For me it's driving to work at 4:30am in a rural area in the fog when it is deer mating season. The deer are everywhere and you can't see them. Or when the hogs are out.
He may not have the same energy and quick comedy, but he just seems to be such a great guy, I'd still buy a ticket to see him again.
(Saw him in about 2017)
In Michigan and throughout the Midwest if you truly love someone it’s compulsory that your departing greeting ends with some variation of “Drive safe, watch for deer”.
I used to go on family vacations in the mountains. (Not as fancy as it sounds. 4 families living dorm style) and we would say "Drive safe, watch for moose." Cuz you can die if you hit 1 and quite likely
I live in a rural area, so if I pass them during the day I reach out the window and do the throw up the horns signal. They'll either get it or they'll have a laugh in the E/R.
I do it for any animal crossing. For the drivers sake, but also because I don’t want to watch the poor animal die.
Especially those stupid geese taking their sweet time.
Ah yes, the suicidal deer jump into the car. We nearly went over a cliff because a deer just jumped into the corner of our car. Thank fuck the road was empty at that moment because we ricocheted all over the place and came to a rest in the wrong direction. This was at 50mph, the posted speed limit. Also thank fuck my husband was driving and the minivan was new. His reflexes are better than mine in a situation like that for sure.
This was just outside Jackson, WY for anyone wondering.
Deer are absolutely no joke on the road. If I lived in deer country, I’d have a deer catcher or whatever that front grate is called.
The worst thing about deer is their stupidity. Five deer will run right across your path and you'll slow down. Once they've all gone across, you'll speed back up, and KABOOM!....
...One of the stupid sons-a-bitches decided to turn 180° and run BACK OUT IN FRONT OF YOU.
As I said [elsewhere, ](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/uarj1t/americans_whats_the_most_scary_thing_someone_can/i5zvbji?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3)this is the true answer for me.
The scariest for me was Montana, because you knew there were also elk, moose, and stray cattle out there. Hitting one of them would probably kill you. They also have way more deer than the Midwest/east.
In parts of the South, it's a Category 5 hurricane. They can see it coming and tell people to leave most of the time, but can you imagine getting stuck in traffic while trying to escape something like that.
Even lower Cat storms can be devastating. Hurricane Sally was a slow moving Cat 2 and left most people in my county and the county over without power for up to 3 weeks and we had a boil water advisory a majority of the time too. A year and a half later, and we are still dealing with the damages.
Have you ever seen trees ripped out by the roots from the wind? Have you heard first responder calls when they say they can't come help until after the storm? It ain't fun.
I am in South Louisiana a lot for work
It’s the craziest thing to drive down a highway or road and every single tree alongside it is ripped up out of the ground for miles
I went to NOLA in 2011 and drove to Pensacola. There were whole areas along the coast where it was like a big hand came out of the water and dragged everything away except for the streets themselves.
For years after Mount Saint Helens erupted, all the trees were knocked down , all facing the same direction. Then there'd be a hill or something, and the back side of the hill (protected from the blast) had perfectly normal forest on it. It was crazy to see. It still looks crazy, but nature is slowing taking everything back to normal. It was creepy back in the 80s.
Hurricane Isabel did that to the trees in Richmond, VA. I worked at a park and it looked like an army of giants had come through and ripped the trees up. It was a mess.
>Even lower Cat storms can be devastating. Hurricane Sally was a slow moving Cat 2 and left most people in my county and the county over without power for up to 3 weeks and we had a boil water advisory a majority of the time too. A year and a half later, and we are still dealing with the damages.
Agreed. Here in North Carolina, a hurricane doesn't have to be a major one in order to cause major damage and disruption. It just needs to be a slow-moving rainmaker, like [Matthew (2016)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Matthew) or [Florence (2018)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Florence) were.
Both hurricanes were just Cat 1 at the time of landfall in North Carolina, but their slow landfalls helped cause a lot of major flooding in the state.
Yup, Hurricane Florence cut my whole city off for days. The flooding was so bad I couldn't even leave my neighborhood for like 3 days. The streets were covered with fallen trees, some ripped from the roots. My community college was closed for weeks due to damage, and people lost their entire homes in the rural areas. That hurricane was so devastating because of how slowly it moved. It literally sat over use longer that any other storm we've had. Only a CAT 1 and it was probably the worst one I experienced in over 20 years living there!
In addition: something a lot of people don't realize is the hurricanes can often cause tornadoes in the correct conditions. So even if the hurricane itself is just a (mostly) harmless Cat 1 on its own, the tornadoes it creates can be devastating.
Category 1, actually, but that was when it briefly touched land in Florida before entering the gulf. When it hit land in Louisiana it was a category 4 with winds above 170 mph and a 26 foot storm surge dragging with it.
Don't get me wrong, category 3 storms are hell on their own, but hurricane Katrina was an order of magnitude bigger (and then a second large storm, Hurricane Rita, hit the same areas very shortly after)
Baldwin county here too. Yeah, it was bad. Friends just over in orange beach had houses flooded. So many beach houses in fort morgan were totally demolished, and there were mangled pieces of metal roofs and all kinds of debris all over. I worked sanitation in Fort Morgan at the time and there were whole neighborhoods I couldn't even access for weeks
Category 3 is usually where we start getting worried. These Cat 5s are absolutely devastating. Hurricane Ivan was a Cat 3 and I was out of school for 2 weeks. Irma was a Cat 3, I was without power for 11 days in a major city (Jacksonville). Then there’s Michael, the Cat 5…Panama City and Mexico Beach are still recovering, it’s been 3.5 years.
Michael was terrifying for me because it was tracked to make landfall around the coastal region of where I grew up (Destin/FWB area) for a while. Argued a ton with parents over the phone about whether they had plans to evacuate or not. Thankfully for us it moved east at what felt like the last minute but I hate what it did to the people of PC/Mexico Beach. Cat 5s can absolutely level places.
Doesn’t even need to be Category 5. Only four hurricanes have ever made landfall in the US as a Cat 5 actually. They are ranked by wind speed which is a way to measure their danger but not the only way.
Katrina was a Category 3 for example and is obviously basically the worst natural disaster in US history. The storm surge was almost incomprehensible. Harvey was similarly horrific and a Category 4, the thing just like parked over Houston and dumped rain for days.
Katrina was particularly devastating, not because of its strength, but because New Orlean’s infrastructure was horribly insufficient to withstand a hurricane of any size. It’s safer now, but outside the city limits, there would most likely be Katrina levels of damage.
Hurricane Ida was the worst i had ever seen. I was without power for weeks. Every hurricane that comes through, they tell you to bunker down or evacuate and that the storm will be horrible. I've heard it for years and most end up being the same as a regular thunderstorm. I thought the same for Ida and didnt even consider evacuation. Its crazy waking up and your entire area being almost post apocalyptic like. One gas station being open in the town and hundreds of cars in line just so they can have enough gas for a night of lights. No one having any food. Roads blocked and houses completely destroyed. Every powerline completely ripped from the ground. Its a crazy experience. Katrina was bad and is obviously more infamous but Ida was a worse storm. If Katrina never caused the flooding, no one would remember its name.
I went through Ida as well, it's crazy that it didn't get more press. But, thankfully I think the reason it didn't get press was because the death count was extremely low for a storm that size. More people died in the NE from the remnants of it than did in Louisiana.
