My first trip to New York City was with my college roommate Jean during the first semester of my freshman year. We took a two-hour train ride along the Hudson River south into the city. From the second we stepped out of Grand Central Terminal, I was assaulted by the sights and sounds of NYC. Darting vehicles swarmed in the streets and hordes of people crowded the sidewalk. The buildings all seemed too tall to me — how could you possibly navigate when you could hardly see more than a block ahead of you at a time, could hardly see much sky? I felt hemmed in and overwhelmed.
Eventually I would come to appreciate cities. I learned to navigate by street maps, grids and signs, rather than geographic markers; I learned to hear specific sounds — car horns, rumbling trains, people, vendors — where before I had heard just noise. In short, I began to recognize and understand everything that so overwhelmed me about New York City.
But on that first day, all I saw was too much. Near the end of our day trip to the city, just after twilight, I tugged at Jean’s elbow, pointing. “Look,” I said. “The first familiar thing I’ve seen all day.” It was a Coleman propane stove, set up to light the jewelry a vendor had on display.
College — leaving Maine — brought its own kind of culture shock. There were things that my new classmates had never done before that shocked me, and things that I had never done that shocked them. I had never been part of a music “scene,” something that I roughly understood to mean going to see certain bands at certain clubs on a regular basis. They had never had an epic road trip 2½ hours south to Portland to see their first concert, sleeping in the car afterward. I went to the Dysart’s truck stop after my high school prom along with everyone else. My new classmates actually knew people who had taken limos, something I thought happened only in romantic comedies and magazines.
I’ll never forget one of my high school friends’ mothers recounting her first phone conversation with the mother of her son’s soon-to-be new roommate about what their boys should be bringing to their Massachusetts dormitory.
“I told her that we lived out in the woods. She said ‘Oh yeah, there are woods by my house, too.’ I told her, ‘No, really, we have deer in our yard every morning.’ She said, ‘Oh yeah, we see deer too.’ Well, then she asked me how far a drive it would be to the nearest Target for me. I told her a little over an hour. She said ‘What? Oh my god! You really do live in the middle of nowhere.’”
Little differences cropped up often when I left the state to go to college. I was unimpressed by the wildlife around campus — I was used to fox kits playing in my driveway — but I had never eaten sushi or seen anyone eating sushi to know how to go about it. Chopsticks? Fingers? I copied the person on my left and tried to look like raw fish wrapped in rice had always been a part of my diet.
Some of the dissimilarities went deeper. I felt intimidated by some of my new friends’ apparent worldliness, their academic confidence and awareness of global issues. But I also was surprised by how quickly they gave up on simple things like broken washing machines, mismatched shelves and ill-fitting clothing. There’s a bit of truth in what they say about Yankees and a thrifty, can-do attitude. I hemmed pants and mended shelves. If the dormitory washer was broken, I did my clothes by hand. “I wouldn’t have thought of doing that,” one friend told me.
It was a learning experience for all of us. Partway through college, I took great joy in bringing three of my best friends north to see Maine. I’ll never forget their reactions. When they first arrived, one of my friends kept saying, “It’s so quiet here — I can’t get over it!” But after just three days on a Maine lake, she learned to listen to it differently — just as I once had learned to “hear” beyond the noise of New York City.
“It’s actually not that quiet,” she said. “There are always birds, the sound of the waves on the water, wind in the trees, your neighbors. I just didn’t know what to listen for at first.”
Have you experienced a moment of culture shock, within Maine or outside of it? E-mail your experiences to meg@margaret-adams.com.
Meg Adams, who grew up in Holden and graduated from John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor and Vassar College in New York, shares her experiences with readers each Friday. E-mail her at meg@margaret-adams.com