Miscellanea from the Lost Quarter and beyond.

One Fine Country!

A windswept coast, ragged and rocky, the sea surging upon the shore. A forest with as many trees as there are stars in the sky, thick and swampy, cut through here and there by rivers and lakes. The vaulting skies of the plains, windswept as the coast, endless in all directions, until abruptly, suddenly the treeline appears in the north or the mountains in the west. Those jagged peaks, tumbling, roaring rivers and forest and the ocean again. Yet another world entirely, just as in the north where the trees disappear as you climb overtop the world. A land of dark and light, frozen earth and frozen oceans.

A land as hard and difficult as it is huge. Flying overhead is to catch glimpses of an incomprehensible vastness. Follow the river to its source, winding through the dense blankets of trees, that impenetrable brush. The patchwork quilt of fields and pastures, everything not quite connecting together. And here and there towns and cities. They seem the exception for great extents of this territory. At night, passing overhead, they are the flickering light standing out in a sea of darkness.

It seems impossible to connect all these places. They are too different and fractious. Nothing fits together easily. To cross it is to feel as though you have stepped into some grand fantasy, where the forbidding wilderness might contain monsters or elves. It is so easy to feel small amidst such a landscape, to feel dwarfed and insignificant. We are so few in such a vast place, huddled together in a few lonely spots, and we take that mindset with us when we venture out into the world.

How to make something of this? Why would you try? Those questions grow louder at times, quieter in others. We have no grand narrative to bind us, no heroic quest with a triumph promised at the end. We feel inconsequential next to so much drama. The product of pragmatic agreements made in the face of that, the terms forever being renegotiated. A river whose course is always changing and where portages may be waiting ahead.

As with so many things, the value is in the trying. Even if the end result will be messy and imperfect, only to rewritten by others. There is value in the work and being part of it.