Yes, it's embarrassing that I established this blog three months ago with big plans for writing in it and then wrote nothing. But now I have something to write about: I'm on Whiffenpoof World Tour and will be for the next three months, traveling to about seventeen countries and taking more redeye flights than the human body should be asked to handle. And our first stop was Portland, Oregon.
We left at 3:30 Tuesday mo
rning from New Haven, meeting in the dark outside ABP. None of us had slept more than an hour, some of us had not slept at all. We'd all spent the day before packing frantically as well as either watching our friends graduate or graduating ourselves (congrats Dee Dee!). My mood was immediately boosted by some validation of my stellar packing job - Whiffs looked at my little bag and said "how the hell did you fit everything in THAT?" I must say, for three months, I think I did a pretty impressive job: one duffel/tux bag and one small Jansport backpack fit all of my necessaries (as pictured on the left).
At that ungodly dark hour we were met by two enthusiastic alums who sent us off with Whiffenpoof ties and best wishes. I remember not even really feeling tired this morning - my brain was shining with this giddy energy ("holy fucking shit I'm about to travel the world for three months straight!"). As we drove to the airport, we talked about things we were excited for, and the world slowly became light blue and misty in a way that felt really poetic to me. So I tried to journal, and managed to scratch out a page in my new Moleskine I bought specifically for tour. I was so cramped in the backseat and the car was so bumpy, however, it was entirely too physically difficult for me to scratch the poetic itch properly. Honestly, this is how I've felt all tour - I've journaled every day (as I resolved to do from the beginning), but it has all too often been a moment caught uncomfortably in a car where I have neither the mental space to properly process events nor the physical space to properly write down my thoughts.
We arrived at Hartford airport and departed at 6 AM for Chicago, which was our layover on the way to Portland. During our two-hour layover, almost all of the Whiffs commandeered a large space in the gate and fell asleep on top of our bags. There was a flight boarding before ours, and the boarding line had to wrap around us. I was one of these Whiffs and caught some good shuteye on the hard floor.
When we arrived in Portland, I made a conscious decision to wake up. One thing I’ve determined to do over this tour is to make the distinction between sleep and waking as clear-cut as can be, spending little or no time in that between-state where you nod off and on and the world is covered with drowsiness.
We went straight to Josh’s mom’s house from the airport and ate Subway sandwiches. The reason we’re in Portland at all is because Josh Levin, one of the Whiffenpoofs, lives here and is the tour manager for the first section of tour. So he’s hooked us up with a pretty incredible few days in Portland.
Pretty quickly we headed from Josh’s house to the coast of Portland. Driving in Portland, the thing that struck me was how lush it is – how green and wet the landscape is. Of course, this is because it rains 8 or 9 months out of the year. But, experiencing the rain here myself, it seems to be a natural part of the landscape, so it’s not as aggravating. Rain elsewhere seems like an interruption, rudely barging in on your day – here, it feels like the natural state, and any dry patches are just pleasant exceptions to the rule. Either way, all the water makes for some healthy plants. As we drove to the coast, we cut through huge hills of pine forest, and I felt like I could have spent forever just looking out the window.
We stopped at a restaurant called Camp 18 which was established by Josh’s stepdad’s parents. Camp 18 was a huge log cabin building, with enormous sculptures carved straight out of tree trunks. At Camp 18 we were treated to the restaurant special: cinnamon buns about 10-12 inches in diameter and four or five inches thick. Jerry and Justin finished theirs – I ate over half of mine, but made the wise decision not to go for the kill.
After Camp 18 we went to Cannon Beach, a beautiful beach that was featured in National Geographic once. Cannon Beach is flat and wide, the sand is all wetly packed like the last layer of a normal beach, and a stream runs through it to the ocean. We walked around for a while talking about how crazy it was that we were actually on tour now. I was giddy with the crisp cool air and visual spectacle of the beach, and I kept on saying, “guys, we get to do this for THREE MONTHS!” Here’s a picture of Haystack Rock, the enormous formation we spent a long time looking at.
That night we sang a concert and I could sense the fresh energy we had as a group – that same holy-shit-we’re-on-tour feeling. The next morning we had two concerts and a masterclass early, but they didn’t seem like chores in the same way they did during the year. Hopefully this energy sustains throughout tour! (Though I’m sure there will be moments where I just want to go home and don’t have the energy for the day ahead of me).
