I was teaching a geography lesson today, teaching the students where 10 or so of the mainland states are.
One of the girls said, "So are all these states connected, or are there bridges between all of them? Can you drive right out of one state to another?" I said, "Yes, they are all connected, and you can drive right from one state to another. You can go right from Illinois to Iowa and back without going on a boat or a plane. You just drive."
I've learned well (so I think) the art of keeping a straight face when I teach something that seems to me to be self-evident. This is something that is so obvious to me...you can drive all the way from LA to NYC (or from Colorado Springs to Chattanooga) with nothing more delaying than construction, toll roads, and detours. No oceans in between.
But coming back from Mauna Kea Beach the other day, I think it dawned on me what it means to live on an island. Living on the mainland, there is always somewhere to go. (My mom and I were planning on going on a weekend trip to Kansas and Missouri and see Laura Ingalls Wilder's home, for example.) But here, there are only so many places you can go.
It seems so self-evident, but again the self-evident truths are some of the hardest to learn. There are only so many places you can go here. Imagine having your whole life conscripted by the ocean. You have nowhere to go but places you have already been, unless you spend choke (many) hours on a plane. This is it: you spend all your time on this piece of land that takes about 5 hours to drive around.
And my friend and I (when we went to the beach on Veterans' Day) followed a car that I swear I have seen around the neighborhood. How can you mistake it with all those bumper stickers? That's another part of island life: there are only so many people, and you are bound to run into one of them again at some point.
Self-evident truths? Huh.
Posted by at November 13, 2003 06:59 PM | TrackBack