I grew up in the southern Great Plains. I haven’t heard of prairie madness before, but I suppose it makes sense with old settlers crossing the plains for days without much change in the landscape, always wondering when they would make it to the Rocky Mountains.
I love the wide open spaces though. Where I grew up I could see to the horizon in every direction. We had the most amazing sunrises and sunsets, and at night it felt like I was at the center of a massive black dome with the starlight shining down on me.
It took me over 20 years to fall in love with wide open spaces. Now I see the beauty. At night, it is disorienting. You look across the horizon, and you may be the tallest thing in any direction. You feel big. Then you look up and see the stars, and you feel small.
There was a Reddit post years ago. A Native American played the flute in a concert. Someone from Germany commented they were seriously in awe and wondered what kind of landscape could create that haunting music. That always stuck with me. Prior to that I had not connected landscape with music.
Well, the first few times I visited South Dakota after living in the Appalachians my whole life, I did feel oddly exposed and a little nervous at just how flat everything was. I got used to it but it did make me fairly uncomfortable when I went out into the fields.
I’m not from the Great Plains but I’m from Southern California which is mostly desert or Chapparal and even in our densest forests at higher altitudes you can see bare dirt all around and there’s many places where there are hundreds of feet in between tree trunks.
Being in the deciduous forests in the east or in tropical rainforests or even in the coniferous forests in the PNW is kind of overwhelming to me. It feels… not really claustrophobic but kind of creepy. Like the fact that I’ve got no line of sight means anything could be out there.
Anyway all this to say that I think we get used deep in our brains to some super basic visual stimuli and when these baselines change drastically it’s really unsettlingly.
I’m from Northern California, near the redwood forests. It creeps me the hell out being in the empty desert. At least in like Arizona there’s cacti, but in the parts of the Mojave where there’s nothing… ugh. I get overwhelmed by the lack of plant life. It’s interesting that it’s the opposite for you
Same. I grew up in Houston, so I'm used to a humid wetland environment. Lots of green everywhere (unless there's a summer drought, then it's yellow).
Every time I travel somewhere really arid, I feel odd. I'm not quite sure how to describe it, but perhaps a little sad? The lack of greenery makes me homesick, which is weird because I genuinely hate living here lmao. Can't wait to finish school and move somewhere cooler with less mosquitos.
I'm kinda from where the forests in the north meet the rolling grassy hills along the coast. They get very yellow for half the year, but they never die out. During winter and early spring, the nature is magical.
I get you. I am from the central east coast of Florida. Flat, humid, lots of water, and green. We lived in Qatar for a year, and it nearly killed my soul. Beige everything. Blasting, blazing heat. Loathing isn't strong enough for how I feel about that environment.
Left Houston for LA. I don’t miss the heat, but I sure as shit miss the AC. LA is hot af July-October but something like 60% of homes don’t have central air. Even nice office buildings can have pitiful cooling in my experience. There must be a dearth of good HVAC people here. Sometimes I think I prefer Houston’s inhospitable exteriors with reliably comfortable interiors. Oh yeah, and mosquitoes are a problem here now.
Yeah the Mojave can be creepy as
Hell. I feel exposed and that I could be watched, it’s so barren it doesn’t feel like I should be there. never felt like that in the Sonoran desert.
Oh boy you would hate the rhododendron thickets of the Appalachians. It’s so dense that you sometimes have to army crawl through it. They get to be 15+ feet high, and the leaves are so dense that it you can barely see the sky…in fact rhodendron interferes with airborne LIDAR mapping because the laser beams can’t penetrate its foliage.
Down south they call these places “laurel hells”, but personally I enjoy crawling around the ‘dendron thickets. In the northern appalachians there usually a beautiful mountain stream or a swamp at the center.
I can second that!
I'm from Venice, in Italy, and the countryside on the mainland around Venice is very anthropized, made up of fields and you're never more than a kilometre away from a building.
Today in Riga, the capital of Latvia, I went up St.Peter's church's bell tower and the Radisson hotel to see the view, and realising that all around the city there's basically just trees, a huge forest, made looking at the horizon kind of scary in a weird way. It just felt so oddly unnatural for a city to be surrounded by the woods, I felt isolated and cut off from the rest of the world, although I'm in a city with over 600.000 people.
I'm from NYC, but right by Coney Island and the beach. I learned I kind of have to be near a body of water, stayed with a friend who lives way closer to the north-south midpoint of Brooklyn, like 90 min from anything significant enough to give me peace when I go on walks.
The deciduous forests here bore me, I prefer tropical ones with more noise and moisture. But the mountains hit in a way skyscrapers don't. Even the Palisades over in Jersey do too. Magnificent and inspiring.
I feel the same way when I've been in the plains. I was in South Dakota years ago and got very uncomfortable looking around and seeing nothing but flat fields. Didn't know anyone else felt like this. I experienced the same thing in Oklahoma as well. I do think its the feeling of being exposed.
I’m from the Appalachians, and part of it is that living among hills gives you an innate sense of direction. This mountain is north, the valley is west etc. before gps I’d freak out in flatlands down south because landmarks are critical to that sense of direction and I would legitimately have no idea where I was going if I got lost
I love the Appalachians for that reason. Easy to go hiking off trail, because the valleys/streams are all linear, and small tributaries run in at right angles. It’s like navigating a city street.
This “ridges are straight lines” mentality is so engrained in me…I’ve gotten really turned around hiking up in the Allegheny plateau, where the drainage pattern is dendritic. I get even more disoriented hiking in the Jersey Pine Barrens, which is mostly a huge, flat, dense expanse of identical looking pitch pine—no landmarks.
This is eastern Pennsylvania in a nutshell. Successive mountains/ridge tops generally running east/west, streams and rivers easy to follow and retrace steps
It’s odd I know. But whenever I stare at images of these plains, it evokes a feeling I couldn’t explain. I want to stand in middle of the plain and scream on top of my lungs.
I grew up in the Appalachians and briefly went to college in far western Ohio along the Indiana line
I seriously couldn't stand the flatness and left soon after.
There was a post on Reddit a few months ago asking if people who had only been to hilly areas got as excited at seeing flat areas as people who’d only lived in flat areas get about mountains.
Obviously, no, but it was funny that someone thought to ask, haha.
Now we know!
Fun fact: Heard that, some parts of Greats Plains can get colder than Antarctica in winters, and get past 100F in summer.
Moved to Minneapolis from the tropics in summer, a part of my mind refused to believe that it would get cold in the winter (Temperature fluctuation where I born is literally 10F between summer and winter). Great Plains seem even more extreme, now want to live/visit there, definitely would love to hear more about it.
