My Dad’s Depression

Can you lead a loved one to happiness?

Paul Barach and his father at Joshua Tree National Park (photo courtesy Paul Barach)

Season 6 | Episode 2

For Paul Barach, hiking is an antidote to depression. Is it that way for everyone?

This episode takes us from Washington State to Joshua Tree National Park and explores what happens when we try to impose our own life solutions on a loved one.

• Transcript

  Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

  VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.

  WILLOW BELDEN: Have you ever had a situation where you’re out on a hike, and you see a mountain off in the distance, and you want to know what it is? Lucky for you, there’s an app that can help. It’s called PeakVisor.

  PeakVisor is our presenting sponsor this season. When you open up their app, it shows you a panorama of everything you’re looking at, with all the peaks labeled. They also have intricate 3-D maps to help you plan out your adventures.

  If you’d like to be a superhero of outdoor navigation, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

  Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

  This season is all about silence. Each episode, we’re exploring how we find stillness amidst the noise of life.

  But before we get to that, I want to tell you about an opportunity that’s coming up. This summer, Out There is partnering with a nonprofit called Common Outdoor Ground to co-host an evening of campfire stories. And we’re looking for three storytellers who’d like to participate. The event will be June 22. And it’s in person, here in southeast Wyoming. If you’re interested in being one of our storytellers, we would love to hear from you. Just click the link in the episode description. And be sure to send us your pitch by May 11th.

  And now, on to our story for today.

  When we find a cure for our problems, we tend to want to share it with others. Whether it’s a solution for insomnia, or a trick for being more productive at work — we have this urge to tell our loved ones about the things that are helping us. We want to fix their problems. And so we try to convince them to follow our lead.

  But what if they're not interested? Can you lead a loved one to happiness? Paul Barach has the story.

  And just so you know, this episode discusses depression.

  PAUL BARACH: If you don’t live with clinical depression: hey, lucky.

  You might think depression is feeling sad all the time, and you’re right. But it’s so much more than that. It’s this homesickness for a place you’ve never been. And it’s this black hole in the center of your chest that’s always threatening to consume you.

  I’ve been battling depression for most of my life. Sometimes it’s bad, and you just ache from all that homesickness. Sometimes it’s really bad, and all the color gets sucked out of the world.

  Occasionally, it’s not that bad. Occasionally.

  My dad kept telling me that I just needed to find a steady career and get back on medication, because that’s what worked for him, and who do you think I got my depression from?

  But A) I didn’t see medication working for him. And B) Tried that already. Didn’t work. So I’d just committed to white-knuckling through my life, but then I went on my first thru hike. And my very healthy plan changed.

  I was hiking The Wonderland Trail, a 90-mile loop around Mount Rainier. And less than a mile in I rounded this bend and looked up from my map. And I froze in place. It was the first view of the mountain from the trail. And it was so big. It was like you were circling a god. And I stood there, just saying “Wow.” Like, I couldn’t understand why everyone in Seattle wasn’t here.

  And the longer I stood there, the more I could hear this stillness, this silence underneath it all. And listening to that silence, the black hole reversed itself, and this joy filled my chest until I thought it would burst. The ache was gone. It felt like I’d finally come home.

  The hike was nine days. And for those nine days, I was happy. I’d stop beside creeks, in forests, or on a pass with Rainier in view, and just listen to that silence.

  And after I got back, the world was brighter for a couple of days. It wasn’t a magic cure. Nothing is. But for the moment, the black hole had stopped sucking so much. By the time the depression came back, I was already planning my next hike.

  And that’s how it went for the next couple years. I got outside any time I could, planned my freelancing work around backpacking trips, and hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. Three thousand miles of trail later, the void had become manageable. The outdoors had made me okay. Happy as often as I was sad. And in depression world, that’s basically reaching nirvana.

  And I wanted that same kind of happiness for my dad, because I was getting worried about him.

  Since turning seventy, his world had shrunk, and he was shrinking with it. His one remaining friend lived hours away. He barely went out. He worked in one room, exercised in another room, then drove to his office to work more, and finally came home to watch TV.

  The whole family could see him struggling, especially over the winters. But any time I tried to talk to him about it, he’d brush it off and then try to give me career advice, which I guess is a love language?

  I just KNEW if I could drag him out into nature, get him captivated by that silence like I was, it’d shake him out of it, at least for a couple of days. And maybe, after he got a taste of that brighter world, he’d want to get back out there more often. He was still in good health, and this felt like the last, best chance to help him.

  So I said we should go to a National Park. Just me and him. Father and son.

  And he said, “Great idea.”

  And then another year passed.

  So I asked again, and he said, “Sounds like a plan.”

  And more years passed, one of which there was a pandemic.

  And once we all got the shots, I asked again. And again and again, because where do you think I got my stubbornness from?

  And after five years of asking he finally said: “Okay. Let’s do Joshua Tree.” And I said, “Thank god. Great. I’ll handle the planning.”

  We’d been driving a dusty stretch of I-10 for a couple hours and I was looking over the agenda. The timing had worked out perfectly. I was unemployed, because there was a pandemic, so I had time. And I’d just had the third round of a job interview that I was a shoe-in for, so there was also money on the horizon. Best of all, this inoculated me from my dad’s career advice, so both of us could focus on the trip.

  After doing a bunch of research, I’d planned three hikes for us to do. They were easy enough that my dad could handle them, and they were supposed to have the best views in the park.

  The first one was a short sunset hike up Ryan Mountain, where we’d get a 360-degree view of the park. The second was a flat three miles to Willow Hole, where we’d get away from the tourists with some of the best rock formations in the park. And we’d finish off the third day with a short hike around Barker Dam, which came recommended as one of the few water views in this desert.

  I was hoping we’d do all three. I was expecting that we’d do two. At a minimum, I wanted to keep my dad from doing what he usually did on trips like this — which was go to the Starbucks to be on his tablet.

  I knew what I wanted out of this, but he’d been mostly silent on what he was hoping to see. And I’d been wondering, out of all the National Parks, why Joshua Tree? Like, did he come here once from San Diego as a teen? Was he looking for some desert sunshine after the Seattle winter? Or was it that the landscape was so different than anything in the Pacific Northwest?

  “Oh, because it’s your favorite,” he told me. “I remember you talking about it.” And I had talked about it, 10 years ago. But if I’d known he had no opinion on it, I’d have taken us to Sequoia National Park, which is my actual favorite, and also closer.

  It was quiet for a while until we passed Fontana, this sprawl of houses in a dusty stretch of nothing, when my dad broke the silence.

  “That’s where my half-uncle’s chicken farm was,” he said. “That’s where I first learned English.”

  It’s the first I’ve heard this part of my dad’s immigration story, which had always come to us in bits and pieces.

  Most of the family had been murdered in the Holocaust, with the survivors hiding out in a bunker beneath a farm in Poland for four years. For obvious reasons, they never cared to revisit that part of their life.

  But he remembered arriving in America, standing on the bow of a ship, and being amazed by a woman’s red nail polish. The luxury that represented.

  When they arrived in California, my dad was captivated by his half-uncle’s television. The first TV he’d ever seen in a home. Over the six months he spent watching baseball and I Love Lucy, he learned enough English to fit in at his first grade class. After school, he’d work in his parent’s grocery store, a job he had until he left for college.

  And after graduating college, my dad has had one other job his entire life. He’s a success by any measure, and I love him for all the hard work he put in. It gave our family a good life. But I knew he wasn’t fully enjoying his own. That’s why I couldn’t wait for my dad’s reaction to Joshua Tree.

  I pictured us sitting at a beautiful overlook. I’d put my arm around his shoulder and he’d say, “Wow” and finally get it, and just be happy in all that silence. And maybe after the trip, he’d get inspired to get out more and brighten up his world. That was my plan, anyway.

  WILLOW: Hey, it’s Willow. We’ll hear the rest of the story in a moment. But first, I want to tell you about another podcast I think you’ll like. It’s called Subtitle and it tells stories about languages and what they mean to us.

  Do polyglots have special skills? Why do we favor some accents over others? Do we think differently in different languages?

  You can hear about the fun debates an American linguist has with her British-born husband and daughter. Or how comedian Sugar Sammy decided to do four different standup shows, each in different languages. Or the incredible staying power of the Irish language.

  You’ll hear all this and much more on Subtitle: Stories about languages and the people who speak them. Listen to Subtitle wherever you get your podcasts, or at subtitlepod.com.

  And now, back to the story.

  PAUL: We both got excited once we pulled off the highway into Joshua Tree. It’s hard not to. Joshua Tree is like touching down on some alien planet.

  The trees look like Dr. Seuss drew them. These thin trunks with branches that contort towards the sky, ending in these long dagger-shaped leaves. And all around them are these towering boulder formations.

  The road wound past some old mining shafts, and I turned to my dad and said, “I’ll never understand it. How can you come out here and look at all this beauty, and only think of what you can extract from it?”

  “That’s because you’ve never been dirt poor, Paul,” my dad replied. And he’s right, but so am I.

  We drove past rows of vans on the side of the road, where climbers packed their gear up after another day on the crags. And finally, we pulled into the Ryan Mountain Trailhead.

  We started up the gentle sandy trail in good spirits. My dad said it felt great to be out of the Seattle gloom. And meanwhile, I was over the moon.

  After years of saying it would happen, and low-key doubting it would happen, we’re finally here. Father and son. About to experience this incredible place together. Maybe next year, we could do Sequoia.

  Midway through the hike, my dad started slowing down. He looked up at the top, and I could see him calculating exactly how many steps he had left in him, which was zero.

  And I tell him, “It’s only a quarter mile more, you know, just a couple hundred more feet.”

  And he waves me off and says, “Go on, enjoy it.” He’ll wait for me.

  And it’s like, come on. Like, we’re almost there. Like, just another quarter mile. But if I push him now, he’s gonna be too tired tomorrow. And I can’t just carry him up there, probably, so I leave him there and jog the last bit up

  And I am so bummed once I reach the top and see that sunset. Because it is incredible. The giant desert sun sank behind the distant mountains. The rock formations below were casting these sundial shadows across the desert floor. And the specks of Joshua trees with their arms up, praising the sunset.

  I’m sure if my dad had seen it, it would have changed him. But that’s fine. Because those rock formations are way more impressive when you’re looking up at them rather than down on them. And we’re gonna see plenty of those tomorrow at Willow Hole. So I soaked up as much as I could, took some photos, then jogged back down to show him what he missed up there.

  He nodded at the photos, then asked to hear more about the job I’d interviewed for. And just as I was in the middle of bragging about how I’ve totally got this job locked down, an email from the hiring manager dinged on my phone. I opened it up, and I totally did not get that job after all.

  And I said, “Ah, dammit.”

  And this sympathy, this care and concern, fills my dad’s face, and I think, ‘Ah, dammit.’ Because now, instead of focusing on all this beauty surrounding us, all weekend, I’d be getting more job advice. Which I got on the whole drive back to the hotel, where he suggested I should figure out how to be an influencer, and I’m still not sure if he knows what that word means.

  The next day was the hike to Willow Hole. Unlike yesterday, I was sure this one would be the ticket. We got plenty of rest. It’s a flat three miles through a sandy wash. A little exposed, but that’s why I made sure we brought plenty of sun protection, and I’ve filled up my CamelBak and I’m bringing two extra liters so we’ll have plenty of water.

  Dad waited until we were halfway to the trailhead to tell me he was gonna sit this one out. Too tired from yesterday to hike. And I took a deep breath, and reminded him that it’s flat the whole way, we have plenty of water and snacks that he watched me pack for him, and we only have one more day here.

  But he said no, and I can’t exactly force a seventy-five year old to hike through the desert. So we agreed that he’d pick me back up at 3 p.m. from the trailhead. And I knew he was heading to the Starbucks to be on his iPad.

  I hiked out beneath Joshua trees towards the snow-capped mountains. And once I got a half-mile from the parking lot it was basically empty of people all the way to Willow Hole.

  And I really wish my dad could have been there. Because it was perfect. Shaded and cool in this amphitheater of stacked boulders and melted stone. Lizards darted to the edge of this small pond where Pinyon Jays bathed and sang.

  We could have rested there for hours hearing the wind slice through the Joshua trees, exploring the boulders, talking, or just sitting in awe.

  Instead, I soaked up as much as I could, then hurried back to meet my dad for the 3 p.m. pickup.

  After two failed hikes, Barker Dam had a lot riding on it, and it did not deliver. It was more of a pond, with some low boulder mounds around it. Dad thought it was fine, and it was. But it was nothing like what he’d already missed. It wasn’t the kind of view that would pull him out of his depression or inspire him to start hiking. There was no “wow” to it. And it was time to head home to Seattle.

  As we drove out of the park, dad turned to me and said, “Have you considered going back to school? There are these programming bootcamps I heard about…”

  And I nodded along, but then out the window I saw a couple of people sitting on top of this rock formation, enjoying themselves in the late afternoon sunshine. And I pulled the car over and convinced my dad to climb up with me. He was uncertain, but it was an easy scramble. I showed him where to put his hands, and placed his New Balance sneakers from Costco in the footholds. And I stayed where I could catch him in case he slipped, then once he had it, scrambled up after him.

  And the view from the top was perfect. Off in the distance, you could see people roping up to climb. On the road below, cars the size of Tic Tacs drove by the boulder formations. And birds were swooping around an impossibly blue desert sky.

  And when my dad finally caught his breath, he turned to me, and said, “You know, maybe they rejected you because you’ve bounced through so many jobs before.”

  And I said, “Let’s talk about that later,” and went to take some photos. Because it was our last day here, and at least I was going to enjoy this place.

  It was quiet for a couple of minutes, and when I looked back, my dad was sitting on a small rock, just gazing out at the expanse. And without turning, he said, “You know, it really is breathtaking out here.”

  And that’s all I wanted him to say. The whole weekend. That he could see what I saw out here. That he’d be okay.

  And I said, “I love you, Dad.” And he didn’t hear me. He was too captivated by the view. And I wasn’t going to take him away from it. So instead I came over and sat next to him and put my arm over his shoulders. And we listened to that breathtaking silence together.

  In the end, it didn’t work. My dad’s still a homebody. I keep hiking. We’re both still depressed.

  The truth is, neither of us knows how to help the other one. We only know how to help ourselves, and barely even that.

  But in the end, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we were out there together. Father and son. Two sad men who wanted nothing more in the entire world, than for the other one to be happy.

  WILLOW: That was Paul Barach. He’s a writer living in Tacoma, Washington. His book Fighting Monks and Burning Mountains: Misadventures on a Buddhist Pilgrimage is available on Amazon. You can follow him on Instagram @BarachOutdoors.

  If you enjoyed this story, please consider supporting Out There. We are a tiny, independent production, and listener contributions make up the majority of our funding. Your gifts pay for the stories you hear on this show.

  To make a contribution today, click the link in the episode description, or go to patreon.com/outtherepodcast. Patreon is a crowd-funding platform for creative endeavors, and it’ll let you make a monthly contribution to Out There — in any amount that works for you.

  Again, that’s patreon.com/outtherepodcast.

  Coming up next time on Out There…

  JD REINBOTT: You’re just sitting underwater, and the only thing you can hear is the sound of your breath and the crackling of life underwater.

  WILLOW: For Mental Health Awareness Month, we’re bringing you a special episode about how silence in nature impacts our emotional well-being.

  Tune in on May 2.

  DENIS BULICHENKO: My name is Denis Bulichenko. I go hiking almost every weekend.

  WILLOW: Denis is the founder of PeakVisor, our presenting sponsor.

