Geography Lesson

Another thing that you are likely to know little about if you move—even part-time--to another country later in life is geography. Before I came here, I knew that Canada had provinces, not states, but I couldn’t have named them all. Indeed, only yesterday while trying to name them all, I could not find New Brunswick located in my mental files anywhere. Wasn’t that I had forgotten it: it just wasn’t there. And you are also, unless you have traveled extensively in the country before you move there—which I hadn’t— unlikely to know much about how its parts are located relative to one another.

When I was in the sixth grade in Idaho, I distinctly recall learning that Canada’s plains states (what did we know about prairie states?) were Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba, and I was encouraged to remember them with the mnemonic device SAM. As a result, I always think that the province next to B.C. is Saskatchewan. I still can’t name one large city in Saskatchewan other than Saskatoon. It astounds me to think that Manitoba has polar bears (at Churchill) or that B.C., so far away from Massachusetts, is a big cranberry growing area. My ignorance about the geography of Canada is so extreme that it doesn’t surprise me that they don’t want to let me live here full-time.

I was bewailing this lack of knowledge the other day to Ed, who reminded me that Americans don’t know that much about their own geography, so maybe it's just a general problem either for everyone or at least for Americans. It is true that if, as an evening’s party entertainment, you give your (American) guests a sheet of typing paper (computer paper, I mean), have them turn it landscape direction (as opposed to portrait), and ask them to roughly draw in the 48 connected states that are south of Canada and north of Mexico, the results are unlikely to be all that impressive. In my experience of doing this, people tend to know the part of the country they’re from or that they’ve lived in, but become pretty vague at best (hopelessly lost at worst), about most other parts.

A simpler version of this is to draw a vertical line somewhere toward the middle of the paper, call it the Mississippi, and get the states on each side of the river from north to south, in order. Here’s a hint: it’s Minnesota at the top and Louisiana and Mississippi at the bottom. Fortunately, I had a daughter, a daughter-in-law, and a son-in-law in school at the University of Minnesota so I got to see the Mississippi right there, with my own eyes. Something of a surprise there, too.

Well, this may all just be that kind of foolish, book knowledge, knowledge about words (or places, in this case) that the elites value but that real people don’t care much about. Why does it matter if you don’t know where to put Delaware on the map if you aren’t going there? Why does it matter if I can’t even remember that New Brunswick is one of the provinces of Canada? It’s a province, whether I know it or not. I think I just feel more settled in my mind if I can explain something about where I am and what’s around me. I feel more like I'm entitled to be there. Not only that, but if Delaware or New Brunswick ever become an issue, I’ll at least know where (or that) they are. What if, say, Sarah Palin had been from New Brunswick? Or even Delaware? I'd know whether or not she could see Russia. Or Maine. Or Washington, D.C.