In my sophomore year of college, I wrote a short story about a boy named Denali who, as a result of a global nuclear holocaust, woke up one day to find himself the last human living on the planet.  Hiking through a forest preserve the other day, I came upon a pond with a single crane, perched in the middle of the water, sitting, waiting, I guess, though I'm not sure for what. Given the time of year, I surmised that perhaps all of his fellow cranes had already flown south and only he remained.  Seeing no evidence of a nest or other signs of additional cranes, I wondered why he was still here, planted in a pond which might, in a month or so, be frozen over.
     As I watched the seemingly lonely crane, I thought of Denali.  I also thought of a time, many decades ago, when I was solo hiking through the Brooks Range in far northern Alaska, over three hundred miles above the Arctic Circle.  It was just me and the wilderness; no one else was even a little close to where I was.  I was utterly alone.  One day, I chanced upon a pond, framed in the fading flowers and grasses of the turning tundra.  In the pond was a duck which, like the crane I was seeing today, was alone.  All of his companions, it seemed, had gone south.  Only he was left.  And what was he planning to do?  Why was he still here?
     All of us, Denali, the crane, the duck, and I, were alone in a wilderness, a wilderness of space as well as time, immaterial as well as physical, a wilderness that set us on the raw edge of existential possibility.  All alone.  The French philosopher Paul Sartre once observed that if there is no God, we humans are the loneliest beings in the universe.  And what will we then do?
     Life dangles before us, enticing, vexing, inviting, taking us into multiple journeys and explorations, opening to us countless horizons of the new and unknown.  Indeed.  So are we like Denali, the crane, the duck, and me in the Brooks Range?  Are we alone, absolutely alone in the universe?  Do we live, finding love and enjoying hope, then die?
     Or are we, in autumn's pictures of life ebbing, lonely creatures, yes, but lonely creatures who are players in a drama of meaning, a personal, transcendent, cognitive, and fulfilling meaning beyond our understanding?