Hey there. My name is Michael. The town board said it'd be good if we put something down for people to remember us by.

I was born upstate, in the Catskills. I did a lot of hiking when I was younger. Sometimes I'd stay up there for a few days and get myself lost. I liked to imagine I was Rip van Winkle, and I'd wake up and come down from the mountains 20 years later.

I was an artist back then, and I came down to The End because I heard it was a pretty nice place to be. Waves, sand, bluffs, all the essentials for an oil painting to hang on some doctor's waiting room wall somewhere. Doctors ate that cliche shit right up. I came down in the winter for a couple reasons. Cheap rooms and no obnoxious tourists. Beaches look just about the same in the winter as they do in the summer if you ignore the ice.

I was on my second night here when we got the blizzard. Complete white-out. Electric gone. I was glad for the fireplace in my room. And then that was it. Everyone was gone. No communication, no helicopters flying overhead, no off-season tourists.

(Not that it bothered anyone too badly. You guys have that whole "small-town but everyone's family" thing happening nicely here. I hope you can keep that way when the rest of us leave.)

After the blizzard...well, it wasn't like the world needed another artist anymore. Not when you can walk into one of those mansions on the shore and pull your very own Van Gogh off the wall for free. I was pretty good, but I'm not on that caliber of skill. So I became a fisherman.

It was pretty nice, being on a boat. I'd been fishing with my old man on some rivers, but never on the ocean before. It's big. Bigger than you'd think, if you've never been out in the middle of one before. You spend more time working than thinking, so that's a plus. I just wish I liked seafood even a little bit.

So, that's about it, really. Don't want to waste your time. Tomorrow we'll be leaving The End and heading west down the LIE, and then we'll be going up as far as we can go. I'm not upset I was chosen to leave. In fact, I probably would have volunteered. I didn't grow up here, so I have no family I'd leave behind. No ties whatsoever. Besides, I'll be heading back home. It'll be nice to see mountains again, even if they'll be empty. Maybe I'll get lost and spend a couple decades up there. Maybe the world will change when I hike back down.

I'm kidding, of course. I'll get us all back if I can manage it. You guys deserve to know what else is out there.

So, thanks for taking me in. I appreciate it.

See you later.

Michael Arnold
Navigator
North-bound Exploration Team