I’ve learned to love both and fuck me if Iowa thunderstorms aren’t some of the coolest things I have ever seen. You can’t just watch them roll in for miles. Then all of a sudden they are on top of you. I don’t think I have ever seen as much lighting as I did in those clouds.

But I frequently go on walks near me in an area that has really odd weather because of a big cold water bay and the interaction between offshore weather and inland weather coming down from the mountains.

Occasionally I’ll be in the woods, dense woods, on fairly flat terrain criss crossed by rocky streams. Places I know very well. But there will be this dense cold fog amidst the dense trees and undergrowth with huge towering white pines overhead.

It’s incredibly disorienting even if you know the trails and they are well marked. You really start to understand stories about “the deep dark forest.”

Around me it’s not too scary because there are boundary features everywhere. Road to the north, road to the east, river to the south, tall ridge to the west. That kind of thing.

In northern Maine in the back country it is a whole different thing. Just semi wetlands in dense forest and rolling rocky hills for miles and miles in any direction and maybe a few barely used logging roads as any kind of boundary feature. That is where you start thinking wendigos are real.