Out West or Back East?

(This is an edited excerpt from my journal… please excuse the stream-of-consciousness nature of this post.)

It is easy to forget up here that this is my final year at Hamilton. The nine of us are all going through the same semester program so the differences between junior and senior status are almost invisible, except for the occasional email or message from someone on campus lamenting the fact that this is a year of “lasts”. Sitting up here looking at the fall colors over the Great Range, I realize with a sharp pang that among the long list of “lasts” for this year, this may very well be my last year living on the East coast. Granted, as of now my future is a big murky blob of uncertainty, with a few vague ideas sticking up like bright red signs that can change direction at anytime. However, as many random versions of post-grad life play through my head, they all involve living somewhere out west.

When I told people in California that I was going to college in the northeast, the most common responses were variations of “get a warm coat” or “I hope you like the snow”. Both of these were not a problem, and the dramatic change of the seasons at Hamilton (and especially here in the Adirondacks) has been one of my favorite things about living in New York state. Still—despite having attempted to explore as much of the region as I possibly could, the word “home” still conjures images of the west, and I honestly don’t know where in the country I will find myself in a year or two. I have noticed recently that “out west” and “back east” are common every day terms as opposed to “out east” and “back west”. Even as a kid who had never been further east than Colorado, I still said “back east” as if I felt like that was my home. This does imply a sense of the west as somewhere exotic and far away, somewhere “out”, while the east is a permanent home base.  Maybe this language is leftover from when the west was still a frontier. I looked up the history of the phrase and instead found a page on Google books that charted the use of the phrases “up north”, “down south”, “out west” and “back east” that says that people are using the terms “out west” and “back east” more frequently in the past 30 or 40 years. Is the east coast some kind of United States default region? Maybe the west coast will always be seen as the quirky younger sibling, and I think I am okay with that.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=up+north%2Cdown+south%2Cback+east%2Cout+west&year_start=1750&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cup%20north%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cdown%20south%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cback%20east%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cout%20west%3B%2Cc0