Saas-fee Morning
Posted: May 01, 2009
Written: June 02, 2008
By: Gregory O'Toole

This morning, after getting "takeaway cafe," I was standing under a store front overhang to drink some of it and to get out of the rain. It's snowy late spring high in the Swiss Alps. There are very few people in town now and most of them are construction workers working on hotel renovations. I see a lot of school children running down the brick streets with umbrellas and wool hats splashing in puddles, so there must be a school nearby. As I was standing there an older man came up past me in the road. He walked slowly but with direction, carrying a large umbrella over his head. He had one hand in his pocket. Just as he was in front of me he turned around and said something in French, very kindly, with patience. He was calling to his small dog following closely behind. The man continued on and vanished around the corner. The dog did, too. Then from down the road behind the man and the dog I heard a small girl's voice calling the dog as well: "Piet!" she called out, her voice bouncing off the stone store fronts. "Piet?!" She called out again. She followed her own voice, walking carefully, avoiding a patch in the street where the masons were relaying the broken bricks. Having made her way to the porch she collapsed her umbrella and snapped it a few times to shake off the rain like I've seen many adults do in the States, but never a child. Then she disappeared inside a spaghetti restaurant.

As I watched this happen, a feeling washed over me that these people were a part of a very long history of daily life. Hundreds of years. I saw a hat that said Switzerland 1273. We have seen and read stories of history like this a hundred thousand times in movies, on television, in novels. But those historic events, once recorded, are once removed from the actuality of what these people know -- and twice removed by the time they are read or viewed by an audience. But the real people living in these older cultures know this life because it is their experience every day. They seem disillusioned. Maybe this accounts for their banal attitudes, or what appears to an outsider as banal, unenthused, as in lacking freshness from the point of view of an American, by contrast, who is used to everything having to be new: new houses, new products, new commercials for the products, on and on. And in America, popular culture says if it is not new, it lacks a certain social value. Not seemingly true in Europe, certainly not in Saas-fee. This would account for the illusion of luster on the surface of American cultural life. It is idealistic and exists only as a material substitute, a myth. Many Americans live in this myth, which can never be fulfilling on any significant level, really. It can and does appear to be, especially when a fresh purchase has just been made: ecstasy fills the head, the reward centers of the brain, a temporary happiness rules, go get more. Europe is like an old man who understands how life goes and has a judicious restraint about him. America is like a gullible and over excited teenager, eager to spend their entire part time paycheck on candy or a fast car when neither will be fulfilling for very long. I think, perhaps, that in a few hundred years, America could potentially reach this maturity level. But it is surely not there now.

I had seen the school kids with their umbrellas only a few moments before and wanted to photograph them. Suddenly, with this realization, I never wanted to take another picture because taking pictures, it occurred to me, is by nature a separation, in act and theory, from the thing that you are photographing. If you take a picture, the subject looks at you like you are an outsider to some degree, the camera as physical object makes it so. The photograph itself is a recreation of the scene: separation from the natural flow. That is why photography exists, to take a snapshot of one thing completely or otherwise out of its context. I didn't want to take a photograph because I didn't want to be removed from this historic understanding of how life is; with which this old man and young girl seemed to be connected. I wanted to be a part of the disillusionment that he seemed to know.

I finished my cafe and began to walk back up the steep street. I realized that by understanding this, that I am a part of what he knows. I realized that this might be the most valuable thing that I get from traveling far up into the Swiss Alps to a town one-thousand years old. Understanding this makes me feel better about the world and makes me feel like I am a more knowledgeable person. I can tell my daughter about it. Therefore, and the most important thing, I will be a better father for knowing it.