Spacing Out

I am not agoraphobic, but years of city living has made me realize just how much I love urban living, and how much the suburbs skeeve me out. The four years of home ownership in Indiana (2001-05) were a very stressful time for me, but those silent nights, with only the coyotes crazy-yipping and the trains howling in the incredible dark (and silence) really creeped me out. The city feels much safer to me than the suburbs -- those endless developments, the big and lonely homes with their silence.

Years ago, as a teen in my high school library, before even being aware of my "city boy" sensibility, I remember being creeped out by this picture...

It's a shot of the German Wehrmacht invading Russia, crossing the endless steppe. And the expanse of it, that endless plain, well, it horrifies me on a very deep level. There are other shots in this series, that'll show this column of tanks just grinding across that plain, but the steppe is infinitely vaster than the tanks, and it's haunting, that nothingness. It's just too much, and too little. I remember training through Montana, seeing that, too -- I'd see this lone house with absolutely nothing around it (well, Nature, of course, but nothing else) and would wonder how people could live there without going batshit-crazy.

I've posted this before (maybe on another blog?) but Palmyra Atoll, a very remote little place in the South Pacific, a satellite photograph of it gave me the willies, too -- the inky dark of the Pacific Ocean, just a few feet from swallowing up this atoll once and for all...


I hyperlinked a kayak ride to that atoll in the above picture. I think they're approaching from the right-hand side, judging from the lay of the land, what little there is of it. Anyway, you can see this unfriendly little atoll, dark and mysterious, rain-soaked. I've put more than a few short stories out on lonely little islands like that.

I'm sure it's tied to an instinctive sociability that is inherent in human beings on some level, but that isolation is just very creepy. Give me something for my eyes to fix on -- mountains, forests, rolling hills. Don't give me featureless plains or thumbprints of fading land in a giant, endless ocean of unimaginable depths and dangers.

I've never felt in danger in the city. But living out in the countryside, I've felt that Gothic kind of dread, the sameness, the emptiness, the lifeless houses, and above all, the wasted space. It didn't help that the years at "The Black House" were filled with weirdness and uncanny things, of course, but still, it creeps me out.