Chapter Nine
The Fondue Party
I guess at this point I should say a little about the preseason nightlife on the mountain. For the sophomore guys and some more adventurous coeds, Le Nord was pretty much it. It was a good sized bar with one Swiss Franc beer (about twenty-five cents for a half litre). The center of attention was the foosball, or zim-zim, table. There were pinball machines and tables where people could meet and talk, but the focus of the room was zim-zim and beer. There were other bars but none as close to our dorm.
There were other entertainments to be had at Le Nord. The beer bottles had a gasketed white ceramic top mounted on a wire clip. There were several ways of opening the bottles, but the most fascinating and difficult involved a bit of slight-of-hand. It looked like you struck the ceramic top with the side of your pointer finger, causing the top to pop out. In reality, you hit the side of the wire clip with your thumb, unhooking it before your finger struck the top. It took a lot of practice to perfect and involved accepting some finger bruises before you got it right. Then again, if you didn’t know the trick and tried to really do it – especially drunk – you could do some damage to your finger! I imagine that you could break it – although the worst I saw was Dick, the sergeant’s son from my army base. He managed to crack the top of the bottle and cut his finger as he smacked the top out of the bottle with brute force. Did I mention that ice was at a premium on the mountain? When I went to the bartender for ice for Dick’s finger I got the standard two sugar cube size pieces that went into their warm cokes. Wrapped in a cocktail napkin, they did little to relieve the swelling on Dick’s finger.
Cokes – the other beverage – were tiny! I hadn’t seen a Coke this small since elementary school – and they cost the same as a half-litre of beer – and they were super sweet, warm and nasty with the two tiny ice cubes rapidly melting inside. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that – beer was the drink at Le Nord! Oh, other entertainments included coaster flipping, coaster puncturing, ahh… salt shaker balancing; lets see, there had to be other fun things to do…– maybe not!
Around the village there was supposed to be a bowling alley, although I didn’t find it for some time, many other more distant bars and restaurants, a movie theatre – although the movies, even the American ones were dubbed in French with German subtitles. When we went to movies we snuck beers in and sat in the balcony making rude noises since most of us had no clue what was going on. More than once a kid snuck in some of the dinner soup or gravy and pretended to barf off the balcony on the unsuspecting viewers below. My input to the revelry was a little subtler. I brought in a small but loud European cap pistol to a James Bond movie I had seen a half dozen times in the States. I waited until Bond had looked around his hotel room unsuccessfully attempting to find an intruder. Then as he lowered his gun to return it to his holster, I fired! The audience jumped as one! That moment captured the rumor mill for almost an entire day. Have I mentioned that preseason weekday nightlife was pretty boring?
The weekends were a little better. There were a couple of places, like the Messange restaurant and nightclub just up the street from the main, that had jukeboxes and dancing. Have I mentioned that the college girls brave enough to leave the dorm after dark walked by me like I didn’t exist? So, in order to dance, and I loved dancing! – I needed to find someone at the Messange who spoke enough English to understand what I was asking.
While trying to find dance partners, I got to know the Messange’s owner, Herr Dietrick, a German. I ordered a German beer one night and he brought it down personally to meet the buyer. I suspect that he had hoped to find a fellow German and may have been a little disappointed at first, but we struck up a good friendship after I expressed my love for his country’s beer. Over the year I even gave him some English lessons. Well, he had a good vocabulary, but he kept putting the verb at the end of his sentences, like they do in German. I helped him practice the English placement. In turn, I got a few complementary German beers. A fair trade! Anyway, back to nightlife, there were more than occasional parties…
As a matter of fact, the second Saturday of the semester, the school decided to start the year off right with an introduction to the mountain and to Swiss foods and beverages. They reserved a famous Swiss Fondue restaurant called “L’Horizon” for a cheese fondue fest and gave the students directions for finding it. We hiked for miles up the switchbacks to and through the upper village, then out a dirt path that ran south along the mountain face. Wilds, Gil, and I strode along the long dirt path following several girls and scanning the distant peaks and the nearby pastures. Actually, calling the downhill slope “a pasture” was generous because grass was just barely clinging to its side. There were a couple of cow paths cutting across it, but the slope had to be greater than forty-five degrees. And when you included the drop from where the path had been built up on the side of the slope, the pasture had the appearance of a grass-covered cliff with a stand of trees in the distance that just hid the valley below.
The cow paths on the steep slope reminded me of a story my dad had told about a joke he played on my mom when they were dating. They were driving from her home in Columbus to meet his parents in Salem. The ride took them through a particularly hilly part of Ohio with lots of farms. When mom pointed out some cows on the steep slope of a nearby hill, dad, having been raised on the farm and just graduated as a veterinarian, took on a scholarly air and told her that the cows in this part of the State were breed for the hills. They had been developed with two legs on one side shorter than the other to help them walk on the hills. According to dad, they drove in silence for several miles until mom turned with a questioning look on her face and asked, “What happens when they turn around?” That memory stuck me as funny just then, and I tried to explain and expand on it with my friends saying that in Switzerland they could develop cows with two small legs on the side to hold them away from the slope. I expounded with, “The cows won’t even have to lean over to eat; they could simply turn their heads to the side.” Wilds and Gil just stared down the slope and looked at me as if I had lost my chips. Admittedly there weren’t any cows on that particular slope, and the guys may not have recognized the small dirt trails as cow paths.
We rounded a turn and saw the restaurant. It was single-story building with a large sloping roof. Tables had been set up outside on a level area. I wondered how a tourist would even find the place. There were no signs, and parking, such as there may have been, was a good half-mile down the path. We gathered around the tables containing baskets overflowing with bread chunks as bowls of molten cheese were set on sterno-heated food warmers. Then, as the waitresses went around taking drink requests, Willie told everyone at our table that you had to drink wine, beer, or hot tea and that cold soda was not an option. He explained that the molten cheese tended to cool and harden to a ball in your stomach, but alcohol and hot beverages would help keep it liquid. He didn’t have to twist my arm. The school was paying, and the waitresses were already bringing out bottles of Yvorne, a local Swiss wine. I can’t imagine any stateside college buying the booze. Unreal!
After we had had massive quantities of the molten cheese-soaked bread and the requisite glasses of wine, the party got started. Several of us left the tables clutching almost full wine bottles. Stallone, Cliff, Spyder, and a few others had chased down a cow and were trying to ride it. I stayed out of it because I had done my cow riding in boarding school, and they are not horses; they are just too bony to be a comfortable ride. Besides a cow can get pissed and chase you off the pasture, which, in this area could mean off a cliff. Then someone got the bright idea of trying to knock the cow down. Cliff bounced of its side several times before a running shoulder block from Stallone knocked the cow to its knees. They took turns sitting on the cow while Bernd took trophy pictures of their success.
I ran into Dick, the sergeant’s son from Landstuhl, at the party. He was hanging around with a group of freshman guys and seemed to be the center of attention. It looked like he would be okay. He said the freshman dorm was a dump in the lower village, quite a hike uphill to the main building. He offered to give me a tour later, but he was a little boastful for my taste. Besides if it was below our dorm, it was a very long hike! I quickly rejoined