Size and Scale

I took the train to London from Aberystwyth, and with transfers it took me approximately 5 hours to get from point A (on the western coast) to point B (close-ish to the eastern coast). I cut a wide swath through the fatter parts of the East-West parts of the UK, and the train runs in less than a straight line from Aberystwyth to London. Drawing a straight line through the area, I cover approximately 212 miles (the train covers about an extra 30 or 40 miles to hit the more lived in parts of the Midlands, going through Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Coventry). Having spent some time in the southernmost lands of Illinois, this sort of travel didn't seem all that strenuous to me, and I could imagine going there and coming home in a day if pressed, especially if a good chunk of the travel was done on train.

My British friends (I found out British encompasses all the countries in the United Kingdom, but is seldom used by anyone other than the English; for lack of a better term, I will refer to the denizens of Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and the Channel Islands as British) do not see that as a short trip. After all, you go across two whole countries. You cover a good chunk of the British mainland. That is an all-day adventure.

At the pub tonight, it dawned on me why there is such a difference in attitude about travel. I was talking about this time I drove with my mother and brother from Chicago to Smithtown, New York. The trip took about 14 hours, and we passed through parts of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, a good chunk of Pennsylvania, some of New Jersey and New York (state), a total distance, according to Google, of 844 miles, nearly four times the distance I traveled to get to London. I regularly traveled from Carbondale to Chicago, a trip of nearly 330 miles, and one time I did the whole trip, there and back, in a day. It wasn't the most fun day in my life, but it was something I did. The thing is, these distances are relative. The trip to Carbondale, or the trip to Smithtown, these are trips across part of a larger whole that is America. The trip from Aberystwyth to London covers the entirety of the country.

It is an issue of scale. According to Wikipedia, the entire UK takes up 94,060 square miles of space, including the water. The land masses of Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England and the islands is approximately 92,800 square miles. To put that in perspective, there are ten states in America that are bigger than that. The entire UK wouldn't even crack the top ten states in land mass, falling somewhere between Oregon and Idaho. An interesting side note, Michigan came in at 96, 716 square miles, but over 14% of the total area is water, and when that was subtracted, it dropped to somewhere around the low 80,000s. This, though, is the kicker of all stats: the total land area (not without water, so usable land) of the 50 United States is 38 times that of the UK. That is, you could fit 38 Northern Irelands, Scotlands, Wales, Englands and the islands into America with a little room to spare. 3,537,438 square miles. Three and a half MILLION square miles.

My British friends often complain about the size of large cities in the UK, where London, Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Belfast and Edinburgh are really about it for large scale cities. Manchester, Aberystwyth (to an extent), Coventry and others fall into a medium sized cities, and then there are a smattering of smaller towns that have some recognition: Bristol, Dover, York, etc. In America, there are hundred of major cities (50 captitals, and not all of those are even that large). New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the three largest cities, have about as many people as the six largest cities in the UK. There are less people in all of Wales than in the city of Chicago by almost a third (though, one shop keeper informed Erika that there were 10,000,000 breeding ewes in Wales, and several million more lambs uncounted; so the old joke that there are more sheep than people in Wales is accurate to an almost 4 - 1 ratio).

The size of America has shaded the way I view travel here. Los Angeles to New York is roughly 2,900 miles. Identifying with all of that space, all of those people, the size of it all, will shade the way that one sees anything.