In The Beginning
Another day at the museum, the fluorescent lights blazed overhead while I squinted at another dead insect, skewered on a pin. For just a moment I felt a certain communion with the long dead arachnid I now studied. When I signed on to work for the museum I imagined the journeys I might take to far off lands; what strange places and creatures I might see someday. But it was not to be, eventually I was informed that, years ago, the journeys had all be taken. The task, now left to those of us who followed, was to organize what our predecessors had seen.
In the hall that to my office there was a series of portraits, the directors of the entomology division, where I was employed. Most depicted scholarly gentlemen in suits against a drab background. All but one. The oldest image was a crumbling sepia toned plate of a man riding on the back of a camel. He seemed to give the camera an impish grin, despite the vast desert that stretched around him. Everyday I stopped by his portrait. Would there a place for him in today's museum? He never had an answer, just that grin. But maybe that was the answer. Maybe a man like that doesn't need a place, maybe then, today, always, a person could carve their own destiny. That sepia tinged world I had once dreamed of had not been washed away by the fluorescent lighting. And a dangerous idea began to grow. There were things to see out there, I knew that much. Perhaps I didn't need someone's approval, or an itinerary, maybe I could go myself and see the places worth seeing. Others warned me of the dangers I would face, but it only steeled my resolve. The man on the camel surely had faced hardship, and yet all that remained was his cheerful grin, a challenge, and a promise, to those who came later.
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