[We are hoping and praying to have a peaceful, restful Sunday. Because once the doctoring starts, those quiet, normal days don’t come around much anymore.]
You’ve heard of cryptozoology, the study of animals that may or may not exist. Well, now we have cryptogeography–the study of places that may or may not exist.
Happily we have Byron the Quokka to explain it. And I’ll bet everybody has a place or two in memory that isn’t there anymore when you want to see it.
And maybe it never was there. Not really.
{If you’re wondering what happened to Joe Collidge… Well, his day was the day we had no Internet till suppertime. Honk if you want a special edition.}
I used to live in a wonderful place by the name of Denver, but the last time I went there, it was more like Los Angeles, with real estate prices to match.
This is a job for cryptogeography!
Just g9 to the 105th meridian, twenty or so miles south of the 40th parallel. That’s where I saw it last. 🙂
Thing is, some of these places move around…
It breaks my heart to see the city I so loved having turned into a place so crowded and so expensive. Denver, of the ‘60s and ‘70s, was a great place to live. The cost of living was on the ground and I could get from any corner of town to anywhere else in town in around 30 minutes. The weather there is great, and I especially loved the delicate balance of thin air and clear skies which made cool days pleasant in a manner I’ve never seen duplicated elsewhere.
No matter what, any time of the year, you could face west and see the incomparable beauty of the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies. I didn’t spend a lot of time in “the hills”, but preferred spending my time on the plains, with the mountains as a backdrop.
Sounds grand! I live in New Jersey, and most of our beauty spots have been paved over.
Decades ago, it was a great place. The personality changed over the years. What I miss is the metro Denver I knew, in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. There was an unincorporated area north of Denver proper, but south of the incorporated suburbs, bisected by Clear Creek.
There were a variety of business activities which benefitted from the relative abundance of land and the proximity of the creek; so there were gravel quarries and a sand company which operated for roughly 20 years selling sand that had gathered during the flood of 1965. There were also a number of truck farms, owned by Italian/American families, and there was a sense of community. There were strong families and neighborhoods with modest homes that were perfectly kept. These were hardworking people who didn’t want to disappoint their families, their church or their community. This stabilized matters greatly, and raised the bar for everyone.
How about Atlantis? Was it really a thing? Then there is the Bermuda Triangle – really a thing. How come so many boats and planes disappear there?