“It’s the little differences,” Vincent said to Jules. And he was right: It’s the little differences “out east” that add up to make us feel
like foreigners in our own country. There are toll roads everywhere, and ticks,
and different accents and speech patterns, and different grocery-store chains,
and startling population density. And, excluding DC, which seems like one big national
park, there are very few national parks here. (Do people here know how they got
robbed, park-wise?)
But it’s the big differences too. Ticks are small, so they’re a “little” difference in that sense, and of course we have them out west too, but they are Quite Prevalent here. For a tick-phobic person like me, this is a big fucking deal.
And the humidity! Good god, the humidity. On the shores here, especially with tropical-storm activity announcing its presence with authority in the Gulf and Atlantic, the humidity has been running about 93%. NINETY-THREE. It makes what should be a pleasant 75-degree high temp into a misery of soggy heat. Our only escape is getting into the van on some invented errand so we can run the A/C.
The lack of federal camping is also a big thing. With Frank’s senior discount, our camping fees out west averaged about $8 per night. Here, we have to rely more on state parks where the nightly camping fee is often more than $30 (even for a nonelectric site!). The difference between $8 and $30+ adds up really fast, you know?
And this should be a little thing, but I’m finding it’s not: The trees are wrong. I love the leafy trees and the way the sunlight dapples through them. But they have become a symbol: This is not home. And all the leaves these trees dropped last fall, and possibly a few falls before that, carpet the ground. It’s scenic, but it’s a haven for ticks. See above.
Yes, there are some evergreens here, and I imagine when we get some elevation or if we head to more northern latitudes, we’ll find more. But the elevations here are just not that high, and the northern latitudes are famous for their fall-colors deciduous trees, so I am not really expecting a huge resolution on this anytime soon. And I miss “my” evergreens.
Conclusion: We’re suffering from culture shock, and we’ve been uncomfortably hot, and we’re spending too much money. We’ve both been feeling like we want to “go home” and what we mean is back to the west. My friend Steph says we’re west-sick, and that sounds about right.
I had a coworker for a while, a person of some authority who would often, repeatedly say, “It is what it is.” His record in my presence was four times during one 30-minute meeting, so that I wanted to step around his desk and slap him silly and shout, “It is what it is, you putz, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept it as the status quo!”
But he may have had a point. I have a persistent “it’s a quality not a flaw” tendency to beat my head against walls and strive and strive and strive to improve things, constantly seeking the bit of magic or luck or muscle that will make everything idyllic again. I’ve been doing that for the last several weeks, and a good bit of our time has been enduring x in hopes of y, or tinkering with z to make x more palatable, with a lot of looking forward instead of being able to really enjoy where we are. And then we’ll get to the next place and, instead of finding an idyll, there’s some new x to deal with (e.g., swarms of vicious biting deer flies on the Eastern Shore).
No decisions yet, and we’re keeping an open mind (the humidity is forecast to be much less this week, and there are no biting flies here so far, knock deciduous wood), but we might be headed westerly. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, we're in the woods where it is peaceful despite the highway noise from the DC beltway, and we have friends to visit in Annapolis and easy access to the city if we want to get our Smithsonian checkmark. And it is what it is.
