I started before the light was generous. Five something, maybe six. The gorge entrance smelled like wet cypress and cold stone, the kind of cold that sits in your throat. No one else on the path yet. Just the sound of my boots finding their footing on loose river pebbles, each step a small conversation with the ground.
The walls rose slowly at first, then all at once. Limestone the color of bread crust, streaked with rust and black where water has been working for longer than anyone can hold in their head. I tilted the camera up and knew the frame would fail. Some scale you just have to stand inside. The narrowest point, the famous Iron Gates, was still hours ahead, but already the sky above was a thin blue ribbon. I kept looking up, then down, then up again. My neck will remember this place before my mind does.
There was a cypress growing sideways out of the rock face about fifty meters up. No soil I could see. Just root and will. I thought of my avó in São Paulo, how she grew herbs in coffee cans on a concrete balcony, and how she would have looked at that tree and simply nodded. Teimosia. Stubbornness as a life strategy. I loaded a new roll and kept walking.
By nine the light finally reached the riverbed. Not warm yet, just present. I stopped where the pebbles were pale and flat and the water was ankle thin, running clear over everything. Sat on a boulder. Ate half a peach from my bag. The juice ran down my wrist and I didn't wipe it. Some mornings ask nothing of you. You just walk through the open wound the earth made and let it be older than every thought you've ever had.
