If I'm being frank, the mountains didn't appeal to me until a few months ago. I didn't understand why or how being outside could compare to the hustle and bustle of a foreign city. I didn't understand how simply coexisting with nature could produce the same effects against my insatiable wanderlust. I didn't understand until I experienced the mountains for myself.
I was driving through the winding foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and as the sun began to sink in the sky, I noticed how quickly the hills and valleys in front of me began to come to life. I began to breathe that thin mountain air, and I was amazed at how much fresher it felt in my lungs compared to European, tobacco-laced oxygen.
When I finally stopped to look at the view from Skyline Drive, my mouth dropped open. In front of me lay miles and miles of peaks, of forests, of ice-cold mountain springs in which I would later sneak off and go swimming. They didn't seem like much to me on paper, all brown and full of bugs and downright boring. But something happened to me on that trip, and I never saw what I expected to see. What I'd built up in my head turned out to be the complete opposite, and I frowned internally as I stared at the horizon.
How could something so beautiful have been hiding from me all this time?
Before, I'd learned to satiate my craving of travel through city life. I lusted after cities where I knew little about familiarity and even less of the local language. Give me sidewalk cafés, old buildings, cobbled streets. Give me something decidedly unfamiliar.
Before, I thought that the unfamiliar could only truly be found in something that barely resembled a lifestyle I knew. I thought that through immersing myself in some ersatz urban culture, one I could barely compare to my own, I would be unsettled and excited enough to feel at home. In some weird way, I was looking for newness in a place that lost its shine the moment I stepped off the plane.
I couldn't look for another home because I had already found one.
Little did I realize that these piles of rock, or so I thought they were, held little more than a new way of thinking. For me, these impenetrable, impossible mountains held a future. Did I intend to enjoy those cities that I mistakenly turned to for satisfaction? Yes. Were they enough to fulfill that forever wandering bit of my soul? Never. I needed the wildness, the uncharted, the serenity of something as simple as nature to put me back on track.
I began to fall in love in the mountains, and a part of me fell in love with the mountains themselves.