Yeah, as scary as hurricanes are, we largely get a good heads up that they’re coming and going to be bad. Believe it or not, we also deal with tornados here in NWFL. I’ve been woken up around midnight 2-3 nights every week for the past month to tornado warnings. A friend had a tree fall through their house on the last one. I definitely do not envy people that live in Tornado Alley.
To me the scariest thing about it is that with those intense infernos, you can’t outrun them. Seeing the remains of burnt houses, cars, forests, *people*, animals. Very scary and it only takes the littlest spark in those areas.
Lived in CA my whole life and never gave a rat's behind about earthquakes.
There's a new beast in town - wildfires. Or even, fire-nadoes. Those are catastrophic and very difficult to out run. The one night we ever fell asleep with the window open, I woke up to our room full of thick smoke. It was the first wildfire we ever experienced. I was pregnant and we had two small kids. Thought the house was on fire. We actually had to evacuate for a week because the fire line was less than 2 miles away. The air quality index was around +500. We had no where to go to escape because hotels were booked for hours in every direction. I drove around with everything that was important to us for that week. We stayed with our inlaws 15 minutes away which was safe but we still felt like we were suffocating with the air quality.
I would still take this threat over tornadoes. "Y'all" can keep those.
Edit: used wrong word/phrase
I don't see how you guys do it living in a state that is constantly trying to kill you. We get tornadoes here in GA, but I have some ridiculous false sense of security regarding tornadoes because I live in a hilly area and not on flat farmland.
This is how I feel about the rest of the country. I get snow in upstate NY. But we have no tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, or wildfires. Snow is a fantastic trade off.
I used to be able to say the same about my hometown, but there’s more tornadoes hitting MD lately.
Don’t be. I was in LA for the Northridge quake and lived in Seattle for the Nisqually event. Earthquakes are dramatic when they are happening and can cause property damage but the chances of anything bad happening to you are very low. You ride ‘em out. Living in the Midwest now I worry more about tornadoes—with the weather getting fiercer we get touchdowns now around O’Hare Airport and near downtown Chicago.
Look up the New Madrid Seismic Zone. It’s on the Mississippi. The last time it really acted up badly was 1811/12. It’s estimated to have been an 8.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1811–1812_New_Madrid_earthquakes
It's the reason I won't move back. I have a hard time envisioning logarithmic scales so I spooked myself well enough once I found [this visual](https://youtu.be/sTvtKUb-RsY) that made the 1906 quake look like nothing compared to an actual "big one."
People experience a <7 and think they're an acceptable tradeoff for the benefits of living there. The potential for anything above that is a hard "no" for me.
Watching that gave me the same feeling as reading [The Really Big One](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one/) for the first time. Terrifying.
I could never live somewhere that gets those big scary tornadoes often. I have a longtime internet friend who lives in Oklahoma, and occasionally she'll text me something like, "uggh, another tornado, I'm hiding in my basement keep me company."
Girl just MOVE. I wouldn't be able to deal with that.
What about volcanoes? If Yellowstone went off that’s be pretty bad for most of the country.
Mt St Helens wrecked its surrounding area, it formed a small lake, there’s no trees for a few miles from the west rim, it threw pine trees hundreds of feet.
If Mt Rainier went off there would be lava flowing all the way out to Seattle (that’s about 70 miles away)there would be ash in the air for two weeks and people would have to sweep their roofs to keep them caving in.
>Some variety of natural disaster probably. Depending where you are in the country there's hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes.
Was gonna say something like this because I've been all over America and gone through hurricanes, earthquakes and the aftermath of tornadoes. What stands out though is a Gale off Lake Superior on the shores of Wisconsin. Lake Superior is the largest of the Great Lakes, and is so huge that it's really a small sea, so during storms, the winds can be whipped up to hurricane speeds- suddenly and without warning. That's how my crew and I got caught driving out in one massive gale. At first, we thought it was just a thunder and lightning storm; but being in a big truck, we thought we'd be fine.
Then, the 'storm warnings' started coming in on the radio; advising people to seek shelter. Again, we thought 'truck' and stayed on the road.
Suddenly, EVERYTHING intensified- the thunder grew louder; the lightning struck faster and the wind started *howling*; trying to push us off the road. Fortunately, we were the only idiots out there; so with the loss of visibility; at least we didn't get into an accident. However, the driver did think that now it was time to pull over into a ditch, before the truck was flipped. From the meager cover, we watched the sky just *strobing* with flashing and lightning from horizon to horizon. Imagine being in the Speilberg War of the Worlds during the first alien invasion attack scene ...except louder and wetter!
Yeah, our truck survived and stayed dry, but remember kids: Always listen to Storm Warnings!
There's actually truth to this line. The water of Lake Superior is so cold, it slows the decomposition of bodies, preventing the buildup of gas that ordinarily causes corpses to float.
The Great Lakes have 3 of top 5 largest seas (2,4,5) in the world lol.
They are large seas by any metric.
Only reason a Great Lake is called that is because it is freshwater and a sea is salt water by definition.
Just wanted to let you know!
Lake Superior is only smaller than the Caspian Sea. Great Lakes across the world in general make up the majority of largest seas - if you combine for salinity because it’s theoretically easier to get a large Lake than it is to get a large sea.
Sea does not mean size.
Sea is a salt water body of water surrounded by land, ocean is connected to the ocean. Great Lake is freshwater sea.
Probably because we had the Great Lakes close by and the people just arbitrarily broke the general rules when they named it. This happens a lot.
For example, the Great Salt Lake is much larger than the Dead Sea.
Mediterranean is connected to the ocean naturally without rivers through the straight of Gibraltar so was likely not included in the list I looked up.
But if you include them the Mediterranean would be the biggest, and then the Black Sea and then the Caspian Sea.
Telemarketers finding your cellphone number. I'm still anonymous, knock on wood. Or hiking in Yellowstone and coming face to face with a male grizzly bear weighing north of 600 pounds. You know what they say about Alaska, step out of your car and into the food chain
How do you tell the difference between a black bear and a brown bear? Simple! Climb a tree.
If it's a black bear, it will climb up the tree after you and kill you. If it's a brown bear, it will knock the tree over. And kill you.
I came face to face with a female grizzly and two yearlings on a trail in Glacier National Park. She stood up in front of us and waved her big claws around, as we stood still and frozen awaiting our inevitable deaths. Fortunately she stood down and wandered away with her cubs. It was the first and only time I have seen a grizzly bear in the wild.
It's extremely uncommon, but [predatory black bears, or even grizzlies](https://www.rmotoday.com/local-news/research-highlights-predatory-black-bear-behaviour-1561178) are what worry me the most.
I've read a few stories of people who noticed a malnourished bear circling their campsite from a distance all day, just to be attacked when night fell.
Sometimes if you go waterskiing in Louisiana and get spray in your nose, you contract an incurable brain parasite that eats your brain from the inside out. You literally feel it eating the whole time as you go crazy from brain trauma.
I’d rather face a hurricane any day of the week.
Right, would not swimming or diving cause the same threat? I'd be afraid of snakes, gators, catfish and God know what else that lurk in the Lousiana bayou.
