Trailer park children, teenage love, and the lifelong pull of Tidewater
Or, "so that's how I got here"
I came here intending to write a post about this relatable meme and my experience spending a day at a school in the South and the interesting observations I had while I was there, but instead, I got lost down Memory Lane for the past few days, nose-deep in old high school diaries and photo albums and came up with… this. Think of it as a prequel to the What I Learned series. Also check out Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.
We did not have these at any of my schools in Minneapolis, but I went inside of one exactly once.
It was my senior year in high school, and we were in Huntersville, North Carolina for part of Thanksgiving break of 2000. My mom, younger sister and I made the drive from Minneapolis in our teal-colored Ford Aspire in record time. We were there to visit my long-distance boyfriend and his family for a few days before heading further south to Alabama to spend the holiday with our cousins.
The boyfriend, who we'll call Matt, and I met the previous summer at a weeklong conference for church musicians that my aunt and uncle took my sister and me on every few years with our cousin. It was like a choir boot camp, but with many opportunities for extra-curricular activities, such as orchestral and hand bell boot camp (I chose hand bell). You stayed in either a cabin, tent, or RV, and most people got around by bicycle or simply walking, depending on how far away they were staying from the main event center. It was like a completely enclosed, self-sustaining community, like going away to summer camp but with your whole family, then you all performed a big concert for each other at the end. It was a blast. It was also age-segregated, so teenagers all over the country could fall hastily in love with each other for one short week each year.
…Or, if you were especially dramatic about it, you could be like Matt and me and idealistically attempt to keep that idyllic summer romance going over 1300 miles with a couple visits and the after-9pm free long distance through our parents’ cell phones or calling cards until we could graduate high school and be together again, when we'd immediately begin our very responsibly-planned future together in North Carolina. We'd get engaged after graduation. I would go to college at UNC Charlotte, Matt would go into the Air Force, and as soon as I graduated with my psychology or photography degree (I was still deciding), we'd get married and start having babies.
The problem was, I had a boyfriend back home, someone I’d crushed on for years and finally managed to get to go out with me only a month or two before. Alas, I managed to forget about him quickly as I became more and more enamored by this large, handsome guy who was only a few months older than I was but who seemed so much older with his deep southern accent and dark chest hair visible through the bright short-sleeved button-down shirts he always wore. Most people there were from the Midwest and even Canada, so he stood out like a sore thumb and got he a kick out of it. He approached me first, asking why I was so quiet, and then he complimented my hair (a surefire way to get my attention, then and now). He flirted relentlessly. I tried to resist his charms at first, what with the dream boyfriend back home and all, and frankly, I was a little intimidated by how hairy and masculine he was compared to the more clean-cut guys I usually found attractive, but he relented and I acquiesced. We became inseparable for the week, all the while insisting to everyone (and ourselves) that we were “just friends” when family and friends remarked on our sudden and noticeable closeness.
The last night we were there, after our concert, Matt drove me back to my family’s cabin in his stepdad’s truck. Parked in the gravel driveway of our camper cabin, he lifted me up and sat me on the truck bed and stood in front of me while we gazed up at the stars and talked. I told him what it was like on mushrooms, which I’d recently done with some high school friends back home. I told him it made you feel like you could say whatever you wanted, from the heart, without judgement. He asked what I was thinking about that I didn’t want to tell him, and I refused to answer. Instead, I turned the question to him.
“It’s not what I’d say,” he told me, “It’s what I’d do.”
Oh, I knew exactly where this was going, and even though I knew better, I wasn’t about to change the script to my very own personal romcom. “What would you do?” I asked him.
He kissed me then, on the back of the truck bed, underneath the stars. It was straight out of a country song. I allowed it, happily at first and relishing in the whirlwind romance of it all, before forcing myself to push him away and remind him — and myself — that I had a boyfriend back home. I agonized over what I’d done, crying to Matt, crying to myself that night as I fell into a fitful sleep. I vowed to keep the secret to myself and not tell my boyfriend. I would just have to forget about Matt.
As soon as I got back, that boyfriend came over and jokingly asked if I'd met any boys, and I got quiet, panicked, finally squeaking out a deeply unconvincing “of course not...”
So much for keeping it to myself.
“Oh, wow, you did meet someone there, didn’t you? Otherwise you would’ve laughed at that joke…” I broke and immediately told him everything, crying and apologizing. He was willing to forgive me and move on, but I surprised myself by telling him I wasn’t. I told him we had to end it, that I was in love with someone else. Shocked and hurt, he left. I waited several long hours and got ahold of my mom’s cell phone to call Matt long distance to tell him the news. Using his pilot father’s buddy passes, he flew out to visit for my 17th birthday a couple weeks later, dressed nicely in slacks, a light blue button-down shirt, and dress shoes, as was customary for passengers using buddy passes then. We met him at the gate, just one year before 9/11 would forever end that casual custom.
We wouldn’t see each other again until my family drove down to visit him that winter.
One of the days I was visiting, Matt got special permission for me to shadow him for a day in school. It was kind of neat, because since we were both in our schools’ respective International Baccalaureate programs, they would be roughly where I was in my own classes at the time and I was curious about the differences in how IB classes were taught in the South versus the North. One of his classes was in one of these trailers because the student population had grown faster than they could build the schools. It seemed strange and foreign to me at first but quickly became normal as soon as we sat down at a table in the trailer-classroom and started class.
To be honest, despite my intense interest at the time, I barely remember what happened that day with Matt in school, or what the school looked like inside, but there are two things I distinctly remember: the trailer classrooms that started me on this entire tangent which has now somehow become the entire subject of this post, and the water fountains, which is what it was supposed to be.