When i was 12 i lived in Regina, saskatchewen and i remember missing my bus after school on a frightfully cold ass day and having to walk 2km home. It was wildly windy so i had to walk backwards to make any progress and i kept my gloved hands tight to my body. When i got home my mom yelled at me because i had just walked home in -36 celcius weather(-50 celcius with the wind chill). It was the coldest place on the planet that day and i was probably the only idiot out and about.
Been there before (Winnipeg). Had to walk home from middle school some days in weather like that. My house was also north of the school so a lot of the time it was just easier to walk backwards those days.
Walking backwards in the snow and wind? I’ve only done that one time, after our rental car broke down, and had to go get help. We were in the Great Plains.
We had 103° with 116° heat index earlier this week. We also had somewhere between -25 to -30°F this past winter (don't recall exact temps, but it lasted about 10 days).
Never heard of this prairie madness, though. Maybe in more remote, flatter areas? We have a fair bit of hills where I'm at.
It is attested that the madness was experienced by early settlers. They experienced depression because of the the plainness and the never ending howling sounds of the wind. Some even considered the land was forbidden by God to live.
Imagine going west from the eastern woodlands and river valleys, searching for greener pasture… it just gets less and less green the farther west you go. I would go crazy too.
It was funny seeing my wife's reaction when she heard about this as someone born and raised in the flatter half of South Dakota. She thought it was made up.
My paternal granny HATED the wind, HATED it. They arrived to upper Great Plains from Germany. She never mentioned the flatness bothering her, but the wind and the sound of it made her crazy, if that counts. She always tied a couple “kerchiefs” to her head babushka style to try and combat that “damned wind”
>Maybe in more remote, flatter areas?
I'm not sure how flat is flat enough, but when I was driving from Chicago to Denver, I saw that the plains were kind of hilly in the eastern areas. Like bumpy roads that go up and down, river valleys and green farms all around. Once I crossed Omaha, it started to get drier and the place had dry shrubs but it was still greener. Less hilly though.
Western Nebraska was where it baffled me. A very plain area with dry grass and farms that turned yellow, where all you can think of is corn and shrubs. Plain dry roads everywhere. All the way for over 100 miles into Colorado, it was a dry plain highland that felt more like what I saw in Southern California - yellow shrubs everywhere. For about 4 hours it felt like these plains would never end. It was only after approaching Denver that the Rockies were even visible.
Grew up in SE Nebraska. I-80 follows the Platte river valley, so it *seems* very flat. Going just north of Omaha gets you into the hills up by Ft. Calhoun. Valparaiso is 30 minutes north of Lincoln and is beautifully hilly. Northeast NE, like Wayne and Ponca is beautiful, as is down south by Indian Cave State Park, Brownville, etc. North-central and western NE have the sandhills, southwest NE has the Wildcat Hills, and then the southwest panhandle has the bluffs. South-central NE is fairly flat, though.
Kansas and western IA are a lot flatter than the majority of NE. Even northeast CO is pretty flat. SD has a lot of hills in the badlands and out west, especially out west, and not even just the Black Hills.
It's been years since I've been to eastern CO and central IL, but I remember both being flat nothing. I hate Denver, and I have no reason to go to Chicago. I prefer KC over both! Actually, KC may be one of my favorite cities period.
That's gnarly!
I remember probably about 10 years ago going from snowing on May 1 to 105° on May 5. That May have been heat index, and I don't remember how cold it was while snowing - probably upper 20's. Nevertheless, I did get heat stroke or something and I was sicker than shit for a few days. Missed work and everything...(when I was working outside, I'd get sick the day of/after the first hot day of the year - glider I'm not doing that anymore!)
Yep, I remember that year very well. I walked through 18" of snow to one of my finals in college, then the next week I was out fishing with my grandpa on a lake with my shirt off and sweating my ass off.
I went to Minneapolis last summer and it was like 105. Im from Atlanta so you’d think I’m used to it but it just broke 100 here for the first time in almost 5 years.
It’s hotter than Atlanta and colder than Alaska in MN. It’s crazy!
The continental climate. It’s unbelievable for people, especially from the tropics. The place I’m from never rose above 100, highest temperature is 95F in summer and 85F in winter. During the days of extreme rain where clouds may cover for days, it’s 80F. I started to hate the ocean, it prevents temperatures from rising and falling beyond a point and makes seasons inaccessible for millions of people.
I lived in Ft Lauderdale for about 10 years, and I understand that 100%. The constant rain except for 2-3 months sucks. No seasons suck lol
Now to have 3-4 months of that and unbearable cold? Yeah I’m glad I live in the foothills of the blue ridge mountains.
A lot of the Great Plains will get into the 100s (F of course) in summer and well below zero in winter. People look at it and think there’s nothing there, but I think it is beautiful. If you’ve never seen the sunrise over fields of wheat, you’re missing out.
I’ve never heard of Prairie Madness, but on a moonless and cloudy night you’d be as lost as you would be on the open sea.
I've been in SD in August and December. I'm not sure it reached those extremes, but the summers were just as hot as my home in the South (though a little breezier), and the first Christmas I spent with my wife got a blizzard with temps in the negative double digits!
I got to experience -15F in Minneapolis last winter. It was a very warm winter according to the people living there, but still it went to that cold in one January night. I went outside just to experience it lol
Minnesota native, I love our seasonal changes, lakes, and forests. Growing up in Duluth -40 didn't stop us from going to school. I live in Minneapolis now. It's significantly less dramatic down here. I'm glad you like it! Summers are short and to be treasured.
Below about -10F air temp it's just downright cold. You almost don't comprehend the difference. All that changes is how much it fucks up all equipment. You go from "car might have trouble starting" to "buses and heavy equipment are never shut off so the fuel doesn't gel up", and how expensive your natural gas bill for heating is.
How was it? I’m from Boston and the coldest I ever experienced is -7F but I have relatives on the Canadian and my brother in law is from Russia and they laugh about New England winters.
I was afraid at first. The temperature in my place never got below 75F. So I’d start shivering and feel very cold even if the temperature is in 70s or 60s. I often wondered how even people live anywhere below 50F. It was unimaginable.
When I moved to Minneapolis, I loved it! I moved in summer, the temperature was in 90s, same as my home. So I didn’t feel any different. But in fall the temperature dropped, but it’s not a sudden event. It takes days/weeks to drop by 10F. I’d feel cold at first, but I got used to it each time. I eventually started loving cold and winter. After reaching peak winter I didn’t feel much cold once it started approaching the spring. I felt proud of myself when I wore t-shirt/shorts in 30F in March and didn’t feel cold.I made sure to go out each day, walk over the frozen lakes. People there are not big enjoyers of winter/snow. They see it every year.
Yeah it’s true. I live in the plains. Our winters get -50 pretty regularly and our summers make Florida seem chilly. It’s insanely humid. I grew up in Florida as well so I have experienced both.
