Pullman

Only in Pullman!

Listen:

The Oregon Marching Band is the best marching band in the Pac-10. Cal’s band puts in a good effort but their musicality suffers, Stanford’s makes babies die in childbirth, and USC’s band can take their one repetitive song and go suck a dick, preferably a big one after yesterday’s game. I don’t consider myself an expert in a lot of fields, but if there’s one area of study in which I can thoroughly beat you over the head with the Rusty Tire Iron Of Knowledge, it’s useless college marching band trivia, and my status as a college marching band aficionado* means that when I say a band is good, my opinion is about as close to right as you can get.

*My hetero writing partner Mike is no doubt shaking his head with disdain right now, already dreaming up another of his world-famous dismissive replies to my blog. Well, you know what, Mike? You’re a pro wrestling aficionado. And sure, my thing involves people in brightly colored uniforms acting like idiots and disregarding musicality in favor of volume, but yours involves scantly clad, sweaty men. Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones – they should also get good real estate agents, because there’s no way a glass house is going to sell in today’s market.

So the Oregon Marching Band is spectacularly great at what it does. Sadly, our budget isn’t quite as great as we are, thus while other, inferior college marching bands get to travel with the football team, we only make one trip to an away game every year. Also, our budget is so small that we can’t even travel outside the Pacific Northwest. This would be fine if any of the Washington teams were worth a damn, but sadly, they aren’t. Thus, when all 200 people in the Oregon Marching Band traveled to Pullman, Washington last week for the game against Washington State, we weren’t so much going to rally our team and fans against a worthy adversary as we were going to provide the soundtrack to a slaughter.

In case you were wondering, the exact terms of the slaughter were 14 to 63, Oregon’s favor.

The last time I traveled with the marching band, we went to El Paso, Texas for the Sun Bowl. Things were different then – I had only just started my blog, and at the time I didn’t know about El Paso. I mean, I knew that it existed, I just didn’t know that it was the municipal equivalent of a dump truck load of flaming manure with Hitler, Saddam, and Bush toasting marshmallows over it. Going to Pullman, however, everyone knew from the start that the trip was going to suck, because most of us have been to Pullman before in one capacity or another and we’re well aware of what it’s like there. Also, my blog is now very popular in the band, and throughout the trip many of my fellow members of the OMB told me (in varying states of sobriety) that they were looking forward to my inevitable blog about their escapades. So while going to El Paso was a naïve trip into the heart of darkness, the journey to Pullman with all eyes on me for a rousing blog about the experience was more like a piece of Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo Journalism, perhaps warranting the Fear And Loathing prefix that I’ve already overused.

So, having been there, what do I think of Pullman? Well, I mean, what’s there to say? It’s a crappy little town that’s really close to Idaho. It certainly isn’t worse than El Paso, if that’s what you’re after. By and large the strongest feeling I had while in Pullman was a desire to leave. In El Paso, on the other hand, I was fighting the overwhelming urge to burn the entire city to the ground and then leave.

Pullman is the sort of town where, in movies, horrible things happen. Despicable, disgusting, gut wrenching, terrifying things. Dark, lonely, two lane highways snake for miles away from the town through endless, uninhabited rolling hills. As the home to a major state university, it’s only reasonable to expect that dozens if not hundreds of beautiful, well endowed coeds have fallen prey to serial killers and radioactive inbred mutants along these desolate stretches of asphalt. Or perhaps the terror will take root inside the town itself – for reasons unknown, Pullman’s dead begin to rise and hunt the living, or maybe carnivorous subterranean monsters start prowling beneath the streets. It’s exactly the sort of quaint, folksy place that Hollywood loves to destroy. I’ve been on the Universal Studios Backlot Tour and I’ve been through downtown Pullman, and the only difference is that the food in Pullman is cheaper.

The only really gory death in Pullman, however, was that of Washington State’s football team, as we all had expected. They seemed a bit resentful of our presence, though – everyone had known from the beginning that they were going to get absolutely dominated, so I guess for the University of Oregon to send a marching band along with its bloodthirsty football team was sort of like adding insult to injury. We wound up sitting on the turf, just behind one of the field goals, and the Washington State players demonstrated their disdain for us by spending the first half hour before the game kicking practice field goals at us. This turned marching band into an extreme sport – one minute you’re watching the conductor, minding your own business and playing “September” by Earth, Wind, and Fire, and the next minute somebody is screaming, “HEADS UP!” and you’re diving for cover from a volley of footballs. Interestingly enough, this didn’t seem to bother our band director, who, should a soccer ball from the adjoining field roll onto ours during a rehearsal, will loudly belittle the soccer team for endangering our safety.

Now that I have the reputation as the guy who writes scornful blog updates about most of the things that happen to him, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised when people expect me to be scornful about a given experience. The thing is, Pullman just doesn’t have a lot for me to be scornful about. It’s a small town, sure, but most towns in the world are, and as much as I’d love to look down my nose at most of the towns on Earth, I really can’t bring myself to quite that level of elitism just yet. El Paso has earned my ire because it has all the small town disadvantages – boring, no cultural opportunities – with all the big city crappiness – sprawl, traffic, nonstop ugly suburbs. There is no excuse for making close to a million people suffer in that sort of environment, which is why El Paso irks me so. Pullman, on the other hand, is just a small town. It doesn’t really provoke scorn in me. It scarcely provokes anything in me, save for the fear that somewhere in the nearby countryside there’s a hillbilly with a chainsaw. Waiting.

Truman Capps means no offense to chainsaw wielding hillbillies.