Things I Have Learned on the Ranch, Part I

When you decide to celebrate the freedom of the great outdoors by peeing on the nearest cattle fence, make sure that it's not an electric cattle fence.

My Night With Tone Loc

By many measures, the town of Troy, Oregon, is quite remote. There is no cell phone reception, any call that you make on a landline automatically counts as long-distance, and the nearest grocery store is an hour-and-a-half drive away through three states. But when I moved here to work on a cattle ranch run by my friends Cory and Dave, I think the major concern I heard from my buddies in San Francisco was something along the lines of "What are you gonna do there for fun?" We all wondered what it would be like to not have any movie theaters, dance clubs, or bars to fill up an evening.

So that's why I was shocked, intrigued, bemused, and most of all, pumped, when Dave came up to me last week and said, "Get ready, Tone Loc is coming to town." "Town", in this case, meant Lewiston, Idaho, 90 minutes over the mountains from us. But since all I knew of Idaho was its fame for potatoes and white supremacists, Lewiston seemed like the perfectly ironic enough place for some old skool rap revival.

Tone Loc, for those of you who don't know who he is (and, if you don't know, you weren't a teenager in 1989), was the purveyor of exactly two classic hip-hop hits--"Wild Thing" and "Funky Cold Medina", the latter a prescient satire of every chest-thumping gangsta tale of sexual conquest that came to populate 90s rap. "Funky Cold Medina" is an "afrodisiac" drink that Mr. Loc hopes will help him "git with the ladies", but instead leads to: 1) his dog humping his leg, 2) a contestant from the Love Connection wanting to marry him after the first date, and 3) him taking a lady named Sheena back to his "crib" only to get a little "surprise". Let us take this opportunity to all get a little Loc'ed out:

I went up to this girl, she said "Hi, my name is Sheena"
I thought she'd be good to go with a little funky cold medina
she said "I'd like a drink", I said "ok, I'll go get it"
and then a couple of sips, she cold licked her lips and I knew that she was with it
so I took her to my crib and everything went well as planned
but when she got undressed it was a big old mess
Sheena was a man
so I threw him out
I don't fool around with no Oscar Meyer weiner
you must be sure that the girl is pure for the funky cold medina

Notice how the last two lines subtly evoke those halcyon days of the late 1980s. Not only does Loc reference the cultural and culinary touchstone of the "Oscar Meyer weiner", but then he takes us back to our shared memories of those "pure" innocent days when we were 13, just coming into our hormones, and all we wished for in a girl was that she not have a penis. Sigh.

Despite the man's obvious genius, I have to admit that I was a little concerned that Tone Loc was coming to Lewiston. Had he really fallen so far that he had to leave the "Left Coast" to come up to Idaho in the middle of the winter to play a 250-person capacity bar named Boomer's? Was he still reeling from his stunning loss during the 1989 Grammy Awards in the Best New Artist category to Milli Vanilli? (Before you mock, Rob and Fab beat the Indigo Girls that year too). Was this all a baldfaced ploy by an ageing rapper for a little more "loot"? Or maybe, just maybe, was this visit an affirmation that our new millenium has finally brought us a colorblind society where white people everywhere can nod their heads, throw their hands in the air, form a W with their fingers and scream "This is def! Also, it is fly!" with a complete lack of self-consciousness?

Friends, I am here to report that my Friday night with Loc took me to a fully irony-free zone, where the whitest people I've ever seen in my life mixed freely with the natives from the local Nez-Perce reservation and wondered aloud to themselves which of the four black guys mingling through the bar was Tone Loc. Where dudes with ZZ top beards guilelessly celebrated whenever Loc and his two forty year-old backup MCs substituted "Lewiston" for "Compton" in their songs. Where hoochy-dressed middle-aged women desperately leaned open-mouthed toward the front as Tone poured from a bottle of the "Funky Cold Medina." And where Dave, cowboy through and through, the man who I married last year, took his shot, jumped on the stage, took the mic from Tone Loc, and freestyled until getting booed off the stage.