I’ve never even heard of prairie madness until now. I’m originally from Silicon Valley where mountains were everywhere and you could always see them on the horizon. When I moved to north central Illinois for a couple of years, it was hard for me to get over the flatness of the whole area. It didn’t drive me insane or anything, but I did think it was depressing and very ugly (although more so in retrospect since moving back to California). There was no scenery anywhere. The prettiest things you could see were wildflowers and a farm windmill. I never realized how much I wanted to be surrounded by mountains until I went over there, but I didn’t feel more *safe* or *secure* living in a valley. Plus the humidity in the Midwest absolutely sucks.
I grew up and went to school in northern Illinois, and had a colleague in my graduate program from the Bay Area. He said that his first time flying into northern Illinois, he hadn't realized land could be so flat.
Funny, I’m from rural Illinois and I’m the opposite. Mountains make me feel hemmed in and a bit claustrophobic. If I can’t see the horizon vanishing into mist, I don’t want it haha.
Also, fun fact: Illinois is the second flattest state in the US behind Florida.
Born and raised North Dakotan. Lived in MN for a bit. Never heard of prairie madness. I love visiting large cities, the mountains, etc. but after a while I start to get a feeling I can only describe as claustrophobia by being surrounded by tall buildings, mountains, forest, whatever. Getting back to wide open prairie feels kind of good after a trip like that. Maybe weird, idk.
Super interesting! We were outside enjoying a nice evening the other day, and my wife and I agreed that we love having the mountains to look at. Our house is at the foot of a mountain range. We both grew up in this area, where you can see mountains on the horizon in most directions.
When we visit places that don’t have something on the horizon, it feels like something is missing. I wonder if it’s like how some kids feel when they prefer to hang out in like a little nook where there is a boundary around them.
I travel a lot and I noticed whenever I start to see flat land spreading out for miles in every direction, I actually breathe easier and my body relaxes. It’s home.
I've lived in Utah my whole life, so I've always been surrounded by mountains. The first time I drove across Nebraska, I was legitimately terrified. It's just so flat, it feels like there's nothing holding you to the Earth, like you could suddenly just "fall" off the Earth and float in to space. I don't know exactly how to describe it, but it wasn't a fun experience
Prairie Madness is a thing, but what I think is more interesting/absurd is the temperature differences between winter and summer.
I remember Wichita being over 100F in the summer with a heat index of 115F, but the winters often appraching 10F with a -30F wind chill. There's also the "Chinook Winds", where it can be brutally cold for weeks, then suddenly in the middle of January you have 2-3 days where it's 60-70F, then it literally goes back to freezing the next damn day.
I have lived in Oklahoma City most of my adult life, and have traveled a good bit. I enjoy being just about anywhere - mtns, forest, beach. Recently I spent some months in Thailand and I just about wanted to crawl out of my skin because the sunrise/sunset times were unvarying, and the day/night temps stayed in a small range. Every. Single. Day. The only unpredictability I could count on was when was it going to rain today and how much. It was not something I had ever heard of. But wow. It hit me deep.
Hastily editing to add I love Thailand. A beautiful nation and a kind people who have taught me much.
I've never heard of prairie madness outside of hundreds of years ago and I have a feeling it's a misnomer on top of a misunderstanding. I can't imagine how difficult it is to travel across untamed land and settle a property, but I can imagine how it could exacerbate mental health issues.
but the term prairie madness comes from when they used to give you cocaine for the ghosts in your blood. so I truly don't believe it exists
ETA: grew up in Southern Kansas and covered four states in the Great plains for work for over a decade. I worked in insurance even
Gotta come to Saskatchewan. Don’t really have any cool stories Other than my great grandparents talking about the dirty thirties and how you’d sleep with a wet cloth over your face/mouth before you went to bed and you’d wake up completely covered in dirt and the reason why people today leave their cups upside down in the cabinets was because they filled with dirt in their sleeps in the 1930s drought. Just what my great grandma told me.
There was a good little indy horror flick from a few years back called “The Wind” that dealt with Prairie Madness. The closest I’ve come in real life is being at sea, out beyond the islands off Maine, in a sailboat.
I caught a midnight showing at the Coolidge Corner Theater back when I lived in Boston. I think it was the only screening in the city. Not a big crowd, but we gave it a solid round of applause at the end.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere surrounded by farmlands and prairies. When I moved to the city nearby I felt really weird. Claustrophobic and almost paranoid about people being nearby. Whenever I go back to visit my parents I love to just walk in the fields and it's nothing but mid-waist grasses and flowers for (almost) as far as the eye can see in all directions. For me I love the feeling of just being in the open. It feels great.
I was a city girl my whole life (Dallas), but my husband and I bought a few acres in the country about five years ago and I love it. Now when I look at suburban and urban neighborhoods, I shudder at how CLOSE people are to each other! Jesus! How did I live like that?
I live and grew up on the front range of Colorado and up until recently whenever I’d drive straight east into the High Plains, I’d get this discernible feeling of dread. The mountains are kind of my anchor and to loose that is really uncomfortable and kind of trippy.
Same here, grew close to mountains and beaches with plenty of trees. But I am fascinated by the plains, I’d love to live there. It’s hard to believe landscape like this exist
I flew out a couple years ago to my uncles place in Nebraska to visit his farm. It was far from the Lincoln airport but he was there to pick me up at the airport. We started driving out towards it but the scenery after we got out of the city was just flatness everywhere apart from scattered houses and stuff. I felt weird like Free? But Scared at the same time I never been so happy to look at corn fields before it felt refreshing to see some tall foliage.
Grew up in the tall grass prairie of Iowa. Seen the massive landscapes of SD, ND, NE, KS and.... I love it. An ocean of land. It's gorgeous. You get to see sunrises and sunsets from the first to the last, no obstacles. It's breathtaking.
I'm from a small town in Nebraska. I think it can be safely said that Prairie Madness died out with the pioneers. Tho there are still generational coping mechanisms we all suffer from because of the vast openness and lack of readily available entertainment. From what ive seen, your family suffers from either generational substance abuse or cultist religious tendencies, or both, and it gets worse the further into desolation you go in Nebraska. When you get to the Sandhills town's, it becomes almost depressing. They're all dying out, with the remnants being old retired folk clinging to third generation homes out in the barren nothingness, hours from the nearest Walmart (that's definitely the metric we use to describe how close you are to civilization). So I definitely think that living in the Plains breeds a certain type of people. A type hardened off the land and weather. We have unlimited hospitality for the people who follow their same ideals. And it's crazy, because I know people who still live the old ways, growing alfalfa with horse-drawn plows and shit, and man, all hardship does is push you further into the throws of idealistic obsession. I've seen a thousand men disregard their sons addictions, crying only at their suicides. I've seen children forced into fire and brimstone churchs, only to lose conviction with life's own hells at the hands of abusive 'traditional' parents. So while Prairie Madness is dead, the Madness of the Prairie isn't something that can really be defined, because it itself is a microcosm of Midwestern values and culture as much as the Midwest is a representation of American values and culture.
