Pocomoke City, Maryland

It is a favorite topic of conversation, where does one region stop and another begin? When does the East Coast become Appalachia become the Midwest become the Great Plains become the Rocky Mountains become the Cascades become the West Coast? All the way across the country, vast changes in landscape and no clear idea when one becomes the other. (some are easier than others. It is very obvious, when at the Denver International Airport, where the Plains become the Rockies.)

Perhaps the most pondered division is that between “The North” and “The South.” When I hopped down from the cab today parked in the Wal*Mart parking lot in Pocomoke City, Maryland, the mild air scented with pines and paper, I knew that I had definitely crossed into the South.

I picked up this load, office products destined for two OfficeMax stores in the Norfolk, VA area, from the DC in Hazleton, PA. That was in the north. What changed? When did it happen?

I drove down the DelMarVa peninsula, an odd appendage on the east coast like a hand pointing south, comprised of parts of Maryland, Delaware and Virginia, separated from the “mainland” by the Chesapeake Bay. It is on this peninsula that 27 years ago I was born and where I lived until I went to college in the, not separated from any sort of mainland, Midwest. It is easier to take this dividing of North and South one area at a time so lets look at the DelMarVa.

An easy, although false feeling, answer is that the line is the northern and eastern border of Maryland, i.e. the The Mason-Dixon Line which separates Maryland from Pennsylvania to the north and Delaware to the east. Today I traveled south through Delaware on DE-1 and US-13. Near Wilmington in the north it felt like “The North” the land rolls with rocky outcroppings and vibrant fall foliage. It can look a lot like New England (Many people think that the movie “Dead Poets Society” was filmed at a New England boarding school but, indeed, it was shot almost entirely in northern Delaware) But in the extremely flat southernmost county (Sussex) you will find loblolly pines, enormous chicken farms (Purdue) and the northernmost cypress swamp in the country. That feels pretty southern to me.

I suppose where these lines exist depends on what sort of geographical or social markers you look for. Where you begin to find these markers you will say “here we are.” Take this for example: I had a teacher in high school who was originally from Egypt. She had gone to college in the US and lived here for quite a while. She and her husband were returning to Delaware from New York City when, after surfacing in New Jersey from the Lincoln Tunnel, she said to her husband “The south really does feel different.” I don’t know what her markers for what made the south were but apparently there they were, somewhere between the meadowlands and oil refineries of northern New Jersey.