The legend of Zerno or Jhernoz

As a follow-up to yesterday’s blog, I will serve you today with the legend of one of my home valley early dweller, called the Zerno or Jhernoz, but to make it easy on all of us we’ll call him Zerno. 

This man predates the establishment of the catholic religion in the Morzine’s remote Alpine valley, and the first monks that established the Aulph Abbey, 5 miles down river from Morzine. The Abbey was founded at the end of the 11th century by monks from Molesme Abbey in Burgundy, including the eventual second abbot of Aulph, Guarinus of Sitten, who later became Saint Guarinus. 

The name of the Abbey can be traced to the Latin word alpibus which means "mountain pastures" which later gave its name to the village of St Jean d'Aulps. Upon arrival, the Abbot looked for the eventual natives, and found three groups of folks that qualified as such. 

One of them, the Zerno, lived on the way to Avoriaz the modern ski resort, the second, that went by the name of Grou Braichard dwelled in the Manche valley, and the third, three women called the Dreffena, resided around what is now the Nyon ski area. 

Upon getting installed, the abbot sent for all of them as he wanted to firmly get them under his control. While the other complied pretty quickly, the Zerno wasn’t excited to meet the abbot and refused to show up.

At long last, and under the abbot’s constant harassment and reminders, and also perhaps out of natural curiosity, he finally came down to the Abbey, and there, in a display of rehearsed showmanship, the Zerno dropped his coat of wolf-skin over a ray of sun entering the room. There, to everyone surprise, including the abbot’s, the animal skin remain suspended around the sunbeam. 

Obviously, the Zarno knew a few things about domesticating photons! Most could have thought he was some kind of a witch, but I think that he had a chance to jump inside a time-travel machine and got to M.I.T. in 2065 to study the transformation of photons into solid lighting devices!

Then he began to walk, taking three steps forward and three steps back. Faced with this rather unconventional turn of events and Zerno’s unique behavior, the abbot thought that the man was no pushover, so he lets him go in peace. My take on that story is that the Zerno was both a maverick and a skeptic, filled with a healthy dose of common sense. 

By suspending his coat over the sun's rays he meant that our star was shining equally for all and that the new masters of the valley, the monks, had no right to chase or control those already there. 

The three steps forward and backward could have shown that the Zerno wasn’t a big shot, that he wasn’t intent on challenging the abbot’s authority, but that he didn't need Christianity, as he was perfectly able to cope with fears from his environment and his human condition, and wanted instead to live freely, day by day, as he pleased, going with the flow of prosperity and adversity, and that in the end, he was neither gaining or losing ground. 

You could call that an independent mind, and iconoclast and a free-thinker before his time. 

I liked that fellow a lot. Today, Jean-Christophe Richard, a local artist who has also fallen under the Zerno’s spell, wants to honor the man by erecting a large size statue of his likeness, some 11.5 ft tall, around Avoriaz ski resort, the place that allegedly was Zerno’s home.

He's looking to raise some 40,000 euros to complete his project. If someone is so inclined to fund the entire work, shoot Jean-Christophe an email from his site !

Of mice and men

I should rather say “Of rats and men” not to paraphrase John Steinbeck’s book title in order to evoke a cultural rift at Morzine, the main town near my home village of Montriond, France, where I was raised. In those days, religion was fiercely rooted into Morzine’s culture, with a mixture of superstition and sorcery that came long before this once inaccessible valley was evangelized by the local monks. 

Morzine had to deal already with its unruly bunch of possessed, hysterical women and also had to wrestle with two distinct, opposed factions, fracturing its community, the red rats and the white rats. 

Again, Morzine stood in a dead-end valley, in this remote part of Haute-Savoie, its back right up against the ridge defining the Swiss border. The river Dranse ran through Morzine, with its right bank, where City Hall, the church and Avoriaz ski area are located, and the left bank where La Crusaz, the new main square, Nyon and the Pleney ski areas are situated. 

In that setting, the inhabitant of the right bank were known as “les rats blancs” (the white rats) and those of the left bank as “les rats rouges” (the red rats). 

The “rats blancs” had the reputation of being overly pious, conservative but also by some, devious as well as consumed by business schemes and profits, while the “rats rouges” were more like peasants and generally more progressive. 

The two clans quarreled quasi-permanently and inter-marriages between rats blancs and rats rouges were quite rare, if not unthinkable. 

Today, under the “British Occupation” of the entire region, things have mellowed a bit, but it’s rare that someone still blames a rat of some color for something bad or unethical happening around town. 

Since I’m not too clear on that subject, I plan to study it further, and I will let you know if and when I’m able to provide you with a definitive explanation of that long quarrel between white and red… rodents! Jul 20, 2011

A first trip ‘round the world, part 36

Pension Grimus was built by Hans Grimus, around 1969, just before we came to Mt. Buller, yet, I don't believe I ever set foot in that building. 

Initially, the Tyrolean-style Pension Grimus was intended to be just a bed and breakfast place, but when a restaurant was also added to the premises, the Orange Lifts company requested that Grimus made it available to house its 17 ski instructors and provide them with breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

In other word, full room and board, hence the name “Pension Grimus”. But beyond this establishment, Hans story is also quite unique and worth telling. 

He had migrated to Australia from Austria in 1960 and got to Mt Buller in 1961 after working as a carpenter around Melbourne, because he was a good soccer player and the tradesmen he would be working for needed a good one for their team. 