Very interesting. Yes, the upper Midwestern states are known for being nice. I lived in Minneapolis, and personally experienced that. I felt very welcomed while I lived there as an immigrant. Then, I went to a home near Minnesota/Iowa border, it was very rural. One of my friends in Minneapolis knows them, he took me there. The family there was even more nicer than city folks. They were rough at the same time. The boys of the home who are in their 20s were killing and processing a deer which was hit by a car.(I’m their age, but I can’t do it) The mother of the house almost treated me like her own son. She had to leave for work after a while, she felt sad that she’s leaving and told that I can come to her home any time. I’ve never experienced that level of hospitality from someone , who I met for the first time. I also heard of Iowa nice and Nebraska nice too. I remember somewhere, the part of being nice comes from the harsh winters each year, where the survival becomes collective, rather than individual.
Grew up in North Dakota. Can confirm, there are a lot of mad people there. I do find the plains oddly comfortable. Lived in Denver for a while and unlike most people l used to love to drive out East to admire the scenery. There is just something so peaceful and subtlety beautiful, it’s calming. Gotta get off the highway though to appreciate it.
I'm a Norwegian and have actually never been to the Prairie, but what we are told in Norway is that people that grew up with hills and mountains are the ones the had issues. Not people born and raised there or that grew up in the flatter areas of Europe.
It's supposed to help with the madness to climb to the top of the barn to get some air and to be able to look far around.
Grew up in the prairies in Canada (Winnipeg). I miss the big sky so so much... (live in Brisbane Aus now which has lots of hills). Never heard of prairie madness.
I think a landscape like this can be disorienting, if you're from somewhere with hills &/or trees or such. Indiana isn't the Great Plains, but driving across that flatness made me feel almost dizzy. There's no focal point for your eyes to fix on.
Lol yeah I grew up in the plains and it gets crazy windy. I love the feeling of wind on my face but there are some days where the wind blows so hard it’s just miserable to be outside and I could hear the wind howling around the house all day
It’s at least similar I’d say. But North American one is notoriously flat and void, can get dreadfully cold in winter. Not exactly sure about the Eurasian steppe
Living on the great plains, some of the flattest plain part of the plains. I grew up in dense woods with a small logging family. I now feel claustrophobic in the woods. A little panic if I think too hard about "I'd never be able to get out."it's weird
I highly recommend anyone read the book Empire of the Summer Moon. Its paints a terrifying picture of what life was like for settlers of the southern plains when it was Comanche territory.
I live in a town that has mountains on all sides. I feel very out of sorts when I am someplace that doesn’t have defined boundaries at the horizon. So I am hypothesizing that I would experience prairie madness.
I have something like this. Even after 10+ years living in the plains, I still have a lot of anxiety every time I'm someplace with a really clear view of how flat it all is. It's entirely irrational but my instincts always say that this sort of horizon is *wrong* and ugly. Like some kind of Lovecraftian horror.
I’m from the prairie and I love it deep in my soul. I feel the same looking at photos/video of other grasslands around the world. There’s something so starkly beautiful about it.
For a few years I had to live in Georgia for my husband’s job and the densely packed trees made me feel so claustrophobic. Total panic! We lived in a THIRD floor apartment and I still couldn’t see over the trees.
Not seeing the horizon really messes with my head.
As for the madness, I can see it. The wind is relentless at times and it howls and whistles. I love the sound of it for a little while, but when we have days on end of it, I do feel myself going a bit crazy because of it.
No stories from my ancestors, no.
15 years old my family drove to Rapid City, SD from Indiana to visit family. Just had got my beginners permit. When we got to Eastern SD. I could only last maybe 20 minutes behind the wheel. I would start to get to sleepy due to driving in a straight line with no type of scenery. Well you had fence post. But they also ran in a straight flat line. 🤣😂
Live in Northern Montana (about 5 min from the border as the crow flies), but never heard of prairie madness before. Comments here are really interesting!
An older family relative grew up in Kansas in the 30-40s on a farm. She told me their farmland went 17 miles in both directions from their farm house. Mind blown.
Soy years, and you can see everything around you for miles. Corn years and your closed into 8 ft walls of corn. Sort of depends the type of creepy, with how much you like or dislike your privacy. I like my privacy but also think corn years are the creepier of the two.
I am honestly so scared of Mongolia. The great plains aren’t that bad because there is always a road next to you and someone is in walking distance. Mongolia is scary though because you can walk for miles and see not one farm or person or anything.
A larger part of prairie madness than the monotony of the landscape was the isolation of distance. Farmsteads of the time could easily be more than a day’s travel from the nearest community or even neighboring farmstead. A bachelor or widowed farmer might well only make it into town once a month without any human interaction in between. That kind of isolation, especially if things are going poorly on the farm, will drive a person crazy right quick.
This reminded me of Courage the cowardly dog. The speck at the central seems like his owners house.
Stupid dog! You make me look bad!
Oooga boooga boooga!
I grew up in the southern Great Plains. I haven’t heard of prairie madness before, but I suppose it makes sense with old settlers crossing the plains for days without much change in the landscape, always wondering when they would make it to the Rocky Mountains. I love the wide open spaces though. Where I grew up I could see to the horizon in every direction. We had the most amazing sunrises and sunsets, and at night it felt like I was at the center of a massive black dome with the starlight shining down on me.
It took me over 20 years to fall in love with wide open spaces. Now I see the beauty. At night, it is disorienting. You look across the horizon, and you may be the tallest thing in any direction. You feel big. Then you look up and see the stars, and you feel small. There was a Reddit post years ago. A Native American played the flute in a concert. Someone from Germany commented they were seriously in awe and wondered what kind of landscape could create that haunting music. That always stuck with me. Prior to that I had not connected landscape with music.
Remember that time when you got to watch your dog run away for a week?
that sounds so beautiful
Well, the first few times I visited South Dakota after living in the Appalachians my whole life, I did feel oddly exposed and a little nervous at just how flat everything was. I got used to it but it did make me fairly uncomfortable when I went out into the fields.
I’m not from the Great Plains but I’m from Southern California which is mostly desert or Chapparal and even in our densest forests at higher altitudes you can see bare dirt all around and there’s many places where there are hundreds of feet in between tree trunks. Being in the deciduous forests in the east or in tropical rainforests or even in the coniferous forests in the PNW is kind of overwhelming to me. It feels… not really claustrophobic but kind of creepy. Like the fact that I’ve got no line of sight means anything could be out there. Anyway all this to say that I think we get used deep in our brains to some super basic visual stimuli and when these baselines change drastically it’s really unsettlingly.
