I was raised on the plains of the Eastern Dakotas. The summers were always noisy: crickets, cicadas, coyotes, prairie dogs, wind, plenty to fill the air. The winters were incredibly austere, sometimes incomprehensibly so to those who haven't experienced them.
On particularly cold and windless days outdoors the silence is almost unbelievable. You hear your heartbeat, the snow underfoot crunches so loudly you cringe, and sounds travels so clearly and without interruption that a half-mile seems within arm's reach. It's absolutely surreal and can be very disorienting, almost like space compresses around you.
It was hard enough to live there in the 90s. I can't imagine how isolating it'd have been on a claim.
Meanwhile, I've been trying highly recommended headphones, and it turns out everyone loves open headphones with no sound isolation, but then I just hear cars outside, my fridge compressor running, computer fans…
Open headphones and sound isolating headphones are good for different things. I personally don't like closed back or sound isolating ones because I want to be able to hear what's going on around me.
If you're trying to block sound, IEMs are usually the way to go. A bit more expensive for comparable sound quality, but it's worth it for the increase in portability
Speaking of Great Plains, I found that, being Swiss, I tend to feel unsettled in regions where no mountains whatsoever are visible on the horizon. I'm not even much of a mountaineer, but it seems I need them around to get my bearings.
I grew up on the US East Coast. When I moved to the West Coast for a summer, I found that my normally good navigational skills were totally scrambled, because the ocean was in the wrong direction.
You get used to it, and honestly, it's nice in its own way. Having the sun at your back warming you on a coolish night while staring at the horizon is pretty peaceful.
Plus, I'd rather watch the sunset on the Indian River than to watch it over the Gulf, because of all the awful people who crowd the beaches of the other side of the state.
I was trying to orient myself coming out of the subway in the heart of downtown Chicago, and I said "ah, the lake is over there, so that's east." My companion was surprised that that was the landmark on which I seized, but I grew up in a rural area in which I could never develop a sense of direction, and felt huge relief when I moved to Chicago and there were two landmarks (the, ahem, Sears tower and the lake) that could be used for navigation almost anywhere in the city.
Once, when I moved for a while from the northern to the southern hemisphere, my time-estimating skills were quite disturbed because the sun traveled from right to left.
> I found that my normally good navigational skills were totally scrambled, because the ocean was in the wrong direction.
I experienced this recently while staying on the North side of Cyprus. If I headed east or west the sea was on the wrong side, compared with where it is at home (south coast of UK). I also get confused when I'm in the southern hemisphere, and the Sun goes across the sky the wrong way, and shadows lengthen on the wrong side of objects.
I had something related in Montreal. Bewildered until I realised the paper tourist map was rotated clockwise by around 60°. North was definitely not where it should have been.
Ronda in Spain is the only place I've felt agoraphobic. There are mountains on the horizon and it felt like they were an unsettlingly long way away.
As a Californian I have the same problem. Just about anywhere you go here there's mountains or at least hills. Driving east from Denver on I70 is just a featureless flat plane. I've driven all over the Great Plains and it's just unsettling. There's an old joke that you can watch your dog run away for three days which is not that much of an exaggeration.
> There's an old joke that you can watch your dog run away for three days which is not that much of an exaggeration.
We have a joke here about people who live in the flat northern coastal regions of Germany: They can see at breakfast who is visiting at lunch. -- But that is nothing compared to the people who live in the mountains in the south: They can see at breakfast who is visiting at supper.
As a midwesterner, California feels to me as if the very earth itself is conspiring against me, saying “those people in the hills above, they’re richer and better than you, poor lowly scum”.
I was the opposite, I spent a good chunk of my time growing up and then in college on the High Plains of Texas. When I took my first job it was in a pine forrest I often felt sick because I couldn’t see the horizon and because the trees block out so much of the early morning and afternoon light.
I moved away from what I grew up with, and prefer it. (Good thing, I guess)
Went from Manitoba prairie, to west coast. Mountains and ocean, and in my yard, mostly a wall of tall evergreen trees.
The weather is pleasant too, but I attribute much of the change to what I find to be a more appealing fractal dimension of landscape. It's not all the same, and I much prefer that.
I think it depends on how you grow up. I personally need to see mountains to be happy but I have talked to people from Texas and they got nervous when they couldn't see the horizon in all directions.
... and not surprising it runs the other way too. I have relatives from the Canadian prairies who feel claustrophobic in the mountains, like the landscape is pressing in around them.