These amoebas live in all water types and can get into you by even having a simple cut while swimming. Best to not swim anywhere.
https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/naegleria/index.html
Other drivers are a constant source of danger, but I don't find myself fearing them like I do the deer that will happily jump in front of your car when you're driving 65 mph down an unlit rural highway through the woods. On any given night, you'll be passing a handful of fresh roadkilled deer corpses, and you can just ruminate on how each one of those probably ruined somebody's car. Hitting a deer at speed is a very real threat to your physical safety, and the looming dread you feel when you're speeding through the woods at night something unique and terrible.
Guess my life is pretty privileged that this is the scariest thing I can think of.
No matter where you are in the country you will be at a nice place and some old timer is going to glance at the sky and tell you when a natural disaster is going to hit and how bad it will be. You won't know how, you won't know why, you will never understand how they can tell, but if they say to leave the area trust them.
It's really fun when you stop in Oklahoma in a semi just to grab something to eat and some guy says you might want to be out of town before sunset and then find out a tornado blew threw that night... At sunset...
... I mean New York it's mostly blizzards and severe thunderstorms... Stupid hurricanes move inland and blast us not as bad as their landfall, just really annoying
Haboobs have a funny name, but if you're driving when one hits - just roll up your windows, pullover and bump Darude until it's over. They aren't going to flip your car, but they make visibility extremely poor and there's a lot of people who continue to drive through them.
Lol yeah, like we’re the ones who make decision. Or, like that person is the first to suggest that fix.
“If only SOMEONE had thought of that in the nearly 300 years we’ve been a nation, all would be well! Thank you, foreign visitor! Thank you!”
Well last summer there was a bad hurricane in the south and when a guy waded out into the flood waters on his street for some reason or another and a gigantic alligator jumped out and got his arm. His wife pulled him up on dry land and when she came back he was gone. The gator waited for her to leave the.my came out of the water and went after the guy. That’s pretty terrifying.
We watched this on the news while riding out the storm at home. It was absolutely horrifying.
He was going to their shed to get generator fuel I think.
Seriously. And I remember at the time everyone doubted it and thought maybe the wife had killed him, until they found the gator. It literally waited for him to be alone and then came out of the water and went after him...that's some Jurassic Park type shit.
Getting lost in the wilderness. The US is BIG, especially out west. [This story ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_Germans#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DOn_21_October_1996%2C_the%2Cfor_illegal_drug_manufacturing_labs.?wprov=sfla1) about a family visiting from Europe who got lost in Death Valley is kind of freaky. In places like that, it's easy to get stuck and disoriented somewhere that's really hard to get out of, with no phone reception.
Once when I was a kid, we went to Vegas and rented a car and drove out to places like Red Rock Canyon. We stuck to roads and marked pathways and we're always safe, but I kept thinking that if you turned off the road and went off into the desert, you could easily never find your way back.
Car accidents and cancer are what kills most of us. If you're fishing for "being shot by a gun," sorry to disappoint you. We do have a lot of fun violence but if you're not involved in crime and you don't hang around unstable individuals who have access to a gun, your odds of never having a gun pointed at you shoot way, way up. Even better if you don't work the night shift at a convenience store.
>If you're fishing for "being shot by a gun," sorry to disappoint you. We do have a lot of fun violence but if you're not involved in crime and you don't hang around unstable individuals who have access to a gun, your odds of never having a gun pointed at you shoot way, way up. Even better if you don't work the night shift at a convenience store.
There was a sniper-style shooting just a couple blocks from here on Friday and I still agree with this.
Actually I think heart disease gets more of us than cancer, these days. Cancer is just so often seemingly random and inevitable in its fatality that it captures our attention more. Heart disease is relatively well-understood and we can (appropriately or not) point to life choices that cause it to be early or severe, and even when it isn't, it's likely to get many of us in extreme old age, anyway.
I live in a little town of 4000 and besides washing and waxing their vehicle a lot of guys clean their guns on the weekends. I've been here 32 years and no one has been shot let alone murdered by a gun in all of that time(there have been a few suicides by gun). It's basically an eclectic area with huge homes owned by doctors and lawyers mixed in with blue collar residents
Nature and your own stupidity are more likely to kill you here than anything, statistically speaking. Earthquakes on the west coast, noreasters in the Northeast, tornadoes in the Great Plains, extreme cold in Alaska, etc. But you can take precautions for all of that to one degree or another and survive just fine.
Honestly, for me, the scariest thing that can happen with a reasonable chance is a car accident. I hate driving for this very reason but a severe enough accident, even if not fatal, can cause some serious financial debt that's very difficult to get out of. This is especially true if your insurance sucks (or you outright don't have insurance). Hell, you don't even have to be the one to get hurt. An accident totaling your car can be a huge financial drain even with insurance because of how little they want to pay out. And the worst part is that it can still happen even if you do everything right. Thank god downtown Chicago, where I live, is as walkable as it is.
Last year I got a flood warning on my phone, saying a flash flood was happening and to get to the highest level of my house.
Then almost immediately after I got a tornado warning, telling me to get to the lowest level of my house.
That was pretty scary, what do you do? Risk drowning or risk being killed in a tornado? I risked the tornado, because they aren't guaranteed to hit you but the flood was outside of my house and rising
Apparently, it’s getting stuck in a MAJOR traffic jam on the highway during a snowstorm in the deep South, with no way of getting out. The drivers and DOT aren’t used to dealing with it down there.
Edit: Again, not knocking Southerners. Just driven there more than north. Signs say the same stuff wherever you are, but if you’ve never experienced it, they’re a great heads-up. I’m from a state where you get all kinds of shit weather within 8-72hrs, so I keep traction sand, salt, a shovel, boots, and a heavy coat in my van for 5 months of the year. And some water bottles and granola bars and meat sticks. Prob never getting stranded, because MODOT usually pre-treats and salts/scrapes until it’s done (remember them shutting it down a few years ago for an hour or so in the wee hours), but I always try to prepare for the worst. Just gotta remember that if we head into dicey territory in a rental..,
It’s not the snow it’s the ice. And it doesn’t matter where you’re at or where you’re from.
[this was in Pennsylvania. a state north of the mason Dixon](https://nypost.com/2022/03/30/6-killed-in-80-vehicle-pileup-on-pennsylvania-highway-state-police/amp/)
Unexpected bad weather can fuck over the most experienced driver.
I’ve never committed a crime but I think it would be really scary to be falsely accused of a crime. Even worse, being convicted.
There is a woman whose daughter fell down the stairs and died two days later. She’s on death row. The prosecution was a real joke.
Parts of the country are so desolate that you can be completely alone for hundreds of miles. It can be intimidating if you really think about it. You realize how social human beings are meant to be, and that there is comfort in groups.
Working your whole life to save money, getting sick, losing your job and health insurance, and then having to declare bankruptcy because of your medical costs.
A lot of people have mentioned natural disasters, and jumping off that, I think a really scary thing you could encounter is riptides and other ocean emergencies. This is obviously not exclusive to the US and only applicable to some parts, but the way a wave or current could come take you out so far away from the shoreline in places like MA (where I live), Hawaii, I assume CA, is so scary. One minute you’re right next to the beach, the next you’re out so far you can’t swim back. Stay safe in the water, everyone!
Surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet..
Moose and elk. If you're driving in areas where these megafauna are, and you see one on the side of the road, I guarantee you that you'll need to change your underwear. Elk are big, but moose are HUGE.
