I’ll always be an East Coaster who’s heart is pulled by the smell of fresh cut hay and cow manure, the thought of a steamy sugar house or a crisp autumn day filled with the fiery color of changing leaves. I don’t know what it is about growing up in New England that at once makes us so nostalgic for the simpler life of rural self-sufficiency, but at the same time lights a fire for the passion of a far flung adventure. Every so often I wander home and find myself torn between these sentiments, and as I grow older, I may not become wiser, but I certainly do gain the perspective of time, place, and experience to better understand these two sides of my personality. While this struggle has existed in me to some degree always, it’s when I return home that I consider it most often. The East versus West discussion can take on many forms; migration, motivation, mindset. Ultimately it’s about where we come from, and where we want to go, parts of ourselves that we can’t escape or deny.
I started writing this piece when we were still back in New England, but it’s been with me for some time before that. I’m back west now, and it’s even more apparent how different things truly are. Weather or not you grew up on the east coast we’re all a part of this discussion, we all came west at some time, unless you’re one of the people from whom we took this land, and unfortunately that’s equally as true in the east. The decision to move west is written into the blood and history of being an American, and that’s true even if you feel comfortable staying put at home on the east coast. Traveling west is part of our individual and collective manifest destiny; experiencing freedom, independence and generally being unbound. What does it mean to you, to live where you do, to travel in one direction or another, does your home call you or is it exploration you seek?
An Analogy: The Lobster
It’s not often today that you sit down to a meal and find in front of you a complete animal. We are used to elegant presentations, main courses, salad forks, and neatly defined portions of grains, vegetables, and of course, cuts of meat: steaks, chops, burgers, each in their own cleanly presented manner, bearing no resemblance to the animal it came from. Beyond the time and sweat we expand to earn the money to buy our food, when you sit down to a meal today, it is extremely rare to have any relationship whatsoever to the journey or preparation it took to bring the food to our plates. Of course we should not be tasked with the pulling off of hair or skin at the time of supper, but to never have to be part of this ritual seems odd. We should all take part in the slaughtering of chicken, the raising of calf, and the butchering of cow to better understand and nurture the sacred and intimate relationship we have, or should have, with our food.
Enter the lobster. Virtually no other meal offers such a visceral and interactive eating experience as the lobster. The cracking of skeleton, the digging out of meat, scraping away intestines and excrement, these all are part of the time honored lobster feast. Eating lobster is an east coast tradition, and my relative absence from this part of the country means it’s been some time since I’ve partaken in this privileged and butter soaked tradition. Recently though, while we were home for the summer, we were able to visit with my folks for a long weekend to “Downeast” Maine, where I was not only able to eat my first lobster in years, but I also had the additional honor of being part of my girlfriend’s first lobster eating experience. This summer was Liz’s first trip to New England, and as you’d expect it was a season of new experiences and fresh perspectives, and yes, her first time simultaneously dissecting and devouring an animal in one sitting.
Bearing witness to this experience was eye opening and shocking in many ways. While slurping and smacking, dripping in butter and cracking apart legs, I watched as Liz quietly poked and examined the beet red crustacean displayed before her. The fact that we began the meal with a course of muscles, one equally bizarre in its separations of membrane and mud, probably didn’t help her appetite. But now, literally faced with the animal she was about to eat, I got the distinct feeling she would have rather finger painted with the animals shit then suck the tender meat from its claws. This sentiment was mostly solidified as I watched her devour the fresh salad and boiled corn as if she were a starving rabbit, before returning to playing with the claws and antennae of the odd sea creature displayed before her.
“It’s green”, she lamented, as we instructed her on how to best pull apart and separate the animal’s tail from it’s body. This part of the ritual is actually even more bizarre then the simple act of cooking and eating an animal hole, being prodded and physically instructed as to the best techniques and tactics to attach the task before her. We each took turns grabbing at the animal, picking out the parts we favored, and those you’d wish to avoid.
