j 
say that I ever saw a prairie hailstone 
larger than a marble, although some 
were as big as taws. However, the folks 
over at Republican City swore they had 
seen hail the size of ping-pong balls, and 
they had cars with bashed-in wind- 
shields to prove it. 
Less dramatic than the storms, but 
equally unnerving — at least for some — 
was the prairie’s trompe I’oeil. Optical 
illusions, caused by the combination of a 
rarified, transparent atmosphere with 
distances so great that “only the curva- 
ture of the earth’s surface limits the 
view,” often fooled the eye of the inex- 
perienced observer. Objects, which 
could be seen with remarkable clarity 
from a great distance, became strangely 
distorted. Some were magnified, so that 
a raven might be mistaken for an Indian 
or an antelope for the much larger elk. 
Some were diminished, so that the leafy 
tops of the line of timber along a distant 
river seemed to “wave and mingle 
among the grass of the wild swelling 
meadows.” Some objects, such as tufts 
of grass or buffalo bones, were elevated, 
stretching up so high that they looked 
like humans. The first to mention this 
phenomenon was one of Coronado’s 
chroniclers, who wrote that the land 
where buffalo roamed was “so level and 
bare that whenever one looked at them, 
one could see the sky between their legs, 
so that at distance they looked like 
trimmed pine tree trunks with foliage 
joining at the top.” Sometimes, under 
the intense glare of a pitiless August 
sun, the “earth and sky seemed to 
blend.” In its most extreme form, this 
illusion became a mirage, such as the 
one described in 1849 by Alonzo 
Delano: “The glare of the sun upon the 
distant plain resembled the waves of a 
sea, and there were appearances of is- 
lands and groves.” 
This “abnormal land” was home to 
me. As I was growing up, I knew no 
other world but the prairie’s vast waho, 
its thunderstorms, its windblown fields. 
This natural habitat would render ago- 
raphobia — the fear of open spaces — as 
incomprehensible to me as, many years 
later, my claustrophobia when ringed in 
by mountains or trees was to those who 
judged such restrictions “natural.” Like 
a medieval woman, I was limited by the 
world I knew but knew not that my 
world was limited. □ 
Great Plains wheatfield. 
Craig Aurness 
60 