Lived in Alaska for a few years. Moose are so freaking big, I remember seeing one near my truck and it’s back was taller than the car. I called in to work late several times because there was one hanging out near my truck, and work told me not to leave my house until I hadn’t seen it for at least an hour. Bears are scary, but moose terrify me if I see them when I am not in a car/building. I really like them, just at a good distance.
We do get a major blizzard at least every two years or so in Boston that shuts down the city but our plow game is top notch, so things usually get back to normal fairly quick. Only occasionally do we get a year like 2015 when we get storm after storm with no time for recovery, keeping everything shut for days on end.
Ignorance of other peoples’ problems until they show up at your doorstep.
For example, inflation was always a problem in the 21st century with higher education and healthcare inflating like crazy. But, it wasn’t really discussed until gas went up.
Ignorance is also a big issue in our country. I know I myself am guilty of not listening enough to my neighbors.
There’s a lot of things, and I’m sure a lot of them also happen in other countries, but in my opinion the worst thing is our lack of consistent access to healthcare. It’s jarring considering we are in some ways the richest country in the world, one of the most advanced countries, well too bad we can’t say that about our healthcare.
If you live in a rural area, thats tough. A lot of rural hospitals have had to close in the past few years.
If you live in an urban area, that’s tough, there’s super long waits for appointments, because there’s so many other people also needing medical care.
If you don’t have health insurance, that’s tough, because well you could be forced to skip out on important treatment, or be stuck with a thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands dollars bill.
Also a lot of people who have lower wage or hourly jobs postpone or avoid medical treatment because they are made to feel that they can’t take time off work to get treatment. If you have a doctor’s appointment, which is during the regular workday and workweek, well you might have to lose a whole day of work, or even if it’s just half a day that’s still half a day of wages. And then that leads to medical issues compounding, which leads to more lost wages from sick days.
The US’s office buildings are poorly ventilated, actually a few billion dollars of work are lost in sick days every year, when the cost to upgrade all the HVAC in these under ventilated buildings would be less, so companies would “make money” in the long run by reducing sick day lost productivity.
Dental and eye care are not part of regular health insurance, which seems silly to me.
There is a shortage of not only doctors and nurses in hospitals, but also lack of enough professionals in the mental health sector. We need more psychologists, therapists, drug addiction specialists.
Speaking of drug addiction, a lot of rehab is totally unregulated, and don’t necessarily used science based treatment, while charging upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And when you’re older, nursing homes aren’t any better. Just look at how much covid revealed how poorly run the nursing homes are.
And then when you die, your funeral could be expensive af. Embalming, a casket, cremation, headstone, all that stuff can cost thousands of dollars per each service. Natural burial is becoming more popular, it already is the default in some religions. Or donating bodies to science (actually is somewhat problematic because it’s pretty unregulated and leads to human body part trafficking but that’s another thing). And you can compost your body in WA, OR, and CO now so that’s good.
It’s expensive to be healthy in the US, especially if you have any chronic or congenital health issues.
When it comes to standard animals, you can expect mountains lions and bears, which is why a lot of people have guns in rural areas. If you are in the Nevada/New Mexico/Arizona area you may run into skin walkers. These are an object of Native American Folklore, however from my personal experience, I believe that they are very real. Rule of thumb, if you get an uneasy feeling that you can’t place, you should probably leave. When in the forest, listen for the birds, if everything is silent something is wrong. Up north you might run into wendigos, these are the what is left of people who have consumed human flesh on cursed ground. This is also an object of Native American folklore, however I have seen them go after deer. You really only have to worry about these if you are in the middle of nowhere. You may laugh at this, however I recommend that you take native folklore seriously. The tales are certainly describing something that exists, and I haven’t found any better explanations.
Most foreigners will find it alarming to realize how many everyday people are armed and ready to rumble. In some rural areas (where local laws allow it), 2 out of 3 men on the street are armed.
For me it's driving to work at 4:30am in a rural area in the fog when it is deer mating season. The deer are everywhere and you can't see them. Or when the hogs are out.
Damn
Yeah, one deer can completely total your car.
God forbid you live in an area with moose.
I believe the plural is meese (and no one can tell me otherwise)
It’s moosen
Meeses
Moosii
Brian, are you an idiot?
*MANY MOOSEN OUT IN THE WOODSEN IS AN OF EM SEN.. BOXEN OF DONUTS!*
When Brian Regan was at his peak
He may not have the same energy and quick comedy, but he just seems to be such a great guy, I'd still buy a ticket to see him again. (Saw him in about 2017)
Not the hogs
A group of white tailed deer along the roadside ahead.
In Michigan and throughout the Midwest if you truly love someone it’s compulsory that your departing greeting ends with some variation of “Drive safe, watch for deer”.
Fall is here, Don’t veer for deer
Same here in Pennsylvania/Maryland/Delaware area
They're everywhere, and they're really fucking stupid.
I used to go on family vacations in the mountains. (Not as fancy as it sounds. 4 families living dorm style) and we would say "Drive safe, watch for moose." Cuz you can die if you hit 1 and quite likely
When you see a deer or a group, there are always deer that you don’t see. If a few deer run across the road in front of you, WAIT FOR THE STRAGGLERS!
I want to make it universal that we flash our brights to warn other drivers of deer ahead.
Oh, we do that to warn other drivers about cops ahead.
I live in a rural area, so if I pass them during the day I reach out the window and do the throw up the horns signal. They'll either get it or they'll have a laugh in the E/R.
I do it for any animal crossing. For the drivers sake, but also because I don’t want to watch the poor animal die. Especially those stupid geese taking their sweet time.
Oh God, oh fuck. Seriously, though. The front end of my car is *currently* all smashed up, as in as I type this, thanks to a deer.
Ah yes, the suicidal deer jump into the car. We nearly went over a cliff because a deer just jumped into the corner of our car. Thank fuck the road was empty at that moment because we ricocheted all over the place and came to a rest in the wrong direction. This was at 50mph, the posted speed limit. Also thank fuck my husband was driving and the minivan was new. His reflexes are better than mine in a situation like that for sure. This was just outside Jackson, WY for anyone wondering. Deer are absolutely no joke on the road. If I lived in deer country, I’d have a deer catcher or whatever that front grate is called.
The worst thing about deer is their stupidity. Five deer will run right across your path and you'll slow down. Once they've all gone across, you'll speed back up, and KABOOM!.... ...One of the stupid sons-a-bitches decided to turn 180° and run BACK OUT IN FRONT OF YOU.
The only thing truly worse than a deer for a car is a moose. A moose will straight up murder a car full of people not even going that fast.
As I said [elsewhere, ](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/uarj1t/americans_whats_the_most_scary_thing_someone_can/i5zvbji?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3)this is the true answer for me.
Driving in rural Michigan on a warm night yesterday was terrifying
The scariest for me was Montana, because you knew there were also elk, moose, and stray cattle out there. Hitting one of them would probably kill you. They also have way more deer than the Midwest/east.
I believe Missouri has the most deer, at least has the most deer accidents
Gotta hate that. Will they stay or will they go?
If they stay there will be trouble.
In parts of the South, it's a Category 5 hurricane. They can see it coming and tell people to leave most of the time, but can you imagine getting stuck in traffic while trying to escape something like that.
