Five thirty in the morning, in October, at two thousand metres.
The light has not started yet. You can feel the wind shaping itself against your jacket. The horizon is a flat, dark blue, the kind that only exists for fifteen minutes before sunrise. Below the ridge, the valley is still asleep, and the headlights on the road look slow and far away.
Enrosadira
The Dolomites have a word for what happens next. Enrosadira. It is from the Ladino, the language spoken in these valleys. It means, more or less, the turning rose.
For somewhere between three and seven minutes, depending on the morning, the rock catches the first light from below the horizon. The pale, almost grey limestone goes apricot, then peach, then rose, then back to pale stone. If you blink at the wrong moment, you miss it.
I have been photographing this same view from this same ridge for nine years. I have caught the enrosadira maybe twenty times. The other mornings, the cloud was wrong, or the wind was wrong, or I was wrong.
What the photograph cannot show
The frame in the bookmark is from one of those twenty mornings. What it cannot show is the four hours of walking that got me to the ridge in the dark. The lichen-cold rock I sat on. The thermos that had gone lukewarm. The small, ridiculous joy of being the only person, on a Tuesday, at that hour, at that altitude.
Some places work for you the first time. Some places make you come back nine years in a row. I prefer the second kind.