Adventures of a Scrabble player in the French Alps

I have just come back from a week in a village of the Alps called Termignon-la-Vanoise and located in one of the nicest part of the Alps mountains: the Haute Maurienne. I was there for a scrabble tournament, a game which is very popular in all the French-speaking countries such as France naturally and its over-seas departments, the isles of Guadeloupe and Martinique on the Atlantic Ocean, French Guyana, La Réunion on the Indian Ocean, its Polynesian territories...but also in Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, Morocco, Senegal, Cameroun...We play duplicate scrabble which was invented more than twenty years ago by a Belgian player and which is quite different from the American and the British so-called “free game”. Our “work” did not start until late in the afternoon and fortunately did not keep us from hiking, the reason why I want to write about one of my walks while it is still fresh in my memory.

One of our friends had taken another friend of mine, Françoise, and myself to Lanslebourg and from there we had a few miles walk in the forest and the meadows to come back to Termignon. Françoise had made the walk the day before and she had told me how nice the landscape was all around and how glad she was to show it to me. The earth path ran along the edge of the forest, a wooden sign warning us: Termignon, 6 kilometres, we could not get lost...only if another path crossed our way, which happened after we had walked for about twenty minutes: Françoise did not remember anymore if we had to go straight ahead or turn left. I fortunately could remind her that she had told me she had met a cyclist the day before, asked him the question and had been advised to go straight ahead. Besides, to turn left meant that we would have to climb towards the mountain, which in any case did not seem right as far as I could judge.

Thus we carried on walking along our path which still ran between pine forests and chatting at the same time. Our walk was not supposed to last more than one and a half hour and this length of time had elapsed when we got to a second crossing. A path turned right, going apparently down to a torrent, ours carrying on straight ahead. Once again, Françoise was puzzled and so was I this time as beyond the torrent I could see through the trees a tarmac road which seemed to go to Termignon. Not really knowing what to do, I suddenly made a suggestion that I still regret having made to this day! (only I would not have had a story to tell...) I said: “Look, Françoise, you go ahead and I turn right towards the torrent and the road. We’ll see what happens.” She did not try one minute to convince me to stay with her and there we went, Françoise straight ahead and poor me towards the torrent, having forgotten that as long as we did not see a new road sign, we were supposed to stay on the same path.

At the beginning, everything was all right, the path and myself went down nicely and slowly towards the torrent the noise of which started soon to become rather violent, all the more as the silence around me grew very heavy. Pines do not have leaves that rustle. Suddenly, no more path, I was alone in front of the forest. Reason told me to climb back, the small flame of madness which still tickles me from time to time pushed me further down towards the water. My moves were more and more awkward as the ground was littered with small branches which had ended there after the lumberjacks had cut the trees down in the forest above. I finally got to the banks of the torrent which was roaring by then.

Looking on my left and on my right, I did not see any bridge. What could I do? I remembered a story my father had told me when I was a child. He was about seven years old when his father told his older brother to teach him swimming on the river Doubs in the eastern part of France. Of course the boy did not need any help as he had crossed the water many times already (the same way I could have done as he taught me to swim when I was only three years old) and that’s how he did it: he would take off his cloths, roll them in a bundle which he put over his head, tie up his shoe laces together so that he could put the shoes around his neck and he was ready to swim to the other side. I did not realize that I was seventy years older than my father had been at the time of his youthful adventures and I decided to proceed the way he had: I thus took off my socks, my shoes, tied up the laces, put the shoes around my neck and started to walk on flat stones which were apparent above the water. I figured that in crawling on them I would eventually succeed in going beyond the middle of the stream which crashed down by now. I had been careful to pull my jeans legs up above my knees and I soon discovered that my walk in the forest had left visible marks: I was bleeding all over. No matter, I tried to go on and soon enough I was in the middle of the torrent and I could clearly see the tarmac road ahead. I would just have to reach the other side, climb up a slope, jump over a fence, and reach the road where I would by chance do some hitchhiking.

It was written that I would never reach the road: at the same instant I was going to jump in the torrent as there were no more flat stones to help me, reason told me not to do it. The risk of being thrown against the rocks and of perhaps dying in the cold mountain stream was too great. I listened now to inward words which made sense and I started crawling back to the banks. I soon enough found myself on a kind of slippery slate soil where my balance was not so good. I used my socks to dry as much as I could the blood that covered my legs and I put my shoes on my bare feet.

A helicopter was flying over my head but I figured it was too soon to have anybody searching for me! I started then the difficult ascent among the trees and the branches, never retraced the way I had taken in the beginning, and found myself after half an hour at the exact place I had left Françoise. I had been walking for one or two minutes when I met two cyclists who were coming from...Termignon, so they told me when I asked them, not even one mile from where we stood. They added that the road sign was a few yards further along where the path made a bend. They offered me some water which I drank with pleasure, being completely dehydrated and not having had the slightest thought of drinking a little of that water that was pouring around me.

The eight hundred meters were not so easy to walk as my damp feet were hurting me inside my shoes. I reached at last Termignon after having crossed a bridge which I had wrongly located in my thoughtlessness. Françoise was waiting for me in front of our hotel and told me that, having been there for one hour, she had decided to go searching for me.

All was well that ended well as we say in France. I drank thirstily a draft beer and wolfed down a cheese omelette. I had two hours left to disinfect my wounds, to have a shower and to get a little rest before the beginning of the “individual” tournament. I am sure that God punished me as I missed a “scrabble” and went back several places. After that I had to cogitate a lot to resume my former rank. Surely my visit to Termignon was made of up and down moves. If my potential readers have the kindness to notice that the day after my adventure or should I say my misadventure I hit a stone flower jardinière with my new car the left side of which was badly damaged, that a malicious referee gave me three zeros for having written after the allowed time, a thing which has never happened in any of the numerous tournaments I have been to up to now, they may understand that I have my doubts as to the opportunity of going back next year to the annual scrabble tournament of Termignon-la-Vanoise, as beautiful as the landscape may be.