Back outside it felt like winter. Anyone in his right mind would have taken the lift back down to Val d'Isere. Not me. I stepped into my bindings, tightened up my pack, lowered my goggles, and pushed off down the glacier east toward Italy, // Bel Paese.
My goal was the Colle del Nivolet, the end of the paved road that winds up into the Italian Alps out of Turin. It didn't look that tough when I planned the route: The Colle sits more than twelve hundred meters below Val d'Isere, less than ten miles away, across terrain I had traversed before. But I was almost thirty years younger then. Or maybe it was the round earth, flat-map syndrome. Or the fact that I was now running on fumes. Anyhow, by night, on skis, in my mid-forties, it was a miracle I made it.
Melting and freezing, freezing and melting had left the top a slick of ice-I needed crampons and an axe more than skis. Clouds kept obscuring the moon. At one point I was sure I was about to slide down a five-hundred-foot chute on my back. It turned out to be only five feet, but it scared the
hell out of me all the same. I went up and down at least three thousand feet, taking my skis on and off as the glaciers appeared and reappeared, until my quads were on fire. Then a small release sluiced me over a cornice, fortunately, it wasn't much of a drop. If there hadn't been a moon and if I hadn't been lucky, my frozen carcass would still be up there, lodged in a crevasse, waiting to be discovered a thousand years hence by some alien race with silicon chips for hearts.
But I was lucky, and I finally did make it to the tiny Italian outpost of [Chiapili, a little after dawn. Thirty minutes later, I hitched a ride with a milk truck down to Ceresole Reale, at the bottom of the lake by the same name. From there, two hundred American dollars found me a ride to Turin and another two hundred-same driver, different car-to Genoa. In the Piazza jPrincipe, I caught the last bus of the day to La Spezia, and by one-thirty ¦hat morning, I was doling out twenty American dollars to a half-drunk cabbie, who got lost four times before he found the port. At one point we tan out of gas and I had to give him money to put twenty liters in the tank.
Even then, I must have wandered around the docks for half an hour or more before I found a lineup of a couple dozen virtually brand-new Mercedes, Porsches, and Audis, and followed them right on board. An auto 'transport, Yuri had told me. Maybe he'd gone legit.