The Midwest on the Actual West

We grad students at Iowa were going round the table for some visiting professor; we were bidden to give our names, research interests, and that vague "something interesting about yourself." Before we were half done, it became clear that we were each jumping in and saying what we thought was interesting about our classmate for them, such that by the time it was my turn, I said simply, "Well, what's interesting about me, guys?" 

One classmate immediately said, "Well, Jacob's lived in Idaho before, I think that's super interesting," and she wasn't even being sarcastic! That neighboring state I relentlessly mocked growing up in Washington, and still did when I went to college in Idaho myself, and continued to so mock whilst a Utah grad student, was here in Iowa perceived as some exotic, wild frontier by my Midwestern classmates. 

Nor was it just Idaho: My time in Utah, and origins in Washington, were likewise cited as intrinsically fascinating by classmates, more so even than my time in Puerto Rico, Mexico, or China.  Of course not everyone around the table thought these western states worthy of note; others were as baffled by the Idaho comment as I.  No, it was not all but only specifically the Midwesterners who cited my farther-Western status as fascinating.  Because for Midwesterners, who apparently already have this edge-of-civilization identity from living just west of the Mississippi, any states even further west apparently have this strange, Shangri-La exoticism and romance about them.

Corroborating anecdote: At a Halloween party, I was chatting with a classmate from Indiana who, upon learning my Pacific Northwest origin, waxed wistful on his one summer working in Wyoming, as though some place 3 states from where I grew up was part of some larger, unified "Northwest" (in the loosest sense of the word) region of wonder and wilderness.  He spoke glowingly of "the Western states" (his phrase, not mine) as some place impossibly distant and beautiful and foreign, that he might want to finally "end up" in one day, the way some people also half-dream of moving to Hawaii or Australia, as though we weren't all part of the same nation, as though he couldn't just drive there himself in a couple days tops.

But then, Midwesterners, with their endless flat expanses, never-ending strings of homogeneous communities, and corn fields stretching into infinity, would experience a uniformity of existence that could be mistaken for normalcy.  In the midst of such overwhelming sameness, where minute changes in landscape are all that can differentiate one state from a next, anything non-same must appear positively other-worldly.  Hence, any region with such variety and beauty of mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes, wildlife and forests as "the Western states" must seem strange and exotic to them indeed. 

It perhaps does not often occur to Midwesterners that they might live in the Western states as easily as they do the Midwest--it maybe requires a great reserve of strength and resolve to risk abnormality, to willingly pull one's self away from such self-evident normalcy.

Perhaps East Coast snobbery is in part to blame--the majority of Americans still, for the time being, live east of the Mississippi, and hence the East Coast still gets to define itself as the center of America.  The Midwest, then, is just close enough to the East to feel pulled into its orbits and definitions, but still just far enough away, just a tad too west of the Mississippi, to feel like they are on the outside looking in.  That is, the Midwest is still looking East, secretly pining to join the big-boys club of that coast, and consoling themselves by calling themselves "the Heartland," the very definition of normalcy--such that only in their most self-aware moments do they look over their shoulders and realize in awe that there is a whole other farther-West looming behind them, exotic, strange, dark.

This is all hyperbole of course.  Mostly, anyways.  For it has been my experience that, though I myself have always just casually considered the East Coast and Midwest as but other parts of the same country, yet still I've noted how the eyes of East Coasters and Midwesterners widen a little when they realize that my "I'm from Washington" does not refer to Maryland or Virginia.  For to them, even that other Washington, the one home to such ubiquitous mega-corporations as Microsoft, Starbucks, and Boeing, is still seen as someplace too far away to comprehend.

More samples: a friend of mine from Idaho once rolled his eyes at an East Coaster who asked in all sincerity if Idaho had paved roads; another from Utah who went to college in Detroit was asked the same of her classmates as recently as the '70s.  But then, the grandeur, variety, and sublimity of the West must just seem so un-tameable to the Midwest.  Now of course, these flat, empty expanses of open country, sure, these we can pave roads on, these we can build houses and safely settle down on!  But the true West...these are places that are conceptually beyond civilization to them. 

To which, all I can say is: Come, my Midwest friends, join us.  We are not that far away at all.  We are not even all that different.  Fear not.  A far more beautiful and wonderful world awaits you.  Life is too short to stare at the same scenes endlessly, over and over, worlds without end.  You are welcome here.  Just face up towards Canada and hang a left, don't stop till you reach the Rockies, then spend the rest of your days exploring everything in them and West of them.  It will soon feel normal to you, I promise, and you'll soon wonder why you thought endless corn fields ever felt so normal to you in the first place.