“Don’t eat that part”
“Just throw that away”
“This isn’t edible, but if you scrape it away, you see this bit here, shaped like a knuckle? That’s delicious, just throw it in the butter first.”
It was around this point when started to get a sense of how absurd this whole thing really was, equally obvious was Liz’s discomfort, and her relative disinterest in the lobster, but still, I couldn’t understand how someone might not find the thing truly delicious. We each reached across the table to grab her dinner and display the appropriate way to crack open limbs and scrape out the meat inside. I saw the look on her face as I stood reaching over the table to her plate, my greasy hands dripping butter and seawater as I crack open limbs and the resulting spray glistens across her face and shirt. This is a little odd, I thought, not something we’d do with mash potatoes or hamburger, each taking turns sticking our fingers into her meal and encouraging her to eat it, but still, I figured with the right advice and a single butter soaked strip of meat, she’d be hooked.
As I said, this ritual of the lobster feast is one that’s uniquely east coast, particularly New England, one steeped in tradition and class, where cracking open the spine of an animal is a privileged experience that is somehow reminiscent of summer, and the finer things in life. Liz grew up in Montana, where her father literally hunted and fished the animals that became meat on her table, so it seems unfair to judge her as naive to the tender connection between man and beast, or craw-dad. In all reality, my childhood was mostly devoid of this connection, outside the occasional fish caught with an uncle. Being both professional photographers, my folks often referred to “shooting” animals but the relationship between telephoto images of songbirds and my chicken nuggets was tenuous at best.
The morning prior to our feast, Liz, my father and I spent the morning kayaking around the open, salty, tidewater ecosystem of the lower St. George river. During our travels we paddled through the thick seaweed, past numerous lobster traps, and walked across a beach with a million crushed clams before dragging our boats back home. It’s rare and lucky to have such a physically and temporally intimate relationship with your meal, both the clams and lobster came from the river just that same day. So often our food is overly processed and on average travels some 1500 miles to get to your plate. The history, tradition, and economy that makes up the Maine seafood industry seems alive an well, and to be fortunate enough to experience and appreciate such a simple and straightforward meal is a rarity in most of our lives today.
I’m not writing to wax poetic about the importance of these experiences, or a local food economy, although I think these relationships are the most important and undernourished in our world, I’ll save that for another day. No, right now, I’m just writing about this because of the deeply hemispherical and regional experience it’s borne from. The idea of East Coast. This term means a lot of things to a lot of people, but for myself, for the better part of the last decade, I’ve been traveling between the east and west, continuously pulled by the traditions and temptations of one landscape or another, and although my adventures and experiences have gained me perspective to many things, this disparity remains, and in some ways, has deepened. What is at the heart of this difference, and how can we learn from it? Where does the deep pride and often prejudice that come with being an east coaster come from? Although some of these questions seem straightforward and easy to answer, others might seem ridiculous to ask at all. I guess at the heart of it is simple curiosity, about who I am and where I’ve come from, what has shaped my worldview, but also a curiosity about action and intellect, the kind that makes up this country, shapes it’s people, how we get along and act towards each other, and more importantly, the land. America’s a big place with a lot of different people. What makes us think and act the way we do, and how can we use this knowledge to better understand and motivate ourselves to take action to move our country, and our own lives, towards a more sustainable future?
