160: Culture Shock, September, 2021
The year was 1953. I was 11 years old.
We had just moved from the suburbs of Boston to Grandpa and Grandma’s farm outside Stony Ridge, Ohio. My father had died two years before. Mom moved us back to the family home largely to provide her three sons with the “male influence” of her three farmer brothers. (In 1953 “male influence” was still considered a good thing.) She built a house to the south of the barn, the house in which my brothers and I would grow up.
Our move from New England to the mid-west was accompanied by a profound “culture shock”, not unlike Dorothy waking up in Oz. Our clothes were wrong, (gaberdine instead of jeans). There were smells, (like the spreading of manure), we had not encountered before. Roosters crowing in the morning. Fireflies lighting the evening shadows.
In short, I was ignorant of this strange new land. “There’s a difference between hay and straw?” I asked. Cousins played games, (e.g. “Red Rover”), I did not know. Firecrackers could be obtained on a kid’s version of the black market. Soon there would be school busses to ride, with sex-ed classes offered by the juniors and seniors in the back rows, and a new school culture to be figured out as well.
But for now it was summer. There was an unfamiliar world to explore. We fished for “crawdads” in the creek a half mile to our south using bread crusts and an open safety pin on a string. Braved the cavernous, dark and spooky barn. Walked the mile to Stony Ridge, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stony_Ridge,_Ohio ), to buy BB’s at Smithers’ hardware store. BB guns were a pleasant part of the culture shock of this strange new world. Lots to learn, lots to like, lots to be anxious about — the natural stuff of childhood.
We tend to associate “culture shock” with international travel, perhaps even regional travel within this country. But this experience of the new and unexpected, of strange customs and behaviors is not limited to travel; it is the very essence of childhood where every day brings its own culture shock as we courageously venture, willy-nilly into uncharted territory. Children are cultural warriors, learning why they can’t tell Aunt Edith that her new hat looks silly, or why fart jokes in church are unappreciated, or even why the knife and spoon belong on the right. All of which is to say that, like every child, I was already a seasoned cultural warrior. But then the foreign strangeness of the rural Midwest took a dark and sinister turn.
Slowly at first, from deep underground where they had been biding their time, monsters began to emerge. Monsters with bulging red eyes, armor plate, and six spiny, jagged legs. Monsters older than I. They climbed up the trunks of Grandpa’s oak and silver maple trees. First by the hand-full, then by scores, finally by the hundreds. The trees were filled with empty suits of buff-toned armor.
What were these things?
I assure you we had nothing like this in Marblehead.
Of course, like most culture shock, it could be tamed by putting a name to it: Cicada. I began to investigate. At first I collected the exoskeletons from which they launched their invasion; empty husks, they clung to tree limbs and trunks. It turned out that their now-rigid legs made perfect clasps with which to surreptitiously attach them to the sleeves or perch them on the shoulders of unsuspecting female cousins. I waited patiently for the predictable scream. (And we call the cicadas, pests!)
Then a revelation in which one mystery of this strange culture merged with another. One evening, while collecting exoskeletons with which to torment cousins, I saw an adult cicada emerging from its exoskeleton.
Now it became clear: the bug-eyed monsters that filled the air with their four inch-long bodies and their other-worldly sounds had come from these launching platforms. It was from these bases that they grew wings to spread out and terrorize the countryside.
One more piece of the cultural puzzle fell into place.
What sparks this memory of an ancient cultural trauma? Just that I have once again encountered these monsters, this time in the strange and foreign land of Virginia. Now the culture shock is gone; only the wonder remains.
If only I had a cousin to torment!
P.S. How, you might ask did I know the year was 1953? Simple, I subtracted 17 from 2021 to get 2004, take away another 17 (87), and another (70), then still another and you get 1953 — the year I was 11 and we had just ventured in to the strange and foreign land of Ohio.
