Are mountains in my DNA?

Recently, I've been chatting with my countryman Alain Lazard, who lives in Northern California, and who got me thinking about Mountain vs. City folks, a tale that began to become a highly charged issue, in the French Alps, back in the sixties and seventies. This subject is likely to feed more than just this blog as I promise to further explore it. To start, let's look at the premises. I was born and raised in small mountain village of the French Alps by parents who had live there “forever.”

I can therefore claim a genuine and deeply rooted “mountain origin.” What is true is that I would have a hard time living anywhere but in the mountains. It could be the Alps, the Rockies or the Himalayas, but I need to see some serious relief in the landscape to feel “grounded” and secure. For reasons I can't fully explain, I look at the mountain differently than anyone who has been born elsewhere and see elements they would never suspect existed. It's not just the mountains, but the skies, the clouds, the shadows, the snow.

My relationship with my environment is instinctive. I can sense avalanche and other dangers before I ever venture in places that are exposed to some kind of risk; my behavior alters itself without any conscious effort on my part. I haven't learn it at school, that sensation somehow resides deep in me. It's just psychic and this can't be a learned response. So, with these observations in mind, I clearly tend to feel more “entitled” to claim the mountains as my own, as my domain, to the exclusion of the newcomer that can't be as much in communion with the elements I know so intimately.

If you read this and were from the plains, the big city or some seaboard location, you might take exception to what I'm trying to say, but I must warn you that I will be hard to be convinced otherwise. This said, the more I think about it, this story is in fact all about human resistance to diversity and if, back in the days, there had been more efforts placed into meshing the various cultures, we all would have won, but we'll leave this part of the discussion for some future blogs, so once more, please stay tuned!