An International Drive Along I-80

Tonight we are staying in a Flying J fuel stop in Rawlins, Wyoming where it is snowing. We’ve been on the road for 14 hours and traveled a little over 1000 miles.  For the first hour we were traversing the Bay Area.  In American Nations, Colin Woodard describes the skinny strip of the United States from the San Francisco Bay Area up through Vancouver, BC as the “The Left Coast.” It is a home of progressive liberalism; creative energy and innovation; and questioning of the status quo social, economic and religious norms and institutions.

For the next 13 hours we traveled across California, the Sierra Nevada mountains, Nevada, Utah and half of Wyoming.  This region he calls “The Far West.”  It is sparsely populated by rugged-individual, self-sufficient Americans.  Many Far Westerners originally emigrated from the Appalachian region.   These states have and are dependent on extractive industries -- mining and oil and gas in particular -- and ranching.  As a consequence, their individualism runs up against BIG federal government and large industry.  It makes for a particular identity and a complex relationship and view of government.

This journey across the spectacular western basin and range of Nevada, salt flats of Utah, Rocky mountains east of Salt Lake City, and Wyoming helped bring alive in us the idea of the stark differences among the parts of our beautiful land.  It is the natural landscape, the people who settled it, the role and our relationships with industry and the government.  It rings true that thinking about the “nations” within North America is a useful way of considering the United States.  Not a monolith.  But stark, regional differences worth trying to understand.
 

Tomorrow we leave the Far West and spend the day in Woodard’s “Midlands” which stretch out from the original Pennsylvanian colonies and their westward settlements.  At the end of the day we will turn north into Wisconsin and an extension of “Yankeedom.”  Four “nations” in two days.


-- Peter