Two news headlines in the past week have me thinking a lot about the nexus between travel and empathy – which, for the record, I do not believe is a sin no matter how it is being recast in the current political moment – and how fleeting connections with strangers can bridge gaps in an increasingly fragmented society. These encounters don’t have to be deep or lasting to make an impression. I couldn’t tell you the names of either of the two people who inspired this realization. We didn’t go on to become friends or even social media connections. Our paths will almost certainly never cross again. And yet, those conversations with strangers linger in my mind and put the news unfolding hundreds or thousands of miles away from my home in a more nuanced, human context.
Contradictions in the Heart of Red State America
The first of these two encounters took place at the counter of a greasy spoon somewhere in rural Oklahoma on my 2023 trip down Route 66. I rolled into a small town, the name of which has long since escaped me, in the middle of a torrential downpour with only one goal in mind: an onion burger, a Depression-era local specialty that one of the many guidebooks I poured over while planning the trip raved about.
That was my first long solo trip, and a week in, I was still adjusting to the rhythms that feel familiar now, the friendly conversations with strangers that pop up at lunch counters and in dive bars, at campgrounds and on hiking trails. And Oklahoma was quickly proving to be a masterclass in those interactions, absolutely teeming with friendly, chatty people happy to talk a while with someone just passing through.
One of the more memorable characters I met on this leg of the journey was a farmer I’ll call Red. I’m rather terrible with names and his didn’t make a lasting impression, so I will venture to guess it was something quite conventional, but the man himself was pretty unforgettable. He was a big guy, in both height and girth, probably in his mid to late 50s, wearing overalls and a MAGA hat so old and faded that I didn’t clock it for what it was right away. But being white, middle aged, and overweight brings a strange sort of privilege as a woman; I’m almost universally non-threatening, a blank slate people project their own assumptions on to.
I don’t know what this particular gentleman saw in my flannel and jeans, my muddy hikers, and my Willie Nelson braids under one of my many bandanas. But what he wanted to talk about surprised me. As we waited for our food – which was, incidentally, worth the slight detour and the hunt for parking in the pouring rain – he held forth on the wonders of wind energy. Leasing the less productive parts of his land to an energy company, he told me, was the only reason he could continue to farm the land that his family had owned for generations. Without the steady income from those turbines, he’d need an off-farm job which he informed me are “scarce as hen’s teeth”, an expression I’d only heard from folksy fiction characters up until that moment. Here was a man who embodied the Trump moment – middle aged, rural, white, probably not college educated – getting almost emotional in his gratitude toward something his party and its leader rail viciously against.
His position probably isn’t unique. Oklahoma is the third-largest producer of wind energy in the US, and the state generates almost half its power from renewables. But it was Red and his farm that I thought of when I read about a growing push to ban renewables in the state he calls home, one rooted in dubious science and populist anger along with more complex issues of tribal sovereignty and the economic tension of becoming a renewable energy leader even as oil and gas represent major employment sectors. But in a time when so much of politics is depicted as a simple battle of us vs. them, that hour or so I spent chatting with Red put a more complex and more human face on an issue that is more than a partisan skirmish for those living on the battleground.
The Empathy of Lived Experience
The irony of the drama in Oklahoma over the alleged dangers and downsides of renewable power unfolding against the apocalyptic images of Los Angeles County ablaze is inescapable. Climate change isn’t a distant possibility; it is a lived reality, and it is hard not to judge those agitating against taking action in places like Oklahoma or my own home state of Michigan, thousands of miles from where nightmare fires and storms are uprooting lives and destroying communities.
Conversations with people around me, deep in the heart of Trump’s Michigan where factories and farms drive the economy and college is looked upon with increasing skepticism, have led me to wonder how much of the lack of consensus on this fundamental challenge of our time has to do with distances never crossed. It is easy to worry more about how the wind turbines up the road impact local bird populations or what the low electrical hum of solar transmission lines means for people and animals living nearby than about wildfires or drought thousands of miles away.
There is something about seeing places with one’s own eyes, especially in the era of Instagram filters and Photoshop enhancement and AI image creation, that makes it more real. And there is something about talking to people in person, even in the casual and proscribed interactions of small talk and interacting with waitstaff or park rangers or cashiers, that weave connections that the digital world lacks.
When I see images of the hills above LA ablaze, I’m not seeing a tragedy unfolding in a distant and abstract locale. I’m seeing one of my all-time favorite hikes, down to the ruins of a 1930s Nazi compound now half reclaimed by nature and covered in graffiti. I’m thinking about the sweet pink-haired barista who pegged my midwestern accent the minute I opened my mouth and passed the downtime of a slow, chilly afternoon in a Pacific Palisades coffee shop chatting about the choices that took her from a Wisconsin upbringing to chasing dreams in Southern California. I’m thinking about parking on the street in Malibu, a surprisingly easy place to pull off for a few stolen hours’ sleep before heading north on the PCH, and marveling at the oceanfront homes stacked practically atop one another. I’m wondering how the people and the places that made the trips I’ve taken through that part of the country so memorable fared as fire ravaged their communities.
And I wonder… What might happen if collectively we decided to foster those connections, casual and fleeting as they may be? Would we care more about the world outside of the little bubbles of routine that dominate our lives? Would we be less susceptible to misleading claims from those with an agenda, or more inclined to try to understand the other side of the story?
Could travel be a part of the cure for the crisis of empathy that characterizes the era in which we live?
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