This was November of 2000, so there were no longer signs designating one water fountain for whites and another for “coloreds,” but there were still a few sets of two fountains that looked just like this throughout the school, with one being the stainless steel modern variety and an old-fashioned white one right next next to it. I remember how I felt seeing them, how I couldn’t stop staring and talking about it afterwards to my family and then, later, to my friends back home in Minnesota. How bizarre, how eerie and looming it made the dark history of the region — and its differences from what I was used to in Minnesota — apparent to me at that moment. There were so many black kids at this school, like there were at mine in Minneapolis; how were both those water fountains still there, in that manner? Minnesota would never, I thought. I was horrified and fascinated.
Matt was obsessed with our Southern vs. Yankee dynamic and was eager to make a Southerner out of me, and I was happy to transform into the Southern Belle that he convinced me I was always meant to be. He mailed me a gift: A heart-shaped frame with Mickey Mouse on it from a recent family trip to Disneyworld with a small Confederate flag sticker inside of it. It was so absurd, that combination of things, but I chuckled as I set it on my nightstand, ready to become that Southern girl as soon as humanly possible.
As you may have guessed, the relationship did not work out — it was over before the new year. There were a few half-hearted restarts and inevitable rebreakups, but in the end, a serious teenage relationship could not be sustained long-distance — at least, not one I was in. Not when I reunited with the boyfriend I cheated on and dumped for Matt, and he was, well, there, and Matt wasn’t. Not after I dumped that guy, again, for someone else (yes, he hates me, still, 23 years later).
I was still in contact with Matt over the phone and through the occasional email or letter, and while I had feelings for him and my new boyfriend had just cheated on me with my best friend (teenagers, amirite?), I had bafflingly decided to take back that boyfriend and told Matt that nothing was going to happen between us in Wisconsin that summer.
Despite all of this, Matt and I still met up at camp in July. He still proposed. I declined, and he cried. I probably did, too, but the main emotion I remember feeling in that moment was annoyance. Annoyance that he did not listen to me when I told him nothing would happen, annoyance that he proceeded to literally propose to me while I was dating someone else, annoyance that I even bothered to go back that year and subject both of us to this pain.
After that, we kept in touch sporadically by phone and occasionally online. We continued dating other people into our very early twenties, until he met the woman who would soon after become his wife and mother of their several children.
Matt wanted to start a family immediately. He always had. I wasn’t so sure anymore, especially after being reabsorbed into my urban, “Yankee” lifestyle and felt I was finally beginning to fit in somewhere and that it wasn’t compatible with whatever Matt still wanted for us back when I saw a simpler life for myself. I was no longer religious, either, and I had become very critical of the very war he would leave to go fight in some time after we lost touch. One of the last times we talked, he sent me a message on MySpace or AIM or some other ancient messaging service and told me that while he would always love me, he met a good woman who wanted a family just as much as he did. He said he was still in love with me, but that he had given up. I told him it was for the best.
Because I am who I am and was who I was, I obsessed over that decision for the next year or so and periodically after, graduated from high school but still a romance-obsessed teenager and melodramatic young adult, wondering if he was “the one who got away.” My destiny, but because of my frivolous and selfish decisions and teenage impulsiveness, I had perhaps wrecked my one chance at true love. It was easier to overlook the glaring differences in our long-term compatibility and romanticize the “high school sweetheart,” love-lost narrative when we were half a country apart. Like my dream to move to New York, I started to forget about my dream of being a Southern Belle and refocused my geographical obsessions instead to Arizona and the Southwest, where I also would proceed to not move.
This wasn’t originally supposed to be a part of my ongoing series about moving from Yankeedom to the South-ish (“Tidewater” if you’re going by Colin Woodard’s definition), but with how often the South keeps coming up when I read old journals of mine to check up on some of these details, it’s starting to feel like the prequel. It reminds me that I’ve had a lot of places in mind for a long time about where I’d rather be than Minnesota.
I came across this memory on Facebook the other day. This is a comment I made as a follow-up on my own post, which was about how I loved hanging out with random other transplants at bars around town. How I had just gotten done bar-hopping with some random bachelorette party I found at the bar at Chili’s after work where I’d stopped for a glass of wine after a late shift serving at the Outback down the road (that exurb prole life, though). I thought it was interesting, especially in light of my recent tumultuous feelings about living here in Virginia and having constant Minnesota FOMO. Boy, did I sure love living in this boring town on that particular night two years ago, drunk as hell after a long shift at a job I loathed in a town where I knew next to no one but my coworkers and the small family I have here.
I was reminded that I did not think of Minneapolis, or Minnesota in general, as a perfect place and that, in fact, I really hated it most of the time. That my recent feelings that I don’t “fit in” here in the DC burbs aren’t new or even specific to this place, but a recurring theme in my life. Probably many people’s lives. Maybe it’s universal, or maybe I’ve always been at least a touch ungrateful; the point is, it isn’t new.
And wouldn’t you know it, I ended up in the South, after all.
Or, like I mentioned before, Tidewater.
I think what Colin Woodard has to say about Tidewater and Yankeedom might explain a great deal about why I find the culture of Northern Virginia to be so uniquely… strange, having come from “Yankeedom,” a place so entirely different. As Matthew Speiser from The Independent summarizes:
Tidewater was built by the young English gentry in the area around the Chesapeake Bay and North Carolina. Starting as a feudal society that embraced slavery, the region places a high value on respect for authority and tradition. Woodard notes that Tidewater is in decline, partly because “it has been eaten away by the expanding federal halos around D.C. and Norfolk.”
I live in “Tidewater,” but Tidewater barely exists anymore. You hear echoes of it in the accents of people over 70 at the post office, or on historical markers and names of shop(pe)s around. But the expanding federal halos have, indeed, conquered and are settling in for the long haul.
But we’ll save that analysis for a real Part Two.