On a travel show long ago, I watched the recounting of a railway journey to the top of Great Britain to visit the town of Kyle of Lochalsh. The trip was scenic and lengthy. The town is at the end of the line. While the town had its attractions, its real attraction was that it was the end of the line at an extreme of the land.

There is something compelling about the utter end of something, going to the last stop, land's end, or even the utter middle of nowhere.

If home is the center, the comfortable, warm center, then these places represent as far from home as we can get.

The world is round, and so there is no real end of the Earth, this must be understood as a symbolic journey. And what does it symbolize? Perhaps, being tired of being in control and safe, we like the idea of getting safely lost. Perhaps, we know that part of the satisfaction of travel is reaching your goal, and this is the end of all goals. Perhaps we need to travel to escape and this is the ultimate escape.

Or perhaps there is some quality in these "edge of the empire" towns, some quality of openness to a beyond, some unstructured freedom that lets us feel a rift in space and time. They tend to be uncluttered places, a painting half finished, open to being changed.