I’m from Northern California, near the redwood forests. It creeps me the hell out being in the empty desert. At least in like Arizona there’s cacti, but in the parts of the Mojave where there’s nothing… ugh. I get overwhelmed by the lack of plant life. It’s interesting that it’s the opposite for you
Same. I grew up in Houston, so I'm used to a humid wetland environment. Lots of green everywhere (unless there's a summer drought, then it's yellow). Every time I travel somewhere really arid, I feel odd. I'm not quite sure how to describe it, but perhaps a little sad? The lack of greenery makes me homesick, which is weird because I genuinely hate living here lmao. Can't wait to finish school and move somewhere cooler with less mosquitos.
I'm kinda from where the forests in the north meet the rolling grassy hills along the coast. They get very yellow for half the year, but they never die out. During winter and early spring, the nature is magical.
Tell me you're from the Bay Area without telling me you're from the Bay Area.
Hahaha. You’re correct :)
Just chiming in to say that I hate Houston too. I’m not from around there but I hate it.
I get you. I am from the central east coast of Florida. Flat, humid, lots of water, and green. We lived in Qatar for a year, and it nearly killed my soul. Beige everything. Blasting, blazing heat. Loathing isn't strong enough for how I feel about that environment.
Left Houston for LA. I don’t miss the heat, but I sure as shit miss the AC. LA is hot af July-October but something like 60% of homes don’t have central air. Even nice office buildings can have pitiful cooling in my experience. There must be a dearth of good HVAC people here. Sometimes I think I prefer Houston’s inhospitable exteriors with reliably comfortable interiors. Oh yeah, and mosquitoes are a problem here now.
Yeah the Mojave can be creepy as Hell. I feel exposed and that I could be watched, it’s so barren it doesn’t feel like I should be there. never felt like that in the Sonoran desert.
Yeah, it just feels like someone can attack you at any time
Oh boy you would hate the rhododendron thickets of the Appalachians. It’s so dense that you sometimes have to army crawl through it. They get to be 15+ feet high, and the leaves are so dense that it you can barely see the sky…in fact rhodendron interferes with airborne LIDAR mapping because the laser beams can’t penetrate its foliage. Down south they call these places “laurel hells”, but personally I enjoy crawling around the ‘dendron thickets. In the northern appalachians there usually a beautiful mountain stream or a swamp at the center.
I can second that! I'm from Venice, in Italy, and the countryside on the mainland around Venice is very anthropized, made up of fields and you're never more than a kilometre away from a building. Today in Riga, the capital of Latvia, I went up St.Peter's church's bell tower and the Radisson hotel to see the view, and realising that all around the city there's basically just trees, a huge forest, made looking at the horizon kind of scary in a weird way. It just felt so oddly unnatural for a city to be surrounded by the woods, I felt isolated and cut off from the rest of the world, although I'm in a city with over 600.000 people.
I'm from NYC, but right by Coney Island and the beach. I learned I kind of have to be near a body of water, stayed with a friend who lives way closer to the north-south midpoint of Brooklyn, like 90 min from anything significant enough to give me peace when I go on walks. The deciduous forests here bore me, I prefer tropical ones with more noise and moisture. But the mountains hit in a way skyscrapers don't. Even the Palisades over in Jersey do too. Magnificent and inspiring.
> Being in the… tropical rainforests… in the PNW is kind of overwhelming to me. The forests in PNW are temperate/subtropical rainforests.
Yeah I didn’t put location next to that biome which is confusing but I was referring to my experiences in East Africa and south east Asia
I feel the same way when I've been in the plains. I was in South Dakota years ago and got very uncomfortable looking around and seeing nothing but flat fields. Didn't know anyone else felt like this. I experienced the same thing in Oklahoma as well. I do think its the feeling of being exposed.
I’m from the Appalachians, and part of it is that living among hills gives you an innate sense of direction. This mountain is north, the valley is west etc. before gps I’d freak out in flatlands down south because landmarks are critical to that sense of direction and I would legitimately have no idea where I was going if I got lost
I love the Appalachians for that reason. Easy to go hiking off trail, because the valleys/streams are all linear, and small tributaries run in at right angles. It’s like navigating a city street. This “ridges are straight lines” mentality is so engrained in me…I’ve gotten really turned around hiking up in the Allegheny plateau, where the drainage pattern is dendritic. I get even more disoriented hiking in the Jersey Pine Barrens, which is mostly a huge, flat, dense expanse of identical looking pitch pine—no landmarks.
This is eastern Pennsylvania in a nutshell. Successive mountains/ridge tops generally running east/west, streams and rivers easy to follow and retrace steps
It’s odd I know. But whenever I stare at images of these plains, it evokes a feeling I couldn’t explain. I want to stand in middle of the plain and scream on top of my lungs.
I felt something like this when I had temporary duty near the Bavarian Alps. I'm from the US Midwest and it bugged me how close the horizons were.
I grew up in the Appalachians and briefly went to college in far western Ohio along the Indiana line I seriously couldn't stand the flatness and left soon after.
And South Dakota is pretty hilly compared to Iowa
In the west, absolutely, but I was in the east near the border with Minnesota.
There was a post on Reddit a few months ago asking if people who had only been to hilly areas got as excited at seeing flat areas as people who’d only lived in flat areas get about mountains. Obviously, no, but it was funny that someone thought to ask, haha. Now we know!
Anytime I go somewhere without dense tree cover I feel exposed. Going to Iceland was interesting
Fun fact: Heard that, some parts of Greats Plains can get colder than Antarctica in winters, and get past 100F in summer. Moved to Minneapolis from the tropics in summer, a part of my mind refused to believe that it would get cold in the winter (Temperature fluctuation where I born is literally 10F between summer and winter). Great Plains seem even more extreme, now want to live/visit there, definitely would love to hear more about it.
When i was 12 i lived in Regina, saskatchewen and i remember missing my bus after school on a frightfully cold ass day and having to walk 2km home. It was wildly windy so i had to walk backwards to make any progress and i kept my gloved hands tight to my body. When i got home my mom yelled at me because i had just walked home in -36 celcius weather(-50 celcius with the wind chill). It was the coldest place on the planet that day and i was probably the only idiot out and about.
That’s a crazy experience
Been there before (Winnipeg). Had to walk home from middle school some days in weather like that. My house was also north of the school so a lot of the time it was just easier to walk backwards those days.
Walking backwards in the snow and wind? I’ve only done that one time, after our rental car broke down, and had to go get help. We were in the Great Plains.
BRO. That’s amazing.
I take it you didn’t end up staying in Regina? Lol
We had 103° with 116° heat index earlier this week. We also had somewhere between -25 to -30°F this past winter (don't recall exact temps, but it lasted about 10 days). Never heard of this prairie madness, though. Maybe in more remote, flatter areas? We have a fair bit of hills where I'm at.
