The print issue, which we worked hard to put out by Orientation, has been snarled in red tape and will arrive later in the week. But for now, a teaser: Henry Pedersen, as profiled by Hannah Goldfield.
"It's hard to explain," says Henry Pedersen, CC'08, when I inquire as to the nature of his summer job. "Just come over whenever you can. My boss is away, so we're having a barbecue. It's gonna be awesome!"
I showed up in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood around lunchtime, expecting the headquarters of an internet start-up or some obscure grassroots organization. Instead, I found an unmarked gate on a quiet residential street. Out bounded the 6 foot-plus Henry, the picture of oh-so-ironic indie rocker in a worn blue 90s-era tank top and paint-splattered pants, hair cropped short but for a single thick forelock flopped over one eye.
But anyone who saw last year's Varsity Show could surmise that if Henry, who composed it, were going to be in a band, it would be a tribute to Earth, Wind and Fire. He plays bass, French horn, and piano; I once found him struggling to get a baby-upright into his Ruggles dorm room (he failed). And it only takes a short conversation with him to figure out that he vehemently despises anything deemed "indie"—within five minutes of our interview, he referred to his own sister as "hipster scum."
So why the tag-sale look? Pure practicality, of course. He swung the gate open to reveal his office: the courtyard of an apartment complex. Far from the Merrill-ing crowds, Henry was employed as a landlord's handyman.
Henry is not afraid to admit that he likes going against the grain for the sake of it, though he stipulates that he cares less about outcome than pathway. It's how he explains his decision to take both Lit Hum and CC as a freshman, an experience he describes as "so fucking hard." It's why, on a trip to India two summers ago, the primary goal of which was to learn Sanskrit, he ended up wandering the desert for two weeks on a camel, then borrowing a canoe from a fisherman and accidentally traveling thirty kilometers upstream in a monsoon. "Coming back," he reminisces, chuckling, "I was so sunburned that I couldn't paddle—I had to float. It was awesome!"
But it's neither odd-jobbery nor ancient language that really gets his blood pumping; it's bones. Henry started off as a religion major. And then, on a sophomore-year whim, he decided to enroll in—of all things—Forensic Osteology, and hasn't looked back since. Before settling into his maintenance stint, he spent a few weeks in Taos, New Mexico, surveying a Pueblan Kiva, or underground house, excavated by Barnard anthropology professor Severin Fowles. For his senior thesis as an Evolutionary Biology of the Human Species major, he plans to run a faunal analysis of the decapitated skeletons of two dogs and an infant found at the site. Not exactly "Victorian Literature and the Concept of the Self."
What's perhaps most surprising about Henry, however, is his dichotomous personality. It's hard to tell whether he's a lion dressed as a lamb or vice versa; he can be incredibly sweet one minute and stingingly sarcastic the next. He's split his time at Columbia between bar-bouncing (you may have seen him, shoulders hunched, posted outside a certain popular Morningside watering hole) and a capella singing (he served for three semesters as the musical director of the Kingsmen), between advocating what he calls "considerate science" (in a nutshell, acknowledgement that there's more than one way to define truth) and needling his peers (this semester he plans to sport a Hezbollah t-shirt a friend brought back from Lebanon). His academic path seems sure to lead to a professional life spent mostly in a dusty lab, yet he dreams of being on television. "If I'm not rich or famous by 25," he declares, inexplicably, "I'm moving to New Zealand." His ceaseless enthusiasm seems to be his only constancy.