I have traveled a lot in my life, and just about every destination I have visited, I have found my fellow Missourians around every corner.
The first time I set off into the big wide world by myself was a few weeks after I graduated college when I bought a plane ticket to the place I had been dreaming of visiting for my entire life: Ireland.
I was nervous about traveling internationally all by my lonesome. I flew from St. Louis to Chicago to Dublin. I took a bus from the Dublin airport into city center and from there hoofed it with my little backpack to my youth hostel.
I didn’t know anybody around me for 4,000 miles in any direction. While terrifying, it was also exhilarating.
After settling in, I ventured into the hostel’s shared lounge where other young backpackers were talking. I was listening to the medley of accents, French, German, Irish and English, when I suddenly heard several female voices that sounded just like mine. Not just an American accent, but a flat midwestern accent.
“Oh, where are you from?” I asked the girls.
“Kirksville, Missouri!” they exclaimed.
“Kirksville? I only live an hour from there!” I replied in true amazement. How had I gone half a world away and the first people I met upon my arrival were people I might run into at a county fair at home?
Little did I know, running into Missourians while travelling would be the rule, not the exception.
The next year, one of my closest high school friends moved to San Diego. She extolled its virtues and finally convinced me to move out there and crash on her couch for a few months.
On the way, I had a layover in Denver and our flight was running late. As I disembarked the plane, I knew I had to hurry to catch my second flight. I was walking quickly up the jet bridge and I could see travelers for the plane’s return flight were lined up at the gate ready to board. Suddenly I saw a face in the line that I knew I had seen thousands of times, but as often happens when seeing someone in a different place than I expect, my brain floundered to grasp her identity.
I knew I couldn’t stop to talk because they were holding the next flight for me and I needed to rush to the next gate. Halfway there, the woman’s identity smacked me like an egg in the face. She was one of my high school teachers. I went to a tiny rural school that had fewer than 10 high school teachers. I saw this woman every day of my life from seventh grade through senior year.
What a wild coincidence, I thought.
A few days after arriving in San Diego, I was asked out on a date by a man I met at the beach. While getting to know each other, he mentioned that he was not a native but had only moved to the area the year before.
“Oh, where are you originally from?”
“Just a tiny town in Missouri,” he replied, naming a location a couple of hours from where I grew up.
Of course.
The next week, after starting a job, my new supervisor mentioned that he had just come back from visiting his home. I inquired from where.
“St. Louis, Missouri.” he said. “Have you ever been there?”
I began to wonder if I was somehow being punked.
A couple of years later, I was back living in southeast Missouri, four hours south of my hometown. I was at a Halloween party when a woman walked up behind me in line for the restroom and complimented my costume.
“Thank you, I’m—” I started to reply before seeing who I was speaking to and blurted out, “What the heck are you doing here?”
I whipped off my prop sunglasses and my old classmate, one of the only 18 other kids I graduated with, stared at me as if she’d seen a ghost. I can’t repeat her exact words in print, but let’s just say she was as surprised to see me as I was her. She was in town for the first time visiting a college friend; she had no idea I lived there, and she and her friend had decided to come to the party on a whim just minutes earlier. If we hadn’t both had to pee at the same time, we probably would never have seen each other.
The trend of meeting fellow Missourians in unexpected places continued as I met my husband, and we started traveling together. We saw a man in a hat emblazoned with “SEMO,” our college alma mater, in New Orleans. We saw matching Blues t-shirts on a couple on a Caribbean cruise. We saw people in Cardinals jerseys while walking down the street in New York City.
During a trip to Los Angeles in 2018, we got tickets to see Jimmy Kimmel. While waiting in the long line before entering the studio, we struck up a conversation with a father and his adult son directly in front of us. They said they were tourists and shared some of their favorite places they had seen in the city. We chatted merrily and eventually asked them whereabouts they were from.
“Fenton, Missouri. I’m sure you’ve never heard of it. It’s near St. Louis.”
Honestly, at this point, I’m beginning to wonder if the entire audience was made completely of Missourians, not just us four.
I’ve found out that this phenomenon is certainly not limited to myself. This story my father-in-law told me takes the cake:
A friend of his went on a Caribbean cruise and opted to go on an excursion to take a nature hike through the forest in Jamaica. While walking on the path, he looked up and saw a familiar face coming toward him. Fifteen hundred miles from home, he found himself face-to-face with a member of his recreational softball team, who unbeknownst to him was staying at a Jamaican resort down the road and decided to take a hike on the same trail that very day.
As they say, the truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.