Country Boy

by Sávio Oliveira (Brazil)

I didn't expect to find Brazil

Country Boy I was living in a new city, far from my homeland. Having to make my own lunch, nobody woke me up in the morning. It's like living when you leave home to study, work, grow... As much as I was enjoying the recent overdose of freedom, I think I was still living on the automatic of a calm life, while the hectic life in the city urbanized the country boy. As much as it scared me, I always wanted to start again, I just didn't know it would cost so much to get the hang of it. I was starting in the first period of the Geography course at that time and a trip was scheduled for the class. We would go to a national park in the mountains, a few kilometers south of Belo Horizonte. I had been in the city for over a year and due to lack of money, I had not gone anywhere yet. On the day of the trip, a cold saturday in august (mid-winter in the southern hemisphere) I sat on the bus, shy, beside those people I had known for a short time and we continued on our journey. The urban grid was staying behind and I was seeing land for the first time in a long time and it was strange, because that landscape had nothing to do with what I knew as "rural". The vegetation was very low and the mountains were made of iron. It was very windy and it was really cold. It was not just any trip. It was the inaugural trip of the Geography course, so it was also like great fieldwork. Passing through a small village among the mountains, there were houses, cars, people, roads, but everything was different. A parallel dimension to the naivete that still shone in my eyes. I had smiles and rigid faces as I had always seen, but the frame's armor and the colors on the screen were summarily new to me. Some readings later I started to call the armor of the geographic space frame and the colors on the screen, culture. That trip was telling me, that the world would always be a new place for those who allow themselves to look from other angles. The iron mountains became songs that I wrote, nurturing my deepest dreams. Seeing some spotlights of forest fires on the beautiful horizon of that dry landscape, I sat on the gazebo early in the evening as on a couch, doing my therapy in the metaphor of real life. At night, the cold wind was already howling higher than my fears, because from everything I didn't expect to find, I found myself and was able to return to the city knowing that I would never miss it.