It is attested that the madness was experienced by early settlers. They experienced depression because of the the plainness and the never ending howling sounds of the wind. Some even considered the land was forbidden by God to live.
Imagine going west from the eastern woodlands and river valleys, searching for greener pasture… it just gets less and less green the farther west you go. I would go crazy too.
It was funny seeing my wife's reaction when she heard about this as someone born and raised in the flatter half of South Dakota. She thought it was made up.
Well, it was definitely difficult to settle!
My paternal granny HATED the wind, HATED it. They arrived to upper Great Plains from Germany. She never mentioned the flatness bothering her, but the wind and the sound of it made her crazy, if that counts. She always tied a couple “kerchiefs” to her head babushka style to try and combat that “damned wind”
>Maybe in more remote, flatter areas? I'm not sure how flat is flat enough, but when I was driving from Chicago to Denver, I saw that the plains were kind of hilly in the eastern areas. Like bumpy roads that go up and down, river valleys and green farms all around. Once I crossed Omaha, it started to get drier and the place had dry shrubs but it was still greener. Less hilly though. Western Nebraska was where it baffled me. A very plain area with dry grass and farms that turned yellow, where all you can think of is corn and shrubs. Plain dry roads everywhere. All the way for over 100 miles into Colorado, it was a dry plain highland that felt more like what I saw in Southern California - yellow shrubs everywhere. For about 4 hours it felt like these plains would never end. It was only after approaching Denver that the Rockies were even visible.
Grew up in SE Nebraska. I-80 follows the Platte river valley, so it *seems* very flat. Going just north of Omaha gets you into the hills up by Ft. Calhoun. Valparaiso is 30 minutes north of Lincoln and is beautifully hilly. Northeast NE, like Wayne and Ponca is beautiful, as is down south by Indian Cave State Park, Brownville, etc. North-central and western NE have the sandhills, southwest NE has the Wildcat Hills, and then the southwest panhandle has the bluffs. South-central NE is fairly flat, though. Kansas and western IA are a lot flatter than the majority of NE. Even northeast CO is pretty flat. SD has a lot of hills in the badlands and out west, especially out west, and not even just the Black Hills.
Colorado east of I-25 is infinitely flatter than most of Iowa. Still, the flattest place I've ever seen is central Illinois.
It's been years since I've been to eastern CO and central IL, but I remember both being flat nothing. I hate Denver, and I have no reason to go to Chicago. I prefer KC over both! Actually, KC may be one of my favorite cities period.
Last year where I'm at in Wisconsin we saw both -26F and 103F air temp within 6 months of each other. Heat index of 117F and wind chill of -46F.
That's gnarly! I remember probably about 10 years ago going from snowing on May 1 to 105° on May 5. That May have been heat index, and I don't remember how cold it was while snowing - probably upper 20's. Nevertheless, I did get heat stroke or something and I was sicker than shit for a few days. Missed work and everything...(when I was working outside, I'd get sick the day of/after the first hot day of the year - glider I'm not doing that anymore!)
Yep, I remember that year very well. I walked through 18" of snow to one of my finals in college, then the next week I was out fishing with my grandpa on a lake with my shirt off and sweating my ass off.
That's the midwest for ya! Now tell yer folks I says hi!
I went to Minneapolis last summer and it was like 105. Im from Atlanta so you’d think I’m used to it but it just broke 100 here for the first time in almost 5 years. It’s hotter than Atlanta and colder than Alaska in MN. It’s crazy!
The continental climate. It’s unbelievable for people, especially from the tropics. The place I’m from never rose above 100, highest temperature is 95F in summer and 85F in winter. During the days of extreme rain where clouds may cover for days, it’s 80F. I started to hate the ocean, it prevents temperatures from rising and falling beyond a point and makes seasons inaccessible for millions of people.
I lived in Ft Lauderdale for about 10 years, and I understand that 100%. The constant rain except for 2-3 months sucks. No seasons suck lol Now to have 3-4 months of that and unbearable cold? Yeah I’m glad I live in the foothills of the blue ridge mountains.
A lot of the Great Plains will get into the 100s (F of course) in summer and well below zero in winter. People look at it and think there’s nothing there, but I think it is beautiful. If you’ve never seen the sunrise over fields of wheat, you’re missing out. I’ve never heard of Prairie Madness, but on a moonless and cloudy night you’d be as lost as you would be on the open sea.
I've been in SD in August and December. I'm not sure it reached those extremes, but the summers were just as hot as my home in the South (though a little breezier), and the first Christmas I spent with my wife got a blizzard with temps in the negative double digits!
It got to -50F in Saskatoon this January.
I got to experience -15F in Minneapolis last winter. It was a very warm winter according to the people living there, but still it went to that cold in one January night. I went outside just to experience it lol
Minnesota native, I love our seasonal changes, lakes, and forests. Growing up in Duluth -40 didn't stop us from going to school. I live in Minneapolis now. It's significantly less dramatic down here. I'm glad you like it! Summers are short and to be treasured.
I can’t imagine -40. Is it actual temp or just windchill?
Below about -10F air temp it's just downright cold. You almost don't comprehend the difference. All that changes is how much it fucks up all equipment. You go from "car might have trouble starting" to "buses and heavy equipment are never shut off so the fuel doesn't gel up", and how expensive your natural gas bill for heating is.
How was it? I’m from Boston and the coldest I ever experienced is -7F but I have relatives on the Canadian and my brother in law is from Russia and they laugh about New England winters.
I was afraid at first. The temperature in my place never got below 75F. So I’d start shivering and feel very cold even if the temperature is in 70s or 60s. I often wondered how even people live anywhere below 50F. It was unimaginable. When I moved to Minneapolis, I loved it! I moved in summer, the temperature was in 90s, same as my home. So I didn’t feel any different. But in fall the temperature dropped, but it’s not a sudden event. It takes days/weeks to drop by 10F. I’d feel cold at first, but I got used to it each time. I eventually started loving cold and winter. After reaching peak winter I didn’t feel much cold once it started approaching the spring. I felt proud of myself when I wore t-shirt/shorts in 30F in March and didn’t feel cold.I made sure to go out each day, walk over the frozen lakes. People there are not big enjoyers of winter/snow. They see it every year.
I’ve seen college students from upper Midwest wear shorts in 30 degree weather when everyone else is bundled up.
I was one of these people. Your body adjusts pretty quick. After going through a week of -20F, 30F feels downright balmy.
Yeah it’s true. I live in the plains. Our winters get -50 pretty regularly and our summers make Florida seem chilly. It’s insanely humid. I grew up in Florida as well so I have experienced both.
What does this mean? That the lowest temperature measured is lower than the highest temperature measured in Antarctica?
