Assignment 3 - Lia Jacobs - Outsiders

Only ever having lived in Missouri and Kentucky, I've never encountered anything that could be called culturally extravagant on a day-to-day basis. Furthermore, I've never ventured outside of the continental United States. Over the summers, however, we typically take a lengthy vacation to an intriguing part of the United States. My family's 'intriguing' consists of innumerable hours spent in a car, accompanied by plenty of hiking. One of the more memorable and influential of these trips was two weeks in Nevada, Arizona, and Utah.

It began in Las Vegas, a city unlike any I had seen before. My father attended a conference there, which paid for all of its attendees to stay in Caesars Palace. It was full of exactly what one would expect to see in Vegas, from bachelorette parties to old men drinking in smoke-filled casinos. For a twelve-year-old, this was quite an experience. Aside from people-watching, we enjoyed the stereotypical tourist experiences like wax museums and enormous buffets. This part of the trip only constituted two or three days, leaving the remainder for my family's preferred form of vacation. Our next destination was Zion national park where we hiked The Narrows, a river at the bottom of a large canyon. After this, we continued visiting several natural phenomena, like Canyon de Chelley with its ancient Pueblo villages.

All of our destinations had been spots that the typical nature enthusiast would have visited, but our final destination was the most impactful. My father spent several years as a child living on the Navajo reservation. His parents had both gotten jobs in a small town called Rough Rock and moved there to become the only white people in the town. This was the last stop on our western adventure. For me, it was rather uncomfortable, everybody seemed to be watching us. As we drove around the town, we saw people staring at us through their windows. It was the first time in my life I had felt like a complete outsider. All of our prior vacations had been to places full of people who spoke, looked, and acted just like us. This feeling of unwelcomeness frightened me. In retrospect, these people were probably very friendly, just simply perplexed at our presence. Twelve-year-old me thought otherwise. It showed me that I certainly do not like being an outsider, whether it be a good or bad thing. I hope to visit a place like this again, just to see if this was simply a childish fear.