College is transition for everyone. For some, it’s going from one town to another, for others, it’s going from one country to another. For me, it’s going from living on a dirt road in rural Pennsylvania to living off the treacherous Garden State Parkway in Montclair, NJ, just 14 miles from NYC.
When I say “rural PA,” one must understand I lived so far off the beaten trail that newspapers refused to deliver and the garbage truck wouldn’t come up our road. I lived 20 miles from my high school and it took me two school buses and a little over an hour to get there (40 minutes on a good day). My graduating class was 135 and a good percentage of them were related to each other. The nearest Walmart was a half hour away and the nearest gas station was a mile and a half away. I lived on 25 acres of pure woods on the outskirts of a cute town called Little Meadows.
Explaining to people what it’s like back home is always entertaining. Rural PA is essentially a foreign country to some people. I didn’t have cell service at my house, we get opening day of deer season off from school, I learned how to fish before I learned how to ride a bike, I’ve hit a deer and almost a bear with my car. It’s all so normal for me, but for people in New Jersey, it’s like watching an episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies.”
When I was looking at colleges, I wanted a school that was “somewhere.” I looked in Philadelphia, Rochester and Erie, but nothing seemed right. I wanted a place that I felt was loaded with opportunity. What’s better than somewhere close to NYC?
What I wasn’t prepared for was the New Jersey culture. I was thinking, “It’s one state to the east; how different can it possibly be?”
After having my first conversation with a fellow student at MSU, I had to go back to my dorm and look up half of what they said in the Urban Dictionary. There’s whole new language here! People were tossing around phrases like “brick” and “pork roll” and I had no clue what they were talking about. People argued about if it was “pork roll” or “taylor ham” and then they’d ask for my opinion. I didn’t know the right answer, so I said Egg McMuffin. I didn’t realize leaving Pennsylvania meant picking up a second language.
I soon learned that getting off campus required a bus, a train or a Lyft/Uber. They had just introduced Uber into the county next to me over the summer, so I’d never used it. I was also too far out for delivery, it wasn’t like an Uber was going to come to me. For some reason, my friends trusted me, the girl who had never used public transportation outside of Disney World, to get them on a train, get into New York, and hop on a subway uptown.
I’ve never used public transportation and now people turned to me for directions. I guess I’m really good at pretending I have a clue about where we’re going. I must say the trains are much easier than the bus. The trains are simple: one way there, the other way back. The bus goes every which way and the drivers aren’t very helpful. I’ve been lost on the bus about a hundred times now. I was stranded in Newark at 10:30 at night on a Saturday when the bus driver swore to me this was the right bus. Word to the wise—just call a Lyft.
And when I called my first Lyft, I was terrified. Not only was I in a car with a stranger, said stranger was driving very fast, dodging in and out of the traffic. I soon learned this was the norm. Everyone in Jersey drives like that, even the bus drivers are aggressive on the highway.
I liked where I’m from, but New Jersey is starting to grow on me. I’m enjoying the aspect of being an outsider. To all those living in the Middle of Nowhere, USA, don’t be afraid of the City Slickers; they’re nice once you get to know them.