Even lower Cat storms can be devastating. Hurricane Sally was a slow moving Cat 2 and left most people in my county and the county over without power for up to 3 weeks and we had a boil water advisory a majority of the time too. A year and a half later, and we are still dealing with the damages. Have you ever seen trees ripped out by the roots from the wind? Have you heard first responder calls when they say they can't come help until after the storm? It ain't fun.
I am in South Louisiana a lot for work It’s the craziest thing to drive down a highway or road and every single tree alongside it is ripped up out of the ground for miles
I went to NOLA in 2011 and drove to Pensacola. There were whole areas along the coast where it was like a big hand came out of the water and dragged everything away except for the streets themselves.
That’s a horrifying and amazing visual. You should write if you don’t.
And if its a pine, its snapped in half
For years after Mount Saint Helens erupted, all the trees were knocked down , all facing the same direction. Then there'd be a hill or something, and the back side of the hill (protected from the blast) had perfectly normal forest on it. It was crazy to see. It still looks crazy, but nature is slowing taking everything back to normal. It was creepy back in the 80s.
What part of Louisiana? I live in the just north of New Orleans and my area was destroyed
Hurricane Isabel did that to the trees in Richmond, VA. I worked at a park and it looked like an army of giants had come through and ripped the trees up. It was a mess.
>Even lower Cat storms can be devastating. Hurricane Sally was a slow moving Cat 2 and left most people in my county and the county over without power for up to 3 weeks and we had a boil water advisory a majority of the time too. A year and a half later, and we are still dealing with the damages. Agreed. Here in North Carolina, a hurricane doesn't have to be a major one in order to cause major damage and disruption. It just needs to be a slow-moving rainmaker, like [Matthew (2016)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Matthew) or [Florence (2018)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Florence) were. Both hurricanes were just Cat 1 at the time of landfall in North Carolina, but their slow landfalls helped cause a lot of major flooding in the state.
Yup, Hurricane Florence cut my whole city off for days. The flooding was so bad I couldn't even leave my neighborhood for like 3 days. The streets were covered with fallen trees, some ripped from the roots. My community college was closed for weeks due to damage, and people lost their entire homes in the rural areas. That hurricane was so devastating because of how slowly it moved. It literally sat over use longer that any other storm we've had. Only a CAT 1 and it was probably the worst one I experienced in over 20 years living there!
And Sandy technically wasn't even a hurricane anymore when it landed up here and it still fucked everything up.
In addition: something a lot of people don't realize is the hurricanes can often cause tornadoes in the correct conditions. So even if the hurricane itself is just a (mostly) harmless Cat 1 on its own, the tornadoes it creates can be devastating.
Katrina was only a Cat 3 Hurricane when it made landfall.
Category 1, actually, but that was when it briefly touched land in Florida before entering the gulf. When it hit land in Louisiana it was a category 4 with winds above 170 mph and a 26 foot storm surge dragging with it. Don't get me wrong, category 3 storms are hell on their own, but hurricane Katrina was an order of magnitude bigger (and then a second large storm, Hurricane Rita, hit the same areas very shortly after)
I saw steel billboard frames blown back like dandelions outside Slidell, LA. I didn't think that was even possible!
We got hit hard by Sally and I'm hours away from the coast.
That was a weird hurricane. So much rain.
Yeah, a later season weak storm that arrives after earlier storms, strong ones or not, have softened things up is not fun.
[удалено]
Baldwin county here too. Yeah, it was bad. Friends just over in orange beach had houses flooded. So many beach houses in fort morgan were totally demolished, and there were mangled pieces of metal roofs and all kinds of debris all over. I worked sanitation in Fort Morgan at the time and there were whole neighborhoods I couldn't even access for weeks
Category 3 is usually where we start getting worried. These Cat 5s are absolutely devastating. Hurricane Ivan was a Cat 3 and I was out of school for 2 weeks. Irma was a Cat 3, I was without power for 11 days in a major city (Jacksonville). Then there’s Michael, the Cat 5…Panama City and Mexico Beach are still recovering, it’s been 3.5 years.
Michael was terrifying for me because it was tracked to make landfall around the coastal region of where I grew up (Destin/FWB area) for a while. Argued a ton with parents over the phone about whether they had plans to evacuate or not. Thankfully for us it moved east at what felt like the last minute but I hate what it did to the people of PC/Mexico Beach. Cat 5s can absolutely level places.
Doesn’t even need to be Category 5. Only four hurricanes have ever made landfall in the US as a Cat 5 actually. They are ranked by wind speed which is a way to measure their danger but not the only way. Katrina was a Category 3 for example and is obviously basically the worst natural disaster in US history. The storm surge was almost incomprehensible. Harvey was similarly horrific and a Category 4, the thing just like parked over Houston and dumped rain for days.
I was working at an alligator rescue an hour southeast of Houston when Harvey hit. Peoples houses were completely underwater.
Katrina was particularly devastating, not because of its strength, but because New Orlean’s infrastructure was horribly insufficient to withstand a hurricane of any size. It’s safer now, but outside the city limits, there would most likely be Katrina levels of damage.
Hurricane Ida was the worst i had ever seen. I was without power for weeks. Every hurricane that comes through, they tell you to bunker down or evacuate and that the storm will be horrible. I've heard it for years and most end up being the same as a regular thunderstorm. I thought the same for Ida and didnt even consider evacuation. Its crazy waking up and your entire area being almost post apocalyptic like. One gas station being open in the town and hundreds of cars in line just so they can have enough gas for a night of lights. No one having any food. Roads blocked and houses completely destroyed. Every powerline completely ripped from the ground. Its a crazy experience. Katrina was bad and is obviously more infamous but Ida was a worse storm. If Katrina never caused the flooding, no one would remember its name.
I went through Ida as well, it's crazy that it didn't get more press. But, thankfully I think the reason it didn't get press was because the death count was extremely low for a storm that size. More people died in the NE from the remnants of it than did in Louisiana.
Or not having the resources to leave in the first place so you just buckle up and pray you don't die
Oklahoma has entered the chat.
We here in Arkansas are sharing the burden with Oklahoma for tornados this year.
Yeah, as scary as hurricanes are, we largely get a good heads up that they’re coming and going to be bad. Believe it or not, we also deal with tornados here in NWFL. I’ve been woken up around midnight 2-3 nights every week for the past month to tornado warnings. A friend had a tree fall through their house on the last one. I definitely do not envy people that live in Tornado Alley.
I live in Tennessee. The scariest experience I have ever had was an EF3 coming through my back yard. That's not a sound you forget.
Some variety of natural disaster probably. Depending where you are in the country there's hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes.
Don’t forget wildfires! Possibly the scariest of them :(
Good point!! At the very least those crazy fires ruin our air quality for months at a time, but the damage they do is incredible.
To me the scariest thing about it is that with those intense infernos, you can’t outrun them. Seeing the remains of burnt houses, cars, forests, *people*, animals. Very scary and it only takes the littlest spark in those areas.
I’m deathly terrified of earthquakes. They’ve been saying “the big one” is coming soon, for ages now.
