I went to graduate school in Wisconsin. Needless to say, the winters were a lot different from what I had known growing up in Virginia. I was prepared, however. I had boots a lot like UGGS before anyone knew about UGGS. I had a long wool coat. I wore it over wool slacks and a wool jacket layered over a blouse. I would wrap one long scarf around my neck and tucked down my front, then another around my lower face. I topped it all with a wool hat pulled down low. Bundled like this, I would walk the mile from my apartment to school.

 In the winter months, my roommate and I would get cabin fever because we did not go out unless we had a reason to. We would be in our tiny apartment for hours on the weekends, reading and studying and otherwise finding things to occupy us.

 One frigid Saturday she was telling me some stories about her rural childhood that involved some farm animals, when it struck me—- I had never really seen most of those animals. Oh, I had seen cows and sheep dotting fields as our car drove by, but up close? Nope.

 There were some I had never seen in real life at all. Pigs, for example. Goats. Chickens.

 I knew all about them, and had seen them in pictures and films so often that I had never realized I had never actually SEEN them.

 My roommate was astonished. Appalled. I was a little shocked myself.

 On went the coats and scarves and boots. Off she dragged me through the permafrost, to the part of campus that housed the agricultural school. They had a farm there with real live farm animals.

 I was like a kid in a petting zoo. My virtual knowledge of these animals was inaccurate in so many ways, and often off the most regarding scale (and odor!). A cow up close looks a lot different from one dotting a field. And a lot different from pictures in books, too. They are so very THERE. Big, in a bulky way.

 The pigs were bigger and uglier than I thought they would be. Charlotte’s Web had sentimentalized my views of them. But what really interested me were the sheep. All kinds of sayings suddenly made sense. They were timid. They moved as a unit, in a group, forward and back, this way and that, their little hooves pattering collectively. Their expressions were—sheepish.

 There have been other times when, upon finally experiencing something in real life, I learned that my virtual experiences had not come close to matching the reality. I even expect it to happen sometimes, like when I travel and visit sites that I know well from books. I’m told that a similar thing happens when people see celebrities (gee, I thought he was taller.)

 But the most memorable times for me have been unpredictable. The first time I was on a ship at sea, for example, the vastness of the sea both awed and frightened me. I felt very small and vulnerable on that ship, bobbing around in the boundless expanse of untamed nature. Even knowing that I was a good swimmer did not help, because there was no land in sight in any direction. Imagine if I had been on a small wooden ship centuries ago, instead of a modern ocean liner!

 With the web these days, we all have extensive virtual knowledge in our heads that far exceeds what we will ever experience in real life. But it is good to see the real thing when we can, I think, because  virtual is never quite the same as real.

 Have you ever seen or experienced something for the first time and been surprised it was so different from what your virtual knowledge of it led you to assume?

 Is your background mostly suburban like mine was? Urban? Country? Are you still living in that environment? Do you prefer it over others?

 What virtual experience would you like to experience for real?

Have you ever been face to face with a cow?