  Recently, he went out with a mountain guide, and they ventured into the unknown. The plan was to go up and over an entire mountain range.

  DENIS:We asked several other mountain guides in that area. They told us, “No, no one does that.”

  WILLOW: The guides didn’t know of any reliable trail that would connect.

  DENIS: But judging by the app data, there was one. And we did that. And yeah, it was just amazing. Even mountain guide was excited about that trip.

  WILLOW: If you’d like to wow the mountain guides, check out PeakVisor.

  They have maps of mountains all over the world, information about weather and snow conditions, and a peak-bagging feature to help you keep track of your accomplishments.

  Check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

  Today’s story was written and narrated by Paul Barach. Story editing and sound design by me, Willow Belden. And special thanks to Maria Ordovas-Montanes and Wade Roush for production assistance.

  Out There’s audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our interns are Katie Reuther and Maria Ordovas-Montanes. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.

  We’ll see you in two weeks. And in the meantime, have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.

Credits

• Story by Paul Barach

• Story editing and sound design by Willow Belden

• Special thanks to Maria Ordovas-Montanes and Wade Roush for production assistance

Links

• Support Out There on Patreon

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This episode sponsored by PeakVisor

Rekindling the Spark

How the night sky reignited one scientist’s passion

Jesse Rivera photographs objects in space (Photo courtesy Jesse Rivera)

Season 6 | Episode 1

We’re told to follow our dreams. But often, that’s disappointing. Reality typically doesn’t measure up to what we’d imagined.

So what then? How do you reignite your passions?

On this episode, we travel from an observatory in Puerto Rico to a hillside in New Jersey, and explore how one scientist overcame the disillusionment of academia.

• Transcript

  Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

  VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.

  WILLOW BELDEN: This season of Out There is sponsored by PeakVisor.

  PeakVisor is an app that helps you make the most of your adventures.

  Let’s say you’re out on a hike, and you want to know what mountains you’re looking at off in the distance. PeakVisor will tell you. You just open up the app, and it’ll show you a panorama of everything you’re looking at, with all the peaks labeled. They also have intricate 3D maps to help you plan out your adventures.

  If you’d like to be a superhero of outdoor navigation, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

  Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

  This is a new season of Out There. And the theme we’re exploring this season is silence. Each episode, we’ll share a story about finding stillness amidst the noise — whether that’s literal or figurative.

  Today’s story is about reconciling our dreams with reality. Chasing a dream can be wonderful. It’s exciting to do something you love. But all too often, we end up getting disillusioned. Because a lot of times, reality doesn’t measure up to what we imagined.

  So, what then? What do you do? How do you cope when following your dreams pulls you away from what you love about them?

  Samia Bouzid has the story.

  SAMIA BOUZID: When Jesse Rivera started doing astronomy, he had no idea he would fall in love with it. At first, he mainly saw it as his ticket to college. It all started his senior year of high school.

  JESSE RIVERA: Spring semester comes along, and this professor from the local university gives a talk about pulsar astronomy and says, “We have these opportunities available for students to come do research for the four years that they're here, and get a bachelor's degree in physics.” And I was told, “You get PAID to do this.”

  SAMIA: The professor was from the University of Texas at Brownsville, right in Jesse's hometown. The school was offering a full scholarship and a four-year research stipend to five students. And that sounded pretty good to Jesse. Not because he knew the first thing about astronomy, but because he liked science and he knew he wanted to go to college. He just didn't have a way to pay for it.

  So, he applied. And he got in.

  The way it worked, he and his classmates split their time between doing regular college classwork and conducting astronomy research. For the most part, they used the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

  For decades, Arecibo had been used to discover asteroids that might collide with Earth, or to pick up signals from exploding stars thousands of light-years away. And now, Jesse had a chance to use it himself.

  In December of 2008, Jesse's first year in college, his team flew out to Arecibo for the first time. And for Jesse, nothing was quite the same after that.

  The Arecibo Observatory was as big as a sports stadium. Picture a giant metal crater built into a mountainside, with something that looks like a golf ball dangling above it. The golf ball is the part of the telescope that you can move around to focus on different objects in the sky.

  JESSE: It felt kind of out-of-body experience to really see the scale of this telescope. I knew it was 300 meters in diameter, but you don't realize how big 300 meters actually is until you see this massive construction that is the size of the mountain that it's built into and it's just … to think that this engineering marvel exists to look at these distant objects that are so far away, incomprehensibly far away ... it makes you feel as part of something bigger.

  SAMIA: Jesse and his peers were using Arecibo to look for pulsars, these dead stars that spew radio waves. They were hoping this research would help them confirm a prediction Einstein had made almost 100 years earlier about the existence of wrinkles in spacetime.

  The day after he arrived, Jesse got to operate the telescope. He sat there in the command room overlooking the dish…

  JESSE: You point the telescope, and you say, “Move to this target,” and then it moves to a target. You see this giant building move, and you hear it. You hear the metal on the rails moving, you hear this mechanical noise in the background of a rainforest. And then you're able to kind of see these signals coming from space in real time.

  SAMIA: Jesse couldn't get over the fact that he was just sitting in the middle of a rainforest clicking buttons and basically talking with the universe. Or, at least listening to it.

  JESSE: Six months prior, I was in high school having zero idea of what astronomy actually entailed, and then all of a sudden, I was at the world's largest single-dish radio telescope in the world, and I was using it.

  SAMIA: On that trip, Jesse realized he didn’t just want a full ride to college. He wanted to be an astronomer.

  JESSE: I realized I loved using telescopes. It's one of those things where you just feel like you belong with the universe. It's like, I feel, it almost feels like a religious experience in a sense. It connects me, I feel, in a way that I haven't really been able to do anywhere else.

  SAMIA: So, in his senior year of college, Jesse applied to an astronomy grad program at Rutgers, in New Jersey – and he got in. He was super excited, but he was also a little nervous, ’cause leaving home to chase some dream of studying the stars was not the kind of thing that's usually done in Brownsville.

  JESSE: I was terrified of telling my mom, because the expectations at home, particularly in a Hispanic household and Hispanic culture, you stick around to try to help out the family in any way you can. And all my siblings had done exactly that. And when I told her, she was like, “¿Y por qué te vas?” She kept asking me why I couldn't do it from home.

  SAMIA: Jesse knew it was what he wanted, though. He had a chance to do something that felt meaningful to him. And it was a chance to do something no one in his family had ever had gotten to do – get a PhD. So he was excited. And three days after graduation, he was on a plane to New Jersey.

  This is where I met Jesse. Full disclosure: Jesse's my partner, and we met that summer doing astrophysics research at Rutgers. And I remember that, at the time, he was psyched to be starting his PhD, but he was also going through a bit of culture shock.

  JESSE: I came from my local university in Brownsville, where all the students looked like me. Everyone in the city looked like me. It was the place where I grew up. There was a very large familiarity there.

  I was now in a place where the culture was different. The people were different. The moment I moved over here, I felt like everyone was much colder to me. Everything was just, it was a culture shock for me for sure.

  SAMIA: On top of that, it was dawning on him that he didn't completely fit in among other academics.

  JESSE: Like my first research group meeting, I heard all these people talking, and I felt different. I realized I had a very thick Brownsville Mexican accent, and it was something that I just never thought about. I never actively thought about it. I think I managed through it by kind of changing the way I spoke, but it was the first time that I had ever actively tried to do this. And it was hard.

  SAMIA: School itself was hard too. When he’d pictured himself studying astronomy, he imagined using telescopes like he had at Arecibo. But in reality, he rarely got to do that. His first couple years were full of classes. Classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, electricity and magnetism. And when he finally got back to research in his third year, he spent almost all his time analyzing other people’s data and debugging code. He hardly ever even looked at the sky.

  JESSE: When you're in front of a computer all day, you start asking yourself, ‘Is this what makes me an astronomer?’

  SAMIA: The longer Jesse plugged away at research, the more disillusioned he became. By the fifth year of his program, he was starting to feel restless. The spark that had drawn him to astronomy in the first place was all but gone. And he began to wonder if he’d gone down the wrong path. He’d known grad school would be tough, but he just started to worry that his whole career would be screens and number-crunching and feeling out of place.

  It had been years since he'd felt anything like the magic he'd felt at Arecibo.

  I remember he started looking into careers in science policy or teaching. It seemed like every month he had a different idea about whether he was going to stay the course or try something different. His heart just wasn’t in astronomy anymore.

  And then one day, completely unexpectedly, a glimmer of that old spark came back.

  It was Jesse’s fifth year of grad school, and one of his friends had introduced him to an astrophotographer, who told Jesse about something called the New Jersey Astronomical Association. It was a site about an hour away where amateur astronomers gathered to stargaze and take pictures of objects in space.

  Jesse was into photography – he'd never tried astrophotography before, but he was curious.

  So, he and his friend Sheehan, a fellow grad student, decided to drive out there one night in November and see what they found.

  JESSE: We start driving through all these little towns in New Jersey, very narrow roads that don't have any real street lamps. And it's just your headlights that are illuminating the road. And this goes on for miles. You see really nothing, maybe some reflectors on some mailboxes, but nothing really.

  SAMIA: They drove to a clearing part way up a small mountain. There, they found a group of astrophotographers gathered in a field, next to a small observatory. The field was dotted with red light from their headlamps. And in the darkness, Jesse and Sheehan could make out the silhouettes of big telescopes aimed at the sky.

  Looking at all the fancy rigs around them, Jesse and Sheehan felt a little sheepish pulling their everyday cameras out of their bags.

  JESSE: We're just like these total noobs coming into this. And we just see all these different people with these telescopes, their mounts, their big tripods. We didn’t know what any of these things were.

  SAMIA: They felt even more sheepish when they realized how little they knew about the sky right over their heads. I mean, they were doing PhDs in astronomy. But the photographers started talking their heads off about the objects they were imaging and what all was in the sky in November, and Jesse and Sheehan didn’t know what to say.

  JESSE: Me and Sheehan were like, “We don't know any of this. Like we spend most of our time looking at our computers. We don't spend that much time looking at the night sky.”

  SAMIA: The photographers welcomed them in, though. And someone even invited them to come up to the observatory, where a telescope was tracking the Orion nebula, a bright cloud of dust and gas in the Orion constellation. There was a spot on the telescope where they could attach a camera. The camera couldn’t look through the telescope, but it could fix on the same spot in the sky and see what the telescope was seeing.

  So they stuck Sheehan’s camera on it and took a 30-second exposure.

  And the image that came out astonished them. Up in the sky, the Orion Nebula just looked like a few specks of light. But in Sheehan’s tiny camera screen, they saw bright reds and purples and billowing clouds – the kind of thing they’d only ever seen in photos from the Hubble Space Telescope. And they realized that, with their cameras, they had a direct connection with these objects way out in space.

  JESSE: It sparked something in me that I hadn't felt in such a long time, which is very, a very weird thing to say, because at this point in my life, I was looking at data from like these professional-grade telescopes. But there is something that you cannot replicate when you are the one that takes that image. And that's your conversation with the universe. And I realized, like, this is what I love about space.

  SAMIA: After that night, Jesse and Sheehan started going back to the field by themselves.

  They saved up their grad school money to buy a budget tracker that they could connect their cameras to, so they could latch onto one spot in the sky for hours, slowly collecting enough light for dim features to emerge.

  And as they did, they got to know the sky over their heads, in a much more personal way than they had through their research.

  JESSE: In order to know what I'm going to image, I have to actually look up what's up. I have to know how fast things move up in the sky. I also realized how massive things were in the sky. There's things multiple times bigger than the moon that are looming overhead at any given time. And it's just, it made me appreciate everything much more. I realized it's just like it was working on my relationship with space.

  WILLOW: Hey, it’s Willow. We’ll hear the rest of the story in a moment. But first, if you’re enjoying this podcast, we have another show we’d like to recommend.

  The Wild with Chris Morgan is a podcast about the wonder and resilience of nature. It’s hosted by ecologist and bear biologist Chris Morgan. Each episode takes listeners on a journey from the pacific northwest to complex ecosystems around the globe.

  And it’s more than just science. The Wild is about hope and why people work so hard to protect wild spaces.

  You can listen to The Wild wherever you get your podcasts.

  And now, back to the story.

  SAMIA: Jesse and Sheehan spent many nights out on that hillside together, telling spooky stories under the stars, jumping whenever a rustle in the woods broke the silence. And they got completely hooked on astrophotography.

  Back at school, Jesse still felt drained by his work, and sometimes felt out of place in academia. But the nights that he spent doing astrophotography with Sheehan helped fill up his cup. They gave him what he needed to keep going. And, in the end, that was enough to help him stay the course.

  Two years later, he finished his PhD and got a job at Swarthmore College, teaching physics and astronomy. And in some ways, Jesse’s fears about academia were true. For him, being a professional astronomer doesn’t involve a lot of telescopes. And at times, he does still feel out of place. But he’s got a tool he can fall back on now to keep that spark alive.

  On a freezing November night, Jesse and I drive out to the New Jersey Astronomical Association. Sheehan’s there waiting for us when we pull up.

  SHEEHAN AHMED: Hey Samia, how’s it going?

  SAMIA: Hi. [laughs]

  The light from his headlamp swings right into my eyes.

  SHEEHAN: Sorry, I don't want to blind you.

  SAMIA: Jesse and Sheehan unpack their equipment and spend almost an hour setting up. They each use a telescope along with their camera now, so setting up is a whole ordeal. They’re both trying to fix their telescopes on a star cluster called the Pleiades.

  SHEEHAN: Yeah, pretty sure that's Polaris.

  JESSE: That one?

  SHEEHAN: Yeah.

  JESSE: And then –

  SHEEHAN: And then vertically up.

  JESSE: Yeah. That’s exactly what I was thinking, that was Polaris too.

  SHEEHAN: Um, so that's east, so that's gonna rise more.

  JESSE: Okay.

  SAMIA: I sit next to them in the dark.

  It’s almost completely silent in a way that everyday life never is.

  There’s something about being under a dark sky in a quiet place that feels almost in between real and imaginary. Like, when you look at a dark sky, you see flashes of shooting stars. You see faint pinpricks of light that appear in the corners of your eyes but disappear when you look at them head-on. It's a little disorienting in a sort of magical way.

  JESSE: Alright, one, one test minute image and then I think I’m ready to start imaging.

  SAMIA: Eventually, Jesse and Sheehan get things up and running.

  As usual, they’re planning to spend at least an hour capturing their images, because objects like the Pleiades are so dim, it just takes that long to collect enough light for a good picture.

  By this point, our fingers and toes are completely numb, so we all climb into Jesse’s car to have some dinner and warm up.

  When we get out half an hour later, clouds have rolled in. Jesse and Sheehan’s telescopes have both stopped tracking and lost their targets. Jesse’s telescope is so lost, it’s now pointing at the ground.

  JESSE: Look, who knows how long it's been here for.

  [laughter]

  SHEEHAN: [laughs] It's looking at the ground, look at it!

  [laughter]

  JESSE: God damn it.

  SAMIA: Later, Jesse and Sheehan admitted that this actually isn’t a very unusual outcome. Often they come out and don’t get a single photograph. But they keep coming out anyway.

  They’ve realized that part of the magic is in the photos they’re taking, but part of it is just being there. Sitting on a quiet hillside, peering into the universe.

  JESSE: The universe just has a way of just like giving you a different perspective.

  SHEEHAN: Like you’re, you're like, ‘Oh god I'm on this fragile ball in the middle of nowhere and somehow it's all working,’ and it's a good feeling. It's scary and good.

  SAMIA: Yeah, it's kind of like, I mean it sounds like what you're describing is what I feel if I'm standing in front of the ocean or something.

