I drove eight hours today, Toronto to Chicago, and arrived without trouble. Long drives tend to scrape away the noise and leave a few thoughts standing. The one that stayed with me came from this trip: two weeks in New England, several days in Toronto, then the familiar approach to Chicago. Travel, I was reminded, is the quickest way to discover how much of what you believe about home is just local flattery repeated until it sounds like fact.
I live in the Midwest—Indiana and Illinois. For years I had heard that Midwesterners are friendlier and more down-to-earth than people on the coasts. That is the kind of thing people say about their own region, and it is pleasant to hear. Hear it often enough and you can start believing it. I did.
New England changed the picture. Two weeks there made the difference obvious, especially on the road. Drivers in New England were noticeably more civilized. Even in New York City, what bothered me was not aggressive speeding but overly cautious drivers going too slowly. Then, as I got closer to Chicago, I began running into several unhinged speeders—weaving through traffic at high speed without ever using a turn signal, as if the highway were a parking lot they could cut across. Impatient drivers were more common too, quick to lean on the horn. I had not seen that in the eastern U.S. or Canada.
In Toronto, nearly every server I encountered smiled in a way that felt warm and unforced. Their manner was more polite than what I am used to from Americans, especially in the Midwest. The food was better too, and not by a small margin.
That same pattern turned up elsewhere. My hometown has summers that sit heavy and humid and winters that are damp and cold, with no central heating; chilblains were always a risk. I had managed to decide this climate was pleasant—at least compared with the Sahara or Siberia. Then I experienced the west coasts of the U.S. and Europe and learned what people mean by springlike weather all year. Even Chicago's weather, by comparison, is better than my hometown's.
Home is home; the old saying that a shabby home beats a golden one still holds. Knowing that other places might be better does not require turning against where you come from. But there is a less flattering lesson. If you never go see for yourself, and you listen only to the compliments that make you feel good, reality can puncture that thin bubble very suddenly. When it happened to me, what I felt was not mild surprise but a jolt of shock and shame.
A note on the driving: if I am from the Midwest, perhaps I was the speeder everyone else was complaining about.