“Dad, why are you taking all those pictures of digital maps?” A worthy question; the stranger to my right in 22C probably thinks to himself, “What a weirdo…” but so far he’s too polite say anything. As the caption at the bottom of this snapshot indicates, my twenty-two-year-old middle son and I are enroute to Denver, Colorado, to be with my mother, two brothers, and sister-in-law during my mom’s cancer surgery. She is coming off of several months of chemotherapy–it’s been rough for her; it will be good to spend time together.
As I seek to occupy my mind during the interspersed moments of boredom inherent in traveling, I am intrigued by just how much an observer can glean about the topography of the country by perusing a simple flight map while entrenched in a United Airlines 757 economy seat. (no endorsements received). The seven or eight photos I’ve taken reveal much about the middle of America and the High Plains, but concerning our current question of lessons-learned from Wheaton, Illinois, and its suburban environs, the attached picture is also enlightening.
A few posts back, in a blurb entitled Arriving, I referenced the patchwork quilt of suburbs around the city of Chicago. Now, frozen in my seat, I hearken back to this metaphor as I zoomed into Chicago, as far as the United map would allow me. I was more than bemused by the resulting image. As you can see, it’s as if the quilter used greener patches of cloth on the left (west) side of the quilt, revealing where Illinois corn fields and farmlands still predominate, saving the tan and gray hues for the suburbs in the middle of the image, with the most solid gray and white pieces representing the real urban core of Chicago stitched onto the right side of the quilt. (Then of course there’s the deep blue of Lake Michigan). It’s remarkable how evident these zones are, even from an assumed vantage point hundreds of miles in space.
The quilter (OK, actually our digital map maker) has done us the further courtesy of highlighting the predominating roads and freeways in Northeastern Illinois. I also would guess there may be some artistic license taken in the color shading of the map, but the essence of the colorization across this image and the others I took of the wider continent remains true to reality. (If nothing else, I can base this judgement on an adulthood spent observing the seasonal hues of the nation through an airline window during flights back and forth across the country.)
Now here’s the mental stretch…we could almost begin to guess at the style of stories, the experiences, the culture, the attitudes, speech, traditions, and outlook of individual people by the shade of their section of the quilt. Of course, this venture risks ridiculous generalizations, but it’s safe to say that someone who grew up on the far left of the quilt in the solid green has had a very different life experience than someone who has spent a lifetime in the solid grays and whites to the right. And then there’s the browns of the High Plains, much farther to the west of this particular image.
Let’s steer clear (hopefully) of urban versus rural tropes. While generalizations can be informative, I have little desire to engage in broad, statistical social science using this image as a guide. Such attempts at quantification will inevitably end up sounding like a tenth-grade sociology textbook, ugh. Instead, I care more for the stories of the individual. I can never tell them all, but rather than in the empirical, the joy is in the telling and reading of the personal. That has been and will continue to be my task.
For a moment though, it is perhaps useful to think big thoughts. Ask yourself, what color was your swatch of cloth (or perhaps you moved often and experienced many hues?) How did that shape who you are and how you think? We will continue to delve.
(I love receiving feedback, and I’d appreciate hearing your stories.)
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