  SHEEHAN: Yeah! Ocean at night has that same feeling as staring out into space and thinking about how big things are – just utterly terrifying but in a good way like, ‘Oh there are so many things so much bigger than me and suddenly all those other things are not that important anymore.’

  SAMIA: For Jesse, going out to photograph space feels a bit like church used to feel, when his parents took him there as a kid.

  JESSE: It was just like you're trying to build this relationship with something that is bigger than you. And there was something soothing about that. I've had my conversation with a higher being. And now I look at the sky and I feel like I'm having that conversation every night. And building that relationship with the universe.

  SAMIA: These days, when he’s not driving out to New Jersey, Jesse usually just sets up his camera on the roof of Swarthmore’s science building during his evening classes.

  And he’s gotten some of his students into astrophotography too. He wants to make sure to keep the spark alive in them. Because he understands what they’ve come for. Like him, most of them come to astronomy wanting to have a connection with space, with the stars they see overhead.

  JESSE: Most students who take Astronomy 1 want to actually look at the sky. But my class is at 10:30 in the morning and we just kind of do more math equations, study a bit more physics, and while there's inherent beauty in that as well, you're still looking at a computer screen.

  SAMIA: So he makes sure they have a chance to really connect with space if they want to. Once or twice a year, he goes out to central Pennsylvania with some of his students to take pictures under one of the darkest skies in the northeast.

  JESSE: When we first got there and they first saw the night sky, I saw in their faces the exact wonder that I felt when I first saw the sky, a truly dark sky, and you see countless stars, you see the band of the Milky Way, and especially when you're doing it with other people, it is such a spiritual connection. There's, there’s something going on there that you can't replicate anywhere else.

  SAMIA: Today, Jesse's not visiting big telescopes anymore. As for Arecibo, it ended operations forever in 2020 when two cables snapped and the structure hanging over it collapsed into the dish. Now, all the research Jesse’s doing is remote, with telescopes he's never even seen. But as far as he is from the telescopes, and from the vision of astronomy that drew him to it in the first place, he still feels close to space.

  And for anyone who finds themselves feeling distant from the thing they once loved, he has this to say…

  JESSE: Find what gives you that spark back, find what makes you passionate about what you're doing in the first place and try to do it. Keep it in your life.

  WILLOW BELDEN: That story was reported, produced, and sound designed by Samia Bouzid. Samia is an audio producer living in Philadelphia. You can see more of her work at samiabouzid.com.

  The story was edited by me, Willow Belden.

  And special thanks to Alessondra Springmann for letting us use some of her audio recordings from Arecibo.

  If you enjoyed this story, please share the link with a friend! We’re always eager for new listeners, and your recommendation is our best form of advertising.

  Coming up next time on Out There: when Paul Barach went on his first thru-hike, it changed his life.

  PAUL BARACH: Less than a mile in, I rounded this bend and looked up from my map, and I froze in place. And this joy filled my chest until I thought it would burst.

  WILLOW: Hiking was deeply therapeutic for Paul. It shook him out of his depression. Made him feel whole.

  But is it that way for everyone? What if you lead a loved one to nature and it doesn’t quite work out?

  Tune in on April 18 for that story.

  DENIS BULICHENKO: My name is Denis Bulichenko. And everything started in 2015 when I moved to Italy.

  WILLOW: Denis is the founder of PeakVisor, our presenting sponsor this season.

  DENIS: And I moved from a relatively flat area, so the mountains were like really, really exciting thing for me.

  WILLOW: So Denis starts hiking. A lot. And he takes his daughter with him.

  DENIS: She was kind of really curious, asking me all the time, “What’s the name of that mountain?”

  WILLOW: What’s the name of that mountain?

  It’s a question we ask ourselves a lot if we spend time in the backcountry. And oftentimes, it’s hard to answer. Because our hiking maps often don’t go far enough.

  So, how do you get around that? Well, if you’re Denis, you create a new app. And yes — you guessed it — the app he created is PeakVisor.

  PeakVisor helps you identify mountains. And it also has detailed maps for planning your adventures.

  If you’d like to be a superhero of outdoor navigation, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

  Out There is produced by me, Willow Belden. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our interns are Katie Reuther and Maria Ordovas-Montanes. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.

  Special thanks to all of you who are supporting Out There with financial contributions, including Jenn Hess, Todd Oyen, Adam Milgrom, Paul Barach, Soledad Montanes Ordovas, Deana Fleming, Eric Biederman, Doug Frick, Tara Joslin, Walter Mugdan, Vivienne Lenk, and Deb and Vince Garcia. You all are the best!

  We’ll see you in two weeks. And in the meantime, have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.

Credits

• Story and sound design by Samia Bouzid

• Story editing by Willow Belden

• Special thanks to Alessondra Springmann for use of audio from Arecibo

Links

• Support Out There on Patreon

• Subscribe to our email newsletter

• Follow us on Instagram and Facebook

This episode sponsored by PeakVisor

TRAILER: Silence

Season 6 | Episode 0

Our upcoming season is all about silence. From the Grand Canyon to South Korea, we’ll travel the globe, exploring how we find stillness amidst the noise — whether literal or figurative. Here’s a sneak peak at some of the stories.

The season launches April 4, 2024.

• Transcript

  Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

  WILLOW BELDEN: Hi, I’m Willow Belden, the host of Out There. Over the past nine years, we’ve been sharing award-winning outdoor stories — stories that use nature to help you make sense out of life. And now, we’re excited to bring you a new season.

  [Sound of someone diving into water, breathing hard. Birds chirping.]

  The theme for the season is…

  MONTAGE OF VOICES: Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence.

  WILLOW: Each episode, we’ll share a story about finding stillness amidst the noise — whether that’s literal or figurative.

  HOWARD NEVINS: I’ve never seen you that happy. And enjoying yourself. You were just so, I mean, beaming type of joy.

  JESSE RIVERA: It’s one of those things where you just feel like you belong with the universe. It almost feels like a religious experience in a sense.

  SHANNON TYO: I haven’t had a wedding but I would assume it’s something like that where it’s like this is such an important day. So every single thing is a blur and also the most important thing that’s ever happened.

  WILLOW: Join us, as we go outside in order to better understand ourselves.

  Together, we'll seek out the healing quiet of nature; we’ll navigate the loss of inner stillness after an injury; and we’ll silence the critics that are holding us back.

  The season launches April 4. Follow Out There wherever you’re listening right now, or at outtherepodcast.com.

Credits

• Trailer produced by Willow Belden, with assistance from Sheeba Joseph, Maria Ordovas-Montanes, and Katie Reuther

• Music from Storyblocks

Links

• Support Out There on Patreon

• Out There is a member of Hub & Spoke

Building Self-Confidence

How a snowboarding accident helped one woman believe in herself

Photo by Thom Milkovic on Unsplash

“Snowboarding would be a fake-it-till-you-make-it kind of challenge: If I could act confident long enough to get me down the mountain, then I would develop actual confidence.”

— Maya Kroth

Maya Kroth’s goal for the New Year was to bolster her self-confidence, and she decided to start by taking herself snowboarding. But things did not go according to plan.

In this episode, Maya shares her story, exploring how you can get your mojo back, even when things go very wrong.

• Episode Transcript

  Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

  VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.

  WILLOW BELDEN: Happy New Year, everyone! I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

  So, I have a favor to ask. I’m putting together our next season. And we have some really wonderful stories in the works. But creating those stories is expensive. We spend months crafting each narrative, and producers need to get paid. We also have costs for music, editing software, audio hosting, and a lot of other things.

  If Out There brightens your day at all, please consider joining me in investing in our next season. Your dollars will go straight to work funding stories. There are several easy ways you can contribute. Just go to outtherepodcast.com/support or click the link in the episode description.

  And now, on to our story for today.

  The New Year is all about new beginnings. It’s a time for starting fresh and putting failures behind you. It’s a chance to become the person you want to be.

  But of course, New Year’s resolutions don’t always pan out. So what then? What do you do, when you have a really important life goal for the New Year, but things go horribly awry?

  In this episode, Maya Kroth takes us snowboarding near Lake Tahoe, and tells a story about trying to gain confidence.

  MAYA KROTH: There’s a saying that how you spend New Year’s is how you’re going to spend the rest of the year.

  I didn’t expect to spend New Year’s Day 2022 in the emergency room of a remote rural hospital. By myself. Without health insurance. Waiting for the doctor to tell me just how bad the news was.

  I was alone. Broke. And broken. This didn’t bode well for the rest of my year.

  I’m not really the type for New Year’s resolutions. I make a few, the same ones everybody does: drink more water, get those 10,000 steps. But what I like better is to pick a New Year's word—a mantra or a theme, some idea to define the year ahead. And in 2022, it needed to be a good one.

  2021 had been rough. When I played back the tape from the movie of my life that year, the word “failure” seemed burned into every frame. There was that thing with that guy that didn’t work out. That podcast series I couldn't sell. There was that trendy weight-loss plan that majorly backfired. By the time I arrived at my parents’ house for the holidays in December, my self-esteem was at an all-time low.

  One night at dinner, we sat around the dining room table to discuss our hopes and dreams for the new year. I should say, my dad and I discussed. We are the talkers of the family. The over-analyzers, over-thinkers. My mom is like a Zen monk, listening twice as much as she speaks. And she hates these kinds of conversations. She prefers to live “in the moment.” Thinking about the future too much makes her nervous, I think. Like we’re going to jinx it or something.

  I told them about the goals I had for the New Year: jobs I wanted to pursue, relationships I hoped to nurture. But I kept holding myself back. Hesitating. I just wasn’t sure I was good enough to get the things I wanted.

  What I needed in 2022 was some swagger. Some mojo. So I decided that my word for the year would be “self-confidence.”

  After dinner, I went back to my old room and started getting ready for bed. I reached into the closet to hang up a blouse and spotted my dusty old snowboard bag shoved in the back corner. Man, that thing brought back memories.

  I remembered the first time I really got the hang of it. I was 20 years old, on vacation in Lake Tahoe with my first boyfriend, Mike. We’d drive up to the Sierras almost every weekend back then. Mike coached me from the sidelines: “Keep your knees bent! Sit back into your heels!” I remember how excited we both were when I learned how to link turns and could finally keep up with him on the intermediate runs.

  God, that felt good. If I could bottle THAT feeling…

  It was all there in the bag: board, boots, bindings. Almost taunting me. Even my old bib and jacket were in there. And they still fit. Kinda.

  I hadn’t laced up my boots in a while, but I wondered if getting back on that board would be the key to juicing my self-confidence.

  There was just one problem: I was scared of falling. And fear is your worst enemy on the slopes. In snowboarding, you’re supposed to keep your weight on your front foot almost all the time. It helps you stay in control of the board. But it also makes you go down the mountain faster. And speed terrified me. The faster the velocity, the greater the chance of breaking something.

  But the alternative was worse: If I wavered at all, shifted my weight to the back, even for a moment, I was a goner. It’s a mental game as much as a physical one. I had to stay confident, even in the face of fear. Not unlike my life at the moment.

  In my vision, snowboarding would be a fake-it-till-you-make-it kind of challenge: If I could just act confident long enough to get me down the mountain, then I would develop actual confidence from having done the scary thing. It’d be a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop: Believe you can do the thing, successfully do the thing, rinse, repeat.

  So I bought a lift ticket online, and the next morning I packed my old board into the car and headed for the hills.

  January 1, 2022, was a beautiful bluebird day. Fresh powder from a Christmas Week blizzard blanketed the Sierras. There were still a handful of spots left in the parking lot at Donner Ski Ranch when I pulled in just after 9 a.m. Standing next to my rented SUV in the thin winter sunlight, I wasn’t even shivering as I snapped into my bib. Helmet, check. Goggles, check. Power bar, check. It was all coming back now, these familiar rituals from another lifetime.

  In the past, there was always someone there with me, a shoulder to lean on while I shoved my feet into those bulky old boots. Snowboarding isn’t something I had ever done by myself. But by now most of my friends were busy with kids and spouses and anyway, I had resolved that this was a solo mission. My self-confidence was broken and I alone could fix it.

  I grabbed my board and tottered toward the lodge to meet Daveed, my instructor for the morning. Daveed was a lanky 19 year old with an accent. A mop of shaggy dark fringe peeked out from under his beanie, covering the left half of his snow goggles. As we rode the lift to the top of the bunny hill, he explained he was from Chile, just working in Tahoe for the season.

  At the top of the slope, we strapped into our boards and Daveed motioned for me to head down ahead of him. He’d watch me first: check out my form and then teach me what I needed to improve.

  I took off down the gentle grade for the first time in a decade, wobbly but OK. I whispered to myself, “You got this.” Weight on the front foot. Heel turn. Toe turn.

  I got all the way to the bottom and didn’t have to stop once. This mission was off to a good start!

  Daveed led me to another chair lift that went up a different, harder slope. He turned to me and asked: “So what is it you want to learn? Your form looks good.”

  I told him self-confidence was my motto for the year. That I wanted to believe in myself more.

  We did that run, then another. On our fourth trip up the chair he told me, “You don’t need me. Your body already knows exactly what to do. Trust it.”

  He was right, and I could feel it. That next run, I was soaring.

  It went on like that for a few hours. When the lesson was over, I gave Daveed a grateful hug and went up the lift for what I decided would be my last run of the day.

  The mountain was quiet. I’d missed that silence: the way snow muffles all the extra sound, leaving only the rusty squeak of the old chair lift. It carried me up, higher and higher, until the lake came into view in the distance. There was no boyfriend next to me this time, but who needed one? I was getting back in touch with something elemental about myself, my essence. Getting back to ME.

  The lift reached the top and I got ready to unload. I angled my body sideways off the chair and placed my board down on the snow, facing forward, weight on my front foot. I stood up and put my back foot on the stomp pad, just like I had a hundred times before, and got ready to glide to a graceful stop in front of a snowbank at the top of the run. But just as I pushed off the chair to start my glide: I caught an edge.

  My board and I went end-over-end in a slow-motion tumble. My right foot, not yet strapped into the rear binding, got twisted into an unholy shape. I heard a snap, like a dried twig, beneath my skin.

  I lay there in the snow, not knowing what to do. I didn’t dare try to stand up. I was only 15 feet from the top of the chair, but the teenage lift operator hadn’t noticed that my little fall was way more serious than it looked. People just kept skiing past me, off the lift and down the mountain, one after another.

  Finally, one skier realized I needed help. She flagged down ski patrol, who strapped me into a little red emergency sled and skied me down the mountain.

  The next few hours are a blur. I remember someone pulling off my right boot and duct-taping a cardboard box to my ankle, a makeshift splint. I remember driving myself an hour to the nearest hospital because I was scared of how much the ambulance would cost. I remember being X-rayed, and waiting forever to hear the results.

  An hour turned into four, turned into six.

  It gave me a lot of time to think. Or more accurately, to freak out. Is it broken? How bad? I’d never broken anything before. How much was this going to cost? And if it had to be broken, why couldn’t it at least have happened in a more heroic way? Catching air during an epic jump or something? Instead, I was just a middle-aged lady with no friends who face-planted in front of a teenage lift operator at one mile an hour.

  It was all so humiliating. I’d come to the snow to bolster my self-confidence, and I’d wound up doing exactly the opposite. By the time the nurse came out to tell me my ankle was broken and I’d need surgery, I’d already mentally tossed my New Year’s motto in the trash. Confidence seemed more out of reach than ever.

  The rural ER didn't have a surgeon on hand to repair my shattered bone, so they just handed me a bunch of paperwork and discharged me. My 80-year-old parents had to drive three hours on icy roads to pick me up and bring me home again.

