Revista Los Nogales no. 5 - Septiembre 2015 | Page 48

Caminatas / Colegio Los Nogales

Before I moved back to Colombia in
2009, I lived abroad for over 16 years
and twelve of those years I spent in New
York City. So, to be honest, the only real
hike I ever got close to or was interested
in was hiking uptown on the subway to
visit the Cloisters. I had always liked the
idea of being outdoorsy and going on
camping trips, but I didn´t really know
anyone who owned a tent or who was
very interested in the outdoors, and seriously, who wanted to explore the world
outside NYC when the world was New
York? If I wanted to, I could go any place or country in the world; they were
just a subway ride away from my tiny
apartment in Brooklyn.
And so, my trips were of another nature.
I liked interacting with people, I enjoyed
the sounds of the city—sirens, filp-flops
on the pavement, ice-cream trucks—its
grime and overwhelmingly exciting rowdiness. I enjoyed museums and art galleries and spent most of my Sunday afternoons either at the Met, in the Roman
and Greek sections—examining artifacts
and imagining what it would have been
like to live during that time—or, gallivanting around town looking at contemporary art that was hard to decipher and
watching films from past eras I longed to

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belong to. I would end the day at a restaurant eating Indian food—my favorite—
and smoking a few cigarettes to help me
digest all the information I had accrued
during my expeditions around the city.
Yes, I smoked. And so when I quit, the
first few months I had to do something
to alleviate the anxiety, I had to get that
energy out somehow. I started running.
At first I could only run a few minutes without coughing up a lung and it
was painful. And yet, and yet, there was
something about being outdoors that

It was freezing, but we all
were. I felt the strength of
this huge landscape, the
mountain was an authority,
and we expressed our respects
with the silence and I felt it.
During those five minutes I
felt an extraordinary force,
everything was silent, but my
heart was beating faster, the
cold was gone, and I was in
peace.
María Lucía Mosquera
R., 2015, Sierra Nevada del
Cocuy.