Back to school

Hamilton Smith, my home for the next 2-3 years.

Now that I'm back in school, my culture shock is subsiding. Students are pretty much the same everywhere. There aren't nearly as many nalgene bottles, and the Death Cab and so-Cal punk patches on backpacks have been replaced by Guster and Phish and Vampire Weekend, but other than that, they're pretty much the same. Weirdly enough, not many young people speak with that classic thick New English accent (you won't hear of an eighteen year-old going fah in the cah)--it's mostly a thirty-five and up kind of thing. Not sure why.

Also, people seem to wear flannel and plaid-print shirts here in a completely straight-faced, un-ironic way. I guess that's what happens when your home doesn't have a rich history of lumberjacking to stereotype.

I've had all three of my classes now, and I enjoy them. My professors are all great and the vibe in the MFA program is laid back and intelligent. I really like all the fiction people, and I can't wait to start workshopping. Off to write now.

Five questions for New Hampshirites (and New Englanders in general)

1. What's up with all the bunting? It's everywhere, along with tons of American flags. I've never been to a place that has so much red, white and blue. We drove past a house that had an American flag in every window (and the old houses here have lots of windows)! There are Obama-Biden stickers everywhere, and a surprising number of still-hanging-on Kerry-Edwards stickers. Some sort of New English pride thing, maybe? All of this I can understand, except for the bunting. I don't think I've ever seen bunting outside of period films, and now it's everywhere. What's up with all the bunting?


2. How are west coasters supposed to eat here? Food here is generally cheaper than back home (no sales tax, sweet), but we're finding it difficult to find some of our staples: no Tilamook cheese, yogurt, or sour cream; no Adam's peanut butter or gourmet peanut butter of any kind; no Hershey's syrup (that one's weird); and on a weird note, it's not called Dreyer's ice cream over here, it's called Edy's, even though it's the exact same product.


3. Why so serious? A mean way to put it would be that everybody is just a little uptight, but that's not quite accurate. Ash characterized it as a lack of west coast earnestness, which is a good way to put it, but I think there's also a lack of self-deprecation. Everything is important. And with good reason: Dover was established in 1623, a donation from Andrew Carnegie helped establish the University of New Hampshire, and many local restaurants, no matter how skeezy, proudly trace their history (Asia Fantasia! Fine Chinese and Korean takeout since 1958!). This all isn't to say New Hampshirites don't joke or have fun—we bought our bed from a jocular, elbow-nudging old guy named Frank—but there's kind of a current of seriousness running beneath everything.


4. Why does your traffic suck so bad? Everybody gets backed up at the tolls as people frantically lane change between the cash, EZ Pass, and exact change lanes—that's to be expected. But why does Dover, with barely 26,000 people, get swamped by bumper-to-bumper traffic during rush hours? I have two theories about this. Firstly, the town is so old there's no grid system—streets intersect at weird angles, there are no stoplights where there should be, occasionally stoplights where I'm used to seeing stop signs, pedestrian-only roads, giant six-way intersections where two or more of the roads are one-way.... it's a giant mess. I'm getting used to it, though. Secondly, nobody here takes the bus. Everybody drives. I'm hoping this changes when school starts and the students return.

5. Why is wine so expensive? When we find bottles we recognize from Bellingham and Seattle, they're four to seven dollars more expensive. The local stuff is expensive too, although oddly the French imports aren't too much more than they are at home. What makes this even weirder is that beer is much cheaper than in Washington (haven't compared liquor yet). As we are too poor to afford a $13 bottle of wine that tastes like a $6 bottle, this makes Ashley very sad.

This came out a little gripier than I intended. Sorry New Hampshirites, I really do like your state! It's just the little things that hang me up and make me remember I'm not at home. Last night my friend in New York posted a Facebook status update about a meteor shower from midnight to five a.m. Man, I thought, wouldn't it be cool to be on the east coast so I could see that? I didn't realize until this morning that I am on the east coast, and, had it been clear last night, I would have seen the meteor shower. This is going to take some getting used to.

