Sea of Fog

As much as I’ve been waiting and working towards it for four years now, I really can’t believe I’m graduating college in three weeks. I’ve got some ideas about where I’m headed, but mostly I feel like I’m groping along in the dark.

There’s this picture (above) I really like to look at now and then, Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.” Even though Friedrich painted it in 1818, I feel drawn to it some near 200 years later. Don’t get me wrong—for me, time is melting away faster than desert clocks in a Dali painting, but this whole sense of temporarily rising above the fold, taking a minute to reflect and then heading back down into a sea of chaos pretty much sums up my whole experience right now.

I’m going to get all dressed up, put on a gown (I’d really prefer it if they called it a robe, because that would make me feel like a king or a wizard or Hugh Hefner), have my named called and hear (hopefully) a bunch of people applaud. And then I go back into the Sea of Fog, obscurity—as Hunter S. Thompson put it, “straight into frantic oblivion . . . just another freak in the freak kingdom.”

It’s now time to make something of myself, though I’m not sure what that is going to be. I’ve always been successful, from the time the guidance counselor pulled me out of the third grade to do all these IQ tests and told me I was “gifted” to just last Friday when I was given a “certificate of excellence” by my college, but I’ve never felt quite content. And that’s probably because I’ve never quite found an enterprise that I could feel comfortable entirely devoting myself towards.

My time spent here at MPT has helped me meditate on just where to funnel my abilities. As someone who enjoys the arts, I am glad to see there are organizations out there who are trying to still support them in an age where dollar signs and immediate gratification are requisite for successful business. I spent a lot of time outdoors as a kid in the foothills of Appalachia up in Pennsylvania, so I’m especially glad to see there are organizations like MPT that are working to preserve the Chesapeake Bay.

And perhaps it’s because I have always been more than a little suspicious of change that preserving such institutions appeal to me. But, as much as I want to fight it, change is inevitable as the sun rise. So with the knowledge that there just might be some organization, some cause out there, that I can really buy into and believe in, I’ve got a little hope about things.

And now I’ve got to get on out there.

Thank you, MPT. You’ve been great.


Kevin Sunday
Communications Intern