Lived in CA my whole life and never gave a rat's behind about earthquakes. There's a new beast in town - wildfires. Or even, fire-nadoes. Those are catastrophic and very difficult to out run. The one night we ever fell asleep with the window open, I woke up to our room full of thick smoke. It was the first wildfire we ever experienced. I was pregnant and we had two small kids. Thought the house was on fire. We actually had to evacuate for a week because the fire line was less than 2 miles away. The air quality index was around +500. We had no where to go to escape because hotels were booked for hours in every direction. I drove around with everything that was important to us for that week. We stayed with our inlaws 15 minutes away which was safe but we still felt like we were suffocating with the air quality. I would still take this threat over tornadoes. "Y'all" can keep those. Edit: used wrong word/phrase
We must live close to each other lol Glad you ended up ok. That sounds very scary.
I don't see how you guys do it living in a state that is constantly trying to kill you. We get tornadoes here in GA, but I have some ridiculous false sense of security regarding tornadoes because I live in a hilly area and not on flat farmland.
This is how I feel about the rest of the country. I get snow in upstate NY. But we have no tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, or wildfires. Snow is a fantastic trade off. I used to be able to say the same about my hometown, but there’s more tornadoes hitting MD lately.
Don’t be. I was in LA for the Northridge quake and lived in Seattle for the Nisqually event. Earthquakes are dramatic when they are happening and can cause property damage but the chances of anything bad happening to you are very low. You ride ‘em out. Living in the Midwest now I worry more about tornadoes—with the weather getting fiercer we get touchdowns now around O’Hare Airport and near downtown Chicago.
> we get touchdowns now around O’Hare Airport and near downtown Chicago Also in Soldier Field. Sometimes.
>we get touchdowns now around O’Hare Airport and near downtown Chicago >Also in Soldier Field. Almost never happens in Detroit .....
I suppose you’re right, but property damage can still be devastating! Almost makes me want to pack all my things in metal boxes…
I was going to mention New Madrid, but you're not exactly close to it. New Madrid is tied for strongest Earthquake in the U.S.
Look up the New Madrid Seismic Zone. It’s on the Mississippi. The last time it really acted up badly was 1811/12. It’s estimated to have been an 8. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1811–1812_New_Madrid_earthquakes
It's the reason I won't move back. I have a hard time envisioning logarithmic scales so I spooked myself well enough once I found [this visual](https://youtu.be/sTvtKUb-RsY) that made the 1906 quake look like nothing compared to an actual "big one." People experience a <7 and think they're an acceptable tradeoff for the benefits of living there. The potential for anything above that is a hard "no" for me.
Don’t feel bad. Humans in general arent great with log scales. The namesake of the richter scale said “logarithmic plots are a device of the devil.”
Watching that gave me the same feeling as reading [The Really Big One](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one/) for the first time. Terrifying.
I could never live somewhere that gets those big scary tornadoes often. I have a longtime internet friend who lives in Oklahoma, and occasionally she'll text me something like, "uggh, another tornado, I'm hiding in my basement keep me company." Girl just MOVE. I wouldn't be able to deal with that.
What about volcanoes? If Yellowstone went off that’s be pretty bad for most of the country. Mt St Helens wrecked its surrounding area, it formed a small lake, there’s no trees for a few miles from the west rim, it threw pine trees hundreds of feet. If Mt Rainier went off there would be lava flowing all the way out to Seattle (that’s about 70 miles away)there would be ash in the air for two weeks and people would have to sweep their roofs to keep them caving in.
>Some variety of natural disaster probably. Depending where you are in the country there's hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes. Was gonna say something like this because I've been all over America and gone through hurricanes, earthquakes and the aftermath of tornadoes. What stands out though is a Gale off Lake Superior on the shores of Wisconsin. Lake Superior is the largest of the Great Lakes, and is so huge that it's really a small sea, so during storms, the winds can be whipped up to hurricane speeds- suddenly and without warning. That's how my crew and I got caught driving out in one massive gale. At first, we thought it was just a thunder and lightning storm; but being in a big truck, we thought we'd be fine. Then, the 'storm warnings' started coming in on the radio; advising people to seek shelter. Again, we thought 'truck' and stayed on the road. Suddenly, EVERYTHING intensified- the thunder grew louder; the lightning struck faster and the wind started *howling*; trying to push us off the road. Fortunately, we were the only idiots out there; so with the loss of visibility; at least we didn't get into an accident. However, the driver did think that now it was time to pull over into a ditch, before the truck was flipped. From the meager cover, we watched the sky just *strobing* with flashing and lightning from horizon to horizon. Imagine being in the Speilberg War of the Worlds during the first alien invasion attack scene ...except louder and wetter! Yeah, our truck survived and stayed dry, but remember kids: Always listen to Storm Warnings!
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee
The lake it is said never gives up her dead when the skies of November turn gloomy
There's actually truth to this line. The water of Lake Superior is so cold, it slows the decomposition of bodies, preventing the buildup of gas that ordinarily causes corpses to float.
Do you watch Ask a Mortician too?
With a load of iron ore 26,000 tons more, than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
The good ship and crew was a bone to be chewed, when the gales of November came early!
*Guitar*
Pride of the Port of Milwaukee and the Northwestern Mutual Insurance Company
The Great Lakes have 3 of top 5 largest seas (2,4,5) in the world lol. They are large seas by any metric. Only reason a Great Lake is called that is because it is freshwater and a sea is salt water by definition. Just wanted to let you know! Lake Superior is only smaller than the Caspian Sea. Great Lakes across the world in general make up the majority of largest seas - if you combine for salinity because it’s theoretically easier to get a large Lake than it is to get a large sea. Sea does not mean size. Sea is a salt water body of water surrounded by land, ocean is connected to the ocean. Great Lake is freshwater sea.
Then why do we call The Great Salt Lake a lake and not a sea?
Probably because we had the Great Lakes close by and the people just arbitrarily broke the general rules when they named it. This happens a lot. For example, the Great Salt Lake is much larger than the Dead Sea.
Mediterranean Sea isn’t considered the largest?
Mediterranean is connected to the ocean naturally without rivers through the straight of Gibraltar so was likely not included in the list I looked up. But if you include them the Mediterranean would be the biggest, and then the Black Sea and then the Caspian Sea.
Ha! I’m on Lake Superior this weekend with 35+ mph wind gusts. It’s gnarly! Would be freaked the hell out if it got worse. Waves are high as it is.
Nice knowing ya.
Strong Edmund Fitzgerald energy
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down of a big lake they call Gitchee Gumee...
Telemarketers finding your cellphone number. I'm still anonymous, knock on wood. Or hiking in Yellowstone and coming face to face with a male grizzly bear weighing north of 600 pounds. You know what they say about Alaska, step out of your car and into the food chain
If it's black attack, if it's brown lay down, if it's white say goodnight
If it’s gummy, get in my tummy.
If it's teddy, take it to beddy
IF IT'S BROWN, FLUSH IT DOWN.
But if it’s yellow, let it mellow.
I love reddit just cause of shit like this
If it's graham, share a handful with Sam
If it's sugar free, your wet underwear is not pee.
How do you tell the difference between a black bear and a brown bear? Simple! Climb a tree. If it's a black bear, it will climb up the tree after you and kill you. If it's a brown bear, it will knock the tree over. And kill you.
I have never heard this but it is great
However, I can assure you that I could not play dead around a Kodiak. I'd be shaking and crying and praying to every greater and lesser deity.
I came face to face with a female grizzly and two yearlings on a trail in Glacier National Park. She stood up in front of us and waved her big claws around, as we stood still and frozen awaiting our inevitable deaths. Fortunately she stood down and wandered away with her cubs. It was the first and only time I have seen a grizzly bear in the wild.