  It took a while to get the full picture of what lay ahead: Surgery to weld my bone back together with pins and plates, then a month in a cast, then another month in a walking boot, then months of PT. No flying home to Atlanta, no driving a car till spring. I’d be lucky to get 10,000 steps all winter.

  In the meantime, I was at the mercy of mom and dad if I wanted to go anywhere, do anything, even just make a cup of coffee. (Have you ever tried to make pour-over on crutches? It’s a nightmare.)

  In the weeks after the surgery, I watched my Fitbit with dismay. My step average went down, down, down. The muscles on my bad leg shrank down to strings. It was the winter of my discontent.

  On one level, I knew how lucky I was. My ankle would heal in a few months, and I’d go back to my able-bodied lifestyle in no time. But still, I hated this new reality. I struggled to accept how helpless I’d become overnight. This was the opposite of the self-reliance I was supposed to be manifesting. And watching my mom race around the kitchen preparing my meals was making me feel so guilty. Wasn’t I supposed to be the one caring for them at this age?

  I became obsessed with snatching back scraps of my independence in any way I could.

  INFOMERCIAL: Are crutches or knee scooters slowing you down?

  MAYA: As I stayed up late one night, doom-scrolling, I came across an ad for a hands-free crutch.

  INFOMERCIAL: It’s a new era. Walk, climb, carry, get your life back.

  MAYAA: The infomercial showed all these smiling injured people walking up stairs, washing their cars, playing with their kids, without depending on anyone for help.

  INFOMERCIAL: iWalk 3: live your life.

  MAYA: It was the quickest 200 bucks I’ve ever spent. I was so excited when it arrived in the mail the next day. Imagine a high-tech peg leg, with a little padded shelf at the knee where I could rest my cast. It came with what seemed like hundreds of velcro straps and snaps. It was complicated as hell to set up, but it got me back in control of my coffee situation, and that felt like a win.

  But even clawing back some independence didn’t lift my gloom. Friends called to check in. They texted me jokes and baby animal memes. Nothing would cheer me up. Having to rely on others was grating on me. I wanted to get back to manifesting the confident, independent self I was meant to be.

  My folks and I fell into a routine. Each evening my dad would cook dinner, my mom would make tea, and I’d hobble into the den on my bionic leg, in a cranky mood.

  After dinner on one particularly emotional day, my mom went to fetch the pot of chamomile, like always, along with a tray of little tea cakes. As she poured the tea, she repeated a story she likes to tell sometimes. It’s about a dream she had when she was pregnant for the first time, with my sister, and anxious about becoming a parent.

  She dreamed she was floating in a river. The current picked up, and she felt frightened. She knew she had no control over where she was going. But then her fear started to dissipate, and she felt calm. She understood she was being supported by this river, buoyed up by this force that was bigger than she was. Powerful but benevolent.

  “What is that, you think?” I asked her, dipping a cookie into my mug. “What is the river a metaphor for?”

  My mom, predictably, felt the parable didn’t need analysis. My dad, the ex-Catholic, suggested the river might be God. We decided each of us might have our own definition for the river. Maybe it’s God, or friends, or nature. Something to which we can give up control. Jesus take the wheel and all that.

  Slowly, I began to surrender. I let myself be cared for. I started to understand that my recovery depended on accepting help from other people. It was ok to rely on encouraging texts from friends, a cup of tea from my mother’s hands, a kind stranger on the ski slope. All of these people who were there for me: they were my river.

  The days stretched out like that. Dinner, TV, tea. We talked about dreams. We watched Succession. I let my bones heal. When the cast came off and the doctor cleared me to drive, it was time to go home. To get back to taking care of myself.

  And now here I am, heading into another new year. I still haven’t gotten back on the snowboard. But strangely, the whole experience did wind up making me more confident. It’s just a different vision of confidence than the one I started with.

  I had thought snowboarding would help me feel stronger, hotter, to become the badass I wished I could be. I pictured myself flying down the mountain — and through life — strong, swift, agile, self reliant. And instead, I fell flat on my face. Literally.

  Now I understand that confidence doesn't only come from being the best athlete or the most successful podcaster or the most independent person in the world. Sometimes it can grow through vulnerability, and reliance on others. It’s not that I’m confident that I alone can manifest my best life. Now I’m finding confidence in the idea that when life doesn't go as planned, my river will keep me afloat.

  WILLOW: That was Maya Kroth. She’s an audio producer based in Atlanta. You can see more of her work at mayakroth.com.

  Our next season is set to launch this spring. And as I mentioned earlier, we are raising money to fund that season. If you feel inspired to help out, just click the link in the episode description, or go to outttherepodcast.com/support.

  If you’d like to stay in the loop about our upcoming season, you can also subscribe to our email newsletter. I’ll be sending out occasional updates there. Again, just click the link in the episode description to sign up.

  Out There is a proud member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of idea-driven independent podcasts. You can check out all the other shows at hubspokeaudio.org.

  Today’s story was written and narrated by Maya Kroth. Story editing and sound design by me, Willow Belden. Out There’s audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our interns are Katie Reuther and Maria Ordovas-Montanes. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.

  Special thanks to all our listeners who are supporting Out There with financial contributions, including Bryan Stokes, David Dolton, Mike Bachman, Caitlyn Bagley, Josh Weingarten, Jodee Pring, Carrie Gulvin, Eric Biederman, Phil Timm, Doug Frick, Tara Joslin, Sue and Gary Peters, Deb and Vince Garcia, and the family of Mike Ludders. Thank you so much. This podcast exists because of you.

  Happy New Year, and we’ll see you in the spring. In the meantime, have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.

Credits

Story by Maya Kroth

Story editing and sound design by Willow Belden

Music includes works from Blue Dot Sessions

Links

Support Out There

Sign up for our email newsletter

Follow Out There on Facebook and Instagram

Closing the Gender Gap

Being told you belong is important — but is it enough?

Learning new skills at the Rowdy Gowdy women’s mountain bike camp | PHoto by Cameron Way

“If you think about sports writ large, it’s been for men, designed for men, this arena in which men can display their masculinity. ... And so women have — forever — not always been welcome in that sphere.”

— Christine Yu

Women are often told we can do anything we want in life: ride bikes, scale cliffs, surf waves. But in some areas of outdoor recreation, the gender gap remains shockingly large.

In this episode, we visit a women’s mountain bike camp in Wyoming and explore what’s really needed to get people of all genders on equal footing.

• Episode Transcript

  Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

  VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.

  WILLOW BELDEN: Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

  Before we get started today, I have a favor to ask. I’m in the midst of planning our next season. And I’m really excited about the stories we’re going to be producing. But creating those stories is expensive. We spend months — literally months — crafting each narrative, and producers need to get paid. We also have costs for music, audio hosting, and much more.

  My goal is to raise $9,500 by the end of this year to help cover those costs.

  If Out There brightens your day at all, please consider joining me in investing in our next season. There are several easy ways you can contribute. Just go to outtherepodcast.com/support — or click the link in the episode description — to get in on the fun. Again, that’s outtherepodcast.com/support.

  And now, on to our story for today.

  Growing up, I was taught that I could do anything I wanted in life.

  I had a mother who was fiercely independent. She had built an impressive career for herself. She had traveled the world. She knew how to use power tools and hike mountains and go camping. And she instilled in me this idea that I was capable of anything.

  My mom was definitely ahead of her time. But even so, I think a lot of women in my generation received similar messaging. We grew up in an era when traditional gender norms were being questioned. Finally, girls were allowed to have ambition. We were told it was ok to follow our passions. To build careers. To ride bikes, and paddle rivers, and sleep in the wilderness. And that was a gift. That kind of messaging is so important.

  But is it ENOUGH? Being told you can do whatever you want — is that sufficient to get you where you want to be?

  In this episode, we’re going to visit a women’s mountain bike clinic. And we’re going to explore why there’s still such a big gender gap in certain areas of outdoor recreation — and what’s really needed to get women on equal footing.

  JENN HESS: Alright, I want to get rolling, since, you know, today we might have a bit of rain issues. So I’m Jenn. I’m the director of the Rowdy Gowdy, co-founder — or actually the founder, not the co. I’m the founder. [laughs] So this is our sixth Rowdy Gowdy. We started in 2017…

  WILLOW: It’s a chilly morning, and several dozen women are gathered at a state park in Wyoming. They’re decked out in colorful bike clothing. And the excitement in the air is palpable.

  JENN: Alright, so what I’d like to do is introduce the coaches. So coaches, can you go over by the green box? Alright, we’ll start with Leslie! [Cheering] She was first a camp participant, and now she’s a coach.

  WILLOW: As each coach is introduced, they do a little dance. And the group erupts in laughter. Playfulness is clearly a priority here.

  JENN: Next we’ve got Sarah. She’s pretty a big deal. I don’t know if you know about her, but she went to the Olympics. [laughter]

  WILLOW: This event is a mountain bike clinic for women. It’s called Rowdy Gowdy — Curt Gowdy being the name of the park where it’s held. And it’s basically like summer camp for grownups. It’s two full days of coaching and riding and building skills on bikes in the company of other women.

  The participants are an eclectic group. There are old women and young women, novices, and folks who have been riding for years. But regardless of their background, almost all of them are here for the same reason. They want to gain one thing in particular…

  CAMP PARTICIPANT 1: Confidence.

  CAMP PARTICIPANT 2: More confidence.

  CAMP PARTICIPANT 3: I just need to build my confidence, I think, and learn to trust my bike.

  CAMP PARTICIPANT 4: Just to be more confident.

  CAMP PARTICIPANT 5: You know, I want to get over the panic.

  WILLOW: So, I’ve actually participated in the Rowdy Gowdy bike camp before, back in 2017. And confidence was something I had been struggling with too. A lot.

  I had been mountain biking for several years at that point. And I should have been decent at it. I mean, I was generally an active, outdoorsy person. I was in good shape. I had a lot of stamina.

  But mountain biking scared me. It’s a sport that involves big rocks and tight corners and steep descents. And I didn’t know how to navigate that stuff. Nobody had ever taught me. So when I got to a gnarly section of trail, I usually chickened out. I’d just get off my bike and walk. And the more I did that — the more I backed down from obstacles — the more I doubted myself.

  Now — in hindsight — I know I wasn’t alone. It’s actually really common for women to lack skills and confidence when it comes to adventure sports. Which is why clinics like this one have sprung up all over the country.

  JENN: Hi, I am Jenn Hess.

  WILLOW: Jenn runs the Rowdy Gowdy camp. And she’s one of the most talented mountain bikers I know. She’s the kind of person who jumps off rocks with her bike, and tears down steep descents. And she does it all with this giant grin on her face.

  But it wasn’t always that way. Her start with biking was actually pretty rough.

  JENN: So, this is going to go way back. I was eleven, and I wanted to be like my brother. He got a paper route, and he got enough money he bought a used little GT BMX bike, and he rode his paper route on that bike. And I thought that was the coolest thing.

  And so, at eleven, I decided to do the same thing. So I bought a pink Schwinn, a used one. And I rode around with my brother. That’s all we did was ride our BMX bikes. And I started to get pretty good at it.

  And then my brother decided to do a couple races, and I decided to go with him, ‘cause he was my buddy. And I was the only girl at this race. It was outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota — like ‘91, ‘92. And I was the only girl, and I was very shy at the time. And boys made fun of me ‘cause I had a pink bike. I was the only girl. And I got so like frightened that I just went home. I didn’t even ride, didn’t do the race, didn’t do anything. And from then on, I walked away from bikes.

  WILLOW: Jenn didn’t start riding again until she was in grad school. By that point, she had moved out to Wyoming, and there were a lot of trails in the area, and she had this friend who was into mountain biking. So she started riding with him.

  JENN: I learned by trial and error. It was basically trial by fire, and I crashed a lot, and I just wanted to keep up.

  WILLOW: This friend did not go easy on her. But even so, she loved it.

  JENN: The best thing about it was that you got away from work and all the stress in your life. And you had to be present on what you were doing. Like you couldn’t think about like, ‘Oh, I gotta do this analysis and it’s not working.’ You know, feels like you’re a kid again, ‘cause you don’t have all the stresses that adults have, you know? [laughs]

  WILLOW: Over the years, Jenn got more and more into mountain biking. And she got really good at it.

  But there was something that bothered her. She was often the only woman — at least on the advanced trails.

  This wasn’t exactly surprising. Mountain biking has always been a male-dominated sport. Like, really male-dominated. By some estimates, almost 84 percent of mountain bikers identify as men.

  But still — Jenn was miffed that there weren’t more ladies out there. And so, she starting thinking. For some time already, she’d been helping out with mountain bike camps for kids…

  JENN: And kept having the parents ask us, “When are you going to put on an adult camp?” And we would kind of just laugh about it, “Haha,” like “Yeah, that’s right, an adult camp.” And we’d just kind of focus on the kids.

  WILLOW: But then she became an ambassador for a bike clothing brand. And they gave her some money to host an event.

  JENN: And so I was sitting at lunch with my partner, and I was like, “Man, an event — what could we put on?” And then it dawned on me: “Of course, a women’s clinic!” You know, one, I want women to ride the hard stuff. But I also want some friends to ride with me that are women. ‘Cause I was only riding with guys. And I’m like, “I would really like to ride with some ladies. If they come to the clinic, maybe they’ll want to ride the advanced trails with me.” So…

  WILLOW: So, pause. If your goal is to get more women into mountain biking, and help them advance in the sport, a skills clinic makes total sense.

  But why is that women – specifically – need clinics like this? Why do we lack technical skills in the first place? And what’s kept us out of this sport for so long?

  To answer that question, we have to zoom out.

  CHRISTINE YU: If you just think about sports writ large, you know, it’s been for men, designed for men, this arena in which men can display their masculinity and can develop leadership skills and all these characteristics that we kind of associate with men. And so women have — forever — not always been welcome in that sphere.

  WILLOW: That’s Christine Yu. She’s the author of a book called Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes. And she says there HAS been progress. Many more women and girls are participating in sport these days.

  CHRISTINE YU: But there definitely are certain sports where that gender gap and disparity is more pronounced. And it seems to be concentrated in kind of like those action and adventure sports — so, things like mountain biking and surfing and the like, right?

  WILLOW: So what’s up with that? Why is the gender gap so pronounced in adventure sports?

  Kate Evans is a professor at the University of Wisconsin LaCrosse, and she studies women in outdoor recreation. She says there are several things that come into play. But a lot of it boils down to what we learned — or didn’t learn — as kids.

  KATE EVANS: When girls are really little, they’re told girls aren’t supposed to get dirty. Girls should be inside – they should be playing, you know, house and doing those kinds of things, while boys should be outside getting dirty, playing with sticks and mud and that kind of thing.

  As we start thinking about outdoor skills, right, so learning about how to be in the outdoors and how to build fires and to hunt and fish and those kinds of skills, traditionally those are skills that are passed on from father to son. And so girls are often just left out of the mix in terms of how to even gain those skills.

  We’re seeing some of that changing. But the women now, what they came up through, very much were those more traditional male versus female skills within our society.

  WILLOW: And then there’s media representation — or lack thereof. Both Evans and Yu say that’s a big deal.

  CHRISTINE: Because, I mean, it’s cliché, but if you don’t see yourself in the sport, it’s harder to then do the sport.

  KATE: And a lot of times when we see people who are portrayed in the media, we see men who are sort of these rugged, muscular people that are mountain bikers or rock climbers. They’re sort of the ones that are doing the things in the pictures, right? And women, if portrayed at all, are the girlfriend or the cheerleader or the one that are sort of on the side watching.

