What’s misleading is that so many people live here. It seems like a city. It looks like a city. And there is plenty to do here. There is no great reason to leave, and unless you do, you don’t begin to ask where the next place is.

In any direction, in every direction, in each direction there is land, land, land, not so full of very much. It goes on, so that looking forward does not see any end, any point where there is someplace…else.

Arriving, it is now a pleasure to look back, to see, and think, to contemplate where I was: that it is an island, an urban jewel in the midst of oceans of land.

Never mind that it is frozen tundra much of the year (today, especially). Never mind the jerks, the banality of copyists trying to be not-so-great from too afar. Never mind the eras of too early maturing teenagers now middle aged who thought they were somewhere…in the big times which got older, faded, tired.

Here, looking down upon Ol’ Miss, the Great River, I see city everywhere, bustling through a wind chill which threatens in each moment.

The steams of city rising tell me that I am in the middle of an island, heavily populated, cut-off from the elsewheres of life which grant meaning in the news of today, every day.

Living on an island, trying to image-ine it big enough so its edges create the dialectics of newness.

So its perspectives of the distances of clear vision grant new understanding and do not stifle.