Air Travelers Display Their Spokaneness

Air travel invites you to review your biases about Inland Northwesterners.

I’ll give you an example.

About a week ago, I was in an aisle seat on a late-night flight from Minneapolis to Detroit. The woman across the aisle seemed sane, so there was no need to resist when she initiated small-talk.

We didn’t discuss anything personal. But I quickly formed an opinion. She was good-natured and unpretentious. She was, it seemed to me, someone who could fit in quite nicely in Spokane.

As the plane was about to land, one of her seatmates asked her where she lived.

I listened to hear her answer.

“Spokane, Washington,” she said.

I thought about that a week later while sitting at Gate 43 in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, waiting for a flight back home to Spokane.

I’ve joked in the past that one can always identify a boarding area full of Spokane-bound passengers because everyone looks slightly dazed. That observation has always been based on the unfair prejudice that people going to Spokane tend to lack a certain polish and outward sophistication. (And never mind that yours truly is seldom described as slick in appearance.)

But while surveying the crowded gate area, I had a realization. It was this: Though I still think of Spokane area residents having a slightly, uh, relaxed and casual look, my assumptions about them as people are positive.

OK, that’s not exactly “Stop the presses!” stuff.

But think about your own set of ingrained regional generalizations. Surely it’s not uncommon for people around here to occasionally find themselves thinking, “Well, we might be a somewhat rumpled lot, but there are lots of worse things.”

Not far away, a man who appeared to be in his 30s was sitting on the floor and talking to a couple of women who sat in chairs. All were headed to Spokane for some sort of church conference.

Maybe it was because I was tired. But this guy struck me as one of the most annoying people I’d ever encountered. He was loud. And not only would he refuse to shut up and let the women get a word in, but he employed a relentless stream of cloying psychobabble in an effort to show everyone within a quarter-mile radius how in touch with his feelings he was.

I never heard him say where he lived.

But even if there hadn’t been other evidence, I would have known. It wasn’t Spokane.

After a while, you start to get a sense about these things. , DataTimes MEMO: Being There is a weekly feature that visits Inland Northwest gatherings.