  WILLOW: And even when women are portrayed doing a sport, it’s usually a very specific type of woman. White, cis, able-bodied.

  KATE: And so even the people that can see themselves in that space is a very sort of narrow kind of a person as well.

  WILLOW: All of this means that most women my age didn’t grow up mountain biking, or doing other similar sports. We didn’t learn the skills when we were little. Which means our male counterparts have a lifetime of experience, while we’re starting from scratch.

  And when you learn from scratch as an adult? That’s hard.

  KELLI TRUJILLO: I’m Kelli Trujillo.

  CAROLYNE WHELAN: My name is Carolyne Whelan. And I’m the Editor-in-Chief at Adventure Cyclist Magazine.

  KELLI: So the first time I was ever on a mountain bike was with a boyfriend who was an experienced mountain biker.

  WILLOW: This is very common. For a lot of women, their first experience in any given adventure sport is with a boyfriend. Typically, a boyfriend who’s been doing it for years. Which can be problematic.

  CAROLYNE: Even people who are supportive partners I don’t think are necessarily the best coaches. And so then you have, like, ugh, I really hate using these terms, because I hate this binary so much, but there’s like the girlfriend riders, where somebody buys their girlfriend a mountain bike…

  KELLI TRUJILLO: And so here I am on this new mountain bike that we had just bought me.

  CAROLYNE: And she goes on like a ride or two, she doesn’t immediately pick up this sport that he’s been playing for 20 years.

  KELLI: So there was lots of loose gravel, lots of roots, lots of rocks.

  CAROLYNE: And then he goes and takes off with his buddies that they’re on a group ride with.

  KELLI: And it seemed like he assumed that I should be knowing how to do this innately, which I just did not. And I really couldn’t ask how to do it, because he had taken off up ahead.

  CAROLYNE: And then the girls end up getting discouraged, taking it really personally.

  KELLI: It was frustrating, and it was demoralizing, and it was a, ‘I can’t do this.’ And so it soured the whole experience for me.

  CAROLYNE: That feeling of telling somebody to just do it, without any real explanation of how, is really anxiety producing. And then that’s going to create a lack of confidence and also some really mixed internal messages of: ‘I should be able to do this; I can’t do this; what is wrong with me that I can’t do this thing?’ And then being like, ‘You know what? I don’t want mountain biking to be the thing that ruins this six-year relationship. I’m just gonna back off, you can just do this thing, because I don’t want to be crying in the woods on a Saturday afternoon with you.’

  KELLI: I gave up altogether, and I didn’t have another bike, even around town, for it was probably another 15 years.

  JENN: A lot of times, folks don’t understand that beginners need some help. And it’s hard to just try it as an adult and get better.

  WILLOW: That’s Jenn Hess again, the founder of the Rowdy Gowdy camp.

  JENN: And so, I think as an adult, it really helps to break down the whole process and kind of take a step back and try to figure out a progression, step by step, to work on your skills.

  [Bike sounds, brakes squealing]

  COACH 1: Ok, so come through again, and let’s just do one more lap, and I want to see, first, take some time in that neutral position…

  WILLOW: Back at bike camp, participants have been broken into small groups. They’re riding over wooden ramps, and through orange cones, and there’s even a station where they’ve got their wheels up on a picnic table. It’s supposed to simulate a steep hill, and it helps you learn how to position your body properly.

  COACH 2: Now, are you in your ready position? You’ve got your level pedals. Um, hover your hands off of your handlebar, and just feel where your balance point is.

  CAMP PARTICIPANT: Oh my gosh. OK…

  OTHER VOICES: You got this! We got you. Nice! Yeah! Nice! Woo!

  WILLOW: It’s cold and raining, but spirits are high, and there is so much encouragement. Every little success is celebrated.

  COACHES: Nice! Beautiful, Riley. You got it. Nice! That looks great, that was smooth! Did that feel better. Yeah Christie. Good job, nice!

  WILLOW: It’s rare to be in an environment like this. A place where you’re learning without being under a microscope. A place where you can be honest about your fears and insecurities. A place where you can take risks, and make mistakes, and blunder your way through things — and everyone will support you one hundred percent.

  That’s not a luxury you get very often in regular life. And the upshot is kind of amazing.

  ALYSSA WECHSLER: You know, just in the span of a 20-minute session, you can see confidence being built.

  WILLOW: That’s Alyssa Wechsler. She’s one of the coaches.

  ALYSSA: The things that always stand out are people who, at the beginning, are so uncomfortable or don’t want to ride over any obstacle or any rock — have spent their lives, as soon as they get to an obstacle, just getting off the bike and walking. And to watch people — it doesn’t even take a whole weekend, it just takes a little bit of confidence boosting, and all of a sudden, they’re just riding things.

  Willow, I remember you very specifically being one of those people, actually. Like, am I wrong? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure I remember that. And then I remember watching you send it off of that rock drop on Stone Temple, and just like going for it. And I was like, “That is not the Willow I have ever ridden with before, and she smoked it!” [laughs]

  WILLOW: Yeah, that’s about right. [laughter]

  I remember that weekend at bike camp, back in 2017, so vividly. I showed up, and they had set up this obstacle course for us. Like, an actual obstacle course. There were these tight corners we had to navigate, and long, skinny platforms to ride over — almost like balance beams, for your bike. And there were even teeter totters. Seriously: teeter totters! I mean, who in their right mind, rides a bicycle over a teeter totter?

  It looked daunting.

  But then this amazing thing happened. They showed us how to do everything. They broke it all down into bite-sized pieces. And all of a sudden, I was pulling off moves that I never would have considered even attempting. I was jumping off the end of platforms. And riding down steep rocks. And doing bunny hops. And, yeah, it was still a little scary. But it was also exhilarating. Finally, the fun was overshadowing the fear.

  And the teeter totters? Turns out, those are the most fun of all.

  KELLI: There always in this stuff now for me is a little bit of the, “Oh yeah? Huh. Watch me! I can do this. I’m gonna do this.”

  WILLOW: That’s Kelli Trujillo again — the one who gave up on mountain biking after that demoralizing ride with a boyfriend.

  Years later, she finally gave it another try. Got a bike. Went to a clinic. And instantly, she felt herself blossoming.

  KELLI: We were riding on this stuff that was, I now know that these were intermediate trails there. So we went around this thing, and there was this big drop-off, and I was scared. I went sideways, and I — “Eek!” — I did like a little girl’s scream. But then we went through it. And like, “OK, well there we are, alright.” And it was just great. It felt like a milestone. It was a “I can do this. See, I can do this. I just need some instruction.”

  WILLOW: These days, Kelli gets out mountain biking multiple times a week. And this year, at age 56, she did her first race.

  A decade ago, when I’d go out mountain biking, most of the other people I encountered were guys. Now? There are so many women on the trails. And they’re riding really well.

  And yeah — skills clinics probably can’t take ALL the credit. Just like there are a lot of factors causing the gender gap, there are a lot of puzzle pieces contributing to progress. For example, these days, there’s more media representation of women in the outdoors. There’s more gear and clothing that fits our bodies. There are whole organizations dedicated to getting little girls into biking.

  But I do think there’s a fundamental truth that these women’s clinics are tapping into. They’re based on the premise that when it comes to social change, it’s not enough to just open the door.

  Yeah — it’s great to tell people of all genders they belong. It’s great to invite us to ride bikes and scale cliffs and surf waves. But we also need someone to show us the ropes. We need to learn the skills we never got as little kids. We need to be told, “You can do anything you want. AND HERE’S HOW.”

  If you enjoyed this story, please consider supporting Out There.

  We have an exciting year coming up, with lots of wonderful episodes in the works. But quality storytelling is expensive. We spend months producing each narrative, and we have a commitment to compensating our storytellers fairly. We also have to pay for music, and equipment, and IT, and lots of other things. It adds up.

  Lately, advertising revenue for independent podcasts has been dwindling. Which means your support matters more than ever.

  There are a number of easy ways to make a contribution. You can support us on Patreon, which is a crowd-funding platform. You can make a gift through PayPal or Venmo. Or you can even make a tax-deductible donation.

  Just go to outtherepodcast.com, and click support, to see all the options. Or use the link in the episode description. Again, that’s outtherepodcast.com/support.

  Thank you so much for being part of this endeavor with me.

  Coming up next time on Out There…

  MAYA KROTH: There’s a saying that how you spend new years is how you’re going to spend the rest of the year.

  WILLOW: Maya Kroth wanted to gain confidence. And she figured a good way to start was to take herself snowboarding on New Years Day.

  MAYA: Snowboarding would be a fake-it-til-you-make-it kind of challenge. If I could just act confident long enough to get me down the mountain, then I would develop actual confidence from having done the scary thing.

  WILLOW: But the outing didn’t go as planned. Tune in on January 4 for that story.

  Out There is a proud member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of idea-driven independent podcasts. One of the other shows in the collective that I think you might enjoy is called Subtitle. It’s a show about languages and the people who speak them.

  In the latest episode, we hear from a loving but confused family living in the UK — American mom, British dad, British-born daughter. They discuss simple words like “sure,” “reckon” and “middle class” — words that mean different things to each of them. There is no mother tongue in this family.

  You can find Subtitle wherever you get your podcasts, or at subtitlepod.com.

  Today’s story was reported, produced, and sound designed by me, Willow Belden. Story editing by Forrest Wood. And special thanks to Lori Mortimer for additional feedback.

  If you’d like to learn more about Rowdy Gowdy, I have a link at our website, outtherepodcast.com.

  Out There’s advertising manager is Jessica Heeg. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our interns are Katie Reuther and Maria Ordovas-Montanes. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.

  Special thanks to everyone who’s supporting Out There with financial contributions, including Angie Chatman, Heather Kitching, Eric Biederman, Phil Timm, Doug Frick, Tara Joslin, Deb and Vince Garcia, and the family of Mike Ludders. We couldn’t do this without you.

  We’ll see you in the new year. And in the meantime, have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.

Credits

Story and sound design by Willow Belden

Story editing by Forrest Wood

Production feedback from Lori Mortimer

Music includes works from StoryBlocks and Blue Dot Sessions

Links

Rowdy Gowdy Women’s Mountain Bike Camp

Support Out There

Sign up for our email newsletter

Follow Out There on Facebook and Instagram

The Flood

What if we’re scared at the wrong moments?

Flooding in University City, Missouri in 2022 | PHoto courtesy Mary Ann Gaston

“Before my eyes, across two different states, what was ‘safe’ and ‘not safe’ became hard to distinguish.”

— Marina Henke

This is a story about fear.

It makes sense to be scared when we’re facing danger. But what happens when disasters occur in unexpected places?

In this episode, Marina Henke takes us from a desert in Utah to a suburb in Missouri and explores how a flood changed her attitude toward risk in the backcountry.

• Episode Transcript

  Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

  VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.

  WILLOW BELDEN: Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

  Our next season is set to launch in the spring. But in the meantime, we’re going to be releasing several bonus episodes this fall and winter. This is the first of the bonus episodes. It’s a story about fear, and why we experience fear where we do.

  It goes without saying that the outdoors can be dangerous. There are wildfires. Floods. Injuries. But what happens when disaster occurs in an unexpected place? What does that do to our fear? And how does it shape our ability to find joy?

  Marina Henke has the story.

  MARINA HENKE: There's about to be a flood.

  I think about floods a lot. For a while, I was terrified of them. I imagined what they would look like, where they might be, what it would smell like. How there's nothing and then something, all at once.

  As a teenager, I spent most summers in the Southwest. That's where I learned about flash floods. This was red rock country, with slot canyons and narrow crevices. Even just 30 minutes of rain can turn a dry riverbed into just a really deathly current. Out West every year people die from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You learned to read the skies. To not camp in certain areas. To always be wondering when and where water could fall.

  And then the summer would end. I'd come back home to the Midwest with its green trees and lazy creeks, parks with half a hill of trees that we'd call forests. In Missouri it actually rained all the time. Huge torrential downpours with thunder that would rattle our old kitchen windows. But you know when something’s so regular, you stop paying attention to it? In my mind, flash floods just didn’t happen in Missouri. I had no reason to be scared of them. That fear, it was tucked away until I went back to the desert. A place where things are dry until they are not.

  The desert was a place I fell in love with, also all at once. I was a kid, going to camp, seeing prairie dogs for the first time. Learning that ponderosa pines, they smelled sweet, like vanilla. I’d fall asleep to lightning storms and watch the sunrise every morning from a sleeping bag. And it’s not that I was never scared. Especially when it came to floods, we learned how dangerous they could be. But I think as a teenager, that risk was kind of thrilling. I kept coming back.

  Slowly, though, during that time, that fear of flash floods — really of risk in the backcountry — it grew.

  On this night, several years ago, I’m in Utah, the southeastern corner of it. The sun's just starting to set. The clouds are thick and full of moisture. It’s me and a group of girls. We’re on a backpacking trip. I’m just old enough to finally be in charge, even though man do I still feel young.

  And I am terrified it's going to flood. I came to the Southwest that summer armed with my usual hesitations. This wasn’t the land of Midwestern gentle downpours. But as we inched our way deeper into red rock country, that fear, its volume just turned way up.

  We finish setting up camp. It's on this shallow incline of a mile-wide canyon we're hiking along. And it's just about to rain. Technically, I know we're safe. I’d learned by now, how to pick a good spot. There's not any huge downpours in the forecast. But I can't eat all evening. I can barely put up with our campfire songs. We go to bed. And sure enough it starts to rain.

  MARY ANN GASTON: I'm Mary Ann Gaston. I'm 76 years old.

  MARINA: Mary Ann lives in Missouri. She speaks softly, but she's not shy. She was a nurse manager for years. She's exactly who I’d want on the other end of a phone call at the doctor’s. And in July of 2022, her house was about to flood.

  MARY ANN: I knew that they were saying we were going to have heavy rains and, you know, to expect flash flooding. And I thought, well, you know, I knew I'd had maybe four inches in the basement once before. And I thought, ‘I can do that.’

  MARINA: Mary Ann lives at the end of a curving street that's at the bottom of a hill. There's a stream that runs behind her row of ranch houses. You can't see it from her house at all.

  MARY ANN: I mean, I've known that it was there. When we have heavy rain, I can hear it. When we don't have heavy rain, I can smell it.

  MARINA: On this quiet street in Missouri, it started to rain.

  MARY ANN: So a little bit before 4 a.m. that Tuesday, July the 26th, I got a phone call from my neighbor who's next door. My son was here, and he has — he had — a Honda Ridgeline truck. And she said, “The water is getting up really high under Chad's truck. I can try and move it if you want me to.”

  And I said, “Well, he's home.” So I woke him up, and he went out the door, and, you know, there was no way to get down the steps. There's a little stone wall that is in the front of my house. And the water was high on the sidewalk, and he came back in, and he said, “I can't get to it.” And he went around to the basement door, and then he said, “Oh, mom, you won't believe the basement.”

  MARINA: Can I just say this is what terrifies me about floods. It's that refrain I heard again and again in the Southwest: There is nothing and then suddenly there is something. And that something is water. It’s so much of it. Enough to kill you. I know this is entirely not logical, but I always think that with fires, you can just put them out. They can disappear.

  Back in Utah I'm in my tent. It's hot. I'm trying to sleep. I can't. Because I am so convinced it is going to flood. Water is dripping onto our tent. I think maybe if I see it, I'll feel better. So I get up, and I open my rain fly, and I stand outside. I try to think of it like those soft rains I love in Missouri. But it doesn't work. I'm alone in the night under just a little moonlight. And all I can imagine is this basin we're in filling up with water like a big bathtub. I think of us sloshing around. Our tents floating to the top, our sleeping bags and pads a big sopping mess.

