by Dan Hiland

Created on: December 07, 2009

Here's to the lonely places- those geographically diverse and sparsely populated areas where you would swear you were the only person for miles- that if you were to spend much more time there, would soon come to believe that the rest of the human race had recently left your planet for the more friendly climes of another.

What I speak of is best known as the place to which you purposely go when you want to get away from them all.

Sometimes it feels good to just be alone. Other times it's a necessity. And then there are the times when you banish yourself to aloneness as a form of punishment.

I trace my fondness for lonely places to a childhood spent away from the city.

Growing up in the country, with all its virtues, is not for wimps. If you are the gregarious type, you are constantly be traveling from your quiet Point A to a noisier Point B in search of human companionship.

If you like solitude, you are vexed by what seem to be constant interruptions from those gregarious types seeking human companionship.

If you are prone to depression or seasonal affective disorder, the solitude of country living can be downright unhealthy.

But if you are "well-balanced" (whatever that means, these days), country life will live up to its joyous stereotype.

I was a mix: the kid who at times wanted someone to play with- but who also found joy in poking around an old barn or darkened shed. It was my way of recreating mysterious scenes I'd grown fond of as a result of watching too many Hitchcock films and Twilight Zone episodes.

Maybe it's the curse of the first-born to be the lone wolf. It certainly can't be argued that us FB's are in a class by ourselves- and many times out of choice. We were our parents' initial attempt at child-raising, and while they sometimes made mistakes, there were no siblings there to get in the way of their making quick course corrections.

By any means, I found the best days not the ones where the sun was bright and sunny, but where full cloud cover meant overcast skies, which by default set the stage for outdoor exploration and moody, gloomy and mysterious daydreams.

A first sense of the lonely places came when my parents took me to the beach for an overnight stay. It was rainy and overcast, so we had to spend a lot of the day and evening inside a rented apartment, a gray and dark-colored wooden building that was the epitome of drab.

The sad part was, I had no memory of ever seeing the beach during that weekend, remembering instead the television program

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