Embedded Metaphors
2 September 2016, 1:38 p.m.
42° 26' 41.6" N, 87° 49' 32.5" W
Now since 1981 or ’82, the way to get from Geneva to Turin in an automobile (or, for that matter, in a semi-trailer truck with a dashcam and a load of hazardous cargo—I’ve just been watching some YouTube videos) is to take the Fréjus tunnel, one of those marvels of international engineering that they have all over Europe. In Gex, we had quite a discussion about taking the tunnel; especially if the older route, the road over the Mont Cenis pass, was still closed for the winter. This was the first week in May, and the road sometimes doesn’t open until June. Basically, Bertha and the monks wanted to take the tunnel no matter what—just get ourselves down to Italy as simply and safely as possible; Henry and the Rabbit Warriors wanted to take the mountain pass even if there was still some snow on the ground—Henry because he was Henry, and the Rabbit Warriors because they wanted to check out the snowboarding. I, as the minivan driver, predictably argued for the moderate position—we’ll take the mountain pass if the road is open, I proposed, and if it’s closed, well okay, the tunnel.
Luckily for us, it turned out that the road was open when we got there—Opening Day had been three days before—so I could stop worrying about Henry running a barricade on his BMW motorbike, pursued by a lumbering BierWagen, and me in the minivan having to follow them as a rescue vehicle. Still, it was really early in the season, so we were just about the only vehicles going up D1006 into the mountains that day.
And no, it’s not like that route number, D1006, has been floating around in my brain for the last seven years. I just looked it up now, on my laptop, after I watched the Fréjus tunnel videos. Augmented memory, let’s call it (although strictly speaking the tunnel videos are now for me a new memory, a memory of a path not taken, something I never did but now recall as if I had driven through the tunnel myself). What I do remember is that back in 2009 lots of ears were popping, in particular the ears of Conrad, the three-year old Duke of Lower Lotharingia, who seemed to start crying every time we gained another 20 meters of altitude. Different people tried telling him to swallow in various languages and at last Bruno calmed him down with ingoia… ingoia… and little sips of apple juice from a box. Of course, there was spectacular scenery, which I didn’t get to enjoy as much as my passengers because I was concentrating on all the switchbacks on the mountain roads.
At the highest point in the road, the Col de Mont Cenis, there’s a lonely restaurant with an amazing view, where bicyclists and cross-country skiers and snowmobilers—or in our case, a convoy intent on intercepting the Pope—can stop for lunch, and savor the accomplishment of simply being there. We sat outside, wearing our warmest jackets and sweaters, admiring the day. I remember trying to tell Lambert how much I loved that phrase, col de mont, which literally means neck of the mountain or collar of the mountain, how I thought it was so much more descriptive than the English mountain pass.
He looked at me as if he wasn’t sure whether I was speaking or just making noises with my mouth.
“The embedded metaphors of each language,” I said, or something like that, probably not those exact words, “they’re fascinating, aren’t they? The metaphors?”
He shook his head, as if I had just plumbed new depths of obviousness and banality. Okay, I thought. If that’s how you want to be....
At the next table the Rabbit Warriors were talking about their plans to come back to these mountains in the winter, about taking the cable car up to the top of Mont Cenis, how fucking awesome the snowboarding would be. Then one of the them, Geng the Horse Lover, maybe, or Ruck the Strong, went on to say how fucking brilliant it was that Hannibal had brought his elephants past this very spot. This particular Rabbit Warrior—whichever one it was—he really liked to throw the F-word around—I think maybe he had perfected his idiomatic English in a Dublin pub. Anyway, I felt obligated to point out that Mont Cenis was just one of six or seven mountain passes that historians had proposed as the route for Hannibal’s passage into Italy, which led to a lively discussion about the various alpine passes, Grand Saint-Bernard, Petit Saint-Bernard, Montgenevre, Traversette and so on, a discussion I thought was kind of impressive in its detail, since we had no connection to the Internet, and only a paper map, the one I still have beside me now, in this coffee shop in Zion. It turned out that Bruno and Lambert, for all their Latin scholarship, had never heard of Hannibal or his elephants. They had heard of the city of Carthage, but only as the home of Saint Augustine, which of course is only approximately accurate. For a moment, I thought about needling them about their ignorance, but the day was too nice.
After I paid for the lunch, we continued our journey downhill, toward the prosperous—and pricey—regions of Piedmont and Emilia-Romagna.
I was watching for the frontier, but it just zipped past. At some point I looked at the GPS on my phone, and it said we were in Italy.
Sure enough, the next traffic sign I saw was in Italian.
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