I had a lovely chat with a fellow traveler and software consultant on my flight home last weekend. It began with a 6 AM flight from Wichita to Atlanta. Normally, I don’t chat with my neighbors on the plane, but from time to time I experience a delightful exception.
I train and consult for a higher education software company. I travel 2-3 weeks per month, usually leaving Monday morning and returning late Friday night. When I travel west I return on Saturdays. Last week I was in Dodge City, KS, and the three hour drive from there to Wichita meant Saturday travel.
My new friend also travels Monday or Tuesday and returns on Fridays. This week was different for her in that she left Sunday and returned on Saturday. When you travel solo, sometimes it’s nice to have a conversation with someone. I’ve also noticed that when I’m tired, my guard is down and I’m more open to conversation.
We talked about where we’ve travelled for work or pleasure. We had been to many of the same places, including Alaska, Jackson, WY, and South Dakota so we compared our experiences.
We both mentioned how our expectation of a place could be very different from our actual experience. Take Alaska, for example. Alaska is so huge (more than twice the size of Texas) that any stereotype will be true in one place and not in another. It’s also easy for people who aren’t from there to underestimate its magnitude. My seatmate had been to Sitka and Cordova. I’ve been to Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula. These are all Alaskan coastal areas. We compared our experiences of the cold with our expectations. I’ve been to Alaska 3 times, twice in June and once in November. My expectation was that it would be colder there both in the summer and winter compared with Manitoba or Iowa, places I lived. That wasn’t necessarily the case in summer or in winter, because of the coastal weather effects. Had I left Anchorage and driven six hours north to Fairbanks, I would have encountered the subzero temps I was expecting.
She mentioned that on her first trip to Denver, she had expected the mountains to be closer than they were. I had a similar experience the first time I drove to Calgary, Alberta. I naively expected mountains to appear as soon as I crossed the border from Saskatchewan, because growing up in southern Ontario, my understanding was that Alberta = mountains. I soon discovered that only the far western edge of Alberta has mountains. Another example was the first time I drove to Florida as an adult. I expected to see naturally growing palm trees as soon as I crossed the border. While there were palms right at the border, they had been intentionally planted around the huge welcome sign, reinforcing the tourist assumption that Florida is all palm trees. Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember that political borders (states, provinces and countries), are just arbitrary lines on a map. The geography of southern Georgia is no different from that of northern Florida, because plants and animals, terrain and weather do not care about state lines.
We each had stories like this, where preconceived notions of a place were found to be inaccurate when we actually visited that place. I appreciated hearing that this happens to others as well.
Generalizations and stereotypes are constructed as people try to understand other people, places and things for which they have no experience. Sometimes these are born out of conditions that are true, or were true at some time in the past. Sometimes they have very little truth to them. The best way to break through is to learn. Visiting places and speaking with people is the best way that I have found to do this. Learning about people and places through experience is the best way to understand our world and the people in it.
Image by Gidon Pico from Pixabay