Midwest? West Coast?

 

It’s odd when you get to this point in your life to have something about your core identity called into question. About a year ago, I was at a training in Minnesota, and in one of the exercises, you were instructed to give a personal introduction about yourself. I described myself as being from the Midwest, and a couple of people in the room shot each other glances and made strange faces.

“What?” I asked. “I thought you said you were from Missouri,” one replied. “I am, lifelong,” I said. “That’s not the Midwest, it’s the south,” they countered.

These people, who were from the Dakotas and Minnesota, considered themselves Midwest. They lumped Missouri in with Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Arkansas. Ok, I conceded, the Bootheel, Branson, everything south us US Highway 60, oh alright, I’ll even say everything south of Interstate 44 may seem to share a certain cultural affinity with our neighbors to the south, but overall, Missouri as a whole, it definitely more akin to Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas than we are to the south.

“What Conference is the University of Missouri in?” they countered.

I’m not a college sports guy, but they had a point, and perhaps there lay the riff. In my formative college years, when I was paying attention, Mizzou was in the Big 8 Conference when I started college and expanded to the Big 12 before I graduated. When we moved to the SEC a dozen years ago, I didn’t think much about it changing my identity. I certainly wasn’t inspired to go out and paint a Confederate flag on top of my car or erect a statue in tribute to a general who fought to overthrow the United States government. Yet, here I am, branded a southerner in the eyes of my northern neighbors, all because my alma mater decided to seek a more competitive football conference.

Growing up on a farm with corn, soybeans, hogs and cattle put me more in a mindset of being related to my neighbors stretching from Colorado to Ohio than it did with those in the south and their cotton, rice and peanuts, although I knew there was a lot of crossover. I don’t know what preconceived notions people in Washington may have when I introduce myself as a Missourian, which calls into question the first half of the title of this blog. Is he really a Midwesterner? I’m now also questioning the second half: Am I really on the West Coast?

If I step out of my home for the next month, and look down the street, I see water. Were I to walk down the street, past the famous (I now know that it is famous) Stadium High School, on down the hill, I could dive into the salt water and swim out to a large ship. Were I able to board that ship (which would have been a lot easier if I’d walked a mile or two down to the port rather than swimming out to it), I could stow away, and the next time that ship came to port, I would be in China. That feels like the West Coast to me. But I’m on Puget Sound. There are no large Pacific Ocean waves crashing against the shore. The water is calm. It isn’t really the coast, is it?

Regardless of what our northern neighbors consider Missouri’s status to be, we had certainly driven through some Midwest to get here, even by their definition. It was now time to make the West Coast official beyond reproach, so we set out on a Saturday morning for the beach proper.

Twin Harbors State Park is just shy of 100 miles from our place in Tacoma, or a little less than two hours drive time. The beach is vast, seems to go forever, and apparently has few restrictions. You can drive on it, build fires… I’m not sure what you can’t do there. We allowed Mary off-leash. If we were still in the state park boundaries, this may not have been allowed, but let’s just say that we weren’t. Mary likes the water but had never been to the ocean. She was in and out of the water some, with the encouragement of a thrown stick to chase. Did she fully comprehend that if she had dived through the breakers and done her best dog paddle, she would have eventually pass by Hawaii, then arrive on the beach in Japan, or perhaps China? I cannot say. But she did thoroughly enjoy running around sniffing things.

As we were walking, we came upon a road leading inland. There was a sign at the end of the road that marked it as a Tsunami evacuation route, complete with an arrow just in case you weren’t sure whether
you should run toward or away from the sea in the event of a tsunami. I may be from the Midwest, but I had that one already figured out without the sign.