Something missing in everywhere but out of town on the plains is horizon to horizon sky. Growing up it was a common daily occurrence now it’s hard to find. I don’t know about claustrophobic but it being missing is weird.
I'm from the prairies. Personally I don't feel claustrophobic but big wide open skies are something I miss when I'm elsewhere, and feel happy to return to. It really is kind of special, though I'm sure most visitors don't even notice.
Prairie thunderstorms are also kind of amazing. Though my perception is they're getting rarer and shorter.
> Though my perception is they're getting rarer and shorter.
This does not match my anecdotal experience. I did a lot of camping as a kid in during the summers in Kansas and had the "pleasure" of riding out many a thunderstorm huddled in a tent (or in a concrete latrine if there was hail/tornados). Several years ago, I once again found myself camping in a raging prairie thunderstorm (thanks to being more focused on the girl I was with than on the forecast) and the experience was surprising familiar... Oh well, she ended up marrying me, so worked out in the end!
May be or may be not. I'm a 52 y/o Brit - we don't have mountains per se. I started skiing in about 1976.
I've seen a few mountains and gear changes.
I've skied in CA - Calgary is nearly the same Northerly latitude as Yeovil (Somerset/UK). It got quite nippy the last time I was there - about -17C. Banff and the rest (Sunshine Valley etc) were great fun.
I've skied a few other places too.
A few years back I recall getting a call whilst I was bimbling down the top end of Verbiers. Bit surreal - big hill and rather steep. Keep your edges keen kids!
Funny, I'm the same way. Grew up in Illinois, which is totally flat. But after an adult lifetime in CA, it seems really, really boring to not have mountains.
Like you (but it was from Kansas that I moved to CA) I came back to the midwest after 26 years in Silicon Valley — wide-open (flat) became "normal" again very quickly.
> “An alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new prairie States [sic] among farmers and their wives,” wrote journalist Eugene Smalley in The Atlantic in 1893.
Meta: I find it cool that The Atlantic was around at that time and reporting on current events, and that it's still kicking around:
When I head out to my father or father in laws (Saskatchewan) farm, I usually ponder the vast empty field for a while. One time when I was at my father in laws, I said "it's kinda eerie how quiet it is" and he told me a story.
A Japanese man had been working at a nearby oil town and had befriended my father in law. He wanted to be left alone in a field to enjoy the quite so he took him to a spot and left him there for a few hours. When my father in law came back, the Japanese man was sobbing.
But the problem is (from what I can tell): it wasn't silent. It was much louder than the woods you know.
This would have been at a time when it was nothing but native plants. Which means it would have been teeming and crawling with native insects (note that native plants will support more insect life than non-native ones - because the non-native insects that evolved to live off the non-native plants, are missing).
So it would have been noisy with insect life.
Butterflies. Creepy crawlies. Spiders. Dragonflies. Gnats. And things I'd have a hard time finding a common name for, moving around.
And then the native reptiles and snakes that eat them (remember, present at a higher density then because there was more of the food they like, and fewer people).
And the birds that feed off them, also present in higher numbers because there were no humans, no domestic cats, and no habitat loss restricting their numbers. No non-native predators at all.
Zero percent pesticides compared to what we have now, much more water (nothing having been dammed or redirected), no farming depleting nutrients in the soil, only 100% virgin high quality composted soil. And so forth.
It would make considerable noise, all the additional living biomass all these ecosystem positive changes would support.
It's pretty easy to confirm this yourself, if you go to a small nature preserve that's been restored with native plants during the summer, and just sit there and observe for 10-20 minutes. And that's only a weak imitation of the amount of biomass those prairies would've supported.
My favourite writer, Czesław Miłosz, remarked how rich the nature was in Lithuania during 1920ies and 30ies (back then, not much changed there since the middle ages), compared to him living in Berkeley later. He wrote that the instect life was particularly impressive and you could have a wall of your house covered by a scum-like layer of various insects. My grandmother, who lived back then in similar conditions, said the same - there could be so many instects that it looked as if the whole wall was moving.
It's also easy to prove you wrong. Just go to the desolate prairies their talking about where you won't find a tree for miles and the birds only fly overhead.
I live on a small farm in the Midwest. When my mom (who lives in NYC) comes to visit, it often takes her a few days before she can sleep well because it's so quiet at night.
Conversely, living on top of a hill, the wind absolutely screams in winter. After two or three days of constant howling wind, sometimes I feel like I'm going nuts.
