Ships on Dry Land

The Aral Sea is the starkest research trip I have taken so far, in the plainest sense: there used to be a sea here, and a fishing fleet, and now there is cracked ground and rusted hulls sitting on sand where deep water used to be. Soviet irrigation planning diverted the rivers that fed it, and an entire economy and ecosystem went with the water.

I came for the ships, which are their own kind of monument, but I stayed for the island that used to sit in the middle of that sea - Vozrozhdeniya, where a biological weapons testing program operated for decades under the cover of remoteness the water itself provided. When the sea receded, the island stopped being an island, and the ground it once needed to isolate became ground anyone could, in theory, walk onto.

I do not have a manuscript yet. I have a notebook full of this instead, and a slowly forming conviction that isolation is a resource a state can use and then simply let expire. That feels like the beginning of something. I am trying not to rush it.