I have loved nature since before I could articulate what nature was. The Rift Valley. The coast at Mombasa. The particular green that comes to Kenya after the long rains when the hills look as though they have been repainted overnight. These were not scenery growing up — they were conditions of the self, environments in which I became a version of myself that I did not become in rooms.
I waited eight years before I drove to Shenandoah.
The park is ninety minutes from Northern Virginia. I arrived in Virginia in June 2011 and first went to the Blue Ridge Mountains in October 2019. The delay has a simple explanation — the first years were the years of building, of Walmart and the military and the workforce programme and the slow construction of a professional life, and the building did not leave much room for the optional. But I also know I waited too long. The mountains were there the entire time.
The Skyline Drive runs the ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains for a hundred and five miles. I have driven it in October, December, and September. Each season is a different mountain. October gives you the colour — the American autumn that appears in photographs and turns out, when you are inside it, to exceed the photographs in the way that almost nothing else in nature does. December gives you the stripped skeleton of the forest and a cold that has character the lowland cold does not have. September gives you the deepest green, the trails still warm enough to hike in a T-shirt in the afternoon.
At the South River Falls trailhead I followed the path down into the gorge where the waterfall drops eighty feet into a pool. My legs knew about it the next morning. I did not care.
Americans go to the mountains to escape their lives. The immigrant goes to escape something more specific: the transaction of being an immigrant. The constant negotiation of legibility. The taxonomy of the self.
I love Shenandoah in the way I love Mombasa and the Rift Valley and the Grand Canyon — not as separate loves but as expressions of the same one. What I love is the quality of attention that a large natural thing demands. Not the performed attention of a museum, but the absorbed attention of being inside something that does not care whether you are paying attention or not, and whose indifference is the source of its peace.
After fifteen years of being asked, repeatedly and without malice, in a hundred rooms and offices and social contexts — the mountain does not ask. It is still there. The asking does not reach this far. I keep going back to confirm.
These notes were made between June 2011 and the present.
I started writing them down in 2026.
The gap is not an absence — it is the difference between experiencing something
and understanding it well enough to put it on a page.