Aug. 27th, 2002 04:51 pm
(no subject)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
muckefuckThe legendary Lore of Brunching Shuttlecocks writes:
It also touches on something that I've been ruminating on for months now. My buddy![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zompist hosts an interesting series of culture tests on his site and I've been wondering if it would be possible to create ones for parts of the USA. There are actually tests there for Texas and Louisiana, but I wonder how accurate they are. The Louisianan one, for instance, focusses only on the southern half of the state. It strikes me as much easier to write a culture test for a subculture, such as Cajuns or Preppies, than for a larger, arbitrary, geopoltical entity. A while ago, an old friend sent me a "You may be from St. Louis if..." and almost all the questions were identical to those of a "You know you're from Chicago if..." test I'd seen earlier.
So I asked myself, could one write a test for the Midwest? Do we in Chicago really share more with my hometown, Lake Wobegon, and the UP than with the rest of the USA? My gut feeling is that we do, but it's hard to come up with specifics.
However, weather seems to be a basic starting point. That and natural disasters. Until I first visited California, I found the summer wildfires hard to fathom. It simply never gets that dry around here. I can remember months without significant rain, but never one with none at all. Living in the nation's breadbasket, we worried drought would kill all our grain, but never that wildfires would burn it all up.
What we did worry about, however, was tornados. Well, "worry" is an exaggerration. They made for good t.v. footage, but I hardly knew anyone who was every harmed by them. They're freaky, but they really don't leave that big a swath. (As a rural Iowan once told me, "A tornado might rip of some of your crop, but it would still leave most of it. A hailstorm, now that was a disaster.") Also, they avoid the urban areas I'm so found of and seek out trailer parks for their playgrounds. So their legacy was mostly hours spent in the basement sitting out Tornado Watches and the rare Tornado Warning.
Still, those experiences mark one. The GWO related an incident from his theologate at SLU. The tornado siren went off and all the Missourians headed for the basement; the West Coasters, on the other hand, went for the roof to see the tornado. He said they were all fascinated by the strangely greenish sky. I knew this as a "tornado sky", and, if you saw it, you were too close to the damn windows. I'd no more stand there and gaze into it then, I suppose, a Californian would run outside to watch the waves in the earth from a powerful earthquake.
We had our own earthquake fervour due to predictions of the re-awakening New Madrid fault, but it was of a very different nature. A major earthquake would be a once-in-a-century event, and we thought about it and planned for it much as we would a once-in-a-lifetime crisis like a nuclear exchange. (I vividly remember two artists' depictions that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch during the 80's. One featured a view of the city after a magnitude 8 or so earthquake, the other after a 10-megaton or so nuclear strike. They looked nearly identical.) Once again, it wasn't until I was in California and my host pointed out which public buildings were standing abandoned because the city or the Church couldn't afford to earthquake-proof them that I realised what "living with earthquakes" was.
But all that is quite secondary to the water issue. Nobody in the Midwest worries about not having enough water. We complain about not getting it when we need it, but, fundamentally, we live alongside the largest sources of freshwater in the world--the Great Lakes, the Mississippi-Missouri river, etc. After the brown vegetation, my next Californian culture shock was finding out not only that restaurants didn't give you ice water when you sat down, but that they were prohibited by law from doing so until you asked.
In fact, what we worry about is too much water. Much more than droughts, which were merely an inconvenience to us non-farmers, we feared floods. Living along the Mississippi, "flood stage" was as much a part of our vocabulary as "tornado watch"; in the spring, it--and the amount we are currently above or below it--is reported for various spots on the river on the nightly news. It takes more rain to make the Great Lakes rise than we'll ever see short of Yahweh breaking his rainbow promise, but Chicago is never far from returning to its original swampy state and not even a Deep Tunnel has changed that. Do Angelinos even know what it's like to have a leaky basement? The water table was so high in one of our houses that we had to have a sump pump running almost constantly--and we lived on top of a hill.
