July Writing Prompts | A — Culturated
Hitting the road for mind-opening adventures
From ocean to ocean, Disney to Cape May, two weeks of road-tripping after college was the start of all the adventures ahead. Road maps in hand, I saw alien-looking landscapes, midwestern sunflowers, and a wistful lighthouse. Graduate school was ahead, along with a summer job. I had less than a month to explore, listening to ’70s disco and rock. One of my favorites was “My Eyes Adored You” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Early that summer, I drove over the Barnegat Bridge and Bay with my best friend and soon-to-be fiancé.
My environment before this time had been loving, but limited. These two road trips offered me a richer realization of just how intricately woven America is. That travel laid the groundwork for me to continue exploring my country and eventually travel overseas.
I worked summers to pay my way through college, which meant I didn’t have a summer abroad like some of my friends. My hometown was homogenous in a way that I didn’t understand at the time. When I graduated from high school in Northwest Arkansas in 1971, my school and my hometown were all white. Really. During an earlier era, the area had what was known as sundown laws. These laws, posted prominently on highway billboards, required any non-white travelers to leave the area before sunset. I’m not sure if these laws were enforced during the time that I lived there, but the reputation remained intact.
My family traveled only to visit extended family, where we could stay in their homes. We didn’t have the income for hotels. Almost all of my family lived in Central Arkansas. I had never crossed the Mississippi River until graduating from college.
When I entered the University of Arkansas in the early 1970s, it was almost all white. The first black scholarship athlete was big news during my time there. Despite the first steps toward integration at the university, my experiences were still limited.
I had little contact with people of other faiths. I don’t remember meeting a Jewish person during my years in Northwest Arkansas. I knew only one Catholic family until I was in the 9th grade. The small community just west of mine had a Catholic School serving grades 1–8, and was predominantly Italian in makeup. In the 9th grade, those students joined my much larger high school. They had a more colorful culture than mine. Or at least it was different.
My two summer trips changed everything for me. For the first time in my life, I saw the two oceans that border our country. Previously, I had not seen the relatively nearby Gulf of Mexico. Road trips by car were a feast for my eyes. They were more relatable than a flight that would have skipped over all that new terrain en route.
On the first trip with a former college roommate and her younger brother, we traveled to Eureka, California, to visit a college her brother was considering for his next step. Along the way, we met a few interesting people, but mostly I observed different, in some cases almost alien, landscapes. We left Northwest Arkansas and traveled west across Kansas in one of the longest, straightest stretches of highway I had ever experienced. Kansas was flat and a bit boring. It seemed to be all farmland. The best part was encountering the fields with acres of sunflowers. There was nothing like that in Arkansas.
We were traveling at the end of May, unprepared for colder weather. When we began the climb in Colorado, the temperature started to drop. I grew up near the Ozark Mountains, but they were small and worn down compared to the jagged peaks of the Rockies. We found a small roadside hotel where we awoke to snow the next morning. We wrapped ourselves in beach towels as we struck out the next morning. It never occurred to us to bring coats on a trip to California near the end of May.
The next section of our journey included the western side of Colorado and a short jaunt across Utah, a bleak yet eerily wondrous terrain of large rock formations and reddish dirt. That view is how I picture Mars today. In places, I could see the heat waves shimmering up from the roadbed and barren stretches of land around us. This heat was experienced the same day as the early morning snow. I was familiar with rocky patches of land without vegetation, particularly in the mountains, but this was only parched dirt.
We drove into the redwood forests of Northern California near the Pacific Coast, where my friend’s brother made a brief visit to the College of Forestry. When he completed his meeting, we followed the Pacific Coast Highway south to Los Angeles, staying with my friend’s eccentric aunt. On the road, I stared enraptured out the passenger window at the ocean that I had never seen. We stopped briefly in a roadside park near Big Sur. There, I worked to wrap my head around how boundless the ocean is. Maps and pictures of the ocean did not equate to actually seeing it. While in Los Angeles, we spent a day at Disneyland and an afternoon on the beach of the Pacific. Everything was new to me.
