I had a rather mundane epiphany last week. I want to hear yours too.
So, I started a new job on the 8th. The city it’s in is one I’ve only been to a couple of dozen times before and only two of those times were in the past decade, but I’ve never liked driving back home from there during the daylight hours. There’s this stretch of road just before a traffic circle that has always made me feel uneasy, and I never figured out why. Sure, it’s pointed down hill for a really long way, but I go down a similarly steep hill with a lot more curves almost every day, so that couldn’t be it.
On both the 8th and the 9th it was so late when I got out of work that it was dark out. But I got out earlier on the 10th. And finally, a decade later, I figured out what’s so scary about that road…You need to know that I’ve only ever lived in small, cramped MA cities of 70-100,000 people or teeny NH towns with no more than 10,000 people in them. In the cities there were buildings stacked one on top of another. The towns are each heavily tree’d since it’s NH and most of the state is like that.
And that stretch of road that makes me feel uneasy? It’s the longest unobstructed view I’ve ever seen - a straight downhill distance with no trees, no buildings, no anything blocking the view for, I don’t know, maybe two or three miles. I’ll have to clock it on Monday and see.
Clearly this means that visiting the midwest would be scary as hell for me
My friend from Ontario said something similar about trains - when she came to the prairies, she was stunned by being able to see a whole train at one time (Ontario is pretty much all trees, and she had never had such an obstructed view, either). It had never occurred to me (born and raised on the prairies) that there are people who don’t get to see views for days all the time.
Eh, a lot of the Midwest has rolling hills, even small mountains and the like. I grew up in the Midwest, and my OMFG moment like that was visiting relatives in Texas. We were driving outside of Houston and it was like I could see forever, the land was so flat. I’m pretty sure I looked like: :eek:
Mine was outside Millington, TN about 38 years ago. I was young, in the Navy, and one night, a classmate and I drove to a park that was far away from all ambient light. I was absolutely amazed by the number of stars I saw - just couldn’t get over it. I’d never realized what an effect a few porch lights and street lights had in my little suburban neighborhood.
I find it odd when I can’t pick out a water tower 15 miles away.
No kind of epiphany, as you describe.
But really, I’m used to looking to the west and being able to say “we’re going to have a bad storm in about three hours”.
Maybe an epiphany counter to yours. When visiting the finger lakes region of New York about four years ago, I found myself wondering when we’d see a break between towns. “Okay, we’re going from Geneva to Seneca Falls. We’ll leave Geneva as soon as we pass half a mile without a house. WTF? We’re here? We haven’t freaking left the last town yet!”
One of the times I drove from Milwaukee to La Crosse (up near St Paul, MN), I remember looking at the person I was with (who was from La Crosse) and saying “ahhh, so these are what people call rolling hills” and I said it in all seriousness. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’d never seen hills, it’s just the first time I’d ever seen miles of green grassy hills all at once. It was also the first time I’d ever seen what I would describe as an Open Sky. I get the feeling that’s the wrong word. What I mean is, I could see the sky, unobstructed, from right to left, all the way above me and all the way down to the horizon…I felt like I should have been in Texas. I’m sure it had a lot to do with it being a pretty clear day as well.
When I moved the the midwest, I found myself disoriented when driving. It took months before I realized it was because I’d always fixed on where I was related to large bodies of water (Lake Washington or Puget Sound. In Kansas City, I had no reference points.
I just thought of an actual dim lightbulb moment. A few years ago one of our fellow dopers mentioned that he had been in Milwaukee and really liked our lake (Lake Michigan). IIRC he said one of the big reason he liked it as that he couldn’t see across it and that it reminded him of an ocean.
To this day, I still think about that comment from time to time. I grew up about a block from the lake and spent a lot of time hanging out on the lake shore. It never really dawned on me that this lake is different then most of the other lakes that you’d find scattered around the US. Whenever I see a lake where I can see across it, I always think of it as a small lake or even a large pond. It was that comment that made me realize that the Great Lakes aren’t normal lakes, they’re freakin’ huge. They’re also the reason we get to drain our gutters and sump pumps into the sewers which dump right into the lake and the reason that even during times of drought there’s never been a water restriction (that I know of) since we draw our drinking water right out of the lake.