The Salty New Englander
Being from New Hampshire, and quite obviously an easterner, my personality shared characteristics with that of the lobster; salty, tough, headstrong, assertive and generally an asshole. Although it helps me to think so, laid back and chill is not a phrase that strikes at the heart of who I am. Liz is from Montana, and offers a polite and reserved counterpart to my demanding and impassioned arguments. In the time we’ve been together and the places we’ve traveled, our differences and similarities have helped to uncover some of the basic truths of this East West difference. Much like many other east coasters of my generation I’ve spent the majority of the last decade of my life living in and exploring the intermountain west. Just like all those who went before us, and the country as a whole, traveling west offered the appeal of liberation, freedom, independence and expression. Since the time of America’s “founding”, moving west has been a part of manifest destiny, the experimentation, exploration and self discovery, both nationalistically and individually, that come along with it has helped shape who we are as a nation. Liz’s own parents emigrated from Pennsylvania, and when you trace any one’s family back just a few generations, we find that no one is really “from” the west, outside of the marginalized and discriminated people who we took it from. But it’s been during this time of my life, taking my childhood and education and adding some additional experience and perspective, that I’ve again and again run into difficulties, differences, and interactions that leave me wondering, what is this dichotomy, East vs West?
My last girlfriend came pretty close to solving this riddle, but ultimately only gave a tantalizing clue that offered insight, but also shined light on an infinite number of previously un-thought of interconnections and differences. It was her father who said it really, so I have to give credit to him, and while this girl was born and raised in the west, I can’t be sure her father hadn’t also emigrated from the east bringing with him some of the shocking sense of perception that growing up in the west surely diminishes. What he said is basically summed up as this,
“It’s obvious isn’t it? The east coast has government and financial institutions, while the west has Hollywood and the pornography industry. anything goes?”
Now while this “anything goes” explanation pretty well sums up the idea of the west, cowboy culture and all, in the end it’s one of those comments that seems to explain everything, while revealing nothing. After all, most of the sick fucks surfing the porn are probably doing it from their mom’s basement in the East Coast, and the folks who established those industries most likely did so out west to escape the persecution and trouble they’d encounter doing it in the east. Again, following the pattern of escapism and discrimination that this country was founded on. Escape the British, kill the Natives, enslave Africans… escape ourselves, enslave some more, discriminate the women… It’s no wonder the fundamentalist religious and polygamous cults establish in the west, where physical isolation means the freedom to establish communities and practices outside the bounds of what mainstream society has deemed ethical or acceptable. But while this may be the case the opposite is also true, that the population density of the east makes for a relative anonymity that can let violence, discrimination, and black market economies operate without anyone even appearing to notice.
When I ask my father about the differences in east vs. west he starts with physical examples; sunsets versus sun rises, rivers running to the left or to the right, the vastness of a desert or the intimacy of an eastern forest. And while these physical differences and our surrounding environment do help to form who we are and how we act, I prodded him for more personal and cultural examples.
“People don’t talk to each other unless they’re angry”, he said about East Coasters. Now, I thought, we’re starting to strike at the core. New England has a reputation for a tradition of tight nit communities, faith, resourcefulness, and interdependence, and while I don’t mean to pick on the place, it’s something of an anomaly, a seed if you will. It’s kind of like the control, the test from which the bacteria grew out of its petri-dish, multiplied, populated, and became an infinite number of strains resistant to different environments but still related to it’s mother.
I only mention this to reinforce the understanding that we all came west at some point. Whether it was us, our parents, or theirs, as a country collectively we all moved west because we were searching for something; freedom, adventure, exploration. The migration has generally been to the left, and that continues to this day. It’s rare to hear of someone moving to the east if they didn’t grow up there to begin with. Today, when I return home and travel about, I see and feel the quaint, bucolic character that is historic New England, where seemingly nothing has changed since the 1800’s and folks still sheer the sheep and boil the sap and press the cider. But scratch a little deeper and the much more becomes apparent. Despite New England’s pastoral charm it has become just as commercialized and materialistic as the rest of the country, and overall one of the biggest differences I feel on the east coast is that everything seems to happen at a faster pace. While this feeling might have it’s roots in New England’s history of hard work and need to provide for oneself, today it takes shape as a kind of hectic distraction what doesn’t mesh with the theme of simpler times.