> Conversely, living on top of a hill, the wind absolutely screams in winter. After two or three days of constant howling wind, sometimes I feel like I'm going nuts.
Semi-related. I grew up in the midwest except I was in a soundproofed basement room with no windows and now I have rather severe misophonia to a lot of random sounds.
We had a big house with a big family, but still not enough real bedrooms for every kid to have their own. I wanted my own room so I took the only available room. I didn't think it was a problem at the time.
Theories stretched beyond the breaking point. I am of the third generation living on the plains of Montana, 60 miles south of Alberta. No such issues are in my family history. If you spent most of your life in the maddening din of New York City and experienced quiet for the first time, perhaps you can’t handle it. For goodness sake this part of the land has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years.
When one moves to a new, "strange", and unknown environment, separating themselves from friends and family and way of life, depression can be very real. Plains or no plains.
I wouldn't call the Great Plains silent at all. The sounds are different from the forested East, but there's a lot more going on than wind. Newspapers have never been immune to taking common misunderstandings and sensationalizing them.
so much this. I had a condo in Murrieta, CA a while back. Bedroom was on the second story, right next to Murrieta Hot Springs Rd. I never got used to all the crazy sounds coming from that road.
There's a "psychic noise" (for lack of a better term) in cities. Less so in smaller cities. Ramps down as you go further into wilderness. The contrast is shocking.
I have seen little discussion of it so I'm guessing most of us don't perceive it. You might even call it woo. Nonetheless.
I could see some people becoming acclimated to it. Unable to tolerate its absence even.
Otoh, some rare weirdos might flourish in that wilderness peace.
I recently returned from a visit to NYC for the first time. While there, I tried to tell my partner about the overwhelming 'citiness' that NYC was exuding but of course I couldn't describe it well. Naturally she shook her head at me.
The trip was five days but I was still keenly aware of it into the very last evening. I had difficulty sleeping due to my inability to shut out all the noise -- sirens, honking, the occasional bit of shouting.
For reference - I was born, raised, and spent most of my adult life in very small Midwestern towns. We moved a lot when I was young and it wasn't long before I learned to feel the vibes of each different town.
I think of this 'psychic' energy as being people's perceptual and effectual fields. Space that other humans can interact with. Growing up in a city, one expects the presence of multitudes of other fields. Being in the wilderness is a trip; it takes a long time for me to really believe I'm not in someone else's perceptual radius. It's hard to convince myself that I could yell at the top of my lungs and not cause alarm, even when in the middle of desert pan where I can see for miles in any direction.
Minor similarity - I grew up near sea, and i remember the first time when inside the country i walked up a hill with an old fortress, looked around and felt something unusual and just a bit disorienting - there were no sea anywhere, just plains of fields and forests stretching all the way to horizon in all directions.
In the rare times when I've not been within a few kilometres of the sea, I've had this same feeling of looking around, not being sure what was missing.
Apparently other things can take the place, with the mind (or is it the spirit) accepting one thing as a replacement for another. Mountains come to mind. Lakes and rivers, too, plus geologic formations. People tell me that these sorts of things can take the place of the sea.
But the prairie, the vast prairie? To me, at least, the challenge of adjusting to the prairie would require replacing something with nothing. I can see how people would theorize that moving to the prairie could break one's spirit.
I'd love to hear how prairie folks feel when they move near the sea, or to a spot within sight of the mountains. Perhaps the anisotropy of view and mobility starts to gnaw at them.
I moved from the greatest of the plains to the mountains, having now lived in the southern and northern Rockies. Counterintuitively, my world became much much larger after discovering topography.
With no large geographic reference point your experienced world becomes only what you can see to the horizon, often blocked by crops or a section treeline. 3-5 miles out, 8 if you find a hill. And, since it's all patchwork rural farmland, every place you go outside of this radius feels the same. You've seen it before; it's just a rearranging of the same stock roads, treelines, fields, fences, and farm equipment.
Moving to the mountains ruined me for the plains. In a ten-minute walk I can observe a river valley unfold below me with my view uninterrupted until the next mountain group 40 miles away. Ten minutes in the opposite direction and I'm climbing to the top of the world. In the mountains there is always something new to see and another incredible nook to find just around the bend. The topography brings a sense of scale that constantly reminds me just how big and exciting the world actually is.
I have lived most of my life on the great plains and while I don't know of sea or mountain, I have lived a few years in a forested area and I felt twinges of claustrophobia the whole time. No farms, no horizons anywhere - just trees. Not for me.
