Keep it Bleak

The ocean is big and scary and full of weird stuff that no one has ever seen and is potentially really dangerous. I used to swim way out into the kelp beds knowing that I could be sucked out to sea, eaten by something, or pick up some awful infection from all the sewage that was floating around me.

But the one thing that has continually haunted my dreams, and scares me worse than any of that other stuff, was that feeling of isolation that you get when you are way out in the water by yourself, or standing in the middle of the desert with no one around. Today I went to a job-site on a military base, and found myself standing on an air strip; a vast swath of concrete, that was bleak, windy, a little dangerous and really really beautiful.