I woke up feeling large. Not in an “-and-in-charge” kind of way. The opposite. I felt like the world around me had gotten so small, and here I was, outsized, clumsy, clashing with my surroundings like a Brobdingnagian in a one-bedroom.
I tried to think of the last time the roles were reversed. The last time I felt small. The last time the world felt vast. The last time I was reminded how monumentally infinitesimal I am in relation to this Earth of ours.
Then I remembered Vietnam. I remembered the 19-plus hours of air travel to get just halfway around this blue marble. I remembered being swallowed up by motorbikes in Hanoi, a pebble in a raging river of two-strokes. I remembered Hạ Long Bay, and being utterly dwarfed by karst after karst jutting skyward from the sea.
At a distance, they looked like rocks. Beside them, they felt like mountains.
As we passed through a cluster of them, our guide explained that there are nearly 2,000 of these islets in the bay, and they had gone through over 500 million years of transformation to appear this way. Just then, we turned slightly, and these two doors came into view.
A moment earlier they were hidden beneath the brush, and a few moments later, behind an outcropping. But for a handful of seconds, there they were, seemingly hewn into the limestone facade, out of place and enigmatic.
My mind began to wander: what was behind them? A home away from home for one of the fishermen that trawled the bay? An abandoned and distant relic of wartime? A long and winding staircase leading to an underwater Dharma Initiative facility? Or maybe the entire islet was hollowed out and these doors were simply the entrance?
In all likelihood, those little doors were benign, hiding nothing more than a storage closet for a captain to stash some gear. I say “little” but by all accounts they were normal-sized. It was just their context that made them feel that way.
Words + Photo by Kyle Kastranec