I dunno, I love the wide openness of it. The wind trying to push you around. The rolling clouds, the dark skies. Try and live on the western edge of small town - even better if you're on a slight rise. You get a sunset every day, cloud watching on a stormy day feels very pagan, and every day smells ever so slightly different.
I moved to Minnesota 20-odd years ago, having always lived near the sea. It took a lot of contemplation before I made the move, exactly for that reason. I think it was such a complete change of environment -- I moved here knowing absolutely no one, and not even where I would live -- that adjusting to the new place, meeting people, starting a new job so completely distracted me that it took a while before it sunk in that I couldn't just be on the beach in 15 minutes. It was disorienting, but far less than I expected it to be. I still miss the sea but it's more of a distant longing now.
> The description of the Great Plains soundscape reminds Adrian KC Lee, an auditory brain scientist at the University of Washington who was not involved in Velez’s study, of sensory deprivation or being in an anechoic chamber—a room designed to stop echoes. In those cases, even the smallest sound, like the rustle of clothing or even your own heartbeat, can become impossible to ignore. As Lee pointed out, the human brain will naturally adapt to its environment, essentially turning up or down the volume to better distinguish what’s going on.
This reminds me of a story, I believe it was told by Joseph Goldstein to Sam Harris (but I could be mistaken), about learning to meditate in noisy, urban environments. It makes me think this method and process could illustrate what the author is talking about.
I live in a fairly quiet community. I’ve become aware of people in our community through mutual acquaintances, friends and family, who have trouble sleeping at night without the television on.
From what I’ve read, this is a common problem with people who suffer from anxiety and depression. So I think prairie madness might have exacerbated already existing mental health conditions in a select group of people.
On Reddit this week, there was a popular video posting of a little boy sleeping peacefully on a chair as a loud mariachi band plays near his ears. How is this even possible?
Are you able to fall asleep easily and deeply at home? I’m a light sleeper, and I’ve often felt like a cat when I sleep. The sound of a mouse would wake me into a running sprint. My mother is the same way, but my father is not, so we joke that I inherited it from my mom, which makes a lot of sense given that I take after her. I’m just wondering if these things contribute to our overall state of awareness and normal waking consciousness. More topical, I enjoy silence, likely as a result of being a light sleeper. So I think I would be mostly immune to prairie madness. It’s also possible that it’s spectrum related in terms of noise sensitivity. One of my first memories was freaking out at a Warriors game as a child because of the noise levels. Interestingly, the spectrum issues come from my father, so there’s a strange mix of genes at work.
My dog happily sleeps with all kinds of noise going on. While he's fairly smart I think there's not a lot of introspective thought in his brain. Probably the same for a kid compared to an adult, or an anxiety-ridden adult compared to a more healthy (if that's the right word) one. My wife can turn off and sleep in under 5 minutes, but leave me alone with my thoughts in the quiet and dark and I'll tell myself stories for hours in a very alert state where tiny noises make my heart race. I don't remember being like this as a child.
> little boy sleeping peacefully on a chair as a loud mariachi band plays near his ears.
I've slept soundly while off watch on a ship with pneumatic chisels and hammers chipping paint off the other side of the steel bulkhead I was sleeping next to. I've seen people fall asleep in a bosun's chair dangling 50' above the water. Some of us can sleep anywhere :-)
I love Carmina Burana. Do you remember how "O Fortuna" captured the public imagination when the film Excalibur (1981) used it, and then a year later, HBO began showing it nonstop?
I live in Fargo. Grew up in Bottineau, ND. I've lived in other states (Minnesota, Washington, California, Australian Capital Territory) but have spent most of my life in ND. I never thought of this place as particularly silent. Sometimes the bugs are annoyingly loud at my parents house on the prairie outside of Bottineau. The wind is almost constant, so you'll hear trees blowing around in the places that have them. Coyotes at night. Squirrels chittering. Woodpeckers. I suppose maybe it's different in the middle of the state where there's nothing but prairie as far as the eye can see, but I doubt it
On particularly cold and windless days outdoors the silence is almost unbelievable. You hear your heartbeat, the snow underfoot crunches so loudly you cringe, and sounds travels so clearly and without interruption that a half-mile seems within arm's reach. It's absolutely surreal and can be very disorienting, almost like space compresses around you.
It was hard enough to live there in the 90s. I can't imagine how isolating it'd have been on a claim.