  MARY ANN: So I went down and I just got halfway down the stairs and I could see about a four and a half foot geyser shooting straight up out of the sewer drain. Just looked like Old Faithful, it was just like... And you could hear this rush. And I have this video of the water just bubbling up. So much water. I actually called 911 because I thought we were going to float away. And the lady said, “You know, we're trying to get people out of cars and people out of homes. Do you have a higher level?” And I said yes. And she said, “Go to your higher level.”

  MARINA: In Utah, there’s just a bit of moonlight peeking out from the clouds. It's damp, and it should be beautiful. I go back to bed. It keeps just raining so gently. But my heart is racing. I can't take a deep breath. I'm lying there thinking about all the water that's trickling down into the canyon that we're in.

  MARY ANN: We could see it now starting to seep under the front door and starting to seep under the sun porch door. And that's when we went upstairs. We retreated to bedrooms. And I had on the TV because I wanted to see what the weather was doing. And after about 10 minutes, of course, the router was under, underwater. So that all went out. And so I said to him, I said, “We need to pack because we're not going to be able to stay here.”

  MARINA: It gets light in Utah. I wake up, and everything's somehow fine. The kids break down camp. I keep looking up at the sky.

  MARY ANN: As it began to get light, it was just amazing. I mean, the house was totally surrounded by water. I looked out. We were, there's a dormer at the top of the stairs, and we were, had the window up and we were looking out. And I kept seeing something in the water, and it was moving. And I finally decided it was a person. He was swimming and he had a backpack he was pushing.

  So I called to him, and I said, “Do you need help?” And I said, “Are you okay?” And I said, “You can come in to my first floor.” But I said, “There's water and there's electrical, you know, things are plugged in and I don't want you to get shocked.”

  MARINA: We start to hike back to our cars. There’s just a light drizzle at this point. We cross a stream where the water looks like chocolate milk. It's up to our knees. In my head, I have a countdown. Three hours until we're safe. Two hours until we're safe. Please don’t flood. Please don’t flood.

  MARY ANN: I have photos around 6:30 where the water is receding in the first floor, and then by 11 o’clock we were outside. But at some point I measured the waterline on the garage, and it was four and a half feet. I mean, all of the contents in the house, in the living room, the couch, the chair, the bookcase where I had my grandson's toys and puzzles and books and craft items, and it had dumped over. And all of that was, you know, on the ground now, wet. If it had a motor or it wasn't wood, I lost it.

  MARINA: In Utah, we get to our vans. It didn't flood. We're loading up our gear, the kids are piling into the back seats. But I still hear myself snapping at everyone to go faster, to stop with the games. I'm still thinking: let's go, let's go, let's go.

  MARY ANN: So the whole neighborhood was, you know, people were just out like almost like a zombie apocalypse. It was a disaster zone, and you could barely thread through the street because of the dumpsters and the tow trucks. And then, then the belongings all started, you know, coming out. So, you know, the front yard was piled with everything that, you know, you, you had.

  MARINA: A flood did not happen that day in Utah. We'd come to a hillside on a canyon that had clumps of sagebrush and prickly pear cacti.

  MARY ANN: There was a fireplace screen in front of the fireplace. There was a nice tan-ish gold chair and a half over there in the corner, there was a little trunk.

  MARINA: And we'd left a hillside on a canyon that was unchanged. It had clumps of sagebrush and prickly pear cacti.

  MARY ANN: And as you can see, we're sitting here with an antique desk, there's a coffee table over there somewhere. And some lamps, but that's it. You know.

  MARINA: Sometimes I think we're scared in the wrong moments. I came back home to Missouri. There's no more red rock, just leafy green trees and heavy Midwestern rain I know to expect. This was years before Mary Ann’s house flooded. And, that summer in Utah had done something. I stopped camping after that. I’d dream about flash floods, worry endlessly about taking kids out into the desert. Missouri was safe, the desert was not. All those things I’d loved about the Southwest — they didn’t stack up to the way my mind, it would just scramble everytime I imagined another season out there.

  MARY ANN: Every time we've had rain since I'm over here, the morning after. And the first thing I do is, you know, I'm down to the basement to see, to see what happens.

  MARINA: Several years passed from that backpacking trip in Utah. I thought about floods less, but only because it had been so long since I’d spent time in the landscapes where I learned about them. Life was good, but sort of flat. I’d dream of red rock, sometimes obsessively look at photos on my phone from those years.

  And then, Mary Ann’s house flooded three blocks from my childhood home. I didn’t know it had happened, didn’t even know to be scared.

  In the days after, I drove around her block, looking at the piles of stuff, looking at the trails of mud. This wasn't red rocks or buttes or mesas, but this? This is what I'd always imagined. People walking around with glazed looks on their face. In shock.

  Some neighbors packed up their belongings. The flood had destroyed their home beyond repair, or maybe they just couldn’t imagine living on this street anymore.

  MARY ANN: It's really eerie to be here in the house now, because there's no one around, you know. It's eerily quiet. And I said to my son last week, “It just kind of feels like a ghost town.”

  MARINA: Insurance agents arrived, flood maps were redrawn.

  It wasn’t all at once, but I could feel something in me begin to crumble. What if bad things happen in beautiful places AND bad things happen on paved streets with ranch houses in the suburbs? It hadn’t flooded in Utah — hadn’t even come close. Before my eyes, across two different states, what was “safe” and “not safe” became really hard to distinguish.

  And somehow, it brought a relief that I did not expect. Mary Ann had woken up and her house had filled with water. It could happen here, it could happen there. I began to feel restless, like I’d been living in this flatter world for no good reason.

  Not long after Mary Ann’s flood, I returned to the desert. I’d forgotten the dryness of the air — the way that the dust can feel soft on your skin. I felt like I was a kid again, like I was falling in love with the desert all over again. But it was a more mature love. I was tentative, I looked at the skies, I felt a fear of what I knew could be true.

  One afternoon white clouds began to stack on top of each other. I knew the desert — knew that they would darken until they turned black, until it rained. It poured for an hour, left huge puddles on the dirt roads.

  That night, I stayed awake in my tent for a long time. I stepped outside, under the moonlight. I thought of floods, and risk, and fast moving water. All those things still existed in the desert I was in. But they existed in Missouri too, with its gentle hills and green trees. There was beauty here and -— yes, there was still fear. But for the first time in a long time, I could hold them both at once.

  WILLOW: That was Marina Henke. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she works as a podcast producer. You can find her on Instagram @marinaclairehenke or at her website, marinachenke.com.

  As for Mary Ann, she’s back in her house again. It took nearly six months to finish all the repairs.

  If you enjoyed this episode, please share the link with a friend. We’re always eager for new listeners, and your recommendation is our best form of advertising.

  Coming up next time on Out There…

  JENN HESS: I was the only girl at this race. It was outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota in like 91, 92. And I was the only girl, and I was very shy at the time. And boys made fun of me ‘cause I had a pink bike. I was the only girl. And I got so like frightened that I just went home. I didn’t even ride, didn’t do the race, didn’t do anything. And from then on, I walked away from bikes.

  WILLOW: Tune in on November 30 for a story about the gender gap in mountain biking. We’ll explore why certain sports are still SO male dominated, and we’ll visit a mountain bike clinic in Wyoming that’s trying to change the status quo.

  MOUNTAIN BIKER: Oh my gosh, OK.

  OTHER MOUNTAIN BIKERS AND COACHES: You got it! You got it, you got it. Yeah Christie! Nice! [laughter]

  WILLOW: Out There is a proud member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of idea-driven independent podcasts. One of the other shows in the collective that I think you’ll enjoy is called Mementos. It’s about the objects we keep, and the stories behind those objects.

  I was actually just listening to one of their episodes last night. It’s from a couple of years ago, and it is just delightful. It’s about this guy from Wisconsin, who ends up taking in a little parrot named Cricket. And it’s just a wonderful story. It’s the kind of episode that just has you smiling to yourself the whole time you’re listening.

  You can find Mementos wherever you get your podcasts, or at mementospodcast.com.

  Today’s story was written, produced and sound designed by Marina Henke. Story editing by me, Willow Belden.

  Out There’s advertising manager is Jessica Heeg. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our interns are Katie Reuther and Maria Ordovas-Montanes. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.

  Special thanks to everyone who is supporting Out There with financial contributions, including Mary Seim, Eric Biederman, Phil Timm, Doug Frick, Tara Joslin, and Deb and Vince Garcia. If you’d like to make a financial contribution of your own, just go to patreon.com/outtherepodcast or click the link in the episode description.

  That’s it for this episode. Have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.

Credits

Story and sound design by Marina Henke

Story editing by Willow Belden

Music includes works from Blue Dot Sessions

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Learning to Swim

What would be possible, if you embraced being a beginner?

Naomi Mellor (photo by Naomi Mellor)

“I didn’t want to be ... starting from the beginning with something that seemed so simple. Swimming, to me, was like riding a bike or learning to drive. It was a rite of passage for young people, not adults.”

— Naomi Mellor

Season 4 // Episode 7

Learning something new as an adult can be daunting, especially when it’s something that a lot of people have been doing since childhood.

On this episode, Naomi Mellor takes us from a beach in Australia to an archipelago in the UK and explores how she got past her fears and pushed herself to take a big plunge.

• Episode Transcript

  Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

  VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.

  WILLOW: To start things off today, I’d like to give a big thankyou to our presenting sponsor. This is a company that’s been with us all season — and in fact, they’ve been supporting Out There for years. Which means a lot. That kind of loyalty is so, so helpful to a little podcast like us.

  The sponsor in question is PeakVisor. PeakVisor is an app that helps you make the most of your time in the mountains. You can use their 3-D maps to plan out hikes. Once you’re out on adventures, their peak identification feature is great for figuring out what you’re looking at. And after the fact, you can keep track of your accomplishments with their peak-bagging feature.

  PeakVisor has information on more than a million summits all over the world, so basically, wherever you’re headed, they’ve got you covered. And in case you’re wondering, the app does work even in places where there’s no reception.

  If you’d like your own personal mountain guide, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

  Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

  This is our last episode of the season. After this, we’re going to take a break for a while. My whole team has worked really, really hard this past year. And we need some time to recharge.

  So we’re going to take some time off. Like OFF off. As in, no email, no phone calls, no work — just down time.

  After Labor Day, I’ll start mapping out our next season. I don’t yet know when that will launch. But I do hope to release some bonus episodes this fall-slash-winter, while we’re working on producing the next season. So stay tuned for all of that.

  And now, on to our story for today.

  This story is about learning something new as an adult. It’s about being a beginner. Which can honestly be pretty daunting. It’s scary to start from scratch. Especially when the thing you’re trying to learn is something that a lot of people have been doing since childhood.

  So how do you get past all that? How do you push through the fear and motivate yourself to take a big plunge — both literally and metaphorically? And is it really worth it?

  Naomi Mellor has the story.

  NAOMI MELLOR: It might start with a buzzing in your head. Or just a feeling that something is coming, a dark, looming feeling on the horizon. There might be an aura, with flashes of light around the periphery of your vision. You may feel dizzy and nauseous, occasionally actually vomiting on a really bad day.

  And then it starts. The pounding, like wave after wave crashing onto a shore. The unrelenting pressure in your head that feels like someone is slowly and ever-so-painfully crushing your skull with both hands, whilst simultaneously stabbing around in your brain with a sharp dagger. All light is blinding. Everything is just too bright, too insistent, too loud, too much.

  All that most people can manage in this moment is to lie in a dark room and endure. You’re waiting for the wave to pass.

  As a child, migraines such as these were commonplace for me. Memories of a cold flannel on my forehead, of my mum’s cool hands and her murmuring, soothing voice, of curtains drawn against the daylight in summer. These loom large when I think back to these times.

  And the primary trigger for my migraines as a kid? It was swimming.

  I know, right? As a nature-loving, sports-mad, adventure-seeking little girl, I wanted to like swimming. I wanted to cruise up and down the pool like the adults and older children I saw, to make it look effortless and easy, and most of all, to enjoy it the way other kids seemed to. Instead, I hated every minute. I argued with my parents about going swimming. And each lesson ended with me feeling physically spent, like a wrung-out wet rag, struggling to breathe, and with the inevitable migraine on the horizon.

  By age 11, I gave up altogether.

  And yet.

  Throughout adulthood my failure to be even a half-competent swimmer niggled away at me.

  To be clear, I could keep myself afloat of a fashion. I vaguely understood the mechanics and methodology. But attempting it was…well, as one teacher dryly observed, like “watching a giraffe go swimming.” My body and limbs were technically present in the pool but were by no means coordinated. I flailed and spluttered, floundered and gasped, and felt like I was drowning after just a few meters.

  Living in Australia in my early twenties, friends and boyfriends swam at the beach whilst I read books or ran along the sand.

  Each year, they trained for and completed a famous swim race, reveling in their achievement whilst I celebrated their success from the support boat, feeling a part of things and yet not a part of things either.

  It wasn’t that I avoided the water completely. My housemate and I went to the beach most days post-work in summer, walking, chatting, enjoying a beer, or messing about in the shallows. But I always stayed right by the shore, where I could touch bottom.

  Then, on one of these evenings, a Tuesday of no particular note, things were thrown into sharp relief.

  Like so many moments in the outdoors, it began with one small, ill-judged decision.

  That evening I was alone. I mostly just walked in these situations, enjoying the long stretch of emptiness which allowed me to calm my mind and unwind. But it was hot — very hot — that day, and I had a bikini with me, so I opted for a little swim.

  We knew about the currents at this beach and the propensity for significant swells. The waves are often big, hence it’s an area renowned for surfing. But on that day, the sea was calm, and all looked well. The water was cool and welcoming, and I floated on my back, very near to the shore, looking up at the vivid blue, cloudless sky, bobbing around in the waves as they came into the beach and thinking about the day gone by.

  Ready to head home, I reached down with my toes, feeling for the sandy ocean floor to wade in. But my toes couldn’t touch down. I was out of my depth. And looking up, the beach seemed all of a sudden much, much further away than I had thought.

  I felt the grip of panic clutch at my chest. Somehow, I was drifting out towards the back of the surf break. The swell was stronger out here, and I started to be tossed around a little. A few waves broke over my head. I tried to head for the shore in the strongest fashion that I could, but I wasn’t going anywhere and I was rapidly running out of energy.

  I stopped for a moment and treaded water to assess where I was. Roughly in the same position as I was previously.

  Another wave over my head. The sharp bite of sea water in my throat. The rush of noise in my ears as the ocean was turning over. This was my first experience of its true power, and I was terrified. I had no control.

  Another couple of minutes went by. Breaths became gasps. Muscles were burning. Arms were flailing. It doesn’t take long when you’re trying hard and going nowhere to become very tired in the ocean.

  All I could see were sets of waves rolling towards me, ready to break over my head, and my rising sense of fear created a tightness in my throat that I’d never experienced before. How the hell was I going to get out of this mess?

  The negative thoughts crowding into my brain were interrupted by a voice at that moment. It wasn’t God, or an angel. It was a young blonde haired surfer.

  “You need a hand?” Those were the only words he uttered before hauling me up onto his board, hopping off the back, and effortlessly riding multiple consecutive waves to land me onto the beach.

  I sat there on the sand, eyes shut, coughing. By the time I found my voice and muttered a thank you, he’d gone, surfboard under his arm, dashing back into the white water and diving under a wave.

