An October in Annecy

After a whirlwind week of working on French and cycling through at least eight different fall break plans, October found me at a bus stop below the tiny village of Lathuile, surrounded by a lake, a blue sky, green fields, and dozens of mountains. As my friends and I dragged our luggage up the slope, we could hardly stop gaping at the stunning scenery around us. It was serene, looking almost untouched even though the land had been inhabited for centuries. After the chaotic busyness of Paris, it was perfect.

The next days were spent just enjoying the scenery and beautiful weather as we relaxed and tried to finish our French classes. But I was raised by the mountains and I have missed them terribly, so while most of my day was spent doing errands and homework, the evenings would find me running up the slope of the mountain over the village, always trying to find a way to climb higher. The French Alps near Annecy are much smaller than the Cascades I lived by as a child, but they held a mystery all of their own. The Pacific Northwest feels rugged and wild--it's newer to European settlement, and it has experienced relatively few centuries of attempts at subjugation. But the Alps have a wildness all of their own. They have been settled for centuries, armies have crossed them, and they have seen the rise and fall of many an epoch of Western history--but this gives them a sense of quiet, unrelenting force that the Cascades are missing. After learning of the turmoil of France's history on the streets of Paris, I was struck by these mountains' permanence--and their beauty. The sculptures and buildings of Paris look poor and dirty next to the wonder of the world that God created. It brought to mind Gerard Hopkins poem, "God's Grandeur":

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs

—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

Lathuile, and those mountains, gave me space and a sense of peace that I was missing for that first month and a half in Paris. It reminded me that beyond every good or terrible act of mankind, beyond every person pushing their way by me into the subway car, beyond every stress and care of life, there is a God who creates beauty that mankind cannot touch. Empires rise and fall, but they have not moved these mountains--and these are more beautiful and more enduring than them all.