Walking out of the weather

Three days in the Dolomites with nothing but a notebook and rain.

It rained for the entire first day. Not the soft rain of the lowlands, but the sideways, committed rain of high altitude, the kind that finds every weakness in your kit and exploits it without comment.

A companion, eventually

By the second morning the rain had become a kind of companion. I had given up on the idea of staying dry, and with that surrender came a strange lightness — a willingness to walk into the weather rather than away from it.

The notebook, wrapped twice in plastic, came out only at the refuges. I wrote shorter sentences than I usually write. The mountains, I think, were teaching me to economise.

Sassolungo, briefly

On the third day the cloud lifted for an hour and the Sassolungo appeared, briefly, like a thought one almost remembers. Then it was gone again, and I walked the last six kilometres back into the rain, content.