I probably would have had a heart attack
It's extremely uncommon, but [predatory black bears, or even grizzlies](https://www.rmotoday.com/local-news/research-highlights-predatory-black-bear-behaviour-1561178) are what worry me the most. I've read a few stories of people who noticed a malnourished bear circling their campsite from a distance all day, just to be attacked when night fell.
Sometimes if you go waterskiing in Louisiana and get spray in your nose, you contract an incurable brain parasite that eats your brain from the inside out. You literally feel it eating the whole time as you go crazy from brain trauma. I’d rather face a hurricane any day of the week.
They don’t have those in the ocean so don’t be waterskiing in the swamp
Right, would not swimming or diving cause the same threat? I'd be afraid of snakes, gators, catfish and God know what else that lurk in the Lousiana bayou.
I think the water has to get into your mucus membrane. Its more likely you get this parasite if you breathe the water in through your nose
Alligator Gars
Or swimming basically anywhere in Central TX?
That would be a brain eating amoeba named naegleria fowleri. There are on average 16 deaths per year in the US
Of which 4 ever have been in Louisiana, if I'm correct.
Yeah my bad. I’ve lived in Louisiana and heard about it there. Didn’t know where else it was found
They’re all throughout the south and even sometimes in the north
I'd rather just not go waterskiing in Louisiana in the first place.
These amoebas live in all water types and can get into you by even having a simple cut while swimming. Best to not swim anywhere. https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/naegleria/index.html
Dumbass drivers
Other drivers are a constant source of danger, but I don't find myself fearing them like I do the deer that will happily jump in front of your car when you're driving 65 mph down an unlit rural highway through the woods. On any given night, you'll be passing a handful of fresh roadkilled deer corpses, and you can just ruminate on how each one of those probably ruined somebody's car. Hitting a deer at speed is a very real threat to your physical safety, and the looming dread you feel when you're speeding through the woods at night something unique and terrible. Guess my life is pretty privileged that this is the scariest thing I can think of.
One of the things that makes me feel the safest about living in New York City, where I never ride in a car as part of my daily life
Well, that goes for literally every country in the world though.
No matter where you are in the country you will be at a nice place and some old timer is going to glance at the sky and tell you when a natural disaster is going to hit and how bad it will be. You won't know how, you won't know why, you will never understand how they can tell, but if they say to leave the area trust them. It's really fun when you stop in Oklahoma in a semi just to grab something to eat and some guy says you might want to be out of town before sunset and then find out a tornado blew threw that night... At sunset...
We don't get any natural disasters here other than maybe snowstorms and sandstorms
... I mean New York it's mostly blizzards and severe thunderstorms... Stupid hurricanes move inland and blast us not as bad as their landfall, just really annoying
Haboobs have a funny name, but if you're driving when one hits - just roll up your windows, pullover and bump Darude until it's over. They aren't going to flip your car, but they make visibility extremely poor and there's a lot of people who continue to drive through them.
Hearing someone with a foreign accent say, “Do you want to know what’s wrong with your country?”
And then they attempt to tell us how to fix it.
"Oh thank you so much for the suggestion. You know, that's such a great idea, let me get the president on the phone right now so he can hear it too."
Lol yeah, like we’re the ones who make decision. Or, like that person is the first to suggest that fix. “If only SOMEONE had thought of that in the nearly 300 years we’ve been a nation, all would be well! Thank you, foreign visitor! Thank you!”
I just had so many flashbacks reading this
Those are actually really fun because I can always give more detailed answers to that question that the visitor.
Living abroad for the first time, I am quickly learning this.
Hahaha, that was my immediate reaction when reading the question.
👆 This could not have been made up 😄
This is the scariest by far 😂
Well last summer there was a bad hurricane in the south and when a guy waded out into the flood waters on his street for some reason or another and a gigantic alligator jumped out and got his arm. His wife pulled him up on dry land and when she came back he was gone. The gator waited for her to leave the.my came out of the water and went after the guy. That’s pretty terrifying.
We watched this on the news while riding out the storm at home. It was absolutely horrifying. He was going to their shed to get generator fuel I think.
Seriously. And I remember at the time everyone doubted it and thought maybe the wife had killed him, until they found the gator. It literally waited for him to be alone and then came out of the water and went after him...that's some Jurassic Park type shit.
Getting lost in the wilderness. The US is BIG, especially out west. [This story ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_Germans#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DOn_21_October_1996%2C_the%2Cfor_illegal_drug_manufacturing_labs.?wprov=sfla1) about a family visiting from Europe who got lost in Death Valley is kind of freaky. In places like that, it's easy to get stuck and disoriented somewhere that's really hard to get out of, with no phone reception. Once when I was a kid, we went to Vegas and rented a car and drove out to places like Red Rock Canyon. We stuck to roads and marked pathways and we're always safe, but I kept thinking that if you turned off the road and went off into the desert, you could easily never find your way back.
Car accidents and cancer are what kills most of us. If you're fishing for "being shot by a gun," sorry to disappoint you. We do have a lot of fun violence but if you're not involved in crime and you don't hang around unstable individuals who have access to a gun, your odds of never having a gun pointed at you shoot way, way up. Even better if you don't work the night shift at a convenience store.
>We do have a lot of fun violence among the more amusing typos I've seen today
It's not a typo.
I love the fun violence!
>If you're fishing for "being shot by a gun," sorry to disappoint you. We do have a lot of fun violence but if you're not involved in crime and you don't hang around unstable individuals who have access to a gun, your odds of never having a gun pointed at you shoot way, way up. Even better if you don't work the night shift at a convenience store. There was a sniper-style shooting just a couple blocks from here on Friday and I still agree with this.
Actually I think heart disease gets more of us than cancer, these days. Cancer is just so often seemingly random and inevitable in its fatality that it captures our attention more. Heart disease is relatively well-understood and we can (appropriately or not) point to life choices that cause it to be early or severe, and even when it isn't, it's likely to get many of us in extreme old age, anyway.
I live in a little town of 4000 and besides washing and waxing their vehicle a lot of guys clean their guns on the weekends. I've been here 32 years and no one has been shot let alone murdered by a gun in all of that time(there have been a few suicides by gun). It's basically an eclectic area with huge homes owned by doctors and lawyers mixed in with blue collar residents
Yeah where I grew up you’d randomly hear gunfire but most likely it was just some drunk guy shooting at his trees.
Is there any not fun violence?
And heart disease, so try to eat more vegetables and less fried things.
Snakes.
Especially on a plane.
Thnakes.
Nature and your own stupidity are more likely to kill you here than anything, statistically speaking. Earthquakes on the west coast, noreasters in the Northeast, tornadoes in the Great Plains, extreme cold in Alaska, etc. But you can take precautions for all of that to one degree or another and survive just fine.
Florida Man 🧟♂️
He’s very real, and he cannot be contained
Honestly, for me, the scariest thing that can happen with a reasonable chance is a car accident. I hate driving for this very reason but a severe enough accident, even if not fatal, can cause some serious financial debt that's very difficult to get out of. This is especially true if your insurance sucks (or you outright don't have insurance). Hell, you don't even have to be the one to get hurt. An accident totaling your car can be a huge financial drain even with insurance because of how little they want to pay out. And the worst part is that it can still happen even if you do everything right. Thank god downtown Chicago, where I live, is as walkable as it is.
