Three thousand miles west of here, the Bowdoin College Meddiebempsters spilled out of minivans in the driveway of Tessa Westfall’s Los Angeles home. Burnt to a crisp from their day at Santa Monica Beach, they threw off their vacation wear with reckless abandon and jumped into the pool. Tessa’s mom wasted no time describing how the pool is neither chlorine nor saline, but rather EcoSmart, while simultaneously dishing out piles of organic snacks. The Meddies ogled as she fed the subpar veggies to the pet desert tortoises, Kippy and Lightning.
Approaching one thousand miles south of here, Carly Berlin hurtled toward Myrtle Beach, S.C. (affectionately known as “Savannah”) with Bowdoin’s ultimate frisbee teams. While the destination wasn’t Carly’s home, she did feel like a token Southerner. She couldn’t help cringing at the abundance of overbearing “Jesus Is Your Savior” and cartoonishly racist “South of the Border Restaurant” billboards. Her car stopped at a Waffle House off the highway somewhere in North Carolina, a place nondescript to her, but to them a novelty where they could order their hash browns “Scattered, Smothered and Covered.”
It’s surreal having people from Bowdoin in our home spaces. Maybe it feels weird for everyone to have the two worlds intertwined. We suspect, though, that coming from far corners of the country makes this experience more pronounced. The presence of Bowdoin guests in our regions provokes us to be critical of where we come from. It heightens our awareness of the background noise of our locales, of the freckles on our own faces.
The two of us hail from places that don’t exactly have flawless reputations on the national stage. Let’s explore this through a fun word association game. Carly, what comes to mind when you think of LA?
Superficiality, road rage, intricate Starbucks orders, Valley Girl upspeak, hippies who shave everything, putting on a full face of makeup to go to your afternoon SoulCycle, class cancellation due to light drizzle, people trying to find themselves, having Jared Leto stare at your butt while on a hike under the Hollywood Sign, etc.
Tessa, what comes to mind when you think of the South?
Sweet tea, “family values,” debutante balls, “Bless your sweet little heart,” Honey Boo Boo, “The War of Northern Aggression,” fried everything, “The bigger the hair the closer to God,” conservatism, chauvinism, racism, etc.
These characteristics are far from representative, but we admit, a lot of them are true. They’ve certainly shaped the landscapes that we grew up in. The truth to them crystallized when we were presented with a whole new landscape: New England.
We were shocked! Tessa was visually stunned by the throngs of 18-year-olds wearing khakis and pastel Polos. Carly had never before met someone from a “town.” Tessa had previously believed that boarding schools only existed in 19th-century Britain or contemporary Utah, where rich LA kids were “sent away.” The whiteness of Maine struck both of us. Physical toughness in the face of the elements (and accompanying lumberjack aesthetic) as a cultural value was totally foreign. In our second year here, much has become familiar. It’s an ongoing process, though—Carly still hasn’t sprung for an E-ZPass in her car.
We’ve experienced people responding with surprise or throwing shade when they hear where we’re from. Having to own and defend our home places has given us more clarity in looking at them. It’s a process towards making sense of and accepting the places that have shaped us, in spite of and because of their deep flaws.
For the whole first part of our lives, a large piece of how we understand the people around us is through their personal context—what the buildings in their neighborhood feel like, the smell of their house, the food their family eats for dinner. In college, everyone’s immediate context is the same. We’re given a whole new kind of agency in defining ourselves, based on our behavior, our interests, our ideas. That being said, there’s something really gratifying about showing people from Bowdoin our backstories.