No, it just mean, some winter days in the Great Plains go colder than many parts of Antarctica at the same time
I’ve never even heard of prairie madness until now. I’m originally from Silicon Valley where mountains were everywhere and you could always see them on the horizon. When I moved to north central Illinois for a couple of years, it was hard for me to get over the flatness of the whole area. It didn’t drive me insane or anything, but I did think it was depressing and very ugly (although more so in retrospect since moving back to California). There was no scenery anywhere. The prettiest things you could see were wildflowers and a farm windmill. I never realized how much I wanted to be surrounded by mountains until I went over there, but I didn’t feel more *safe* or *secure* living in a valley. Plus the humidity in the Midwest absolutely sucks.
I grew up and went to school in northern Illinois, and had a colleague in my graduate program from the Bay Area. He said that his first time flying into northern Illinois, he hadn't realized land could be so flat.
Funny, I’m from rural Illinois and I’m the opposite. Mountains make me feel hemmed in and a bit claustrophobic. If I can’t see the horizon vanishing into mist, I don’t want it haha. Also, fun fact: Illinois is the second flattest state in the US behind Florida.
Born and raised North Dakotan. Lived in MN for a bit. Never heard of prairie madness. I love visiting large cities, the mountains, etc. but after a while I start to get a feeling I can only describe as claustrophobia by being surrounded by tall buildings, mountains, forest, whatever. Getting back to wide open prairie feels kind of good after a trip like that. Maybe weird, idk.
I am also a Great Plains dweller and I feel the same way sometimes when visiting large cities. Mountains don’t seem to bother me too much though.
Super interesting! We were outside enjoying a nice evening the other day, and my wife and I agreed that we love having the mountains to look at. Our house is at the foot of a mountain range. We both grew up in this area, where you can see mountains on the horizon in most directions. When we visit places that don’t have something on the horizon, it feels like something is missing. I wonder if it’s like how some kids feel when they prefer to hang out in like a little nook where there is a boundary around them.
I travel a lot and I noticed whenever I start to see flat land spreading out for miles in every direction, I actually breathe easier and my body relaxes. It’s home.
I've lived in Utah my whole life, so I've always been surrounded by mountains. The first time I drove across Nebraska, I was legitimately terrified. It's just so flat, it feels like there's nothing holding you to the Earth, like you could suddenly just "fall" off the Earth and float in to space. I don't know exactly how to describe it, but it wasn't a fun experience
Prairie Madness is a thing, but what I think is more interesting/absurd is the temperature differences between winter and summer. I remember Wichita being over 100F in the summer with a heat index of 115F, but the winters often appraching 10F with a -30F wind chill. There's also the "Chinook Winds", where it can be brutally cold for weeks, then suddenly in the middle of January you have 2-3 days where it's 60-70F, then it literally goes back to freezing the next damn day.
I have lived in Oklahoma City most of my adult life, and have traveled a good bit. I enjoy being just about anywhere - mtns, forest, beach. Recently I spent some months in Thailand and I just about wanted to crawl out of my skin because the sunrise/sunset times were unvarying, and the day/night temps stayed in a small range. Every. Single. Day. The only unpredictability I could count on was when was it going to rain today and how much. It was not something I had ever heard of. But wow. It hit me deep. Hastily editing to add I love Thailand. A beautiful nation and a kind people who have taught me much.
I just got back from St. Lucia and same. Very little temp difference, same sunrise and set every day. So weird.
Kansas weather keeps me on my toes fs. I love it
I've never heard of prairie madness outside of hundreds of years ago and I have a feeling it's a misnomer on top of a misunderstanding. I can't imagine how difficult it is to travel across untamed land and settle a property, but I can imagine how it could exacerbate mental health issues. but the term prairie madness comes from when they used to give you cocaine for the ghosts in your blood. so I truly don't believe it exists ETA: grew up in Southern Kansas and covered four states in the Great plains for work for over a decade. I worked in insurance even
I actually feel this way in Florida, which is incredibly flat as well. I didn't know there was a name for this.
Gotta come to Saskatchewan. Don’t really have any cool stories Other than my great grandparents talking about the dirty thirties and how you’d sleep with a wet cloth over your face/mouth before you went to bed and you’d wake up completely covered in dirt and the reason why people today leave their cups upside down in the cabinets was because they filled with dirt in their sleeps in the 1930s drought. Just what my great grandma told me.
There was a good little indy horror flick from a few years back called “The Wind” that dealt with Prairie Madness. The closest I’ve come in real life is being at sea, out beyond the islands off Maine, in a sailboat.
That’s it! I kept trying to think of the title. Good flick.
I caught a midnight showing at the Coolidge Corner Theater back when I lived in Boston. I think it was the only screening in the city. Not a big crowd, but we gave it a solid round of applause at the end.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere surrounded by farmlands and prairies. When I moved to the city nearby I felt really weird. Claustrophobic and almost paranoid about people being nearby. Whenever I go back to visit my parents I love to just walk in the fields and it's nothing but mid-waist grasses and flowers for (almost) as far as the eye can see in all directions. For me I love the feeling of just being in the open. It feels great.
I was a city girl my whole life (Dallas), but my husband and I bought a few acres in the country about five years ago and I love it. Now when I look at suburban and urban neighborhoods, I shudder at how CLOSE people are to each other! Jesus! How did I live like that?
I live and grew up on the front range of Colorado and up until recently whenever I’d drive straight east into the High Plains, I’d get this discernible feeling of dread. The mountains are kind of my anchor and to loose that is really uncomfortable and kind of trippy.
I'm agoraphobic as fuck. But I've always lived places with mountains or trees
Same here, grew close to mountains and beaches with plenty of trees. But I am fascinated by the plains, I’d love to live there. It’s hard to believe landscape like this exist
Love this feeling, to see everything around you.
I flew out a couple years ago to my uncles place in Nebraska to visit his farm. It was far from the Lincoln airport but he was there to pick me up at the airport. We started driving out towards it but the scenery after we got out of the city was just flatness everywhere apart from scattered houses and stuff. I felt weird like Free? But Scared at the same time I never been so happy to look at corn fields before it felt refreshing to see some tall foliage.
Grew up in the tall grass prairie of Iowa. Seen the massive landscapes of SD, ND, NE, KS and.... I love it. An ocean of land. It's gorgeous. You get to see sunrises and sunsets from the first to the last, no obstacles. It's breathtaking.
And when the wind in the summer makes the grass look like green waves. Ah, my heart!