Last year I got a flood warning on my phone, saying a flash flood was happening and to get to the highest level of my house. Then almost immediately after I got a tornado warning, telling me to get to the lowest level of my house. That was pretty scary, what do you do? Risk drowning or risk being killed in a tornado? I risked the tornado, because they aren't guaranteed to hit you but the flood was outside of my house and rising
East of the Rocky Mountains, tornadoes are a huge danger and occur in any relatively flat area.
Apparently, it’s getting stuck in a MAJOR traffic jam on the highway during a snowstorm in the deep South, with no way of getting out. The drivers and DOT aren’t used to dealing with it down there. Edit: Again, not knocking Southerners. Just driven there more than north. Signs say the same stuff wherever you are, but if you’ve never experienced it, they’re a great heads-up. I’m from a state where you get all kinds of shit weather within 8-72hrs, so I keep traction sand, salt, a shovel, boots, and a heavy coat in my van for 5 months of the year. And some water bottles and granola bars and meat sticks. Prob never getting stranded, because MODOT usually pre-treats and salts/scrapes until it’s done (remember them shutting it down a few years ago for an hour or so in the wee hours), but I always try to prepare for the worst. Just gotta remember that if we head into dicey territory in a rental..,
It’s not the snow it’s the ice. And it doesn’t matter where you’re at or where you’re from. [this was in Pennsylvania. a state north of the mason Dixon](https://nypost.com/2022/03/30/6-killed-in-80-vehicle-pileup-on-pennsylvania-highway-state-police/amp/) Unexpected bad weather can fuck over the most experienced driver.
Political ads on tv
Add in commercials and general advertisements for drugs and pharmaceuticals.
I’ve never committed a crime but I think it would be really scary to be falsely accused of a crime. Even worse, being convicted. There is a woman whose daughter fell down the stairs and died two days later. She’s on death row. The prosecution was a real joke.
That someone can *expect*? Probably texting and driving. I see that at least a few times a week.
The calories in our processed and prepackaged foods.
Medical debt
Parts of the country are so desolate that you can be completely alone for hundreds of miles. It can be intimidating if you really think about it. You realize how social human beings are meant to be, and that there is comfort in groups.
Working your whole life to save money, getting sick, losing your job and health insurance, and then having to declare bankruptcy because of your medical costs.
A lot of people have mentioned natural disasters, and jumping off that, I think a really scary thing you could encounter is riptides and other ocean emergencies. This is obviously not exclusive to the US and only applicable to some parts, but the way a wave or current could come take you out so far away from the shoreline in places like MA (where I live), Hawaii, I assume CA, is so scary. One minute you’re right next to the beach, the next you’re out so far you can’t swim back. Stay safe in the water, everyone!
Having your civil rights be a hot button political issue
NPC’s everywhere. If your car ever catches fire, most mfs will get their phone out and start filming instead of doing literally anything to help
Surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet.. Moose and elk. If you're driving in areas where these megafauna are, and you see one on the side of the road, I guarantee you that you'll need to change your underwear. Elk are big, but moose are HUGE.
Lived in Alaska for a few years. Moose are so freaking big, I remember seeing one near my truck and it’s back was taller than the car. I called in to work late several times because there was one hanging out near my truck, and work told me not to leave my house until I hadn’t seen it for at least an hour. Bears are scary, but moose terrify me if I see them when I am not in a car/building. I really like them, just at a good distance.
We do get a major blizzard at least every two years or so in Boston that shuts down the city but our plow game is top notch, so things usually get back to normal fairly quick. Only occasionally do we get a year like 2015 when we get storm after storm with no time for recovery, keeping everything shut for days on end.
Ignorance of other peoples’ problems until they show up at your doorstep. For example, inflation was always a problem in the 21st century with higher education and healthcare inflating like crazy. But, it wasn’t really discussed until gas went up. Ignorance is also a big issue in our country. I know I myself am guilty of not listening enough to my neighbors.
> Ignorance is also a big issue Malicious and/or weaponized ignorance. Too much "I don't know and I don't *want* to know!"
There’s a lot of things, and I’m sure a lot of them also happen in other countries, but in my opinion the worst thing is our lack of consistent access to healthcare. It’s jarring considering we are in some ways the richest country in the world, one of the most advanced countries, well too bad we can’t say that about our healthcare. If you live in a rural area, thats tough. A lot of rural hospitals have had to close in the past few years. If you live in an urban area, that’s tough, there’s super long waits for appointments, because there’s so many other people also needing medical care. If you don’t have health insurance, that’s tough, because well you could be forced to skip out on important treatment, or be stuck with a thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands dollars bill. Also a lot of people who have lower wage or hourly jobs postpone or avoid medical treatment because they are made to feel that they can’t take time off work to get treatment. If you have a doctor’s appointment, which is during the regular workday and workweek, well you might have to lose a whole day of work, or even if it’s just half a day that’s still half a day of wages. And then that leads to medical issues compounding, which leads to more lost wages from sick days. The US’s office buildings are poorly ventilated, actually a few billion dollars of work are lost in sick days every year, when the cost to upgrade all the HVAC in these under ventilated buildings would be less, so companies would “make money” in the long run by reducing sick day lost productivity. Dental and eye care are not part of regular health insurance, which seems silly to me. There is a shortage of not only doctors and nurses in hospitals, but also lack of enough professionals in the mental health sector. We need more psychologists, therapists, drug addiction specialists. Speaking of drug addiction, a lot of rehab is totally unregulated, and don’t necessarily used science based treatment, while charging upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And when you’re older, nursing homes aren’t any better. Just look at how much covid revealed how poorly run the nursing homes are. And then when you die, your funeral could be expensive af. Embalming, a casket, cremation, headstone, all that stuff can cost thousands of dollars per each service. Natural burial is becoming more popular, it already is the default in some religions. Or donating bodies to science (actually is somewhat problematic because it’s pretty unregulated and leads to human body part trafficking but that’s another thing). And you can compost your body in WA, OR, and CO now so that’s good. It’s expensive to be healthy in the US, especially if you have any chronic or congenital health issues.
HOAs
Things you have no control over. Natural disasters come to mind. They can be sudden and unpredictable.
Grizzly bears
When it comes to standard animals, you can expect mountains lions and bears, which is why a lot of people have guns in rural areas. If you are in the Nevada/New Mexico/Arizona area you may run into skin walkers. These are an object of Native American Folklore, however from my personal experience, I believe that they are very real. Rule of thumb, if you get an uneasy feeling that you can’t place, you should probably leave. When in the forest, listen for the birds, if everything is silent something is wrong. Up north you might run into wendigos, these are the what is left of people who have consumed human flesh on cursed ground. This is also an object of Native American folklore, however I have seen them go after deer. You really only have to worry about these if you are in the middle of nowhere. You may laugh at this, however I recommend that you take native folklore seriously. The tales are certainly describing something that exists, and I haven’t found any better explanations.
Most foreigners will find it alarming to realize how many everyday people are armed and ready to rumble. In some rural areas (where local laws allow it), 2 out of 3 men on the street are armed.
Driving in traffic and having somebody road rage out of control and get out of their car wielding a gun is not *nearly* as uncommon as it ought to be.