  I was lucky. But the experience left me bruised and chastened. The ocean had shown me her dark side. For the first time in my life I had been genuinely scared I might drown.

  But I was so embarrassed that this had happened to me. I was ashamed I’d been stupid enough to go swimming alone. So I told precisely no one about my frightening experience, not even my boyfriend at the time. I simply backed away from the ocean.

  Deep down, I knew I needed to address my lack of capabilities. I’d had a major wake up call, and I really wanted to do something about it. I wanted to feel at ease in the water, to be a confident swimmer, to know that I could cope out of my depth without the clutches of dread grasping at me.

  But I was frozen and just couldn’t get started. I was standing in my own way, which is strange, because I am someone with an innate love of the outdoors, and an even bigger love of a physical challenge. I’ve run an ultramarathon, but for some reason, I could not convince myself to learn to become a competent swimmer.

  The reality was that I didn’t want to be seen to be starting from the beginning with something that seemed so simple. Swimming to me was like riding a bike, or learning to drive. It was a rite of passage for young people, not adults. I couldn’t imagine telling people that I was learning from scratch. That would be mortifying! And the longer I left it without grasping the nettle, the larger the mental block became.

  The following year I left Australia, returning home to the UK after several years away. Swimming wasn’t embedded into the fabric of daily life in England the way it is in Australia, mostly because the weather is, well, inclement at best a lot of the time. The water is cold here, and whilst the sun sometimes shines in summer, that’s unpredictable to say the least. I mean, come on. You all know we Brits love to talk about the weather all the time, mainly because we’re jealous of everyone else’s long lazy summers basking on the beach.

  I ran, and cycled, and hiked, and practiced yoga, and life went on. Until that is, an unexpected moment occurred.

  It happened over a cup of tea.

  My closest colleague at that time was a woman named Katie, who is one of the kindest, most focused and capable individuals I have ever met. She’s a highly intelligent and empathetic veterinarian, beloved by her clients and their animals, a woman who had ridden horses to a high level previously, and she was looking to get fit.

  One morning, she asked me whether I’d consider a triathlon.

  “No”, I replied, “I’m just not sure it’s for me.” I left it at that, I didn’t want to go into details. “How about you?” I asked.

  She sighed and said, “Well, I fancy it. But I can’t swim.”

  She said it so simply, with no apparent embarrassment whatsoever.

  How did I not know this? Standing in front of me was this brilliant, capable woman telling me that she couldn’t really swim either. I felt ashamed at my own lack of transparency, the fact that I’d never had the guts to be so straightforwardly honest with other people, that I’d hidden my ineptitude beneath excuses about being on my period, having forgotten my swimsuit or heading out for a run instead because “I needed the miles under my belt.” How ridiculous that seemed now.

  “I mean, I vaguely know the theory,” she said, “I sort of learnt as a child. But I can’t swim a length in the pool, and I don’t like being out of my depth.”

  What? This was exactly the same as me! A kindred spirit in the crappy-swimmer stakes!

  Words spilled out of me as I found my voice and described how similar my situation was, how I was in the same boat, that although my brain knew what it perhaps ought to do, my body had never performed the movements enough to normalize them for my limbs. The panic and extreme exhaustion that swimming induced. And the migraines. Oh, the migraines.

  We commiserated with one another about having kept this secret bottled up inside for so long. We shared the shame we felt about being in our thirties and not being able to do something that a lot of kids could do pretty competently, and we laughed at our own ridiculousness. We gently unpicked the fact that what actually underpinned our reservations about learning something new was a fear of failure. What if we tried to learn, and we were no good at it?

  And that was the moment. It was so simple. There was no great fanfare, just a cup of tea in a quiet moment, and two friends realizing they were in the same boat.

  Just before she left, I blurted it out. “Do you want to find a teacher and learn together?” Katie smiled, and said, “Why not. Let’s do it.”

  What struck me about this moment was that failures aren’t so embarrassing if other people are experiencing them too. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to share this story: to remind others that there are lots of people out there who can’t do the things that you expect that they can, and when we share our vulnerabilities with others, it’s amazing how many you’ll find in the same boat. Katie had been open and shown her vulnerability to another person. I, in turn, had bared mine right back.

  There was something about that shared moment, and the prospect of the shared experience of learning that made the idea of taking swimming lessons seem much less daunting, a shared power between us as it were. The apprehension was still there, but I had a buddy to keep me accountable, to make sure I turned up, and in whom I could confide.

  And contrary to my expectations, it was fun.

  We found a patient, empathetic teacher named Kathy, who listened carefully to each of us, digesting our individual stories. She acknowledged our fears, and told us that none of what we said was particularly uncommon, because actually, a lot of people can’t swim the length of a pool.

  To start with, she asked us to just swim — to do what we could, for as far as we could. That way she’d know what she was working with, or, to be more precise, what she wasn’t working with.

  I attempted a few strokes of front crawl, then surfaced, spluttering and gasping. My feet pedaled, toes searching for the floor, and I stood up, relieved that the pool was standing depth throughout its length.

  “OK,” she said. “Let’s begin.”

  By the end of that first lesson, for the first time in my life, I was hopeful about swimming. I started to think that there might be a time when, with a good deal of practice, I might actually enjoy it.

  Adding to the optimism was the fact that Kathy had a theory about my migraines. She suspected my breathing, or lack thereof, might be the trigger. Due to my poor coordination, I didn’t breathe well enough or often enough, and my short inefficient gasps might be leading to lower oxygen delivery to my brain.

  Now that we thought we had an explanation, the breathing practice began.

  Kathy had me doing all sorts of drills with floats, and paddles, and fins, and strange pieces of apparatus I’d never seen or heard of before. I learned to turn my head properly, to keep my ear on the surface of the water and to take powerful, efficient breaths to re-oxygenate myself effectively.

  Kathy was kind and understanding, but that didn’t mean she didn’t push us. She did. Every session was so tiring, but slowly, gradually, week by week, I improved.

  I started to be able to coordinate my head, my arms and my legs into something that looked vaguely like a recognizable stroke. First, I managed a length, with a decent rest when I got there. Then I could swim two lengths, then four. There were headaches, yes, but nothing unmanageable. I felt tired, yes, but not a crushing tiredness I couldn’t cope with.

  It was so hard, but it felt worth every ounce of the effort. If you love sports, you’ll understand the rush of endorphins — that “good” tiredness that comes after enjoyable exertion. And I swelled with pride each time I touched the end of the pool and turned to go again. The tide was turning gradually, and my confidence turned with it. The water had become a haven, a place where I was alone below the surface, away from my smartphone and people talking to me.

  But although I had become comfortable in the pool, I still felt a sense of dread at the vast wildness of the ocean. The whole point of learning to swim was to feel capable out in open water. And I yearned to be outside, to be swimming in nature. Achieving “success” for me was to see the sky as I swam, to feel the tingle of salt in my throat, and to swim out the back of the surf break without being paralyzed by fear. I wanted to tame the beast that had terrified me so thoroughly that day in Australia.

  And then I discovered Ötillö, and the sport of swimrun.

  Ö-till-ö translates as “island to island” in Swedish. This sport is about adventure and being in nature. In a swimrun race you swim, then run, then swim a bit more and run a bit more, getting in and out of the water up to 40 or more times. Everything you wear you carry throughout the race, meaning you swim in your trainers and run in your wetsuit, which, quite honestly, makes you look a bit strange when training alone on the edge of London. It’s a friendly, inclusive sport, where everyone is welcomed and encouraged, and the emphasis is on the journey, not the time it takes you.

  There are good swimmers and good runners, and people new to both. There are old people, young people and others in between, and there’s a rainbow of nationalities at every race. The events are held in some of the most beautiful corners of the world, in national parks, archipelagos of islands and remote stretches of coastline. The events embrace the wildness and unpredictability of nature and often include technical trails and bits of bouldering. Ötillö was founded by Swedes, and everyone’s a little bit bonkers. It sounded right up my street.

  I knew that completing a race would be a chance for me to prove to myself that I could conquer the ocean, once and for all. I set my sights on a solo race in the Isles of Scilly, a stunning group of islands off the coast of Cornwall. If I was going to challenge myself in the sea, it might as well be in a beautiful place.

  Then I had to pick how long a race I wanted to do. The World Series category had 30 km of running — no problem, I thought — and 8 km of swimming. Ah. That was far too much. The middle distance option entailed 13 km of running and just under 3 km in the open water, which I decided was realistic but sufficiently ambitious. I signed up.

  In preparation, I started swimming at our local lake several times a week, against a backdrop of pink early-summer skies. The ducks swam alongside me, and weeping willows bowed to the water on the shores of the lake, casting dappled shadows across the surface. It was bliss, and for the first time, I started to feel at one with the water. Smooth. Strong. In flow. Connected to nature. I was still overtaken by other swimmers very regularly, but who cared? I was a swimmer too, and it didn’t matter how fast or otherwise I was. I belonged.

  The day of the race neared in June, and we traveled down to the Isles of Scilly in high spirits.

  But the day of the race dawned wild. It was so windy, with gray clouds scudding across the sky, and a big swell in the sea. The waves looked brutal, the ocean was unleashing the power that I knew she held. Familiar feelings of fear niggled at my insides.

  There were mutterings and rumors about whether things would go ahead, which only served to heighten my nerves. But the safety crews were in place, and after a few minor course amendments, we began.

  The gun went, and the pack set off. First run, check. Into the water. First swim.

  It was cold, and I was enveloped in a maelstrom of arms and legs. In the confusion I headed in the wrong direction, subsequently swimming far further than I needed to. I was having trouble sighting, and failing to employ the skills I had assiduously honed over months of practice. Dammit. I was flailing. Why had I thought this was a good idea? I was in the sea, miles from home, fighting my way through several feet of swell and legs, and struggling, big time. The doubts crept in. This was just the first swim, and there was a long way to go.

  Someone once said to me, “How do you run? You just put one foot in front of the other. It’s all in your mind.” This thought occurred to me as I felt out of my depth, and out of my comfort zone. How do you swim? Just keep your arms turning over, and your legs kicking. It’s all in your mind.

  I refocused on my stroke and my breath. One, two, three, breathe. One, two, three, breathe. This calmed my mind and settled my body. I slowly found a rhythm.

  Coming out of the water after the first swim, I was near the back of the pack, but I’d made it, and we all hot-footed it off around the coast path.

  Gradually, though, I got into it. Run a bit, swim a bit, judge the swell, negotiate the rocky exits, watch your footing, follow the flags, run some more, swim some more. I found myself smiling, and by the time I stood on the precipice of the rocks at the entry to the next swim, with the wind whipping my hair, I was laughing. This was madness, and I was loving it. I felt free, and I knew I’d be ok. I was. I climbed in and out on the rocks of the islands, riding the waves on the way into the shore. I felt strong and powerful, working in tandem with mother nature, not against her.

  After a couple of hours, I crossed the line with a huge smile spread across my face, filled with joy and delight.

  That day at the Ötillö, I didn’t conquer the ocean. But strangely, I didn’t feel the need to anymore. Mother Nature had drawn me in with an almost magnetic force. I had never felt more free than I did during those few hours, negotiating my way around a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the birds wheeling and calling overhead. The raw power and vastness of it all were the most devastatingly thrilling thing. The ocean had got under my skin, and entered my soul. She no longer felt like an adversary. She wasn’t a dangerous beast I had to slay or tame. Instead, she was a friend. A partner in crime. A source of freedom and belonging.

  It seems so obvious now, but at the time it was a revelation: as much as the sea can terrify you, so she can thrill and calm you even more. Nowadays, when I look out at a stretch of open water, it fills me with excitement, rather than trepidation. And when I’m swimming, the ocean seems to hold me in the palm of her hand.

  My first race was done. This year, I’m taking on a big one.

  WILLOW: That was Naomi Mellor. She’s a podcast host and producer living just north of London, in the UK. She's also the co-founder of the International Women's Podcast Awards. You can see more of her work at everybody-media.com.

  And just a quick update. Since this story was produced, something really unfortunate happened. Naomi was in an auto accident this spring, so she’s not going to be able to compete in any big athletic events this year after all. But she’s hoping to be back on track in 2024.

  Naomi, I’m wishing you a speedy and full recovery.

  As I mentioned at the top of the episode, we’re taking a break for the rest of the summer. And I don’t know exactly when our next season will launch. But we do plan to release some bonus episodes later this year. And if you’d like to stay in the loop about that, just sign up for our email list. I have a link in the episode description. And you can also follow us on social media for updates. We’re on Facebook and Instagram @outtherepodcast.

  Out There is a proud member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of idea-driven independent podcasts.

  One of the other shows in the collective that I think you might enjoy is called Mementos. It’s a podcast about the things we choose to keep, and the personal stories behind those things. It’s a quiet, introspective podcast — kind of like Out There. And Lori Mortimer, who hosts it, is just a wonderful human.

  You can find Mementos wherever you get your podcasts, or at mementospodcast.com.

  Support for Out There comes from PeakVisor. PeakVisor is an app that helps you make the most of your time in the mountains. They have intricate 3-D maps to help you plan out hikes. Once you’re in the mountains, you can use the app to figure out what peaks you’re looking at. And if you need a little help staying motivated, they also have a peak-bagging feature.

  If you’d like your own personal mountain guide, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

  Today’s story was written and narrated by Naomi Mellor. Story editing and sound design by me, Willow Belden. Out There’s advertising manager is Jessica Heeg. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.

  Special thanks to everyone who is supporting Out There with financial contributions, including Angie Chatman, Eric Biederman, Phil Timm, Doug Frick, Tara Joslin, Deb and Vince Garcia, and the family of Mike Ludders. If you’d like to join your fellow listeners in helping us fund our next season, consider becoming a patron today at patreon.com/outtherepodcast. Patreon is a crowd-funding platform for creative endeavors, and you can make contributions in any amount that works for you. Again, that’s patreon.com/outtherepodcast.

  I hope you have a wonderful summer, and I look forward to making more stories for you after we come back from our break.

  And in the meantime, have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.

Episode Credits

Story by Naomi Mellor

Story editing and sound design by Willow Belden

Music includes works from Blue Dot Sessions and StoryBlocks

Links

Sign up for our email newsletter

Support Out There on Patreon

Follow us on Facebook and Instagram

This episode sponsored by

PeakVisor

Excavating Grief

How a trip to a cabin helped the healing begin

Foreground: Mykella Van COoten; Background: Cabin near Toronto (Photos courtesy Mykella Van Cooten)

“Sometimes, the feelings that are causing us problems are buried so deep that only the stillness of the woods can show us what we are truly feeling.”

— Mykella Van Cooten

Season 4 // Episode 6

Mykella Van Cooten was angry, and she didn’t know why. It got so bad that she began to feel unhinged.

And then, she went to a little cabin in the woods. In this episode, she tells the story of what happened. It’s a story about stopping, about letting go, and about uncovering the real feelings that are buried deep beneath the surface.

• Episode Transcript

  Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

  VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.

  WILLOW BELDEN: It’s a beautiful Sunday morning. I’m in Colorado with my uncle. We’re at the top of this mountain. And the view is just gorgeous. It’s this panorama of snowy peaks. And we’re trying to figure out which mountain is which. Because, the day before, we had tried to summit one of them. Which didn’t end up working out, because we got caught in a snowstorm. But anyway, we wanted to see where we had been. So I pull out my phone and open up PeakVisor.

  So, North Arapaho Peak is straight in front of us there.

  WALTER MUGDAN: So, when you say “straight in front of us,” does it look like the highest peak from our perspective?

  WILLOW: Yes, it looks like the highest peak.

  WALTER: OK.

  WILLOW: Um, and then you see the glacier.

