Fear and Perceptions
Entrance to Capulin Volcano When I was a very little girl, my grandparents took me to Capulin Volcano. We looked at all the pictures in the visitor's center, which I have a vague memory of. And then my grandpa was going to walk down into the volcano with me. I freaked. My grandparents couldn't figure out why, after all, the volcano was extinct and perfectly safe to walk down. What they didn't realize is that I saw something very different than what everyone else saw. I saw a sandy slope with a large hole at the bottom. (Think of looking down at the top of an hourglass while the sand funnels down the hole, or sand dunes) I didn't see a trail, lava rocks, trees, dirt. My intense fear of this volcano totally changed my perception of what I saw at that moment. Maybe if my grandparents had understood my very distorted vision, they might've been able to convince me to release that and go down into the volcano. But, at that point in time, as I watched the s