The night gave me hope. Hope that a boy from Jersey can join with cowboys and indians in Idaho and, for a forty-minute set, sing, sing, sing, tongue-nowhere- near-cheek, in brotherhood with one of the godfathers of rap. Hope that here on the ranch I can lose all of the cynicism of the city and party whenever I want like it's 1989. And hope that the next two months out here will somehow measure up to the Friday night I spent in Lewiston with Mr. Tone Loc.

Never Lose the Outrage, or the Chocolate, or the Microlending

Happy post-Valentine's day! Here's three links:

You have $1. One dude's thoughts on how you should spend it to do the most good:
http://www.slate.com/id/2135721/

If you thought you were a slave to chocolate, try living on the Ivory Coast: (from Kimmy)
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2006/02/06/PM200602067.html

And then channel your outrage by buying fair trade chocolate: (from Natalie)
http://store.gxonlinestore.org/chocolate.html

A Day in the Office

Calving season has begun up here on the ranch in Oregon, and that's not a good thing. The cows up here weren't supposed to be birthing for two more weeks, but one of the herds apparently got into some pine needles. Eating pine needles can lead to spontaneous abortions, so we're finding a lot of very premature calves out on the range. Some are stillborn, and some are okay, but most of them are somewhere in the middle. This leads to moments where you're hurrying to the shed with a baby calf in your arms, hoping you can get it close to a fire and feed it with a bottle so it might get its temperature and strength up and make it through the night. Your jacket's covered in calf shit (which, in case you haven't had this experience, is a whole world of nastiness beyond cow shit) and you're sitting on the floor rubbing the cattle's belly and praying that it'll stand up and be able to go outside again, and knowing that, well, it probably won't.

Que Le Vaya Bien, Quixote

So . . . we're back! We've actually been back for over 6 weeks now but since we've been couch-surfing ever since, it still feels like we're traveling. Only with much better food and higher standards of hygiene. We've been visiting long-lost friends and family all over the country under the guise of Meg's interviews for residency. To her momma's relief, she agreed to get a real haircut for the occasion, and traded in her tired backpacker garb for an interview suit and her backpack for a smart little attaché (whatever that is).

Meg's soon to head back to New Haven to finish up that whole med-student gig she's got going on, but not without checking out Rahul's new life as a cowboy first. Because he can't look for a job until Match Day comes and we find out what city we'll be calling home for the next 3 years, he's decided to shack up at his friends' cattle ranch in eastern Oregon and make himself useful. Goals include: looking less stupid riding a horse, pulling a calf from its momma's wahoo, changing a poopy diaper (an adorable one year-old named Roan is in the house), and of course continuing his quest to write the Great American Short Story (downgraded from previous Great American Novel ambitions).

While we won't have anything in the way of a permanent address to show for ourselves until June, we are in possession of new cellphones (with multi-colored flashy blinky lights that please us greatly). Call soon and often!

Rahul: 415-623-4559 (415-MAD-ILLZ)

Meg: 415-623-4562 (415-NAD-GLOB)

Before we get all philosophical and long-winded on you, we wanted to say:

1) The blog shall live on (http://tothevolcano.blogspot.com). Starting next week, Rahul's gonna start telling stories of his new life as an Oregon cowboy. There'll be blood, there'll be tears, and it'll be waaaay more graphic than Brokeback Mountain.

2) For everyone who didn't have the patience or the bandwith to view all 2000+ photos that we uploaded, we've narrowed 'em down to a mere 171! If you're interested, head to our Best of the Volcano photo album: http://flickr.com/photos/rahuljyoung/sets/72057594049841786/

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We keep promising to come up with deep and profound reflections from our year on the road in this, our last Quixote email (until the next journey, that is), so here's a start. The questions we've been asked the most since coming home have been "Do you feel like a different person from when you left?" and "Is it hard/weird/distressing to be back in America after everything you've seen?" And the honest answer, dissatisfying though it may be for the asker and us too, is "well, not really." We certainly hope that spending a year in the developing world has changed us. We almost wish we were suffering from extreme "reentry" shock and angst, but the truth is that being home still feels like, well, being home. It feels pretty natural to be back, to spend on a mocha what we spent on a night's accommodation a few months ago, to call family and friends whenever and wherever we feel like it on our disco cellphones, to spend hours on Christmas Eve driving all over Houston looking for the perfect last-minute addition to the Zapatista dolls we bought in Chiapas that no longer seem like quite enough. And it feels damn good to pile Meg's whole family + Rahul onto her parents' bed for the annual "Twaz the Night Before Chriztmaz" reading/debaucle (don't ask), or to know that when Rahul's mom needs the lawn mowed and the gutter unclogged, we're the ones to do it.