Growing up in California, weather was something that happened to other people, like meteor strikes or cholera.This is a major reason why I think I wouldn't like to live in California. I love to visit, but actually moving there strikes me as akin to working at Disneyland.
It also touches on something that I've been ruminating on for months now. My buddy
zompist hosts an interesting series of culture tests on his site and I've been wondering if it would be possible to create ones for parts of the USA. There are actually tests there for Texas and Louisiana, but I wonder how accurate they are. The Louisianan one, for instance, focusses only on the southern half of the state. It strikes me as much easier to write a culture test for a subculture, such as Cajuns or Preppies, than for a larger, arbitrary, geopoltical entity. A while ago, an old friend sent me a "You may be from St. Louis if..." and almost all the questions were identical to those of a "You know you're from Chicago if..." test I'd seen earlier.So I asked myself, could one write a test for the Midwest? Do we in Chicago really share more with my hometown, Lake Wobegon, and the UP than with the rest of the USA? My gut feeling is that we do, but it's hard to come up with specifics.
However, weather seems to be a basic starting point. That and natural disasters. Until I first visited California, I found the summer wildfires hard to fathom. It simply never gets that dry around here. I can remember months without significant rain, but never one with none at all. Living in the nation's breadbasket, we worried drought would kill all our grain, but never that wildfires would burn it all up.
What we did worry about, however, was tornados. Well, "worry" is an exaggerration. They made for good t.v. footage, but I hardly knew anyone who was every harmed by them. They're freaky, but they really don't leave that big a swath. (As a rural Iowan once told me, "A tornado might rip of some of your crop, but it would still leave most of it. A hailstorm, now that was a disaster.") Also, they avoid the urban areas I'm so found of and seek out trailer parks for their playgrounds. So their legacy was mostly hours spent in the basement sitting out Tornado Watches and the rare Tornado Warning.
Still, those experiences mark one. The GWO related an incident from his theologate at SLU. The tornado siren went off and all the Missourians headed for the basement; the West Coasters, on the other hand, went for the roof to see the tornado. He said they were all fascinated by the strangely greenish sky. I knew this as a "tornado sky", and, if you saw it, you were too close to the damn windows. I'd no more stand there and gaze into it then, I suppose, a Californian would run outside to watch the waves in the earth from a powerful earthquake.
We had our own earthquake fervour due to predictions of the re-awakening New Madrid fault, but it was of a very different nature. A major earthquake would be a once-in-a-century event, and we thought about it and planned for it much as we would a once-in-a-lifetime crisis like a nuclear exchange. (I vividly remember two artists' depictions that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch during the 80's. One featured a view of the city after a magnitude 8 or so earthquake, the other after a 10-megaton or so nuclear strike. They looked nearly identical.) Once again, it wasn't until I was in California and my host pointed out which public buildings were standing abandoned because the city or the Church couldn't afford to earthquake-proof them that I realised what "living with earthquakes" was.
But all that is quite secondary to the water issue. Nobody in the Midwest worries about not having enough water. We complain about not getting it when we need it, but, fundamentally, we live alongside the largest sources of freshwater in the world--the Great Lakes, the Mississippi-Missouri river, etc. After the brown vegetation, my next Californian culture shock was finding out not only that restaurants didn't give you ice water when you sat down, but that they were prohibited by law from doing so until you asked.
In fact, what we worry about is too much water. Much more than droughts, which were merely an inconvenience to us non-farmers, we feared floods. Living along the Mississippi, "flood stage" was as much a part of our vocabulary as "tornado watch"; in the spring, it--and the amount we are currently above or below it--is reported for various spots on the river on the nightly news. It takes more rain to make the Great Lakes rise than we'll ever see short of Yahweh breaking his rainbow promise, but Chicago is never far from returning to its original swampy state and not even a Deep Tunnel has changed that. Do Angelinos even know what it's like to have a leaky basement? The water table was so high in one of our houses that we had to have a sump pump running almost constantly--and we lived on top of a hill.