Life in a Parallel Universe

For many of us in the New Paltz area, the Mohonk tower orients us in the universe.  It is set in the west, with the tower on the southern edge of of the Skytop notch, unchanging.  So it seemed as I grew up.

Then one day, in my youth, I happened to see it from the Rondout Valley side.  Mohonk was in the east, facing the wrong way.  (Click on the image to enlarge.) This was a major disruption to the cosmos. 

At the time, my reading habits tended toward what are now termed graphic novels, but were known then as comic books or “worthless junk that will rot your mind and turn you into a juvenile delinquent.”  So naturally, this strange development could only conjure up notions of Bizzaro World from the Superman comics–that parallel universe where everything was a convoluted version of people and things found in the regular universe. 

The unsettling reversal of Mohonk made me wonder: did people in the Rondout Valley call it Knohom?  Did they go swimming in the winter and sledding in the summer?  Was there a Bizzaro version of me lurking around the Rondout Valley? The mind reeled.

With the passing of the years, I now realize that our prospect of Mohonk was just one of many in a wider universe.  It was just luck that we happened to get the normal one.