Like most sophisticates raised in an urban setting who grew up watching a lot of TV I'd always assumed that between New York City and LA lay a vast wasteland populated by great unwashed masses of fundamentalist Christian hillbillies whose only use for city slickers was as a commodity. This is perceived wisdom, handed down from generation to generation. Certainly primitive man was afraid of the woods - the forest prime evil. In fables and stories bad things happen in the woods: to Hansel and Gretel, and Ichabod Crane, and Young Goodman Brown, and Colonel Kurtz. And nowadays in the movies, where every canoe trip, hike and cross country excursion ends with innocent burghers being chased around in the dark by chainsaw wielding inbreds who want to quarter the males in the smokehouse and breed the females to poor deformed cousin Jeb who they keep chained up in the barn.
Nowhere is this wisdom so succinctly summarized as in Apocalypse Now, where the chef goes searching for mangos in the jungle and ends up finding a tiger and Martin Sheen says "Never get out of the boat." The boat is civilization and outside its safe confines is something wild, and its always hungry. Even today as urbane as I am I'm sometimes halfway convinced that if I stop to buy gas anywhere other than a Thruway rest stop I'll end up bent over the leaded only pump, squealing like a pig.
When I was 12 or so though my parents left the safe confines of Syosset and moved us all to the middle of nowhere: a place called Laurel Hollow. As you can imagine I was scared to death. Hollow brought to mind headless horseman with flaming pumpkins and laurel was some sort of phantasmagorical shrubbery. So not only did I face the prospect of going to a new school and making new friends, but I was surrounded by foliage capable of concealing god knows what sort of unholy terrors. I recall many sleepless nights after the move, tossing and turning in the dark, listening to the terrifying howl of the crickets.
Imagine my surprise when I learned that people who lived in Laurel Hollow were just about the same as the people of Syosset. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I quickly made friends and was accepted into one of their gangs (they called them "country clubs") and played a strange game invented by native americans, called "lacrosse," which these people played instead of baseball. Heck I even kissed a girl or two, and neither of them was my sister.
It was my experience growing up in deepest darkest Laurel Hollow that gave me the courage to leave the safe confines of Long Island and move to the upstate wilderness, first to the Bronx and then even farther north, to Scarsdale. Like the Kentuckian Daniel Boone, who moved farther west every time he found himself saddled with a neighbor, I have since come even farther north, where I find solace in open spaces, and the trees, and the lack of people, and the wildlife, the lack of people, and the lack of people, and the lack of people. Sure, I have some fundamentalist Christian hillbilly neighbors, but they don't eat people much and even when they do they're far enough down the road where the smell doesn't drift up here anyway.
Funny thing though. I was down to the general store the other day and Eb, the guy who runs the place said that he’d been talking to one of his regulars and my name came up and the guy said that he thought I was a pretty good fellow and not at all rude and obnoxious like most downstaters. Knowing MBC MJMahar as I do I don't doubt that that's the same impression that Kentuckians have of Saint John's fans. Still it brings to mind the old Russian proverb: "A German may be a good fellow, but it's still better to hang him."