Wednesday really kicked into gear late in the afternoon, when we drove up to Oregon wine country. The hotel we sang at that night (The Allison) treated us to a wine tasting before our concert at Natalie’s Estate Vineyards. Boyd, the owner of the vineyard, poured us our glasses of wine and explained each to us in turn: a Chardonnay which was fermented in stainless steel barrels and thus was clear and refreshing, a Merlot, Cabernet, and a Cabernet-Merlot mix which was the 2007 reserve. There was a chef who paired the white wine with a shrimp bruschetta dish and the reds with pulled pork on sweet potato slices (not to mention the huge plate of cheeses, fruits, nuts, crackers, and chocolate covered strawberries). There were gold plates with a hole cut in them to fit our wine glasses, so we could hold both the plate and the glass in one hand. We sat around talking about artisanship in all of its different forms – how well-made coffee, tea, wine, cigars, liquor, beer, music, or really anything all kind of tasted the same – a deep, layered taste that goes through stages on your tongue.
That night we sang at the Allison Hotel and immediately afterward sat down for an orgasmic three-course meal: an excellent salad (sadly rare in the world), steak with mushroom sauce, a chocolate ganache with caramel corn garnish, wine during and coffee afterwards. Josh broke out a box of cigars (a gift from his uncle Chris) from the Dominican Republic and passed one to each of us. The cigars were short and smooth, neither mild nor biting. We walked off the hotel grounds and onto a field which we only discovered later caked each of our shoes with over an inch of mud. Almost all of us smoked, though many had never tried a cigar anymore. There was much coughing and desperate wars to keep matches and cedar sticks lit in the breeze – eventually we all gave up the pursuit of sophistication and passed a cigarette lighter around. The sun was setting behind ornate clouds on one side of the field; on the other side the moon was rising between pine trees. This was the first “moment” of tour. Afterwards we talked about the importance of not forcing “moments” and not overanalyzing them either while they are happening or in retrospect. The combination of the cigars, the fresh excitement of our upcoming tour, and the idyllic setting simply lifted us all into heaven. We waxed philosophical, talking about cigars as a metaphor for mortality, whether it would be more beautiful if the world came to be without a Creator or with one, and also spent some time talking about vocal technique and connecting with the lyrics of a song. Driving home, high from the cigar, I felt like I loved everything and everyone in the world, and got very huggy-feely.
Unfortunately some people got sick from the cigars, and one car had to stop for someone to puke. This began the sicknesses we’ve already had on this tour: Sam Bolen has been up a couple different nights puking from a stomach virus, and Scott actually had to go to the emergency room because of an inexplicable excruciating feeling that his head was going to explode. When we went to Josh’s Mom’s ranch this weekend, Scott stayed home at Josh’s Dad’s – but I think he’s okay now.
Thursday morning we got up and had brunch at the house of a Spizzwink family (parents of one of the underclassmen in the Spizzwinks). After, five of us went to the Oregon Zoo, where Jerry worked as a summer intern last summer in the Birds of Prey section. Jerry’s former coworkers gave us a backstage tour, which was incredibly cool. We met two owls (a small, stressed-looking owl and a gorgeous eagle owl with deep gold eyes), three eagles (two bald eagles, one smaller and one larger, and a golden eagle – two of these eagles were missing one eye), a kinkajou (a really cute lemur-like rodent who we got to feed), a big blue and gold parrot (who painted abstract paintings and prefers to use colors matching its own feathers), a turkey vulture, a porcupine (who we also got to feed), and a funny-looking friendly bird I don’t know the name of that reminded me of Kevin from Up. Most of these animals were rescue animals who wouldn’t be able to survive in the wild (hence the eagles with one eye). Needless to say, this was an incredible experience.
That night, after a stop by Powell’s Books, a bookstore that takes up a whole block, we attended a small happy hour thrown by the Yale Club and then sang a sold-out public concert in a Unitarian church in downtown Portland. We made about $5000 in ticket sales and $1200 from CD sales at this concert – none of which Josh and Mike had budgeted for – so it was a successful night to say the least. After the concert, we went to a couple microbreweries where the beers were sophisticomplex but overall too hoppy for my taste (yeah, I just coined a word. What up.).
Friday morning we sang a concert for a high school and had a satisfying workshop with an enthusiastic and talented high school choir. Afterwards we came back to our hotel for a sleepy rehearsal, where we learned some rather silly Japanese music. Then we had a happy hour hosted by Mercy Corps, the charity that Josh worked for during his two years off between leaving Tufts and coming to Yale. The happy hour was in Mercy Corps’ World Headquarters, a very chic building with walls of exposed concrete, light wood and glass. Mercy Corps laid out some food and booze for us and we sang some for them and spent a slightly awkward two or three hours hanging around. As at most events like this, there was a cluster of Whiffenpoofs talking to each other at most times as well as individual social-feeling Whiffenpoofs having conversations with strangers. I had a good conversation with a woman whose name I don’t remember who is in charge of private fundraising at Mercy Corps. I told her about my idea that psychological research could be used to understand much more deeply why people aren’t highly motivated to give to charity, and that this understanding could be implemented in much more effective fundraising campaigns. She certainly seemed interested and I saw some light in her eyes, but in the end she admitted that there was no job perfect for someone who wanted to take such an academic, theoretical approach to such a practical problem.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of vacillating lately between thinking that I should dedicate myself to using psychology for the public good and thinking that I should do philosophy because it’s the subject I’m most intrinsically passionate about and most naturally talented at. The answer to “what do I want to do with my life?” is different depending on what sub-question I use to answer it. If I ask, “well, what do I want to accomplish with my life?” then the answer is: save the world by using psychology to influence people to give to charity. If I ask, “well, what is the career I would most enjoy on a daily basis?” then the answer is: do philosophy, because I find its questions intrinsically compelling and get more satisfaction out of writing philosophy papers than out of doing perhaps anything else. Both of these arguments seem compelling to me, but I have to dedicate the first part of my career to one or the other (even if in the long run I can pursue both). So ask me what I think I should do with my life on any particular recent day, and the answer will be something like my mood – it systematically varies depending on the time of day and my particular context. All of this is as a big preamble to saying that this Mercy Corps happy hour made me feel for an evening like saving the world is the way to go.
