Mark's Pages

May 26, 2006:

As a child what impressed me most about The Country was that it was dark.

In the city there's light 24 hours. Streetlights, porch lights, searchlights, living room lamps spilling through window curtains. Mile after mile of permanent illumination.

In Montana at night you couldn't see past your headlights. The circle of the world, two dozen feet, outside of which is nothing, just the moving blur of reality disappearing into the past. That and the army of flying insects struggling to join you inside your temporary truth.

Darkness, and with it the feeling of profoundest isolation.