when my parents first started talking about moving the family to lancaster county, i have to admit, i was less than enthusiastic. i grew up in guatemala, but every few summers we’d head north to the u.s. where we’d drive all around, visiting friends, family and national landmarks. i had been in probably 35 states by the time i was twelve and had seen quite a bit of america that i really liked, but lancaster was not one of those places. we had visited here before, and nothing about it really struck me as a great place to live. all i knew of lancaster was the pumpkins and the amish and the farms, and i wanted no part of that. things got worse when my dad said we wouldn’t be living in the city itself, but outside somewhere. we were going to turn into hillbillies, i thought to myself, and life would never be the same. on the last day of school in guatemala before we moved here to lancaster, the other kids signed my yearbook saying they would miss me and we would stay in touch and that i would have fun in lancaster and that pumpkins are cool after all.

well, i have lived here for seven years now, with over six years in the same home, by far the longest stretch of time in one place to this point in my life. and i have to admit, i like it here. sure, everyone always complains that there is nothing to do and everyone who has grown up here is itching to get away, to move out west to somewhere magical and distant like california or colorado where they would do everything lancaster never allowed them to do, but i have never felt more at home than i do in this place.

i was right about the pumpkins and the amish and the rednecks, though. those stereotypes are there for a reason. we live in a rancher that is part of a row of six houses. other than this mini-neighborhood, everyone else around is amish. our backyard stretches back into an amish corn field which was just cut down a couple of weeks ago. now when i look out the kitchen window i can see the amish farm house back there and the clothesline with all the hues of black and blue and white hung out to dry. across the street in front of our house is another amish farm. there is another one just up the road and then another around the corner. buggies are always passing by, and the horses leave their droppings, just to let us know that the pavement belongs to the amish and not to the rest of us who drive cars and talk on cell phones.

on the drive to school, i pass two, maybe three roadside stands selling pumpkins. but then again, it is autumn now, and i suppose anywhere you go, you’d have pumpkins for sale.

the redneck stereotype is pretty accurate as well. of course, not everyone around here is a redneck. i went to a suburban high school here with a lot of upper middle-class kids who live in housing developments for people who make $100,000 a year, vote for republicans and drive suv’s. there were also the rednecks though, and the less obvious sons and daughters of farmers who didn’t wear overalls and camo. my alma mater lies between the city school district, where a lot of african americans and latinos live, and the district in the southern end of the county, where all the rednecks live on farms and shoot their guns with reckless abandon and don’t bother to wear their seat belts.

the other afternoon, a friend of mine called me up and told me that she and some others were going to be going to a place called the buck that evening and that i’d be welcome to come along. in my seven years here i had never been to the buck, though i had passed the place on several occasions and had sometimes toyed with the idea of going there sometime, so i decided to tag along. the buck is a motorsports complex down in the redneck part of the county, not far from maryland and the mason-dixon line. every saturday night during the summer they have a big shabang with one sort of motor sport or another. this time it was tough trucks and mud bogging.

never before in my life had i been in the presence of so many bonafide rednecks. (i use the word redneck so freely here because these people are proud of their redneck status. they had it on t-shirts and it was even spray-painted on the hoods of some of the trucks in the competition. it was not at all a derogatory term as some use it.) i don’t know where they all came from, to be honest. there had to be thousands of rednecks, each shelling out their eleven bucks for admission, and from what i gathered, this was a weekly tradition. for many, it is probably their church - their weekly gathering with likeminded people, all focused on something very important to them. the buck is part of the culture, and this being the grand finale for the season, even the announcer was lamenting the fact that he didn’t know what he’d do with himself during the winter months.

if you want an eyeful of camo suspenders, trucker hats, confederate flags, scruffy faces and bulging lower lips, you really need to check out the buck. of course, if you’re like me, you’ll feel way out of place. the last time i remember feeling that alien was in the middle of nowhere in kenya, where the people may have never seen white folks before.

those who know me know that i enjoy spending time at barnes and noble, where i go regularly to read, to write, to listen to music on my ipod and sip on a caramel frap with whipped cream on top. one of the things i love about going there is that it is a great environment for thought because it is easy to pretend you are smart when you’re in a cafe/bookstore.

but before my evening at the motorsports complex, surrounded by a sea of proud rednecks who live in a very different world than my own, i had never considered how b&n is my own version of the buck. i had always assumed that everyone hung out there, but now i realize that the people at b&n are much like myself - self-supposed quasi-intellectuals who have money to spend on trendy coffee and have time to kill.

i suppose it is just the animal in us, the notion of sticking to our herd, pack or flock. we aren’t monkeys caged together at a zoo, but we all choose to climb on the same tree in the jungle, oblivious to what lies beyond.