The Chalet in History

The question you are asking yourself right now, as you motor down a deserted boulevard in this sprawling city of the interior, is: who was the first person who eyed the primeval northern forest – the shaggy lindens with their colonies of bees, the imperious, shade-giving oaks and the scores of squirrels who depend each of them, the blazingly bright larches that have stood sentinel on the alpine heights for centuries – and thought: ‘Yes! Quick, quick now! Let’s chop all this down and build a chalet!’?

And it’s not just the taiga that’s being destroyed. It’s meadow and underbrush -- sassafras and birch, goldenrod and gooseberry, wintergreen and sedum, even the mosses and lichens that create their vibrant micro-ecosystems on the moist rot and rocky outcroppings that dot the forest floor. All hacked away to yield yet another chalet.

And yes, it’s always a chalet. That tiny Swiss house, transmuted by the alchemy of acquisition into a mental map of imagined economic progress: start with a subsistence hut of primitive accumulation, move to a utilitarian split-level subdivision, spend a fortune for a quasi-feudal suburban McMansion,  and, at the apogee of capitalist desire, obtain the unobtainable: a dwelling so special you seldom even use it – a pied-a-terre home chock full of the best appliances, a chalet on stilts with its head in a cunning cloud.

God’s honest truth: Adam and Eve didn’t eat of the tree of knowledge. They chopped it down, seasoned the timbers, leveled the garden, built themselves a chalet on a 10-acre plot, and successfully claimed ownership with a fraudulent deed from the serpent. The bible tale is just a cover story.

We have toppled royalty and toppled dictators and even toppled Gods. But will we ever topple landlords, who continue to exercise their despotic dominion over the planet, grading the hills and degrading the soil, so the globe – this whirling speck in space – comes to resemble Easter Island, but instead of haughty carved heads our civilization has left a sterile sprawl of chalets across the thawing permafrost as we nose without thinking into the slipstream of a future in which we will not exist.