In many ways the quaint charm of today’s New England is just as much green wash as elbow grease. Pull up a populations density map and you’ll see how lop sided the country is. Few places along the eastern seaboard can you live and not be 500 miles within a few million people, whereas there are numerous places in the west where you can be about a thousand miles from a just a few hundred people. It’s these people and the space between them that drive the differences in east vs west, not just their sheer number but also what that sort of close proximity, or lack thereof, breeds. What they’re doing, how they’re living, and what their priorities are.
While it might seem like people on both sides of the continent have managed to distance themselves from interacting with their natural environments on anything but a purely recreational level, when considering differences on this scale, subjects like people, land, property, action and power, all start to blend together and become interrelated. The east coast’s population density means that the land has been subjugated for industrial infrastructure, homes, suburbs, and the like. While much of it may be rural, there is very little wilderness or land that is not private in the east. Meanwhile, the population scarcity of the west makes for an experience where wilderness can be exploited for its resources, whether industrial or recreational in nature. Also, the abundance of space means that when you add more people, as much of the west is experiencing, they tend to sprawl outwards like a bunch of spilled milk, paving over vast amounts of land for strip malls and grocery stores simply because they can.
Western Horizons
The intellectual nature of the east coast means that it’s where things happen, politics and government in this region make decisions not only for our country, but the rest of the world. Meanwhile states in the west are making decisions that govern their individual right to smoke pot and people generally seem more concerned with the going climbing or the radness of their ski outfit then the politics and policies that are ultimately shaping the decisions that will decide weather we’ll have a winter to play in in the future. In the east I feel like everyone is up-to-date on all the current global news, I can always find someone who can talk for hours about the possibilities and illusions of society, people who are concerned with being creative, making money and doing something with their lives. While in the west I find myself part of a culture that holds radness as sacred above all else, people who derive their identity from pitches climbed, miles run, or backcountry turns made. The push to get gnarly and announce it a daily is a part of every ones experience, out here people are busy in a different way, a different state every month, a different country every season, and a different sport every hour.
Recreation differs greatly among the coasts. Here, I’m a skier and a climber, like I said, an identity that shapes a large part of who I am and how I view the world. In the west you find a level of recreator devoted like no other. this is where the term bum really comes from, surf bum, ski bum, climbing bum. Although the real age of these “bums” is probably over, folks out west still hold this ideal to a high regard, spending weeks living out of a van, drinking shitty beer and generally living the dream. In the east, things seem to be tailor made for the weekend warrior, the working stiff who can afford all the great gear but only makes it out one or two days a week. But of course this opens the door to another reality of the East West divergence. The east is where the jobs and money are. Those living in the west, even young professional types, are generally willing to sacrifice money and luxuries to be closer to the real mountains and have more readily available opportunities to enjoy them. While this is a choice we all make consciously, willing to sacrifice these things for our love of the mountains, unfortunately I think the employers of the west understand this and take advantage of it as well. That is to say, not only do employers understand we will do anything to work and play in the mountains, but the real jobs, the challenging and cutting edge ones, those socially accepted as “worthwhile” or worth the label of career are in the east.
It’s ultimately impossible to make generalized statements about either locale. There are few hard truths and no absolutes. I didn’t write this harass anyone or make a pariah of myself, I don’t expect to answer any questions or solve any riddles, only to pose the question, to ask the unanswerable, and as a result maybe help us each take a closer look into our pasts and futures, into our choices and beliefs. These questions, although they might not be answerable, simply to ponder them might make us better humans, better friends, and better neighbors.
If you have been part of this migration, or even if you haven’t, what does it mean to you? Why have you traveled to another coast, or why have you stayed put? What is different or better, what’s the same or lacking?
I hope some of these insights, however fragile or ill conceived they might be, may help us answer these questions, or at least get us asking them. Because in the end its going to take a deep look into ourselves, our hopes and dreams, our fears and resentments, to figure out how to live together and swallow some of the pride that comes with being an American, to sacrifice parts of our lives, and our identities (of whichever side), for the benefit of the Earth we all share, the one we’re killing with our bullshit.