(Special submission by friend of the blog, Barry Karr, Director of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry)
When I was 13, my parents packed up the whole family into a RV and took us on a several week cross-country trek across the United States. We started in Western New York, traveled across the northern section of the US, down into California, and heading back across through the southern states. (On a historical note, we were there at San Clemente, Calif., the day Nixon flew there after resigning the presidency.)
Anyway, one day, while we were doing the sights in San Francisco, we went into a little pizza restaurant near Fisherman’s Wharf to get lunch. There were seven of us, my parents and five kids. While behaving like kids, and eating pizza as fast and furious as kids are famous for, a husband and wife sitting at the table next to ours got up to leave (I am not sure if they were leaving because of us). They asked my parents if we’d like the half pizza or so that they had not touched. I don’t recall if my parents (at that point) accepted or not, but they did engage the couple in a bit of a conversation. The usual things came up like what were we doing, what we were visiting, where were we from etc. Then the conversation went something like this:
My Father: “we’re from New York State”
Woman: “That’s interesting, so are we, but we moved away some years ago.”
Father: “Really, what part of New York?”
Woman: “The western part of the state.”
Father: “So are we, what town?”
Woman: “Well, it was such a small town, if I said it you’d never have heard of it. We were from a town called Arkport.”
Father: “That’s where we’re from!”
Much more conversation and catching up on family and mutual friends followed. And, without doubt, we took the pizza.
[EDITOR: There’s a definite theme with people with precisely common roots running into one another in far-off locations. I particularly like the common assumption that “it’s too small for you to have heard of.” It further increases the oddity of the run-in simply because the number of people who could have any connection to the town in question is severely reduced. And yet we see it a lot. Is there any meaning behind it? Did they learn anything from this endeavor, or make a connection that was of particular value? It doesn’t sound like it. There’s no lesson to be learned. But it just shows us that unlikely events like this clearly happen for no reason all the time. Which means occasionally they’ll happen even when there does appear to be some hidden message. But that’s only to be expected.]
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The one thing that really sticks out of this story for me is the location of the meeting, Fisherman’s
Wharf in San Francisco. Here’s what the San Francisco Chronicle has to say about that location:Last year, almost 12 million people made their way to the Wharf. In international surveys, it ranks as the No. 1 destination for SF-bound visitors, right ahead of Chinatown and the Golden Gate Bridge. http://www.sfgate.com/neighborhoods/sf/fishermanswharf/
So, you can see how 12 million visitors increases the odds of meeting someone from your own town. Now, if they had met in Tasmania, Australia, Volgograd, Russia or The Republic of Chad, a landlocked country in Central Africa, I would definitely be impressed!
I can top that, by a little bit (Arkport lists as pop 844 currently, my story refers to a town of 300). I was waiting to catch a bus in Baltimore at the Convention Center (well, OK, next to the Harbor which is about as touristy as Fisherman’s Wharf). The lady dispatching buses had a distinctively familiar, non-Baltimore accent, so I asked here where she was from. I got the “small town you wouldn’t have heard of” reply, but also “Oregon”, to which I replied, “try me, I’m from Oregon too.” “Dundee”, she replied. “Well, I went to elementary school in that town, back in the 1950’s,” I informed her. The clue here is that even though we think we all speak the same language and can generally only pinpoint a few dialectic differences, dialects really do differ enough to tell, even in the U.S. When I first heard the woman in question speak, I identified a familiar accent and knew in advance she was from the western part of the country, although admittedly not a close to home as it turned out. In that light, the coincidence is not so striking.
In 2000 my wife and I were cycling on the Oregon Coast. In Tillamook we saw another couple on bicycles but didn’t approach them. Later that day we were on the longest climb of the day and stopped to take in the view. Another couple on bicycles were descending and stopped to chat with us. It was the same couple we had seen earlier that day. We noticed one of them had a jersey that said “The Great Peanut Ride – Emporia, Virginia”. We asked if they were from Virginia. No, they were from North Carolina. We told them we were from North Carolina. Where in North Carolina? Greensboro. We were from Greensboro too.
We went our separate ways, then later that evening we went to a restaurant. As soon as we walked in we saw the other couple again. We had dinner with them. We have seen them on bicycles around Greensboro a couple of times since but we aren’t really friends.
My family moved from a small town in Pennsylvania to San Diego in 1965. In 1986, I was having dinner with a group of about 10 people, mostly strangers to me, and the subject of being from small towns came up. A man across from me said, “I’m from a very small town,” and I replied, “You can’t be from as small a town as I’m from.” “Where is that?” he asked. “Jeannette, PA,” I replied, adding for clarification, “it’s near Greensburg.” “I know,” he said, “That’s where I’m from!”
Turns out his mother went to high school with my father, and neither had heard from the other in the intervening 40 years.