The trip home through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma added to my repertoire of previously unexplored lands. I didn’t fully absorb the culture of these new places, but I began to understand how people lived differently based on their environments and their worlds.
The California road trip was followed a week later by a trip to New Jersey with my future husband, a Polish Catholic guy from New Jersey. I met him the summer before my last year of college. He was also a student at the University of Arkansas, but a few years older than I. Part of what I came to love about him was that he was different from anyone else that I knew.
We stayed with my boyfriend’s family in New Jersey. I tried to internalize what living in this part of the country looked like. They teased me gently about my accent, but they had one also, the quintessential New Jersey accent.
On our way, we had traveled across the Appalachian Mountains, which seemed familiar to the Ozarks, only taller and with more of all that comes with living in the mountains. Near the Baltimore Harbor, I saw rows and rows of bleak, forlorn tenement buildings. Compared to rural poverty, the poverty of the tenements was concentrated, compacted. Poverty in Arkansas was scattered and often unseen in my part of the state. I didn’t know much about the individuals living in the tenements, but seeing this part of the cityscape helped me to process what I learned later.
I compared this second trip, seeing the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, to my recent experience with the Pacific. The Atlantic is where I saw and climbed my first lighthouse, the Barnegat Lighthouse. My boyfriend showed me his childhood home, a middle-class rowhouse in a Polish section of the city. He showed me a baseball field where he played as a child, and the tiny Polish Catholic church where his parents were buried on land directly behind the church.
It was in New Jersey that I met my first Jewish person, my boyfriend’s sister-in-law. I visited my first Jewish deli, and the following day, I had Polish Kielbasa sausage with my scrambled eggs for breakfast. On our first day in New Jersey, I rode with his sister-in-law to the deli. The locals were navigating a multi-lane roundabout, windows down, screaming profanities, honking, and finger-waving. The roundabout was like a time warp where alternate behavior was acceptable and required. Everything went back to normal when we exited the circle. For the most part, in the South, we kept our windows up while cursing or muttering under our breath.
We joined my future sister-in-law’s Jewish parents for a day at their beach house on Cape May. We had a traditional Jewish meal, featuring brisket and their usual side dishes. Other relatives joined in. It was at that meal that I got a sense of, not a completely different culture, but a different way of doing the same things. They had brisket and latkes. My family shared roast beef and mashed potatoes. Families everywhere gather to connect and share the food of their respective cultures. The food at this gathering was different from the feasts at my parents’ home, but the idea was the same — to enjoy each other’s company around great food prepared and shared in the same way for generations.
During those two trips over a three-week period, my worldview expanded. I went home, but I was different. I gained new awareness of the differences in our traditions. I didn’t adopt a new culture, but I gained a better understanding of the limits of my own and the values of others’ cultures. I found the differences stimulating, rather than something to resist.
When we married, I took my husband’s Polish surname and left behind my more common maiden name, Parks. As we built a shared life together, in a larger, more diverse Central Arkansas city, we adopted the status quo of our surroundings. Our home was more like the one where I grew up than his childhood home.
Following that first venture to the Atlantic Ocean, my husband encouraged us to travel as much as we could afford. Due to limited time and money, we traveled primarily in the U.S. The spirit I developed from those two trips to see the oceans has stayed with me. Much later in my life, I made my first trip overseas. I wish he could have joined me; he died of cancer before we had that chance.
I now live three miles from the Atlantic Ocean, in one of Florida’s largest cities. The state hosts people from diverse cultures around the world, particularly from Latin America. I continue to travel and explore.
There is as much to be learned by examining how we are alike as there is in recognizing our differences. It is interesting to consider the origins of our differences. Are they influenced by environmental conditions, religious practices, national and local traditions, or economic stressors? Life adapts. The adventure is to see all the wondrous variations.
This story is in response to A-Culturated’s July Writing Prompt. I look forward to reading other thoughts on The People Who Made You.