Shincha Season Part IV: “Cosmic Triggers & Wedding Dinners”
In which I chase Satsuki with shou pu’erh in the Oregon Shuttle, whilst writing a best man speech.
They called it “moving pipe.” That sounds like a sexual euphemism. I cannot confirm the usage one way or the other.
What do I know of the linguistic intents of alfalfa farmers?
My guess—and it is merely a guess—would be that would be more accurate to use the term “moving sprinklers.” Because, from my understanding, that’s what it was. My classmates would be driven out to their family farms and be forced to push these massive metal sprinkler pipes around in order to ensure that their hay farms would receive proper aquatic care.
On several occasions while spending my elementary school springs, winters, and falls amidst the parks, mountains, and farmlands of Southern Utah, I was invited to ‘move pipe’ on a farm. I never hesitated to turn down the opportunity. It was a well-known fact that my father often repeated in jest and agreement that I then and now “hate barnyard smells.”
This was only reinforced by the foul and devastating experience of traveling to a farm multiple times per week for a year to feed a ‘pet’ pig that my father named ‘Snacks’ (and whose siblings included Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner) only to one day find out that Snacks would no longer require our trips to the trough feed him. My dad swung open the freezer with a grin to reveal Snacks in a new form: some 30 separate white paper pouches. He would now be the one feeding us.
The result of all this has been a decidedly anti-agriculture stance.
How absurd it is, now, to ride in a shuttle, clicking along the laptop keys and stopping every few seconds to try to capture the perfect Satsuki shincha + agriculture fields picture from my beloved readers. As recent posts have revealed, this present—and by no means naïve—farming fascination is not only because so many people describe sencha as ‘grassy.’
I’ve got just a few more sips left of the Satsuki in the photo (a 2023 Japanese sencha from Hoshinoseichaen in Yame) but don’t worry—I’ve got a few nuggets of a ripe 2011 shou pu’erh from Yunnan that was accurately re-titled “Cosmic Trigger” by Fly Awake tea shop in Portland, Oregon.
Famous here at Tea w/ Dweez dating back to the inaugural dispatch with a brew of “Golden Buds of Joy” that was gifted to me by a fellow ghostwriter, Fly Awake is a ten-year-old teahouse tucked away behind one of the busier district on the proud-to-be-‘weird’ Eastside of Portland.
In many ways—taste, culture, aesthetic, physical space, customers, staff—Fly Awake is the polar opposite of the modern Japanese tea scene of which I’ve become recently so well acquainted. A garage-door opens up to an open space that brings the city’s many breweries to mind if instead of beer pong they hosted Dungeons & Dragons tournaments. In short, it’s the Portlandest place you can imagine. There’s even a ‘bar’ where customers had pulled up, rifling through the drama of the day. It was a jarring and awe-inspiring experience to spend about 90 minutes there, sipping two teas through infusions transported over to our seat from the bar in the same standard-issue glass water pitcher I use at home.
Three of us tried a new crop of Yunnan-grown 2023 green tea called “Green Meanie,” that was described as a “so savory that you will want to chew it.” But the leaves really only started giving after the second steep and even then it was less savory and more scrapy, a lot of throat constriction and dryness. I started flipping through the other teas in the menu—all with their own Portland-Weird-Grade descriptions and a tarot-card like illustration beside them. (Side note: I almost paid for a tarot card reading, which is also on the menu, for the purposes of this newsletter — and to get answers about how much of my beard to trim—but I had my hands too full to carry that weight, as you’ll discover below).
Alas, I didn’t really settle into the space until my two companions had cut their visit short. At that point, I was left alone to my thoughts—which, in this instance, meant the pressure was off. I no longer had to explain anything to anyone (or justify my choosing to visit Fly Awake or even decide whether or not I liked it there). I could let the experience unfold and because of that, it took on a new shape. This often happens with tea. I love to share it with others but it’s a different, and sometimes needed, experience to enjoy it on my own, especially when I’m visiting a shop for the first time.
In the end, it was inconceivable how hard the second tea smacked into me when I consider how much the first one passed me by.
In many ways—dankness, earthiness, borderline old sockiness—shou pu’erh couldn’t be more different than the brightness, grassiness, and borderline electricity of Japanese shincha. To chase the latter with the former—as I am right now whilst the santiam river rages out the window to my right, eventually giving way to Detroit Lake which, in parts, is as wide and expansive as the bluebird sky above—is the sensory contrast of standing underneath a spring waterfall or rolling in the soil beneath a fallen log.
At Fly Awake, I drank Cosmic Triggers as I wrote the bulk of a speech I have the honor to give on Saturday night. A best friend of mine is getting married. I’ll save the thicker pulp for the speech, but I will concede here only that I cannot fathom my safe transition from teenage to adulthood without his friendship and guidance. The flow of the tea in the shop yesterday and the shuttle now, helps the tears tickle out from the edges of my eyes. To borrow a line from Fly Awake: it is significantly shifty.
.There’s a line in the Janelle Monae song where she says the following:
“I’m trying to find my peace / I was led to believe there’s something wrong with me.”
The song is on a playlist in my iTunes that I made for my friend a dozen years ago. Monae cries in the video—tears are a huge theme of the track itself. When I started this newsletter, I told myself if I could make myself cry every time I wrote it—whether out of joy or despair or both—then I would have done a good job.
I don’t always check that box, but I checked it today.
Now, a woman’s hair is snaking into my shuttle zone. The strands are tickling my knee and competing with my screen. I’ve been tempted to write about culture shock upon coming home—encapsulated by the aforementioned fellow passenger. She has twin bottles of Coke tucked into the edges of her backpack and could be propped as symbolically American. The driver rattled off the complimentary snack options when she came aboard in Salem:
“Golfish…just kidding…we have no Goldfish. We have Ruffles. Cooler Ranch Dorritos. BBQ Lays.”
It’s Monae that brings me back from the more trivial analyses. I used to play this song for my English students in Chongqing. Few of them could watch the whole video without turning away.
We are climbing higher. There is un-melted snow mounds on the ground out the window. There has been a heatwave in the Pacific Northwest the last few days. There are burned out trees everywhere you look outside.
“This is a Cold War. Do you know what you’re fitting for?”
