An explanation

When I published that post in this blog, I thought I was going to write an explanation a bit later; but I’ve been very busy until now –it was a very hard end of year! OK. Now I’m going to give some (preliminary) ideas about the post “a break of dawn”.

Even though it’s important to remark that Val Veny is an amazing place, you have to distinguish between what the things are and what you feel about the things you are looking at. A green field full of little yellow flowers in the evening light is clearly different from the same green field, but full of ants. In the first case, the beauty of the green field is undeniable. However, as a matter of fact, you can say «I don’t like it» because you don’t like, for example, yellow things or little flowers. But, obviously, it’s your perception of the world –and not the world itself– what leads you to say «it’s awful» instead of «I don’t like it», I mean, to put your sensations in place of reality (for more about these digressions, see C. S. Lewis, The abolition of man, 1^st chapter).

You can’t deny it’s easy to make this mistake. Actually, things we don’t like are usually named bad things. You can call awful a beautiful, starry night if you have a headache –the kind of headache that makes you see the world as a boring place and the pharmacist as the worst kind of man because the perfect aspirin hasn’t been discovered yet.

How often have you made this mistake? How often have you seen some beautiful places, amazing landscapes and pleasant people as bad things?

Something like that happened last August when I spent one night at Rifugio Elisabetta, a shelter near Courmayeur. I made this trip with two friends, E and S. We attended the Holy Mass at Notre-Dame de Guerison Sanctuary. At about 5.30 PM we drove car until the end of the Val Veny road. After that, we walked a couple of hours through the valley, arriving at this place:

In the picture, you can see the valley between the mountains, the fast-flowing stream in the deepest zone and the road (only a few cars pass through it, those that belong to the people who live there) on the left. If you walk along the road, you suddenly start to walk between more and more streams that, together, seem like a lake. 

When it rains or when the snow melts, the little streams make up a real lake, like in this photo –taken two weeks after:

If you leave the road for an hour, you can visit the frozen lakes that are disappearing little by little… Actually, they are not completely frozen; you can find (in summer and if you are lucky) the edges frozen, but not the whole lake.

The road becomes a path when the valley goes up towards the smallest mountain in this area, Col de la Seigne (2516 metres high), the natural way between Courmayeur (Vallée d’Aoste, Italy) and Bourg-Saint-Maurice (Savoie, France), a perfect place to go trekking. The shelter I’ve just mentioned is on the Italian side, and it’s a necessary step for trekkers.

Rifugio Elisabetta, the day after

I have to confess that I’ve never made the way down to France; I’ve visited Bourg-Saint-Maurice going down by the Petit Saint Bernard pass, by car, as I will probably tell you some time.

E, S, and I arrived at Rifugio Elisabetta in the evening. We had dinner (an excellent and not expensive two-dishes-plus-dessert Italian dinner) and we went to sleep. We decided to visit Col de la Seigne before daybreak, in order to see Mont Blanc shown by the first morning light. It meant we changed the original plan, because we had planned to climb another mountain in (and not before) the morning. I discovered I couldn’t make the two trips; and I didn’t want to wake up at 5 AM… By the way, I thought (and I still think) the idea was physically and geographically wrong, because from Col de la Seigne you can see the west side of Mont Blanc, and, you know, the morning sun lights up the east side of everything in the world, not the west side, so we were going to look at the shadow of Mont Blanc and to strain our eyes with the first ray of sun in the daybreak. It seemed to me quite silly…

At 5 AM we got up and left Refugio Elisabetta. It was very cold, and obviously dark. I didn’t have a torch, while E and S did. I walked along the path following S’s light. It was fun. But when we were near the summit, we saw them… An army of clouds came to us from France, and made the dark path a humid, cold, and dangerous place. By the way, if we expected to see the Mont Blanc illuminated (if it was physically possible), the French clouds made every confidence vain.

 Finally, we arrived at the summit, which was covered by a lot of clouds.

After that, we started to go down. Going to Col de la Seigneto see the break of dawn was a huge disappointment. There was no sun, no view, no light, and no dawn at all. We felt only the wet and cold air from the clouds and the violence of the wind in the French-Italian Alps. Col de la Seigne’s summit seemed to me an awful place, and climbing it seemed the worst idea I’d ever agreed to. The rays of light from the sun were simply invisible. I decided I’d never again go there, in the sunrise or at any other time of the day.

To complete our morning, while we descended, S felt one of his legs was hurt. Mont Fortin would have to wait for a while. It would have been impossible to climb another summit that day.

But after a few minutes, the army of clouds was broken by the sunlight. It was an amazing –but very short– view. The whole landscape showed clean of clouds and the break of dawn touched the summit of Mont Blanc. Against my opinion, the view from Col de la Seigne(not from its summit, still covered by clouds) was wonderful. I didn’t remember that sunlight comes from theEast in the morning, but also from the South (in the Northern Hemisphere, of course), then, there was a very strange view, magnificent and subtle, sublime and quiet, simple and indescribable.

What’s the true Col de la Seigne, the humid, windy and cold summit or the amazing landscape and astonishing view of Mont Blanc from its Italian slope? Is it a beautiful place or an awful one? I’ve thought several times about this subject. I think our bad experiences have a good side too. To be honest, I’d never imagined I’d have been in these mountains. Despite the horrible weather, the most important fact is we climbed the Col de la Seigne. Even though there isn’t a line to show the border between France and Italy, if you arrive at Col de la Seigne’s summit, you are on the border; I mean you can go from a country to another on foot. If I had got enough time (because, although it seems I was on holiday there, I was actually working at Courmayeur and, for this reason, I had a kind of ‘timetable’, where there was a moment to go out –and another one to go home!), I’d have liked to descend to Bourg-Saint-Maurice. It might still be possible… I don’t know when.

Col de la Seigne is a mountain, the lowest mountain of that area and, then, the natural way to France. A mountain is itself amazing and dangerous. The more you climb, the more you want to go up. The more you find some slippery paths, the more you want to defy the hardest challenges. I think Col de la Seigne and, probably, every mountain in the world are wonderful places in themselves; but our impressions of them are influenced by the weather or some other incidental factor. Similarly, some ideas of our team mates can change a good plan into a tragedy, and so we may think falsely that that mountain is an awful place.

The same situation appears again in our work, for example. How often do our work mates change our impressions about our work? How often do we forget we have –after all– a job instead of nothing? Is it true that we sometimes lose the first purposes and goals that we aimed at when we started to work? Make the same questions about other fields of your life. What about family, neighbourhood, school, parish or any part of our life in which we forget about the good things we have and we only pay attention to the bad events?

By the way, if I hadn’t followed up S’s idea, I wouldn’t have seen the morning light shining on the eternal snow of Mont Blanc. If I hadn’t walked through the dark clouds and the humid wind, I wouldn’t have taken the path to the warm kiss of the sunrise in the valley. What are your dark clouds and where your humid winds come from? Do you think of the sunrise waiting for you when you reach the summit and you start to descend? What’s your sunrise? Probably, the last is the most difficult question; not only because we tend to forget what we expect to reach when we start an activity or when we –simply– live with other people, but also because we don’t have a very clear idea of the things we are going to find, and when we find them we can only discover that our ideas were a little (and a quite smudgy) mirror of amazingly real (and unknown) things that we have come to discover.

Everyone who has gone through an experience like this, please, add a comment. And, if you want, correct my English!-

(Thanks, Ana, for your help!)