For my 27th birthday, my father gave me a knife I had to forge by myself.
The gift was a one-day workshop in Monterrey – a city in the north of Mexico, which is considered the industrial powerhouse of the country, with a modern skyline surrounded by tall and beautiful mountains – where for a whole day I would learn how to hammer a piece of steel into a blade. I love knives and have a collection of them from many different places around the world, and I had never done anything like this before, so I immediately said yes and then forgot about it for weeks until the date of the trip was close.
Weeks before though, I started to have strange dreams, which over the course of weeks all started to thread one with the other. The pattern I noticed the most was a labyrinth. One night I raced a friend (who actually lives in Monterrey) down a parking garage built as a square spiral, floor after floor at high speed – like a powerup – until we reached the center of it. Another night I walked into a sandstorm and had to close my eyes and keep moving forward; I passed through a tornado, and when I came out the other side, someone told me to check my stats, I'd been upgraded.
In the last one, I was trying to hide with some friends from my Uni (Tec de Monterrey) from some people. I would find a small underground room off the main passage; I got in and pulled the door behind me. I left the keys outside on purpose, so that anyone who came looking would think no one had entered.
It’s funny, I don’t always recall my dreams, but when I do I know there is something always hidden that they want to show me. I wrote them down and as weeks passed by something clicked inside me.
Then the day came and I flew to Monterrey with my dad.
That day we went to have lunch with one of his friends, and with a cousin who thinks very similarly as me. We both want to build something, travel the world, take charge of our lives and live it on our terms. Right after eating lunch at a typical northern Mexican cuisine restaurant, we set out to do a tour of the city. My cousin then took me to see the original campus of our university, which is huge compared to mine in Mexico City.
We walked around, he showed me almost every building, and I was very impressed at the size of it. I even wished I had done a semester there. I thought it was a very cool tour since it is the origin of where I studied, which felt like going to the source of my higher studies.
At some point just before the sunset, we walked into one of the academic buildings and since he wanted to show me a panoramic view of the city. We got out on the twelfth floor, but the elevator shafts and a few service walls cut up the sightline, so all you really got was the city in fragments through different windows.
I'd been telling my cousin about the labyrinth dreams as we walked, including the strange video-game quality some of them had — like I was moving through a level, looking for something the system hadn't told me I was supposed to find, and how in them I saw people from my university.
We were standing on the twelfth floor just us, not a soul in sight, when I noticed a door at the end of one of the hallways. A service door. No signage, no glass, the kind nobody is meant to push on. It was open.
He was shocked. He told me he had been to this building many times. He had been to this floor. That door had always been locked. We looked at each other, and with a grin we silently agreed.
We went up.
Behind the door was a narrow stairwell, and at the top was another floor - a fa completely dark, the lights off, no one there. Across the floor was a small unlit stage with flags hanging behind it, like a ceremony had taken place hours earlier and the room had simply not been cleared. We crossed the stage and walked out onto the open platform behind it, and the city was suddenly all around us in every direction. The mountains surrounded Monterrey in a bowl, and we were standing inside the bowl, above it. The full 360° view. No one else on the roof.
For weeks I had been walking underground in my dreams. And now here I was, on the highest floor of a building, behind a door that had been locked every other time my cousin was there, looking at everything at once.
When we finally went back down, the stairwell had a strange shape on the way out – the steps were descending in a tight triangular spiral. I had been racing down something exactly like this in a dream weeks earlier, and now I was at the top looking down, ready to reach the bottom once again.
The next day was the workshop.
My father and I woke up early, ready for the action. The forge was small, a home forge to be precise, in the small town of Santiago, 30 minutes away from Monterrey. There were four anvils, a homemade furnace, and four students ready to smash some iron. The blacksmith was a tall, bearded man, if he wasn’t so tall he would have totally resembled a dwarf smith. He showed us how to design our blades, hold the hammers, where to strike.
The hammers were heavier than I thought, and I was the skinniest guy there, and yet I managed to hammer way more times than the rest of the guys. There is something about hitting hot metal and the sound of it that takes you out of your head. The red steel starts going orange, then yellow, then regains its metal color again, and you see how it starts to flatten out and take shape under your every strike. We kept going with the rest of the process for the whole day, from 9 am till 9pm.
When the blade was almost done, the smith asked if I wanted to polish it down, or leave the heat marks visible. The forging process leaves the metal stained in different shades of brown, blue and purple. Polishing it makes the steel smooth and silver; while leaving it makes the blade look like the fire it came out of.
I just polished the tip and the sharp end. I left the rest as it was. The hammer marks and the colors resembled a mountain range, which felt right since we were in Monte-Rey – the Mount of the King – which was a clear reflection of the place and a kingly gift. Also, every knife I own is polished. The fact that I was making my own, and I wanted it to look unique, I decided to leave the raw marks of the fire and hammer hits on it.
Once we were done, we said our farewells to the other students and the smith, and we went back to the hotel. On the way back, my father and I shared an incredible moment talking about the amazing experience of forging a knife, contemplating what we had created, with the light of the full moon shining onto the beautiful mountains.
The next day my body was destroyed, I felt pain in places I had never felt anything before. My cousin and I had planned a hike for that day, but we changed plans and just chilled in the pool for the day. Later we went to have a delicious dinner at a Japanese restaurant called Señora Tanaka. There my cousin told us he had a déjà vu moment and told us that a couple weeks before he had dreamt this exact scene: my father, him and me eating dinner and talking about life with my father giving us advice, just like he was doing so in that moment.
The next day we had our flight back to Mexico City. I was reading on the way back a book called The Creation of Experience by Jacobo Grinberg, which proposes human consciousness creates reality by interacting with a space-time energy matrix.
So, I did not get an epiphany right there, but a week later. I went to Monterrey thinking I was going to learn a craft and make my own hand-made knife. I saw that as the main purpose of the trip. But when I came back, I felt like something deep inside of me had been preparing me for this trip far longer than what I consciously could tell. The forge taught me about steel and fire, but the trip taught me about what travel actually is when you let it surprise you. Most of the journey is the part that wasn’t on the itinerary and that wasn’t even on the scope of happening. The dreams from weeks before, going to the origins of my university, the door that was unlocked for us at the exact moment when we were there.
This is what I want this publication to be about. Not a perfect itinerary, nor the photo of the delicious food we had or the golden hour – though I will write about those too as well. But the other side of the coin, the half of the trip that came unannounced and that the trip itself never told you it was going to give you. It just lets you experience it. Live it.
Now every time I look at my knife, it reminds me that the intense heat of the fire and every hammer hit that life gives you are not there to destroy you, but rather shape you and show you what you are made of.