We spent that evening at Josh’s Dad’s house. He cooked us Copper River salmon, which is apparently a rarity that can only be obtained three weeks out of the year. The steak was about a foot by two feet – that must have been a huge fish! We had another fabulous meal and spent the night simply relaxing in the house, utilizing the internet, belting out barbershop quartets that Jerry printed out for four of us to learn, etc.
Saturday morning we woke up and began the drive to Two Saddles Ranch, a 3 ½ sq. mile piece of the earth that Josh’s Mom owns. We stopped by Multnomah Falls, the second-highest waterfall in the United States, and took pictures in the light misty spray. Then I drove the car the whole 3-4 hours to the ranch, and it was an incredibly beautiful drive. We drove by Hood River, a big blue body of water surrounded by mesas and cliffs, and turned off 84 into the great wilderness. Unlike western Oregon’s well-treed landscape, eastern Oregon, beyond the Cascades, is like a well-watered desert grassland – lots of shrubs and some small trees on grassy hills and rock formations. The most beautiful part of the drive, however, was our forty-minute drive between two small towns through multitudes of windmills. Each of the windmills was its own white giant but they all turned together in a very pleasing way. And the hills rolled so softly and were so green that I realized the default Windows background picture must have been taken on this drive.
Our car arrived an hour ahead of the others (everyone else stopped for lunch when we didn’t, because we’d had a big breakfast before at Denny’s), and Noel (Josh’s Mom) took us for a tour of the property on the back of her pickup truck. The ranch is a breathtaking piece of land. It’s a similar landscape to what I’ve described before – huge rocky hills, green, with sage brushes and juniper trees abounding. What was truly astounding to me, though, was the idea of owning so much land that you don’t know it all, that it would take two full days to horseback ride through all of it. It’s honestly incomprehensible to me. But it’s all functional land – about 60 black angus cows graze it, which they sell to meat ranches as breeder cows. They have 20 horses on the property as well, and horses are really Noel’s passion – she was once an award-winning show rider. After riding around on the property in the pickup truck, we went back to the ranch house and had dinner with a whole big group of people, all family and friends of Noel and her husband. The family and friends were not only visiting for Memorial Day, but also for the Spray Rodeo, which turns the little town of Spray from a population of 150 to a population of two or three thousand. Today (Sunday) we sang the National Anthem at the Spray Rodeo and spent the afternoon watching cowboys compete for who could best ride a bucking bronco or most quickly rope down a calf and tie three of its legs together.
The highlight of our little time at the ranch was the trail ride I got to take this morning. I rode a horse named Denali, a tall white-and-brown painted mare who liked to eat the plants against my will and scratch her belly by walking over the sage brush (which I happily allowed her to do). All five of the Whiffs who were riding were being carried around by our horses rather than really guiding them, so a lot of the ride was composed of us saying “woah!” and trying to get our horses to stop trotting. But we got to see the beautiful landscape by literally going off the beaten path and climbing to the highest point of the hills. Every once in a while I had the urge to draw a sword and yell “chaaaarrrggeeee!!!!” and gallop across the fields, but I restrained myself, mostly because I didn’t have a sword.
Now, after spending the day at the rodeo, we’re driving back to Josh’s Dad’s house in Portland. We’re going to arrive at around 10 PM, crash immediately, and wake up at 4 AM to head to the airport. We have an early flight to Vancouver, a 4-5 hour layover there, and then an 11 hour flight to Beijing tomorrow. From Beijing, it’s going to be Thailand and then Japan. I’m very excited about all of these things. Portland has been a wonderful first stop, very comfortable and beautiful, and my belly is full of free food, but I feel like tour has still yet to begin – we’re going to leave the US and not come back for almost three months. What a crazy notion! But I feel ready.
World, here I come!
P.S. Pictures from the ranch will be included in the next post, once I load them from my camera.
