Jun 26 2008
Fear of Being Alone
This is the second of the two entries I wrote on my cruise, completed June 18:
We spent the morning tooling among the icebergs until we had to turn around (the icebergs were getting both too numerous and too big for safety). Very exciting…and viewing all this—and being out in the cold and the spray of rain, surrounded by whales coming to the surface and seals bobbing up out of the water or laying out on top of the icebergs themselves—has energized me to write about Seattle…especially since most of my novel takes place right on the water. Being on the water is beautiful, but it is eerie as well. If I fell into it, at this temperature, I’m not sure I’d make it to land before I succumbed, even though I am pretty fit.
And out here, up in the Tracy Arms Fjord, I’m not sure land would help me. The whole fjord seems to be high craggy rock, with trees clinging inexplicably to its sides. I might get to its edge, but the waves might just crack me against the rock at the very end, or if I managed to climb up, I’d have nothing to eat and far too many miles to go before I could find civilization. Very scary.
I would be utterly alone…and I am not certain what is more frightening than that. Perhaps that fear of being alone is one thing I can explore in my novel. Perhaps that is the whole point of the novel, in the end.
