text by A.R. Minkkinen In a place called White Sands, New Mexico, you can get lost in no time on a cloudy, windy summer day as your footsteps are erased nearly as quickly as your bare feet make them. With no sun to guide you, it’s like being on another planet. The pull of places like that might be the same as the emotional grip that the tip of Mt. Everest has on champion climbers, or in the photographs of Ivan Murzin, the magnetic pull of a national park in Siberia where multitudes flock in winter to tempt gravity off the surface of an infinite tabletop of ice. Is it to slip away unnoticed that drives the psyche to experience such places—whether vicariously or through the intrepidness of others—or is it to simply affirm that we are alive? There are no answers on Google Maps, but the novelist Alan Lightman, in one crazy chapter of his classic bestseller, Einstein’s Dreams, does surmise: What if we lived in a world where people live forever, what other way would there be to end the millennia of boredom we would face otherwise than “dive into Lake Constance or hurl [ourselves] from Monte Lema.” Luckily, the edges of most continents are trimmed in utmost beauty. So, there’s no need to fret. Just take a deep breath, hope the ice holds, and exhale. As Ivan Murzin writes, “You are leaving childhood’s nest ... to discover this life, your own path, moving further and further, without knowing where will you be later.” But to remain optimistic, he makes sure to add: “Enjoy the slide in the white infinity space.”