Culture Chronicles — An Introduction
On December 16, 2021, at 10 o’clock at night, my husband and I got into our packed-to-the-gills Volvo station wagon and left our home in Alameda, California. The movers had taken everything else the day before. The house we left behind was now empty, some of our castaways left in a pile on the sidewalk, and after a brief stop at Walgreens to drop off some old medications in the bin at the pharmacy, we headed to our new home in Helena, Montana.
Montana just happens to be where my husband’s new job is. It’s not like we chose Montana. We thought about leaving the San Francisco Bay Area for a long time. Our children are living their own lives in different cities, and with the Bay Area cost of living, we could never see ourselves retiring. We would be working until we died just to pay rent.
When friends heard we were moving from California to Montana, they would say, “well, that will be a culture shock!” It was a remark that didn’t surprise me but I was curious. Culture shock to me is associated with moves to exotic lands where culture is radically different. I knew what they meant.
I wasn’t leaving the United States and yet, everyone was aware that the culture of Montana would be a radical change. California — very blue state, super liberal. Montana — red state, conservative. Besides speaking the same language, using the same currency, and observing the same national holidays, the culture of this new place just might put me out of my comfort zone.
But I was curious: what could I learn about what divides us by observing my own responses to the culture of this new place? What have I taken for granted by living nearly my whole life in the Bay? How has what I’ve witnessed every day, dealt with every day, shaped who I am? And what has shaped the worldview of the people in Montana?
The title of this post is Culture Chronicles. There are so many different definitions of culture! To me, culture is any aspect of how a community functions. In some ways, cultures are created to support the values we are committed to. Culture is also created to manage environments and survival. The diet of Inuit people, for example, is a factor of where they live and what they need to survive. Food is a perfect example of an element of culture determined by environment and survival. Culture is about how communities survive. Culture is what you like to do in your spare time. Culture determines the structure of your environment — just compare the floorplan of a Victorian home to a Soho loft. Culture is personal too.
Let me tell you about my culture. My parents were first-born Americans and were raised in the Jewish faith and culture in the Bronx. They passed that on to me. When my father was offered a teaching position at Stanford in the mid-’60s, we moved west. My father was an academic who functioned in the world of the mind. Our house was FILLED with books. We were an urban family. My father spent Sunday afternoons reading the New York Times in our living room in San Francisco. Instead of settling in suburban Palo Alto, my mother insisted we live in the city, so my father commuted for 25 years from San Francisco.
I have never lived far from a coast, ever. I have never lived farther than 20 miles from a major metropolitan hub. Besides the two years that I lived in the Napa Valley, I never lived anywhere without sidewalks. I’ve gone long periods of time living without a car, traveling on public transit. Running to the store for ice cream was never more than a ten-minute trip on foot.
To define my personal culture: Jewish, intellectual, urban. Ice cream is essential to life.
Living in Montana, I have an opportunity to come face to face with my own cultural privilege. What is it that I have completely taken for granted living in California, and what is it that Montanans take for granted living here? And how do those things we take for granted affect how we live and what we think?
Now that we are here in Montana, I have been observing this daily, constantly. I want to share these thoughts with you in the Culture Chronicles.
