For music journalists of a certain vintage, a dull but terrifying unease often greets invitations from pop stars to fly somewhere special to spend time with them. We are six years out from from the Rihanna Plane disaster, a promotional experiment that forced a gaggle of writers to follow her first-class life around as they were stuck in sub-economy purgatory, waiting for a fleeting glimpse of the star. Just last year, the Fyre Festival became an iconic debacle, when, after being lured out by the likes of performers including Lil Yachty and organizer Ja Rule, fans and journalists were marooned in the Bahamas with only turkey sandwiches to eat and no way home. And almost every writer out there has a scary story about a time they covered some random festival in some random place with some random disaster as its sad punctuation.

And yet, Kanye West’s brand, especially in 2018, is disorientation, so when he invited me and a number of other journalists, celebrities, and industry types to fly to Wyoming to hear his new album ye in the state in which it was recorded, it somehow made chaotic sense. Many of us were only invited a day before we were set to leave and given absolutely no information as to what to expect—I did not even know what time I needed to be at the airport until late the night before. (As of this writing, I am still unclear when I will be heading back home.) There was no itinerary of what we’d do once we’d arrive, no hotel information, no schedule of events. At the airport, a small private terminal in New York’s JFK reserved for chartered flights, about a hundred people sat on top of their luggage in a state of stupor staring at their phones; the employees of the private airline were unwilling or unable to even tell us when the plane would finally take off. In that moment, a vague terror began to wash over me that this could be a nightmare and, given Kanye’s recent mood, that the nightmare itself might be the goal in some sadistic way.

Of course, adding to the chaos is that this is not a normal time in Kanye land, which is really saying something considering how abnormal much of his career has been. He has, of course, received flak for comments made about Donald Trump and slavery, and for the first time maybe in his entire career, you can feel a line actually being crossed in even his most loyal fans, with many unsure of what to make of an artist they grew up with, who many feel is almost family. He has spouted ideas that are at best interpreted as confused and misguided, and at worst as hateful and dangerous. There were, as far as I could make out, hushed conversations around me about the state of his persona. I wasn’t the only one worrying.

Except the trip wasn’t a disaster, and actually, the ride was quite comfortable. Inside the jet, which held around 70 people, was one big first class filled with buttery brown leather seats that reclined. We ate Lay’s potato chips and roast beef sandwiches wrapped in plastic—not exactly food you’d imagine Kanye or his wife Kim Kardashian eating themselves, but hardly the pathetic fare seen at Fyre Festival. The plane was filled with a random assortment: Skinny kids in Raf Simons Adidas shoes who made the older flight attendants worry, I overheard, that they should’ve carded everyone on board to make sure the bountiful wine was being given legally; the stylish visual artist Lucien Smith and a few cool members of the avant-garde jazz group Onyx Collective; and some more conventional folks who looked like they could have worked for Kanye’s label, Def Jam, or Adidas, which owns his Yeezy brand.

And by the time we landed, the confusion of Kanye West started to again feel like a strength, at least in the moment. We pulled into a tiny airport in Jackson Hole surrounded by white-capped mountains and fields for as far as eyes could see. There is something beautifully surreal—beautifully Kanye, in fact—about seeing a young man, as I did, in a black balaclava pulled over his head, a black leather Off-White trench coat draped over his body, and a clear plastic briefcase walk down the stairs to step out onto a Wyoming tarmac. There has been talk these days about red state and blue state bubbles, but here, surely, was about as strange a mingling of the two as I could ever imagine—a hypebeast ensconced in pine trees and rolling hills wearing Martin Margiela.