looking upstream

Seen from a small village above Ponte nelle Alpi, the Piave River valley snakes its way upstream towards the distant Cadore Dolomites.

The first time I left my native mountain valley for an extended period of time I was 17 years old, embarking on a 1 year stay as an exchange student in the US. The organization tried to match the students with host families residing in an area that would be somewhat similar, in terms of natural landscape, to their home environment. So I was sent to Colorado. But someone didn't take the time to check the actual location on a map and I found myself nowhere near the Rocky Mountains, but rather in the flat, endless plains of the prairie. Beautiful in its own right as the prairie is, it was dramatically different from where I came from. In whichever direction you looked, there were few or no landmarks and even trees grew only along the banks of the river courses. The rest was an immense expanse of sandy-bluish coloured grasses, rippled here and there by the wind that swept unhindered through the plains.

I was (sort of) prepared for the language and cultural disconnect, but not for the utter sense of dislocation caused by the simple fact that, all of a sudden, I could no longer orient myself, pinpoint my location in the world so to speak, in reference to the mountains. I felt ungrounded and lost and realised, for the first time, how much the Dolomites, with their familiar peaks, meant to my sense of where, and perhaps also who, I was in the world. I remember this as perhaps the first of many "certainties" that one must learn to put in perspective while growing up and coming to terms with the fact that much of what we regard as "fixed" is actually relative to culture, language, place and time.

Nevertheless, to this day, returning home, opening my window in the morning on a landscape of familiar childhood land marks, gives me a sense of peace and security I experience nowhere else.