Home is where the apex predator is

 
The girl at the train station loves, loves, loves her town, which is cold and empty and expensive and unreachable by cars. And, as an added bonus, polar bears amble down the street every so often to see the sights and forage for food, which could include incautious locals.

Still, she’s crazy about the place and her decision to move there from a much bigger city with more heat, more creature comforts, lower costs and decidedly fewer apex predators. She’s young, yet, and she might change her mind someday, but right now she loves knowing everyone in town and having everyone know her. She loves the quiet and the crisp winter air. She loves conversing with tourists and then sending them on their way.

It’s easy to lose track when you travel by air, especially if you’re spoiled like I am with O’Hare airport 12 miles from home and a non-stop flight going anywhere. Take a close look, though, and you realize that the world is a gigantic canvas of empty space with a few human settlements to break up the monotony. Some of
the settlements have obvious appeal, but others require a footnote or two.

Whenever I head out to some isolated stretch of land, I wonder about the people who choose to live there. What made them decide that this cold stretch of barren wasteland would be a great spot to settle down, maybe raise a family, maybe build a life?

I talk to the locals whenever I travel and they all have their reasons for coming, or for staying, in a town that wouldn’t make my top 1,000 list of home towns. Unlike Mr. Rogers, they don’t want to be my neighbor, either. They like where they’re at just fine and there’s no way to convince them that big-city life is worth a spin.

We’re all the same, at least in theory. We all have the same hierarchy of needs and pretty much identical genetics. Hair and eyes and skin and height and weight will vary all over the place, but the fundamentals are the same at birth. Our vision is shaped by our experiences, though, and the girl in the train station cannot help but see the world much differently than I do, and vice versa.

In a very real sense, we live in different worlds. Both of us need to survive and thrive in the environment we’ve chosen, which can lead to markedly different interpretations of the same developments, sharply different views of normal and safe and sane.

No matter how hard we try, we all end up in some form of echo chamber, relishing the reassurance that comes from familiar voices. We engage mostly with people who live near us, look like us, and share our educational/economic/religious/cultural histories. We mock the people who take a deep dive down the rabbit hole, but pretty much all of us slide into our own circles of trust, unintentionally and unaware.

I have no idea if the girl in the train station is trapped in an echo chamber, or which chamber it might be. As I listened to her story though, she helped to lift me out of mine.

There's another trip or two on the agenda and we'll be meeting some strange ducks, or other waterfowl, along the way. Be sure to read all about it by clicking here to subscribe.

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