While talking about my Spring Break plans, I quickly learned that sentence structure was everything.

“I’m going camping in West Virginia,” I burst out as I passed a friend on the Quad.

“Why?” He responded skeptically.

I tried again with another friend.

“I’m going camping in West Virginia!”

“Are you going to marry your cousin?”

I processed this comment and it hit me: I was going to the South. Hillbilly country. Hick land. Where marrying family is not only allowed, but encouraged. Where there’s a Chick-fil-A serving homophobic fried sandwiches on every street corner. That South.

The next time I ran into someone I knew, I tried a different approach.

“I’m going camping with the Syracuse University Outing Club in West Virginia.”

The person smiled. “That sounds like fun.”

Success.

I was determined not to let the stereotypes held by my mostly New England- and New York-based friends ruin my adventure. I was going camping for the people, activities and raging passion for s’mores. Just to be clear, for those keeping score: Motivation equals one-sixth people, one-sixth activities, four-sixths s’mores.

And after a week in the South, I can confidently say I can still eat my body weight in s’mores, and West Virginia is really a lovely state.

Sure, I didn’t have cellphone service. And sure, the nearest place to get Wi-Fi was a Subway restaurant with a sign that read, “Special: Chicken and Biscuits.” And sure, I may or may not have seen a man near me riding a tractor as it dragged his son around on a sled.

But it’s all about the experience. It’s good for you to be thrust into a new environment. It’s like fish oil and kale, or something.

There were, however, a few adjustments I had to make.

I like to look semi-decent when I walk out the door, and I don’t think that’s too much to ask of a vain 20-year-old who’s guilty of looking at herself in any slightly reflective surface.

But there wasn’t a single mirror in my cabin – not even many shiny objects. I was forced to check myself out in a spoon.

It was strange getting used to not knowing if my hair was full of knots (it was), if my eyes were full of eye boogers (very likely) or if my legs were overdue for a shave (I didn’t need a mirror to see that).

And then there was the lack of showering.

It was actually embarrassingly easy to adjust to that one. Some people craft, I shower semi-regularly. It’s kind of my thing.

But I knew I had gotten too relaxed when I forgot to wash my hands after having an intense emotional connection with a wild horse.

I was going for a 12-mile hike called “the Death March.” On the last stretch, the girls I was with and I approached a field of horses.

We walked slowly through the field until one of the horses made eye contact with me. Eye contact that slowly transformed into soul contact. I reached out and started petting and kissing him. We were soul mates in another life, but instead of being reincarnated into a white girl from Connecticut, he got to be a horse.

Later that night, I wondered out loud to my friend, “Should I take a shower?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “I just washed my hands after touching the horses.”

“Washed your hands?” I exclaimed. “What a concept! I totally forgot that was a thing.”

But I shrugged. This was life now. In true southern spirit, I tried not to think about all of the things I had touched and ate after embracing a wild horse. I was a West Virginian, not an uptight northerner.

That is, until I got home and proceeded to take the longest shower of my life, do five loads of laundry and wash my hands five times.

You know what they say: You can take the girl out of the suburbs, but you can’t take the neurotic, privileged qualities out of the girl.

Sarah Schuster is a sophomore magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly in Pulp. She can be reached at seschust@syr.edu.

Published on March 20, 2013 at 9:43 pm