The Long Way Up

Because there was a church at the top of Monserrate, I wore jeans.

That was my first decision, and almost immediately it seemed like the wrong one. I could have taken the funicular to the top. Instead, I chose the roughly 1.5-mile pedestrian route and started climbing dressed for the sanctuary rather than the effort required to reach it.

The path kept rising. Bogotá, already high, fell farther below me while the elevation added its own demand. I was sweating heavily before I had gone very far. My calves burned. Soon my hamstrings and quadriceps did too.

The photographs from that day are more orderly than my memory. They show the route, people moving in both directions, the city spreading out below and eventually the sanctuary. When I reached the top, what I felt first was relief.

Then the scale of Bogotá became visible. From the streets, the city had been a collection of routes I was learning: the apartment, the café, the grocery store, the places an Uber could collect me. From above, those familiar fragments disappeared into an expanse I could not organize.

I went into the church, sat down and prayed. What I prayed for, I don't remember. I remember sitting. I remember praying. I remember no answer that I can reconstruct now.

Behind the church, shops lined a passage. I bought two small crosses there, one for myself and one for my mother. I sometimes joke that I had to climb a mountain to buy them.

My mother still wears hers. She tells people that her son brought it from Bogotá. When I see it, I remember the jeans, the burning legs, the city below and the pew where I sat.