right and short from front to back. Mine is a medium wing. In Africa I have a maximum stability wing that I used as a freshman. Though this is already my flight 3 out of 5 I promised to fly this holiday without considering to stop this forever, and fear is back down to normal, I do feel the freshest man around. Many things you did not do for some years feel a bit clumsy, but when it comes to distancing yourself a km from the earth under some tissue, the feeling gains some additional dimensions.
I jump. My altimeter (beeping as soon as you rise) got lethally oxidated in a Lake Vic rainstorm so I simply have to feel the thermals, which is not easy when they are weak. Nevertheless, I am sure that without it most of the guys around me would have kept altitude longer than I did. Another thing resurfacing in me is that I have never been among the good ones in this company. Partly this anabaptist experience consists of remembering that I have not seriously lost capabilities but still were to acquire many of them.
Below the "blanket" you just go down according to the design of your sail: mine 1.5 m per second. The landing at Uriage is at 440 m, but I left my car up at 1600. Any chance for hitch-hiking around 19:00 hrs.? These bloody French will all start cooking drinking and eating, Chamrousse, chiefly a ski resort is 90% empty. I see an open space half way on the densely forested slope and land there, fold the wing, hide it, plot its GPS position and start to walk up (not forgetting my GPS fortunately). A small path South leads up but slowly. I have 600 m to climb. Fortunately it joins a well rising forester's track. That is it! I start rising 9 m a minute, that is 540 m an hour, so around eight I should be up. After 40 minutes the track ends and the slope rises menacingly. There are red signs marking an 80% sloped path. I still have 2 hours of light and 300 m to climb. A few times the path involves almost vertical climbing during 10 m or so and would be frightening were there no trees all over to break a fall. Once, after just having passed such a place, my GPS fell out of my pocket but I got it back. Then, after struggling for an hour or so, I saw freshly cut trees. There should be a foresters' track up there. To reach it took me another 20 minutes, they probably tow the trees up with long cables. Walking again normally, I climbed the last 100 m to reach my car for some beers, bread and finally a shower from my jerry can in the insect infested sunset. The mosquitoes stay clear of DEET, but shit flies should be taught manners. What is the shit fly's advantage in trying to sit on me?
I have self-scanned maps of the Alps on my computer and GPS-calibrated them. That is how I saw a road leading up to 500 m from my wing, and, what was more: 500 m horizontal! I drove down, picked the wing up at the onset of the real dark and headed for Grenoble, where, Google had told me, there is is Jazz club called La soupe aux choux (Cabbage Soup, to be more precise: Swedish Turnip-Cabbage Soup).

Foto: Jazz Club La soupe aux choux (I photoshopped myself to the charming front).

The club hosted for the night a suburb music school. Pupils were playing with teachers, a dinner was arranged for friends and family, and quite unlike concerts of established pros, the joint was crammed. After I told the saxophone teacher that I had my soprano in my car, he told me to "draw it" (as he put it) and at the end of the night, actually the next morning, I played some tunes.