Morongo Valley wind turbines seen in a non-disorienting way
When I am in unfamiliar surroundings, I sometimes feel disoriented. I might not know which direction I am traveling, and at times can even feel unsteady on my feet. I dislike these feelings intensely, and because I suffer from bouts of vertigo on (luckily) infrequent occasions, I have learned to recognize the signs of disorientation coming, and have acquired certain techniques to deal with the effects. I've also learned that once I feel unbalanced, I can really do very little about it.
I recently returned from a vacation in my adopted state of California, and while near Joshua Tree National Park, I was driving on Twentynine Palms Highway from the town of Joshua Tree to Palm Desert when I experienced an intense feeling of disorientation, but this feeling was different from any previous I had experienced. It was a feeling of weightlessness, rather than dizziness, and an intense feeling that I was in a place that was so foreign, it was as if I was on a new planet, with different laws of gravity governing it. The feeling seemed to be brought on by the experience of the nearly pitch-black road I was on, from the strange plant life doting the sides of the road whizzing past me in the periphery of my headlights, and by the small, flashing red lights barely illuminating the hundreds of wind turbines covering the landscape around me. As the road descended and wound back and forth, my car on it, these small lights actually seemed to move and float, and the blades of the windmill, though virtually invisible, must have registered a kind of slicing terror within me.
I have never experienced a feeling like that when not under the influence of a mind-altering substance, and the only substance available to me on that day was the world I inhabited.
