My brother is lucky to be alive

My older brother Brett is the middle child and by far the easiest of the three of us.

He's nice.
He's responsible.
He was an officer in the Marines.
He saves money.
He's a great dad.
You know, the kind of child a parent wants to have.

Except for that sticky part about how he was constantly trying to get lost or killed while we were kids. There was the time he was two and my mom was pregnant with me and he fell out of the car and lost all his hair. And the time he was eight or nine and fell out of a three-(or four)-story tall tree into a creek bed that luckily had ten inches of water in it (else he'd be a gonner). But this one's my favorite. Come back tomorrow, I have an interview with my bro in which he clears up and totally confuses many parts of this story, so that's cool!

The Incredible Disappearing Boy

When we lived in Geneva, my mom didn't work. She did Other Stuff. She taught English to students and au pairs who lived with us. She traveled with my dad occasionally and by herself occasionally. You know, she was busy. She had three crazy, busy little kids. My dad travelled almost exclusively for work so he was not there much.

In the summer, our parents sent us to Camp. In Geneva in the seventies, this consisted of a fairly Hippie-style experience, and one that included bus trips up into the mountains around Geneva {we affectionately like to call these mountains the Alps} to a campground where we'd play in the woods and go exploring.

I have vague memories of these days in camp. I'm sure my brothers have stronger ones. The most vivid for me were the two Swiss camp counselors who were clearly...um...dating, and who would show us how to french kiss and tie cherry stems into knots with their tongues at the same time. Kinda gross, huh?

Anyhoo, back to how my brother was trying to off himself. You know middle children. They're happy go lucky. Or at least my brother was happy go lucky. He'd go along with anything. My oldest brother usually looked out for him and I'm not exactly sure why he fell down on the job on this particular day except they were in different age groups.

The bus took everyone up into the mountains to the campsite. They played, ate lunch, got into trouble, explored, and loaded back onto the bus to go back to town. Everyone but Brett, that is. Brett was playing hide and seek with some friends and was hiding. Seriously, they loaded the kids onto the bus while he hid. They miscounted the heads while he hid. His friend Jeffrey told the counselors that Brett wasn't on the bus, but they didn't' listen to him. They drove off down the mountain back to the city while he hid.

I guess he finally figured out they'd left him at some point, and he came out of hiding.

Can you imagine? You're eight years old. You speak English but you're in the forest in the mountains of Switzerland...alone. The school bus with your counselors, your older brother, little sister and all your friends has left you behind. What would you do? Brett just did what Brett would do. He tracked back out to the road and started walking.

He stopped at the first house he came to and asked the woman who answered the door if he could use her phone. We guess that he spoke French, and he was able to tell her he wanted to call home.

So he dialed our number....it rang...and rang...and rang. Mom was at the grocery store. Nobody answered. Mom says he tried to call Andrews and maybe their French housekeeper answered the phone or maybe not, we aren't clear on the details of that one. Either way, he wasn't able to get anyone on the phone, so he left her house and started walking down the road again.

Guess what he did next, this little kid all alone in the forest of the Alps? He flagged down a truck and hitchhiked to the French/Swiss border, where he got out and came home. You see, our street was Impasse de Mon Idee and was right next to the border crossing in Thonex. In fact, the neighborhood kind of wound around behind France, if that makes any sense? So he was able to tell the truck driver he lived in Thonex and the guy let him out at our street.

Thank God for the truck driver who gave the little American boy a ride down to the border crossing.

Thank God for the Swiss woman who was frantic that this little American boy had taken off by himself and was lost. She kept calling our house and the Andrews until she got a hold of their French housekeeper and explained the situation. By then my mom was home. Shortly after that, Brett walked into the house. You can imagine how relieved my mom was to see him after hearing that her son was at this woman's house and hitchhiked with a truck driver!

My mom called the camp and they said they realized Brett was missing once they got back to town, so they had dispatched a driver to go back up to the campsite and find him. She was livid. Jeffrey had told them Brett wasn't there and they didn't listen. I guess the counselors were really shaken up, too, so that's better than not caring. Right?

So anyhoo, that's the story of how my brother Brett got lost in the forest of the Swiss Alps and hitchhiked home.

Crazy, eh?

So yeah, stop back by tomorrow for the awesome interview with said brother in which the details of this story become even more exciting and confusing and I even post some pictures of our childhood home and its proximity to the French border. Awesome.

A sad footnote: Jeffrey, Brett's friend, died in high school from a skiing accident in Vermont. He was a racer and was an excellent skier, but he hit a patch of ice in a race and crashed into a tree. So sad, so young.