Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1997/05/14/kudzu_and_ivy.php
Wednesday, May 14, 1997
It was my second day as a Dartmouth student and my DOC trip was descending a rugged White Mountain peak that had been enveloped by clouds all morning. Suddenly the clouds lifted and we were bathed in the warmth of the September sunlight. We had all paused in wonder as the lush valley was unveiled below, when a student behind me exclaimed, 'SUN!' I instantly wheeled around and offered my instinctive reply, 'yea-h... what ch'ew need?' Judging by his confused reaction, the use of 'son' as a masculine pronoun is wholly unique to the Southern lexicon.
I have always been an unapologetic Southerner. I become misty-eyed at the opening arpeggios of 'Sweet Home Alabama,' I read Faulkner feverishly, and I wrote my Dartmouth admissions essay on the Dukes of Hazzard and the Allman Brothers. I have had no known relatives north of the Mason-Dixon line in the last three hundred years, but after 18 years in Hixson, Tennessee I've traded in my beloved waters of the Tennessee River for the frozen ones of the Connecticut. Being a Southerner at Dartmouth has been quite a culture shock, but I've grown quite fond of New England. Still, life in the Nawth is not without its idiosyncrasies.
Dartmouth's culinary offerings came as one of my first surprises. I could lament the absence of good chicken and dumplings, mashed potatoes, or barbeque pork-chops, but there is one more immediate and glaring problem: grits. They can be found at the Hopkins Center, but anyone who dared serve such low-quality grits in the South would be quickly dispatched by a tire iron, two-by-four, or a broken Jack Daniels bottle. The problem is the fundamental approach to the whole situation. Grits are not health food, but are essentially vehicles for salt, butter, and, on occasion, cheese. Hop grits are dried out, occasionally crispy, and so congealed that they can't even be poured. The Good Lord didn't intend grits to be solid food and I shouldn't have to add three packs of butter to make a small bowl fit for human consumption.
Football is an entirely different affair in the North. My freshman fall I casually mentioned the SEC in a conversation about the University of Georgia. One girl in the group looked at me and asked with an air of disdain, 'What is THAT?' The Securities and Exchange Commission be damned, in the Southland, the Southeastern Conference is only slightly less recognized than the Holy Trinity. I use sacred terms intentionally, because in the South, college football is a religion. In the tradition of the Inquisition, my friend's father, a local sportswriter, routinely receives death threats after his annual predictions for the Alabama-Auburn game. Every fall Saturday, thousands of middle-aged pilgrims don orange warm-up jackets, orange and white striped Zubaz pants, and orange foam mesh University of Tennessee caps. They pack their families into their custom vans (always emblazoned with a UT spare tire cover) and head due north to Neyland Stadium, where they fill the 96,000 seats to capacity without fail, scream 'Go Vols,' and belt the chorus of 'Rocky Top' until they're hoarse. Just as Southerners must have a church affiliation, you must also have an SEC affiliation. Personally, I am the proud progeny of a University of Mississippi alum and abhor the Vols. Still, I do miss the pageantry and excitement of it all. Contrast this with Dartmouth — no one really shows up for games, no one can recite the team roster from memory (let alone one from thirty years ago), and no one really seems to be concerned about this but me.
Besides SEC football, Southern culture revolves around social events and Southerners are more than proportionally represented in the fraternities and sororities of Dartmouth. But not all of the Greek system makes sense to me. At several Dartmouth fraternities you'll find hordes of brothers clad in Mossimo shirts, tight black jeans, and new white athletic shoes. As the soulless techno or eighties music provides a full frontal assault on the senses, they swoop out of nowhere onto the dance floor and paw at any girl in sight while spouting epithets reminiscent of the prodigious Vanilla Ice. Simply put, this would not happen in the South. Not surprisingly, most of these fraternities draw heavily from Long Island and New Jersey, who boast exemplary citizens and cultural icons like Joey Buttafuoco, Amy Fisher, and Jon Bon Jovi. You can write it off as backwards sexism, but Southerners still have some sense of chivalry. By our cultural norm, borderline sexual harassment is not how you win someone's affections.
Music in the North is drastically different. I grew up only a couple hours away from Atlanta and Athens where I was exposed to incredible music and where musicians are always well-supported. At Dartmouth, no one will show up to support a great band, opting instead to dance the night away to the digitized boom-chicka-boom-chika of a deejay. My childhood heroes were drawn from the ranks of New Orleans jazzmen and the blues masters of the Mississippi Delta. Hixson is by no means the cultural mecca of the free world, but it saddens me to see classmates who rarely engage themselves in music, let alone contemplate it. As one freshman from Ohio asked me, 'If jazz musicians are so good, how come you don't see them on MTV and VH-1, huh?'
But nothing is more unique to Dartmouth than the weather. I once believed, in my Southern naiveté, that hibernation was only for bears and squirrels. I was wrong. In what many have called the 'mildest' winter in recent years, I discovered why Stalin sent Russian dissidents to Siberia. The snow was gorgeous for about a month. I thought that snow remained on the ground in the winter and was eventually followed by one (1) 'mud season,' which was generally agreed to be unpleasant. Wrong. Mud-season was not a singular event, but a four-time affair stretching from February to late April. In the South, I could go running in a T-shirt and shorts even on some January days. Here, my daily run was impossible unless I wanted to recreate an Icecapades show scripted by Kafka or the Three Stooges (depending on your perspective).
I was initially worried that all Yankees behaved with the hostility of the
stereotypical New Yorker. I'd rather not visit Boston or New Haven again, but I feel right at home in Hanover. New Hampshire folks are not much different than Tennesseans. They drive big trucks, chew tobacco, and get into barfights. But, more importantly, I appreciate their friendliness, their earthy courtesy, and their complete lack of pretension. Perhaps Siberia isn't all bad.