This past weekend my mom and I went to Yosemite. I'd been there before and had once climbed Half Dome, but she hadn't seen the valley and all of its glacier-molded gigantic granite topography.
She has seen lots of granite before though, particularly in New Hampshire, known as the Granite State. She's vacationed there nearly every year since I was in elementary school so I've seen a lot of it as well. One of the things I remember seeing is the Old Man in the Mountain. The Old Man was an over-hanging rock formation on the side of a mountain that when viewed from the side looked like a Lincoln-like profile of an old man. There were lots of legends about the Old Man, some dating back at least hundreds of years.
At Yosemite's nature centers there was a lot of emphasis on the slowness of geologic time, explaining how it took millions of years for the features of the valley to be shaped. So imagine my shock to have learned that a few weeks ago the Old Man in the Mountain collapsed. It fell off. It's not there anymore. Somewhere in the scale of geologic time, a seemingly permanent feature of the landscape disappeared in my lifetime. I hope this is some random coincidence and not a harbinger of other geographic traumas to be suffered as a result of me somehow being cursed...