He then moved to the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. At first, it began as a means of obtaining extra irrigation, however it soon expanded to integrate a hydro-electric power supply. 

The purpose of the “Scheme” was to collect water from the east of the Great Dividing Range and divert it westward through the Snowy Mountains to create a major water supply for farmers and also to generate electricity. 

This is while he was working on this project, that in fact was quite dangerous, that Hans Grimus got to know Mt. Buller and its nascent ski industry. 

With little skiing experience (something that might sound strange coming from an Austrian native), he managed to stay upright on his first run down Federation and got a job as lift operator for Ernest Forras, the owner of Kooroora. 

He continued working for Ski Lifts Mt Buller (Later renamed Orange Lifts) and eventually became its manager. Hans and his dog Kaptan were inseparable and both were iconic to Mt. Buller, especially after Kaptan decided to take on skiing! 

Hans was charismatic and had a bigger-than-life personality on the mountain. He was a loved member of the entire community, and respected throughout the ski and the wider tourism industry. 

He had a reputation as an impeccable host, an astute businessman, as well as being the life of any party. 

He passed away in September of 2018 at age 78. 

A first trip ‘round the world, part 35

Aside from Ernesto, Gérard’s friend, visitors from France to our Ski School were few and far between, except that day when Joël Gros from Faverges, near Annecy, came to visit us at Mt. Buller. 

Just like us, he had landed a ski instructor job at nearby Mt. Buffalo, very, very small ski resort with one pomalift offering some 500 ft. (150 meter) vertical drop. 

Its owner-operator, a colorful fellow by the name of Ollie Polasek was disappointed that Joël couldn’t play the accordion and did not know how to do prepare the appfelstrudel. 

To compensate for that our colleague taught a huge number of beginner skiers along with a Swiss instructor. At the end of July, he traveled to see us at Mt. Buller for a giant slalom race and that’s how we met. I remember that he sported a fresh “crew-cut”. 

He was anxious to free himself from Polasek. Just at that time, he was contacted by a certain Siegfried "Sigi" Haberzettl, ski school director at Falls Creek who hired him away from the demanding Polasek and where he taught skiing till the end of that winter season.

There he met two other French instructors, Jean Barbier and Daniel Trésanini that were instructing among ten other Austrians. 

As he was reminiscing about these good old days, Joel added: “Among the resorts employees there were two 'Jane Smiths' so it was in early August 71 that I met my current wife…” 

What’s even more remarkable is that I would rejoin both Jean Barbier and Joël Gros when I took a job with Look ski bindings three years later and met them again in Nevers, France. We would keep on working and meeting together over the following decades. 

What a small world!

A first trip ‘round the world, part 34

Communications with France were few and far between when we were in Australia. 

Even though we never thought of using it in our wildest dreams, phone would have cost us a fortune that we didn’t have or were willing to part with, maybe telegrams in case of emergency and of course air-mail correspondence. 

There was a tool, though that was even cheaper than a postcard or an airmail letter, and it was the good, old aerogram. 

An aerogram, or aérogramme in French, was a thin lightweight piece of foldable and gummed paper for writing a letter for transit via airmail, in which the letter and envelope were one and the same. 

Enclosure were forbidden in these light letters, which were sent abroad at a preferential rate. Printed warnings existed to say that an enclosure would cause the mail to go at the higher letter rate. I don’t remember how much such a missive cost, but it was pretty cheap. 

Gérard remembers that he never received any mail from France, which he put on the account of the controversial nuclear tests in French Polynesia that were opposed by the Australian authorities and might have led to a stoppage of incoming correspondence from that country. 

We could however successfully send mail to France whether postcards, regular letter, and of course aerograms that our friends and families had finally discovered thanks to us !

Do you know the Rocky Mountain beeplant?

For a couple of weeks, I had noticed a flower I thought I’d never seen before called the Rocky Mountain Bee (Cleome serrulata). 

From what I’ve learned after identifying it with my “Plantnet” app, it grows to 150 cm (59 in) tall, with spirally arranged leaves. The flowers are reddish-purple, pink, or white, with four petals and six long stamens. 

Flowering lasts an extended period because it begins at the bottom of the stalk and works its way up. Many species of insects are attracted to it, especially bees, which helps in the pollination of nearby plants. It is native to southern Canada and the western and central United States. 

The plant has often been used for food, to make dyes for paint, and as a treatment in traditional medicine. 

I love it and I will try to plant some in our garden!

Always keep your trophies at home!

It appears that over the years, Ted Ligety, our local champ, left the race trophies he collected in Europe in the “good hands” of Head skis, that I’m certain, were proud to showcase in the lobby at their Kennelbach factory in Austria. 

His racing career over, it made sense for Ted to repatriate his sporting memorabilia, but the guy or girl who packed the whole collection of trophies, thought they were just skis and packed them so poorly that when they made it to Park City, only 40% of the pieces survived the trip in one piece. 

“Needless to say the crystal trophies from Kranjska Gora and Alta Badia didn’t fare well,” wrote Ligety on his Instagram account. 

What should he do? Crazy Glue them back to their former glory or ask Johan Eliasch, Head’s CEO to do the gluing himself. 

A better idea yet, might be to have the Swedish billionaire re-order some replacements for the broken pieces from the various resorts that gave them to Ligety in the first place. 

Now that Eliash is also the new FIS boss, he should be influential enough to get that for his former start athlete!