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Stories of my Life: A Swiss Scavenger Hunt

By Karl North | May 16, 2024

Joe Dassin was sweating bullets. He was scribbling frantically amid a pile of dirty coffee cups on scratch paper that he had covered with algebraic calculations. We were the only people in the Buffet de la Gare (train station restaurant) of the sleepy little Swiss border town of Chiasso, a couple of blocks away from Italy. Apparently this route south was little traveled in November.

Joe and I were trying to solve a quadratic equation that we presumed would divulge a telephone number which, in turn, would inform us of the next stop in a game that had sent competing teams of junior and senior class boys from two Swiss secondary schools on a four day adventure that was taking us all over the little alpine nation. The sole employee on duty in the station café watched us from his post behind the espresso machine with amused indifference. He had generously provided the paper napkins on which we were doing our calculations.

“Getting anywhere?”

Joe gave me a dirty look that said no. US high school algebra offered only brief exposure to quadratic equations; the experience had not stuck, and I had all but given up working on the problem. Joe, on the other hand was embarrassed. At the end of our senior year at École Internationale de Genève he was to pass his ‘first bac’, a French secondary school national exam that requires an educational level equivalent to at least two years of college in the US. Although we were the same age, Joe felt that with the educational advantage of his European schooling he should have solved this math problem by now.

Although he had lived on both continents after his parents had separated, Joe preferred his European persona. He was proud of his Paris accent, his superior European schooling and his well-traveled cosmopolitan life. His attitude to Americans like me who were just beginning to discover Europe was mix of condescension and friendly tolerance. We all lived on the same hall in the junior and senior class boys section of the small Internat, or live-in population of Ecolint as boarding students called the school, the École Internationale de Genève. Although he tried not to show it, he was disgusted to be teamed on this adventure with three Americans who barely spoke French and whom he could beat using only one hand at “baby-foot”, the European table soccer that we played constantly in the Internat day room.

At that point early in my year at Ecolint I knew little of Joe and his background. A gregarious guy, he had been at the school long enough to gain some serious status and advantages. As manager of the school’s high fidelity sound equipment he kept it in his room to play music whenever it was allowed, and even illegally after hours thanks to the acoustic insulation he had installed to hide the sound from the proctors. I saw that he also played the day room piano every time he got a chance. When he was not speaking French, he spoke with a perfect American accent in a school where British accents were the norm among non-Americans. Gradually Joe and I discovered enough of our mutual interest in music to form an a capella quartet and teach ourselves to sing black church classics like Go Down Moses, Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho and others. As such music was little known in Europe, we were asked to perform it in a school assembly where it was a great success. That was the start of my dawning awareness that Europeans appreciate African-American music far more than most Americans.

Only years later when Joe had become a French pop star did I learn enough of Joe’s extraordinary family history to be sorry that I had not known it at the time. Born in the US of American citizens, he moved to France only when his father Jules, a successful film maker, was blacklisted in the McCarthy witch hunts that destroyed many political, academic and artistic careers in the early 1950s. Jules Dassin’s films departed from the usual Hollywood fare devoted to the petty quarrels of the affluent classes; instead they celebrated the rough and tumble life of the US working class with a realism that the self-appointed censors of the witch hunt deemed un-American. Barred from work in the US, Jules found his film-making style embraced in France, but the move to Europe split up the family, leaving Joe’s mother back in the US. Jules Dassin’s great French success, Jamais Le Dimanche (Never On Sunday) gave him back his film career, and he married the star of the film, Greek actress and activist Melina Mercouri. After Ecolint, Joe tried college in the US, intending to major in anthropology, but eventually quit and returned to Paris where he acted bit parts in his father’s films and started his singing career.

Joe and I were tired. None of our team had slept in a bed the night before, the first day of the scavenger hunt, due to a move that initially put us ahead of all the other teams in the competition. It had ended in a fiasco that kept us from finding a hotel room and gained nothing on the other teams.

“Let’s get our Italy passport stamp and call it a day” Joe said regretfully. “We need to make contact with the other two, let them know we’re stuck and decide whether to call the emergency number to the game organizers and throw in the towel.” We walked the short distance to the Italian border on the edge of town, crossed over to get the Italian stamp in our passports, then turned back through customs to the Swiss side as the customs agents of both nations watched us with quizzical aplomb.

The creators of the game that we were experiencing called it Le Concours de Suisse. It consisted of a series of messages containing clues that sent us from one location to another across the country. In each location we were to search for clues to a new message that contained new instructions, usually somewhat hidden (as behind a quadratic equation!), that would send us on to other destinations. The adventure was designed to put teams of high school juniors and seniors on our own with a Swiss rail pass and barely enough pocket money to cover food and lodging for the duration of the game, to teach us teamwork and to let us experience a bit of Switzerland in a novel way by sending us traveling around the country to find the next clue to the next destination in the game.

Yesterday’s instruction had been to gather passport stamps from all countries that adjoin Switzerland and to solve the equation that would give us the clue to the next destination. Our team decided to split up the work, and the two brothers from Big Sur went off to Germany and Lichtenstein respectively while Joe and I went to the Italian border and worked on the equation. We were to rendezvous at a central point, the Buffet de la Gare in Zurich when we had each finished our part, which if successful would take us on the next step in the game.

