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LIVING & TRAVEL Verbier On Nearly No Dollars A Day by steve mencher

Patrick Tacchini is 22 years old and owes money to everybody in town due to a failed music promotion business. He's marking time, working off his debt by chauffering visiting musicians like Bjork around town. He's waiting for the jolt that comes every winter when a new crop of young travelers -- skis and snowboards in tow -- makes its way up the mountain. They arrive with the first heavy snows; Patrick and his friends are waiting, ready to hand over the keys to their city. "When the guys with big luggage packs come here, with nothing in his pocket, if he meets another guy, we say, 'Here's a place to sleep.' It's organized. Like an undergound. We know it's possible to sleep in this or that chalet, in this place is a lot of Swedish or Dutch people, and so on. A lot of people can stay for only a few francs a night."

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Patrick is always looking over his shoulder, as if someone he owes is going to grab his scrawny body and pitch it over the nearest unbearably scenic cliff. He came to Verbier 16 years ago and is fully tangled in its workings. His uncle owns a hotel. His father-in-law is an electrician. "We don't have any real history here," he says. "No famous people or famous thing. It's the biggest territory for skiing in Europe; nothing else." Even as he looks forward to the upcoming winter, Patrick laments the inevitable end of the snowy rush: "Realize how difficult it is," he tells me. "One day there are 40,000 people here, the next day 2,000. When Winter is coming, there are great expectations. We are living through the tourists. We know we're going to meet people and speak with them. We might fall in love. But then you know they're going to have to go back down the mountain. "When it's not the skiing season, all the people who live here are sleeping with each other; everybody's interested in everybody else's pain." Steve Mencher is a former producer for National Public Radio, and a charter member of the Acme Content Providers of Washington, D.C. Illustrations by Federico Jordan, a freelance illustrator based in Mexico. © 1996 Tripod, Inc. All Rights Reserved.