I’ve recently landed to live part time in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. It’s an ideal looking town of a bit over six thousand people, having a waterfront full of the signs of its local industry: fishing (lobestering? I don’t know what you call what lobster boats do). I do know that lobster boats are way hotter than fishing boats: big ‘ol butts. In the morning, I walk by character homes and trees — such green trees — and the smell of marine paints (chemical like resin) and slag (burnt electrons and sunburned skin) from the places repairing aluminum boat parts; there’s this toxicity in the marine layer that wraps the charming waterfront in a romantic mist; a protected harbor with a tinge of chemistry. It’s only present at a very particular part of the morning.
And this idealism wrapped in a marine layer of cancer causing agents, makes me to wonder a lot about stereotypes in this new setting. The stereotype of small towns and stereotypes within this new stereotype. I’ve never spent any time really living in a small town and I can feel knee jerk reactions to things I witness that are shitty and think to myself “fucking small towns”. But these aren’t unique to small towns. The extraordinary mundane pleasantness of certain conversations here could easily find their mental parallel in someone in LA describing a TikTok to me (is that how you say that?) or their favorite trashy Netflix show; my perspective jumps and mugs these conversations here in derisive tones, because in general I don’t like these types of conversations that are like barges that require no tugboats: they just plow forward without any ability to be swayed.
I think a lot of this disconnect is scale. Our values should be reflected consistently through different scales and rarely are. It's a bit like how I would deal with a roommate that was eating my food out of the fridge and an HOA that was making strange use of funds for building maintenance. Both require clear communication with individuals, while in the first case I may be more inclined towards passive aggressive hints, and even feel justified doing so. But both situations are the same, just different scales: people I’m in relationships to due to my housing situation; people that must be counted on in order for me to have a smoothly running home life. I should address both situations aware of the values I’m trying to exercise.
Small town or large city: they both are full of the same things just at different sizes. The good and bad people. The annoyances and the blessings. To hold one up as a better or worse version of the other is to focus on a toxic film, perhaps smelling of resin, over the simple fact: we are all the same. And I think focusing on this film turns a situation away from the possibility of what it can achieve, away from the overall protected harbor that is available for refuge, and instead places us in boats bobbing separate on an infinite ocean.
I had a night out in Yarmouth that ended in me getting punched in the face. It involved some guys that believed me to be gay. And to be honest a second time, I had quite a lot to do in provoking them (don’t blow kisses at angry men). Luckily no injuries came from the whole thing, but I was furious and upset after it in only the way you can be when you are forced into a situation where you know that violence should not escalate, but the reptilian part of your brain desperately wants it to. My wife dealt with the vitriol and vile I spit at Yarmouth that night with a calm collected patience. And in reflecting on the whole instance the next day, I thought about how in my head I had immediately felt like I saw the obvious intolerance that was present in all small towns. There was no safe harbor. Only toxic marine layers in a specific part of the morning light.
But I’ve met those same guys in a 100 bars in 30 different countries. I’ve met them in LA. And I think a larger danger of these men in any of these places is when their presence and/or actions gets labeled as something to do with them being an “other” or from “someplace else”. That’s a problem of a larger internal mechanism at work.
I think some of the ways we feel so acutely new discomfort or joy is in the fact that it seems unrelated to what we previously have felt. But I think it’s disingenuous to maintain that those feelings aren’t related to the structures we have already built in our life. To see how they are scaled versions of something that we have experienced in what we consider to be our own space.
Yarmouth taught me a bit about my marine layer.