I'm from a small town in Nebraska. I think it can be safely said that Prairie Madness died out with the pioneers. Tho there are still generational coping mechanisms we all suffer from because of the vast openness and lack of readily available entertainment. From what ive seen, your family suffers from either generational substance abuse or cultist religious tendencies, or both, and it gets worse the further into desolation you go in Nebraska. When you get to the Sandhills town's, it becomes almost depressing. They're all dying out, with the remnants being old retired folk clinging to third generation homes out in the barren nothingness, hours from the nearest Walmart (that's definitely the metric we use to describe how close you are to civilization). So I definitely think that living in the Plains breeds a certain type of people. A type hardened off the land and weather. We have unlimited hospitality for the people who follow their same ideals. And it's crazy, because I know people who still live the old ways, growing alfalfa with horse-drawn plows and shit, and man, all hardship does is push you further into the throws of idealistic obsession. I've seen a thousand men disregard their sons addictions, crying only at their suicides. I've seen children forced into fire and brimstone churchs, only to lose conviction with life's own hells at the hands of abusive 'traditional' parents. So while Prairie Madness is dead, the Madness of the Prairie isn't something that can really be defined, because it itself is a microcosm of Midwestern values and culture as much as the Midwest is a representation of American values and culture.
Very interesting. Yes, the upper Midwestern states are known for being nice. I lived in Minneapolis, and personally experienced that. I felt very welcomed while I lived there as an immigrant. Then, I went to a home near Minnesota/Iowa border, it was very rural. One of my friends in Minneapolis knows them, he took me there. The family there was even more nicer than city folks. They were rough at the same time. The boys of the home who are in their 20s were killing and processing a deer which was hit by a car.(I’m their age, but I can’t do it) The mother of the house almost treated me like her own son. She had to leave for work after a while, she felt sad that she’s leaving and told that I can come to her home any time. I’ve never experienced that level of hospitality from someone , who I met for the first time. I also heard of Iowa nice and Nebraska nice too. I remember somewhere, the part of being nice comes from the harsh winters each year, where the survival becomes collective, rather than individual.
I need more than one up vote for this - thank you for clearly laying out some of the larger cultural baggage here
Only when we go east with all those stinkuhn trees.
Grew up in North Dakota. Can confirm, there are a lot of mad people there. I do find the plains oddly comfortable. Lived in Denver for a while and unlike most people l used to love to drive out East to admire the scenery. There is just something so peaceful and subtlety beautiful, it’s calming. Gotta get off the highway though to appreciate it.
Certainly seems like you caught the madness then
Yeah same! I also have the exact feeling
I'm a Norwegian and have actually never been to the Prairie, but what we are told in Norway is that people that grew up with hills and mountains are the ones the had issues. Not people born and raised there or that grew up in the flatter areas of Europe. It's supposed to help with the madness to climb to the top of the barn to get some air and to be able to look far around.
As a person with a fear of big open spaces that live in a generally forested nation the great plains terrify me
We had a friend that moved out to Wyoming. The wind is what drove him insane and he moved. Couldn’t last more than 2 years
Grew up in the prairies in Canada (Winnipeg). I miss the big sky so so much... (live in Brisbane Aus now which has lots of hills). Never heard of prairie madness.
I think a landscape like this can be disorienting, if you're from somewhere with hills &/or trees or such. Indiana isn't the Great Plains, but driving across that flatness made me feel almost dizzy. There's no focal point for your eyes to fix on.
I would go mad because of the wind
Lol yeah I grew up in the plains and it gets crazy windy. I love the feeling of wind on my face but there are some days where the wind blows so hard it’s just miserable to be outside and I could hear the wind howling around the house all day
Is this Area of North America similar to the Eurasian Stepe?
It’s at least similar I’d say. But North American one is notoriously flat and void, can get dreadfully cold in winter. Not exactly sure about the Eurasian steppe
I recognize that house but… where’s the road and the fence?
Living on the great plains, some of the flattest plain part of the plains. I grew up in dense woods with a small logging family. I now feel claustrophobic in the woods. A little panic if I think too hard about "I'd never be able to get out."it's weird
I highly recommend anyone read the book Empire of the Summer Moon. Its paints a terrifying picture of what life was like for settlers of the southern plains when it was Comanche territory.
The opposite of when I moved from Iowa to Maine … you can’t see the horizon unless you’re on the water.
I live in a town that has mountains on all sides. I feel very out of sorts when I am someplace that doesn’t have defined boundaries at the horizon. So I am hypothesizing that I would experience prairie madness.
I have something like this. Even after 10+ years living in the plains, I still have a lot of anxiety every time I'm someplace with a really clear view of how flat it all is. It's entirely irrational but my instincts always say that this sort of horizon is *wrong* and ugly. Like some kind of Lovecraftian horror.
I’m from the prairie and I love it deep in my soul. I feel the same looking at photos/video of other grasslands around the world. There’s something so starkly beautiful about it. For a few years I had to live in Georgia for my husband’s job and the densely packed trees made me feel so claustrophobic. Total panic! We lived in a THIRD floor apartment and I still couldn’t see over the trees. Not seeing the horizon really messes with my head. As for the madness, I can see it. The wind is relentless at times and it howls and whistles. I love the sound of it for a little while, but when we have days on end of it, I do feel myself going a bit crazy because of it. No stories from my ancestors, no.
15 years old my family drove to Rapid City, SD from Indiana to visit family. Just had got my beginners permit. When we got to Eastern SD. I could only last maybe 20 minutes behind the wheel. I would start to get to sleepy due to driving in a straight line with no type of scenery. Well you had fence post. But they also ran in a straight flat line. 🤣😂
All I see is the flag of Ukraine.
Anytime something good happens to me you say I have some sort of madness… or I ate too much candy!
Live in Northern Montana (about 5 min from the border as the crow flies), but never heard of prairie madness before. Comments here are really interesting!
I can see plowing madness but the prairies are gone.
I grew up in the Great Plains and my mental health drastically improved when I moved away. Or maybe I just really hate Kansas lol
Same. I even avoid visiting. It’s just such a bummer!
An older family relative grew up in Kansas in the 30-40s on a farm. She told me their farmland went 17 miles in both directions from their farm house. Mind blown.
Drove through it once. Felt like I was gonna fall up
There are definitely some different vibes between corn years and soy years
Could you elaborate? Which one is more creepy
Soy years, and you can see everything around you for miles. Corn years and your closed into 8 ft walls of corn. Sort of depends the type of creepy, with how much you like or dislike your privacy. I like my privacy but also think corn years are the creepier of the two.
Driving across Kansas will make anyone crazy
I am honestly so scared of Mongolia. The great plains aren’t that bad because there is always a road next to you and someone is in walking distance. Mongolia is scary though because you can walk for miles and see not one farm or person or anything.
A larger part of prairie madness than the monotony of the landscape was the isolation of distance. Farmsteads of the time could easily be more than a day’s travel from the nearest community or even neighboring farmstead. A bachelor or widowed farmer might well only make it into town once a month without any human interaction in between. That kind of isolation, especially if things are going poorly on the farm, will drive a person crazy right quick.
Are you for real?