What are your Christopherian experiences?

•Seeing something differently than what you expected…
•A change in the way you look at the world or how the world appears to you…
•Some sort of revelation, Eureka-aha, epiphany…

“Just as Christopher Columbus challenged the notion that the earth is flat by sailing ‘beyond the edge’ and thereby showing its curved shape…” (Armstrong, p. 152).


My own Christopherian encounters…

One of my most arresting experiences was seeing my first dump. We were in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on vacation during the summer. Dad and a friend were driving around with a couple of us boys.
We stopped at a dump outside of town. I'd never seen a dump before nor had I ever thought about what happened to trash, et al. (I must therefore have been quite young.)
The day was warm, sunny, and bright. Lovely green trees surrounded the dump. What we saw was utterly grotesque in my eye.
It was so ugly I couldn't comprehend it. There was so much trash it almost made me sick. Of course, it stunk. It seemed senseless.
I remember trying to ask Dad where it came from and why it had to be here. He answered, but not to my satisfaction. I couldn't stomach his answers. I urged him to leave soon.


>In high school English Lit, reading Samuel Pepys' account of 1666 London fire and being amazed I could be in on it at this remove of history.

>At Calvin College chapel, John DeVries talked about how India's hunger problems will not be overcome without removing the shackles of Hinduism.

>Cross-country skiing with Brad Quist and others in Michigan, north of Grand Rapids, and coming to the top of a hill and getting a vista—a surprise at how I relished that common feature of Colorado.

>In contrast to my own dad, from my father-in-law Gordon Thomas I realized you don't have to learn to do all the skilled tasks (construction, auto repair, etc.); you can pay an expert to do it.

>Realizing at about age 35 that my recollections of the Dependable Dry Cleaners in B.V.—the smell of which I had always associated with the gum we always got there—was actually the smell of a chemical used in the process.

>Mr. Priest spent the bulk of his days working at his Chevron station in Bear Valley. He died rather young, likely in his 50s, and within a few weeks the station was bulldozed. This illustrates to me the terrifying transitoriness of life.

>Some people don't want to be the boss and are happy to work for someone else.—Tom Owens, contractor, Feb. '95

Mar. 3, 1996—Bethany was looking at the Ethan Allen (furniture) catalog about March 3, and recognized her name in the words. She pointed out, "Look, Dad, there's my name, except the 'B' and the 'Y' there." I was surprised to see this and impressed that she had seen it. Subsequently I printed the letters 'B' and 'Y' on the computer in matching size of the catalog and attached them to it. The second word, Allen, isn't too far from Aileen, especially in block letter format.

May 5, 1998—Audre's grave could nearly be seen from Grandma and Grandad's backyard. I didn't know this until my Grandad's funeral when next to his burial plot was the marker for Audre. Although we visited the grandparents almost every year, we never visited the grave of my aunt, a 1948 polio victim at age 18.

Feb. 4, 1999—Crossing the Great Plains in a car is much better than by horse, but it's still a tedious trip. I've wondered how the pioneers maintained their sanity. Some years ago on a road trip back to the Midwest (with those wide-open spaces that give one time to think), I passed the time change line someplace in Nebraska and began to wonder when time zones were devised. I knew from a sunset table I had for bird hunting that each degree of longitude equated to 15 minutes of sunlight. Yet a degree of longitude was 30 or 60 miles and farther than anyone travelling by covered wagon could cover in a day.
So when did time zones become necessary? About the time that one could notice a change in the sun, actually lack of movement if moving west. When did people start moving fast enough to be concerned if they were experiencing the day at the same rate as others? The earliest technology that transported people that fast was the train. So I figured time zones were instituted about 1860 when there was a transcontinental railroad moving people east to west or west to east faster than the sun moved across the sky and the day time would be noticeably different from the time one got on the train to the time one got off.