But to return to the episode of the sleepless night. The first day, all teams started from Geneva. Each received a message directing the teams, at intervals so that teams would not meet, to the next location. The message was only a single proper name. Frantic research on our part finally revealed it to be the name of an obscure downtown café. We filled backpacks with snack food cribbed from the school kitchen and headed downtown on the trolley, an excellent system of public transport that went everywhere in the city and even across the French border to Annecy, several miles away. A search of the café at first divulged no clue as to the next message. We were getting anxious. Some of the café regulars eyed us warily, some with amusement.  The juke box was playing. Curious about what music a Swiss juke box offered, Neal, one of the California brothers, looked over the titles.

“Hey, here’s a tune titled Ecolint!”

“Play it, for chrissake!,” yelled Joe. The bartender, in on the game, laughed. Bingo. The message in the tune directed us to the next location in the game, a castle in ruins on a hill overlooking Sion, a town over a couple of hours away by train in the upper Rhone valley beyond Lake Geneva. For a while we relaxed, enjoying from the train window the spectacular alpine vista across the lake.

By the time we reached Sion in the upper Rhone vineyards and hiked up the side of the valley to the castle, all the other teams were already there, busy trying to decipher the next message. It was a message in code from car headlights located on the other side of the valley. No one was getting it. I looked at the blinking lights. It had to be Morse code.

“I can do this!” I exclaimed. In an earlier teenage obsession with electronics, I had built some amateur radio equipment and learned enough code to get the legal license to operate a transmitter. I quickly repeated the letters I saw in the lights to a team member, who wrote it down and read off the message to the rest of our team, huddled in secrecy away from the other teams. The message was simple: “Come to the lights”.

We agreed on a plan to sneak off quietly like we’re going back to town, then short cut directly down across the valley toward the car headlights. We jumped fences and crossed vineyards whose grapes, I learned in later life, made some of the best red wine in Switzerland. Unfortunately we had not counted on an encounter with the Rhone River. When we reached it, there was the car on the other side, still blinking its Morse code. But no bridge. We were the first team there, but on the wrong side of the river. By the time we bushwhacked our way through the fields to the only bridge, which was back in town, and followed the Rhone to the car, it was nearly midnight. The organizers – our teachers – told us all the other teams had finally read the message, come to the car (the right way) and returned to town to find hotel lodging. We were the last, and they were tired of waiting.

“What took you so long?”

They shook their heads in weary amusement at our story.

“You might not easily book a hotel room this time of night.”

They were right. Swiss rural towns run on rigid Calvinist clockwork like the trains and most everything in Switzerland. The town of Sion was closed and locked for the night. No one would answer our knock at any hotel door. Quelle fiasco! The only building open was the train station, where we thought to spend the night sleeping on the waiting room benches. At least we would be out of the increasingly frosty November night. No sooner had we settled on the waiting room benches but the station master woke us to say that the station was closing until 6 AM and sent us back outside. Next to the station were two brightly lit phone booths, almost the only lights in town at that hour, but not locked. We split up, two to a phone booth, and survived until dawn on shared body heat and food we had brought.

There’s not much left to tell about our scavenger hunt story. Joe and I shot much of our stipend on a good dinner and lodging in Chiasso. He introduced me to café kirsch, a Swiss version of a potent combination of caffeine and alcohol that is common in Europe: café cognac in France, café schnapps in Germany.

My initiation to café kirsch was an early, albeit minor example of a long series of encounters with European traditions whose historical depth and richness stretch back centuries and rest on a foundation in the ancient civilizations of the Orient and India. Over the years I experienced a growing awareness of how little of these traditions and their accumulated wisdom crossed the Atlantic in the mental baggage of Europeans who colonized the New World. As I gradually discovered, many European traditions reveal a time-tested maturity that lends them a quality that I rarely see in their US equivalents. I see this quality across the whole range of European culture, be it culinary, architectural or agricultural, or less tangible but more important, in customs of social and political interaction and in a sense of the importance of history to an understanding of the present. Why did the emigrants to North America see so little value in these traditions that they left so many of them behind? Of course the incessant material expansion that marks the American Way of Life fascinates Europe, but as they know from history, it takes more than physical wealth to build a civilization. Now, nearly 60 years after my Swiss introduction to Europe and after ten years living and working in French-speaking countries, I see more than a little truth in the view common on the Continent that the US is still an infantile society.

We reconnected with the rest of our team in Zurich the next day. Knowing we had already lost the game, we enjoyed a leisurely brunch in Zurich’s train station Buffet de la Gare which, often like the trains themselves, offered three classes of service, a concrete example of European class structure. My still vivid recollection is that even in the third class restaurant where our meager finances confined us, the quality of the service was impeccable, and eye-opening for me – white table cloths, silver dishware, hovering waiters, etc.

We were the only team to fail to finish the game. That did little to dampen our exhilaration at the experience of four days on our own, traveling sometimes on quaint little trains on narrow gauge rails that negotiated tunnels and sheer drops through magnificent Alpine scenery, frosted with the first snows of the season. As a team, we had seen bits of five countries, and had a lot to share.

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