Road Trip Day 2: Biker Gangs

We just happened to be driving through South Dakota near the beginning of the 69th annual Sturgis Motorcyle Rally, an event that draws more than half a million Harley Davidson owners to a little town in western South Dakota. Harleys blew past us in the fast lane all day, riding in groups or by themselves, towing motorcycle trailers or flashing American flags.

As we approached Spearfish, where we planned to stop for the night, Harleys passed us in droves. They swarmed off I-90 to the fast food restaurants and bars. We ate dinner at Arby's and looked for a motel with vacancies, but no luck. It was almost dark, and I didn't want to drive the trailer at night, but we had no choice. We continued on past Sturgis to Rapid City, where the hotels were also full of Harley riders. Eventually we found a room (smoking, ugh) in a Days Inn I'm pretty sure was occupied exclusively by bikers. When I went out to get my clothes from the car, a big drunken group of them stumbled down the stairs from the second floor.

So Sturgis made our evening a pain, and we were both sick to death of seeing bikers and their bikes—especially when two of them set up camp directly outside our window in starred-and-striped folding chairs to chain smoke and talk bikes—but I liked the idea of it. I liked that without corporate sponsorship, an event can unify a culture like that. In the last few years, Sturgis's rally has drawn between 500,000 and 750,000 bikers. They catch up, carouse, compete in races and events, and generally have a great time. It's kind of a grass-roots American culture thing that doesn't happen that often anymore, and I'm glad I got to see a little bit of it.

Road Trip Day 2: Clerks

Outside our motel in Drummond

Whew. I'm catching up on the road trip business as fast as I can so I can move on to actual life in NH. Sorry for the flurry of posts--soon I'll slow down.

Everybody in these Montana towns seems to know each other. The night before I saw the motel clerk chatting up the good old boys about trucks, and before we left Drummond that morning we stopped at a gas station where the clerk and the customers all seemed to know each other. I guess that happens in a town of 318 people (thanks Wikipedia) where the biggest thing that happens every year is a cattle meet.

Montana's mountains flattened out and we drove, drove, drove. Montana is BIG. I-90 stretches for 552 miles across the state (again, thanks Wikipedia) and for more than half of them there's not much to look at. We stopped in a town called Columbus to buy food, and felt like total out-of-towners when we got lost and bumped our Taurus and U-Haul trailer through tiny residential streets, searching for the grocery store. When we did find it, we rushed in to locate the bathroom and speedwalked a full circle around the store before realizing the bathroom was right next to the entrance. We bought our food and checked out. The clerk, an older woman, had a friendly chat with the woman in front of us about finances, the economy, and her job at the supermarket--they knew each other. When we got to the front of the line she stopped talking, ran our food through the laser and shoved it in bags, and wouldn't make eye contact. She only responded to us when I asked if I had to sign the receipt. At first I was puzzled--what had brought this on? There could be a number of things:

The rude clerk left me in a bad mood for the rest of the drive out of Montana. Were we really such obvious foreigners? And was it normal to treat foreigners with such disdain? Then I realized what had probably brought this on: Ashley's dress. The woman glared at it a few times. It's a red dress, very cute, not too flashy, but definitely out of place in Columbus, where most of the women (and all the shoppers in the IGA were women, many with kids) wore mom jeans and blousy shirts. I don't think the red, slightly low-cut dress went over well in the little town full of rural Montanans, kids, and churches.

It made me think about standards of taste. What is perfectly acceptable in Western Washington (Ashley wore the dress to her sister's wedding for God's sake) is viewed as too dressy, too revealing, too whatever, in other parts. It made me nervous for arriving in New Hampshire—I might have to relearn all these little social codes I'd never really thought about. I might piss people off without even realizing it. More thoughts on stuff like this as it comes.

Here's a lovely brochure from the Sky Motel in Drummond: