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Storm The Hardware Store, Not The Bastille by Greg Dobbs
I just came back from a week at Les Trois Vallées, the equivalent of Vail or Aspen in France. Eating flaky croissants (pronounced "kwah-sont," for you konfused Americans) for breakfast and crusty baguettes at every other meal, I should have nothing to complain about.
Why can’t a nation that came up with the cleanest way yet to slice off a man’s head, and that managed to build the Eiffel Tower even before a 2000-room Las Vegas hotel thought of the same thing, figure out how to create ski lift lines that don’t make you feel like cattle caught in the flow at the slaughterhouse. Why, to put it directly, can’t the French use rope?!?!? After all, as Brigitte Bardot proved to the world, France is a well-developed country. Putting aside the fact that female attendants at French airports will walk right in on a man using a urinal when it’s time to do their cleaning, France, I am certain, is part of the civilized western world, not the Third World it sometimes tries to resemble.
Picture them this way: take a hundred two-by-four planks, each at least six feet long, and lay them side-by-side, touching, with no space in-between. Then lay another hundred planks in front of them and a hundred more behind. Now choose any two together from the original row in the middle, pretend they’re nailed to your feet, and try to go an inch or so forward, let alone make a left turn. Either you can’t, or you can but only by lifting and laying your planks across the top of the guy’s ahead of you or on either side of you. Trust me, the guy’s not happy with you, nor are the people nailed to any of the other planks ... who’re all trying to do the same thing, at the same time, with the same stressful results! By the time you’re finally close to the front, you’re in the same mood as a taxi driver when the light turns green on New York’s Avenue of the Americas where it narrows down at Central Park from five lanes to three. (Meanwhile, whoever you’re with is by now two or three planks ahead or behind.) Mon dieu, how about "a leetle rope, monsieur?" A couple of hundred yards of rope – I’d even settle for meters – could solve the whole thing. Could it simply be that no one from France has ever entered an orderly ski lift line in America? Had they done so, they’d have seen that we run ropes to organize the masses making their way to the lifts. Merging in orderly and courteous fashion when our paths cross, we methodically and comfortably advance to the front. Together! If our party is only two or three and the lift accommodates four, stray skiers from singles lines can join us. It’s -- p-e-r-f-e-c-t-a-m-e-r-i-c-a-n-e-f-f-i-c-i-e-n-c-y. If the French admired the American revolution so much that a few years later they held their own, let’s show ‘em how we’ve revolutionized lift lines. Maybe then, instead of storming the Bastille, they’ll storm the hardware store ... and buy some rope!
To learn more about Les Trois
Vallées, check out http://www.les3vallees.com/. |
The French have many
superlative traditions worth preserving. Ski lift lines aren’t one of
them. If you ski but don’t appreciate American efficiency, read this. If
you could care less about skiing but simply want something nasty to say
about the French, you can read this too.
What’s more, arriving on
the tail end of a stunning storm which dumped a meter (about three feet,
for you provincial Americans) of fresh powdery snow on the slopes, and
skiing down sheer couloirs (cliffs... I think) without the annoying
barriers American resorts erect to keep you on groomed runs, I should have
nothing to spoil my memories. But it just ain’t so. Why not?
Because of French lift lines! 
And this leads me to my
complaint about French lift lies. They aren’t like our lines. They aren’t
like anyone’s lines, unless you’re talking about a line of Third World
refugees trying to jam themselves aboard the last bus out of a war zone.
Yes, French lines are something like that.