When I learned how to drive (in Milwaukee) my dad taught me that if you ever get lost, just drive east until you hit the lake, then start over. It was nice to know, as I was getting to know the city on my own that as long as I went East, I really couldn’t get to far away from home by accident…ya know, without driving off a bluff and landing in the water. Even if I accidentally went really far North or South, as long as I got myself back to the main road that runs along the lake, I could, at the very least, call my dad and least be able to give him some sort of a reference point as to where I was.
I grew up on Lake Superior, and when I was a kid, it always struck me as profoundly strange that people called those little pond things that you could see across “lakes”. A Lake was something huge and deep and cold and you definitely couldn’t see across it. Those other things? I dunno what they should be called, but they definitely shouldn’t have the same name as a real Lake.
When I was a kid, I walked alone out on to the salt flats at Death Valley. When I got there and was wondering what there was to see, I realized that it was absolutely silent. I could cars on the road in the distance, and people in the parking lot a mile or so away, but no sound at all.
I think it was a lucky coincidence. No wind at all, no fellow tourists or family members joining me for the walk, no airplanes overhead. Still, I remember it some 30 years later.
That was an epiphany from many years ago, when I got my first glasses. I was quite young, and had been so nearsighted all my life that I literally could not distinguish separate leaves on a tree when I was standing under it. I knew in the abstract that trees had leaves, and had seen leaves on trees when I climbed them, but I had never actually been able to look at a whole tree and see the leaves at the same time. All the new detail I could see, and the realization that this was how others had seen the world all along, crashed together in my young mind so that the only coherent thing I could think about it was, “Trees have leaves.”
I spent the whole trip home staring avidly out the window, and for weeks, I was prone to stopping in my tracks just to look at things. Even decades later, with my vision surgically corrected, I still stop sometimes and look at perfectly ordinary things with a bit of wonder, because I remember what it was like to be unable to see them.
I had a high school classmate tell me about some place he visited in New Jersey or New York, some place in that area that had a vista labeled “Three Mile View”, like it was this vast expanse of wide open space. I was highly amused since at the time all I had to do was look over there and see mountains 20 miles away. Hell, at the moment I can see Mt. St. Helens, and it’s 60 miles away as the crow flies.
Those are the exact first words my sister said after stepping out of the optometrist’s office wearing her first glasses. I’ll have to email her a link to this thread.
My own little epiphany was when, in the sixth grade, I realized that the reason we did page after page of the same sorts of math problems was not for the sheer joy of it, but rather because the rest of the class had to do it over and over in order to have a chance of remembering how to do them. It somewhat dampened my enthusiasm to know that I was the only one having fun. Thinking back, it seems weird that I went so long without realizing that I was experiencing things so differently from my classmates.
Mine felt rather mundane when it happened, so I’ll count it.
The first time a bullet whizzed by my head and it made the exact sound it does in the movies. There were two thoughts running through my head. 1) You are being shot at, dummy. 2) That sounds *exactly * like a movie!
I snickered about that for two days… it just felt so… normal, at the time.
When I was a struggling college student a friend let me move in with him and his son until I got “back on my feet.” They lived in a fairly new suburb. I was used to living in older neighbourhoods. I always felt uneasy in the suburbs, I chalked it up at the time to the financial discrepancy between me & everybody else - struggling student vs. families with 2.5 kids, 2 cars, and manicured lawns. It wasn’t until 9 months later when I was settled into my own apartment downtown again that I realized why I was so uncomfortable in that “new” neighbourhood:
No trees.
The trees in the 'burbs were small, newly-planted ones. I was used to living where big, tall, old trees flourish.
I was twelve or so, standing in the kitchen doorway and looking out the opposite window when I noticed something very wrong. Aren’t trees supposed to have leaves? That’s when we knew I needed glasses.
No recent epiphanies having to do with natural landscapes, but I had a small lightbulb flicker this morning when I realized that the water pressure of my old rusted-on showerhead, which ordinarily goes through a 30-gallon tank of hot water with the speed and force of a riot hose, could be controlled simply by not pulling the temperature knob out all the way.
Hot water in my apartment is now good for more than a five-minute shower. A small and mundane lightbulb moment, but satisfying.
I was born and raised in the flat prairie, so seeing mountains when I was a teenager, in Georgia, was mind-blowing. Land goes up like that? I remember waking up early to watch the sun come up over the mountain, and realizing that part of the valley would be in shadow for a good part of the morning. I couldn’t get over it.