There are times when we are aware of differences in ourselves, and they creep in at unexpected moments. When Meg realized that her airport shuttle driver was Eritrean, instead of having no clue where Eritrea was, she excitedly jabbered about her favorite places to get shiro and cappuccinos in Asmara and got to hear about the driver's experience as a fighter in the struggle for independence from Ethiopia. When we spent New Year's in the Mission district in San Francisco this year, it felt more like home to us than it had a year ago when we lived there, as we caught Spanish phrases floating by and stopped longer to gaze at the boldly colorful street buildings. We felt ourselves focusing less on our own vulnerability and whiteness, and more on the vulnerability and vitality of the people all around us. When we wandered the aisles of a Costco in Idaho celebrating the low low prices on vats of hummus (without bargaining!), we wondered what our favorite Himalayan vegetable vendor would think of the massive shelves of shrink-wrapped bulk food.

For both of us, the stark contrast between life here in the developed world and life there in the developing world, the brutality of extreme poverty, the outrage and helplessness it engenders in us, and the need to do *something* about it have never been so palpable. For those of you who've been following the blog all year, you haven't heard a lot from us about outrage or injustice. We tried to keep our blogposts light-hearted and (hopefully) entertaining, and also reassuring to our mothers that we'd return home unscathed.

And it wasn't just the way we wrote, it was the way we lived. We had an absolute blast last year, and yet, for most of the trip, we were surrounded by poverty and hardship. We could have spent the entire year despairing at the fucked up state the world is in, and maybe we should have more than we did. We could also have distanced ourselves from the suffering, blocked it all out, and left it behind when we returned to America. What we tried to do instead was recognize the sometimes harsh realities, but continue to seek out beauty and humor whenever we could. Now we're back, and we're starting to ask ourselves: how do we adapt without forgetting, immerse ourselves in our lives here without losing track of the things we want to change, enjoy every moment in America without ignoring the responsibility we both feel to start doing something damnit!?

We don't know. We don't know. Is there room in Meg's upcoming 80-hour workweek to work toward social justice? Is taking a job in green building enough to make Rahul feel that he's doing his part? What happens when we have kids? It's so damn hard to change the world even if you're willing to sacrifice the rest of your life in the process. Can we even start to try and still indulge in gourmet dark chocolate and cheap red wine, romantic getaways to New York City and impassioned karaoke ragers, and love everyminute of it? We don't know, but we're trying to figure it out. Let us know if you've pulled it off, because we could sure use some role models right now. For now all we got is that we have to keep searching for an answer, and try never to lose the outrage, or the chocolate.

I Heart Troy Polomalu

Last year around this time, we woke up early in Bangalore, India hoping to cheer on my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers to victory in the AFC Championship Game, only to have our hopes dashed at 6am by the dastardly Patriots. This year we’ll be watching the Steelers win the Super Bowl from Wallowa, Oregon, drinking beers in the afternoon surrounded by Seahawks fans (cuz Seattle, being only 5 hours away, is just about the closest major city to us out here). Different year, different place, different time, different life, but somehow Meg and I are gonna be on a couch together again, cheering on the Steelers. I hope this part of life never changes.

--rahul

Back in Time

We leave for Oregon today, thus postponing our plans to wrap up our travel photos and thoughts of closure once again. But we're gettin' there. Really, we are!

And so we begin our life as cowboy and cowgirl out on a cattle ranch run by friends of ours. We'll be birthing cattle, riding horses, mending fences, nannying a one year-old named Roan, and working on our thesis (well, Meg will anyway). The closest airport to Troy, Oregon is Lewiston, Idaho, so we're flying there via Boise. And check this out: our flight from Boise to Lewiston leaves at 6:45pm, and lands at.....6:40pm. Whoa.

--rahul