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One time I was talking to somebody in NYC and they called Colorado the “west coast,” and I looked at them with the dry death stare one acquires growing up in the Mountain West and said, “The distance from Denver to LA is greater than the distance from Chicago to NYC,” and I’ve never seen someone come that close to physically reproducing the exploding head emoji.
(For those genuinely puzzled by the above but afraid to ask: Colorado is the West, not the West Coast.)
Genuinely curious: where does the self-identification line shift?
Do folks in Sacramento think of themselves as living on the “West Coast?” What about near Yosemite? Reno?
(@seachanger, is this one accurate?)
I always think back to this one NY Times article in the 00s where the food reporter breathlessly praised the new food craze that had started in Brooklyn: banh mi.
I remember thinking, “Banh mi have been popular here in MSP, in the US, for…what, 10 years? 20 years? And have existed in Vietnam, their place of origin, for •how many• decades now?!” But no, it officially does not exist until it reaches NYC.
That’s the mindset in which somebody can think Colorado is somewhere near the Pacific Coast.
I notice and appreciate all the folks in the replies who posted the classic New Yorker cover on this topic.
My cousin from PA had that framed in her apartment back when she lived in Brooklyn.
@inthehands From my memory of living in NorCal, I'd say Sacramento yes, Reno no. Partly for distance, partly for cultural divides, partly for arbitrary political boundaries (like Colorado, Nevada is landlocked, so it doesn't have a coast anywhere).
@fgbjr
Whether the cultural line falls on CA / NV is part of what I was trying to suss out. Sacramento is landlocked, too — at least as much as MSP is, since both are a river trip from the ocean — and thus has no coast. Yosemite is part of the same mountainous region as Reno. So where does the action-at-a-distance effect of “coast” taper off?
@inthehands Kids in Sacramento can hop over to the coast for parties from Sacto, and professionals often have vacation homes there. The wine country is also close by and a big draw, with a strong coastal influence to its weather. Although it's blistering hot and dry in North Valley summers, the place has a coasty or coasty-connected feel to it. Further north and east in Lassen, Tehama, or Modoc County it's a tougher call though.
@inthehands
Can confirm that coastals, and particularly New Yorkers, and insufferably provincial. LA and NYC are the only towns that expect everyone else to know their little districts
@inthehands It's been like that for a long time. View of the World from 9th Avenue was on the cover of The New Yorker in 1976
@inthehands
Right? When did they first learn about pho? We've had pho and bahn mi in the Twin Cities since the late 80's, early 90's, after the veit/hmong refuges started opening restaurants.
Wait until they discover zilzil tibs.
So much of America missing out by not embracing immigrant communities.
@inthehands ughh there were so many of these like when they discovered there are Indo-Caribbean people in existence
@inthehands As a native Coloradan I am still salty about the summer camp kids in Minnesota who informed me that Colorado was not "western" but that California was. Validation, at long last.
@whetstone
As a Coloradan who lives in Minnesota, I can say with confidence that most of the lovely Midwesterners here have absolutely no clue where or what the West is.
@inthehands @whetstone
My friend from Seattle laughed that people used the term "Midwest". It's not west at all. It's the middle of the country He would also dispute Colorado being "The West" Texas, too. They are in the middle of the country.
@Okanogen @whetstone
These terms are of course situated relative to history, not geography. The Midwest was exactly that from the point of view of European descendants who had colonized only what we would now call the East Coast.
But if we are going with raw geography, Colorado is most certainly in the western half of the lower 48.
@inthehands @Okanogen “midwest” is no more nonsensical than “the middle east”
just tells you something about the perspective from which the naming originated
@whetstone @Okanogen
Indeed. Edward Said wrote a whole book (Orientalism) with this observation as its cornerstone!
@inthehands @whetstone After a decade detour in Utah, I will agree with "most." 
@inthehands Reno is further west than LA, but I don’t think Lake Tahoe is large enough (or near enough) for it to count as coastal.
Regions in CA are weird and depend on where you grew up. Ask a native where Northern CA is and you’ll get answers ranging from north of Redding, Sacramento, Fresno, or the San Gabriel Mtns
@inthehands I've talked with folks in Sacramento who think of themselves as living in the Bay Area.
@aubilenon Ah! I think of it as squarely Central Valley, perhaps wrongly!
@inthehands I don't really have a strong opinion as to whether the central valley extends that far north. I generally think of Sacramento as being in the stuff-that's-near-Sacramento region.
@inthehands In the other direction, it's pretty common to hear Philadelphia described as an East Coast city (we're not on the outer shoreline, but the city is an Atlantic seaport). But when I lived in Pittsburgh, at the western end of the same state, you generally didn't hear people say they lived on the east coast.
@JMarkOckerbloom @inthehands
When I was planning to move from Portland, Oregon to Pittsburgh, some of my friends referred to me as "moving to the east coast". I assured them that this was very much not the case.
This New Yorker cover captured this phenomenon well.
@JMarkOckerbloom @inthehands Philadelphia is an East Coast city, and central NJ is part of Philadelphia
@inthehands Reno is not the west coast. Sacramento is mostly transplants from LA so it does think of itself as the west coast, but it's a good question whether eg: Stockton does
@inthehands I don’t even consider Bakersfield to be the west coast, but it is because California is.
@maggiemaybe Official definitions aside, I wonder whether people from Bakersfield would consider themselves to be West Coast?
@inthehands @maggiemaybe I've been to Bakersfield and Barstow. Not a fan.
I lived in Las Vegas for nine years and I've been in Portland for 38 and counting. Neither are west coast cities and Nevada is not a west coast state.
@inthehands Rocky Mountains?
@inthehands I grew up in southern Oregon along the I-5 corridor and my sense is that everything west of the Cascades feels like "west coast", but that's purely a personal perspective.
@inthehands ...and no "coast" either.
@inthehands When I lived in LA a lawyer referred to Chicago being in the North East. As someone from New England I laughed until I realized that it actually is for court. 
@inthehands It's west of the Mississippi, so that's close enough to the pacific for military use :-)
@orc
Here in MSP, folks sometimes like to quip that because the Mississippi runs between the cities for part of the border, St. Paul is the start of the East and Minneapolis is the start of the West.
The cities are in fact neither East nor West in the “US regions” geocultural sense, but it’s a cute thought.
@inthehands of course :-) when I moved from St Paul to Minneapolis y-e-a-r-s ago I told my family that I was moving out west!
@orc
Ah, I missed that you’re a local too! So you know how you can see the mountains and cacti increasing with every inch as you cross the Lake St. bridge….
@inthehands used to be a local! I moved even further west a few decades ago.
@inthehands NYC is easily the most location-chauvinist mindset in the US. Think of how much NYC-based media assumes the rest of the country knows (or cares) about the geographic details of the boroughs, or the minutiae of perceived civic differences between them, while at the same time assuming that (say) LA and SF are basically the same place.
@inthehands@hachyderm.io The one that cracked me up is my coworkers in Florida calling Colorado "the Midwest".
Uh, no, buddy... it's "the West" or "the Rockies".
It's always annoyed me that we call it the "Midwest" when really it should be the "Mideast". The Mississippi River is on the east side of the US, so the entire "Midwest" is also on the east side of the US.
While I'm ranting, I also think we should get rid of the letter "C" from the alphabet. It's superfluous.