  WALTER: Oh that is the glacier. That whole big snow bowl thing is the glacier. OK, now I get it.

  WILLOW: Right.

  PeakVisor is our presenting sponsor this season. Their app helps you figure out what you’re looking at when you’re out in the mountains. When you open it up, it determines where you are, and then it shows you a panoramic picture of everything you’re seeing, with all the peaks labeled.

  If you’d like your own personal mountain guide, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

  Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

  Big feelings can be scary. They keep us on edge, they seep into our work, they can threaten our relationships. And it’s especially hard when you don’t really know where they’re coming from. When the feelings don’t make sense.

  So what do you do in a situation like that? How do you regain a sense of calm, when your emotions are baffling, and you can’t seem to get them under control?

  In this episode, Mykella Van Cooten takes us from her home in Toronto to a cabin in the woods, and explores how she found healing.

  And just so you know, this story contains some adult language.

  MYKELLA VAN COOTEN: I learned a long time ago, as a black woman, I had to control my anger. I never wanted to be stereotyped as an angry black woman. But last year, my anger was right there, bubbling and rising up. And there was so much of it. It got to the point where I got so angry that I began to feel unhinged.

  Every little annoyance would balloon into this weird rage. Every noise my roommate made; every time my dog Eddie stared at me and I didn’t know what he wanted; every time there was a knock at the door while I worked from home, I would feel this rage just rising up. I felt like I was outside of my body. And I just kept wondering: why am I so angry?

  I like being in control. It makes me feel safe, and it relieves my anxiety. So when my anger began threatening to burst out of me, I was scared. I felt out of control, and I did not like it.

  Normally, when I need to sort out confusing emotions, I go away. I book myself into a retreat with yoga and energy work, sound baths and meditations. A trip with a purpose. And then I come home feeling refreshed.

  But this time, taking off for a week of “me time” just wasn’t an option.

  I’d recently changed careers and I’d gotten a coveted work opportunity, and I didn’t want to say no to it. That also meant I had a deadline to meet. So there was no way I could take time off.

  So I figured I’d do the next best thing: I’d book myself on a work-away trip. I wouldn’t be able to get away to a retreat, but I would be in a place where I could be alone with my dog and just kind of veg out, doing spurts of work, and maybe get away from the daily annoyances that were triggering this weird anger.

  I started researching the perfect hideaway, with quiet and hiking trails, but also cell service and high quality wifi. After weeks of searching, I’d found the perfect spot. I even knew what restaurants were nearby, what they had on their menus, and if they delivered. I was ready.

  So I headed to this little cabin in the woods, to work remotely, in peace. Well, that’s what I thought I was doing. It turns out, nature had other plans.

  I did have some idea where my anger was coming from. I want to say it was September 2021 when I got a text from my stepmother. She was asking if I wanted to adopt a child.

  I guess this question deserves a little bit of history. I’m 50 years old. And there have been several times in my life when I have tried to have a child. I had tried to get pregnant during my short-lived marriage. Later, I joined a co-parenting “dating” site. Then, a really good friend of mine even tried to help me make a baby for almost a year.

  I had tried a lot of things. But none of them had worked. So, when my stepmother asked me if I wanted to adopt a child, it made sense. And I said yes. We hung up, all smiles, and that was that.

  The following February, I got a call saying there was a baby who needed to be adopted in Guyana. That’s where my family is from and where my stepmother was living at the time. The baby girl would be born in two months. I was going to be a mom!

  And my stepmother offered to help — a lot. She offered to move the baby in with her until the baby could come to Canada. She had a lawyer handling all the paperwork at her own expense. And she even promised that she and my dad would help me out financially.

  The baby was born in April. Every few days, my stepmother would send pictures or we would do a video call. And I started to plan a baby shower.

  But some things were feeling off to me. Like, when the baby was just a couple of months old, I remember hearing that my dad had told a family friend that he had a new grandchild. But somehow, I was never named as the baby’s mom. And later, I found out, promises were being made to the biological parents — about things like visitations — without asking me first.

  It seemed like my dad and my stepmother didn’t really see me as the baby’s mom. And more and more, I was feeling like some kind of surrogate caretaker or babysitter, not a mother. I felt like they didn’t even see me, and it hurt.

  The last straw was an issue with the baby’s name. My stepmother and I simply couldn’t agree on what to call her. And when I didn’t back down on what I wanted, my stepmother just stopped. She stopped talking to me. She stopped sending pictures and updates about the baby. Well, there was one phone call. On it, stepmother said she felt disrespected. Then she hung up.

  I didn’t get a chance to respond, and my requests to talk more were ignored.

  Eventually, I got a text from my stepmother saying simply: “The parents have decided they no longer want you to adopt the baby.”

  I went from being a mom, to not.

  I was stunned. I felt how you feel after an accident. Numb. Dazed. Like when time stands still, and you aren’t really sure where you are, or what just happened. Sometimes I would just walk my dog aimlessly, feeling out of my body, like I was free-floating.

  After the shock wore off, there were all kinds of emotions. Different ones on different days, in different hours, and different minutes. There were all the bad ones: sadness, depression, loss, grief. But there were also good ones. I was relieved to finally know what was going on, to be free from a co-parenting agenda I hadn’t consented to. And I was proud that I put my foot down. And I was grateful that I had had enough time to cancel the baby shower before people had wrapped gifts for a child who wasn’t coming.

  I felt so many things. And I processed them all. Every day, for months, I did the emotional work of sorting through my feelings. And I had come to terms with losing the opportunity to adopt a baby.

  So why, dammit, if I had done so much emotional work, why was I still so angry?

  On the morning of my trip, I checked the last item off my list and headed out. It was a nice drive, just an hour and a half outside the city. Then, there it was: the cutest little cabin, sitting at the edge of a forest in all the prettiest reds, yellows and oranges.

  I got out of the car, let Eddie out, and moved my things from into the house. I packed everything away — food in the fridge, clothes in the dresser, toiletries on the shelf in the bathroom. Putting everything in its place made me feel at home.

  So, now that everything was in its place, now what? I had no work to do that day, so I decided to explore the cabin’s amenities. There was a cute porch to sun myself on and a cute little firepit just for me. The fall sun was beaming down like it was still summer.

  So I sat by the firepit, and I rested.

  Well, kind of.

  I sat there for a few minutes. But it wasn’t long before my brain started circling. Had I forgotten anything? Had I put all my stuff away? Was the car locked? Did it even need to be?

  Then I’d stop myself and clear my mind. But in just a few more minutes, I was thinking: ‘Am I sure the car is locked?’ Then I realized the car is literally right beside me.

  I’d stop thinking, but after a few minutes, I’d have another thought.

  Oh, this sitting still, doing nothing, it felt so weird. I don’t know the last time I just stopped. I don’t think I remembered how.

  I only stayed sitting in that chair because the sun was so unusually warm, and I wanted to stay and enjoy it. So I stayed in that chair. And that’s when things started to happen.

  I lost track of time. And then I felt the denseness of my body, sinking deep into that chair. And my breathing started to slow down. My shoulders relaxed. Sitting amongst those beautiful trees in the sunshine, with nothing to do, I finally sunk into rest. And I cried — gentle, thin lines of tears that slid and rounded my cheeks and dripped off the edge of my chin.

  I have no idea how long I cried. But, at some point, I got up, dried my tears and went back into the cabin. I had to prepare for tomorrow. I mean, I had a schedule. I had work to do.

  So, the next morning, I settled in, with headphones, laptop and a snuggly corner of the couch to work in, with my little mug of tea. Then I attempted to start my workday. And I did do some work. But I was distracted, and I was still grouchy. And mostly, I was still drenched in sadness. Like after a really good cry, but one where you know there is much more pain there. I was grief soaked.

  And the next day, I was nauseated. Then, for some reason, I started craving whole milk. I haven’t drunk whole milk in over 15 years. But I thought my body wanted it, so I went out, I bought it, and I drank it. One swig. And then I threw it up.

  Dammit. Oh God, I knew what this meant. When I am nauseated and can’t hold down heavy food, something emotional needs to come out. And it needs to come out now.

  My body, mother earth, they didn’t care about my work schedule. They just didn’t care. My feelings were going to come out. Right now. Shit.

  So finally, I just surrendered. I took a break from all my non-pressing work, and I just sat there. I sat in the cabin, I sat by the fire pit, I sat on the porch. I ate when I needed to. But mostly, I stayed still, and I just stared — out the window, at the trees, at the TV, into space. And when the tears came, I let them. I let it all go.

  And once I did, I had a shocking revelation. My overwhelming anger was my way of staying in control, of staying safe, from a deep grief that was terrifying me. And it wasn’t about losing a baby. Yes, that was sad. But I had come to terms with being childless a long time ago. This grief was way deeper. I was grieving the loss of the family life that I’d hoped I’d gain by raising this child.

  My parents had gotten divorced when I was around seven years old. Before then, even when my parents were fighting, I loved being with my dad. He was my absolute best friend. My favorite memory of him was when he bundled me and my sister up in our snowsuits and took us to the park to play in the snow, for hours. And my mom, she waited inside like a Leave it to Beaver mom, making hot chocolate.

  So when my dad moved out, I lost my playmate. I lost my partner in crime. And after he left, he didn’t call. He didn’t return phone calls. He didn’t visit, and he’d often miss his assigned weekends with me and my sisters.

  Then, when he got together with my stepmother, I got to live with them for several years in my tweens and in high school. All of a sudden, I didn’t have to hope he would return my phone calls or come around. I didn’t have to hear him say he couldn’t talk because he was having dinner with his new family. I was in his new family. And he was right there.

  As an adult, I worked for my dad's business for a while. And when I worked for him, I’d see him every day. And we would joke around and get along just like when I was little. And if I called him, he’d call me back.

  But once I stopped living and working with him, I didn’t see him anymore. And he stopped returning my phone calls. He was gone.

  But his new family, oh, they seemed to have a charmed life — a mom and a dad in love, with really cool kids. A full family. And as I got closer to my half sister, sh’d tell me about my dad taking pictures of her while she got ready for prom, just like it is in the movies. He even showed up for a 5k run that she did to cheer her on. Yet, he hadn’t shown up to my graduation — from university.

  I mean, I knew I was jealous, but I didn’t realize how desperately I wanted to be a permanent member of my dad’s new family. So, when my stepmother called and asked if I wanted to adopt this child, with the full support of her and my dad, and I would be the mom to the first grandchild my dad and stepmother wanted so much, something inside me said, “This is my way in.”

  I felt blindsided. It seemed no matter what I did, I would never be enough to fully belong. I was broken.

  Now I knew exactly why I had been angry. My anger had been protecting me from my pain. But now that I knew the pain existed, I wanted to let it go. I wanted to feel normal again.

  So in that little cabin, amongst towering trees and nurturing sunshine, I let the healing begin.

  That week, I stayed still and allowed myself to feel my deepest pain. And as I did that — as I processed the real feelings that had been buried for so long — there was no space left for the anger.

  When the week was over, I was still grief soaked. But I was so relieved to feel something I understood and could reckon with in real time. Honestly, by the end of the week, even knowing I had more grief to work through, I felt refreshed.

  When I got home from the cabin, I still got angry. But it was like the little annoyances of everyday life. The grief was still there too. It takes a long time to be done with grief. But finally I knew what I was feeling, and that felt good.

  I know I will never be a real member of my dad's new family, and honestly, I don’t want to be. I realized that the fantasy family I had created in my mind, that wasn’t real. The real family dynamic, I found out, is something I don’t want to be a part of. And nature helped me see that.

  I had processed a lot of feelings since the adoption fell through. But it wasn’t until my trip to the cabin — until nature forced me to stop and let go — that I could even express the deepest pain I had inside. Sometimes, the feelings that are causing us problems are buried so deep that only the stillness of the woods can show us what we’re truly feeling. And only by letting ourselves feel those feelings can we start to reclaim our inner peace.

  WILLOW: That was Mykella Van Cooten. She’s a radio producer living in Toronto. If you want to see more of her work, I have a link at our website, outtherepodcast.com.

  Coming up next time on Out There: Naomi Mellor never learned how to swim. And taking lessons as a grownup? Well, that seemed out of the question.

  NAOMI MELLOR: Swimming, to me, was like riding a bike or learning to drive. It was a rite of passage for young people, not adults. I couldn’t imagine telling people I was learning from scratch. That would be mortifying. And the longer I left it without grasping the nettle, the larger the mental block became.

  WILLOW: Tune in on July 13 for a story about learning something new, as an adult.

  OK, so, time for a pop quiz. Where do you think the majority of Out There’s funding comes from? Is it: a) advertisements, b) gifts from listeners, or c) grant money?

  If you guessed B, you are correct. Last year, about two-thirds of our revenue came from listeners. Two thirds. That’s huge. It’s because of you that we are able to create thoughtful, introspective stories.

  So, to everyone who is already supporting Out There: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I am blown away by your generosity.

  If you’re not already supporting the show, consider becoming a patron today. Patrons are listeners who make monthly contributions to Out There through a crowd-funding platform called Patreon. You pick the amount you want to give, whether it’s $5 or $50 or some other amount, and they take care of the rest.

  To become a patron today, click the link in the episode description, or go to patreon.com/outtherepodcast.

  Out There is a proud member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of idea-driven independent podcasts. One of the other shows in the collective that I think you’d really enjoy is called Ministry of Ideas. It’s a small show about the big ideas that shape our world. Most recently, they’ve been running a special series about the relationship between religion and science. You can find Ministry of Ideas wherever you get your podcasts, or at ministryofideas.org.

  Support for Out There comes from PeakVisor. PeakVisor is an app that helps you make the most of your time in the mountains. They have intricate 3-D maps to help you plan out hikes. Once you’re in the mountains, you can use the app to figure out what peaks you’re looking at. And if you need a little help staying motivated, they also have a peak-bagging feature.

  If you’d like your own personal mountain guide, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

  Today’s story was written and narrated by Mykella Van Cooten. Story editing and sound design by me, Willow Belden.

  Out There’s advertising manager is Jessica Heeg. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.

  The final episode of this season will be in two weeks. We’ll see you then. And in the meantime, have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.

Episode Credits

Story by Mykella Van Cooten

Story editing and sound design by Willow Belden

Music includes works from Blue Dot Sessions

Links

Support Out There on Patreon

This episode sponsored by

PeakVisor

Ice Swimming

Soothing the brain by shocking the body

An “avanto” in Finland, where people go ice swimming (Photo by Landry Ayres)

“I had found this incredible sense of peace right there in the middle of that ice hole.”

— Elizabeth Whitney

Season 4 // Episode 5

In Finland, it’s commonplace to go swimming in the winter — outdoors.

The practice offers surprising mental-health benefits, and it isn’t just for die-hard adventurers. On this episode, we share the story of one woman who started “ice swimming” in an effort to get through a devastating grief.

• Episode Transcript

  Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

  VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.

  JESSICA HEEG: This is Jessica Taylor, and I am the advertising manager at Out There Podcast, and I am actually in the middle of the Grand Canyon right now. And I’m out at Plateau Point, so I’m right above the Colorado River. And I’ve opened up my PeakVisor app.

  WILLOW BELDEN: PeakVisor is our presenting sponsor this season. Their app helps you figure out what you’re looking at when you’re out on adventures.

  Let’s say you’re in a national park, and you see a mountain in the distance, and you want to know what it is. PeakVisor will tell you. It’ll show you the name of the summit, how tall it is, how far away it is, plus, loads more info.

  JESSICA: It’s really cool to be able to see every single point and every single elevation of the entire canyon, all the way around me.

  WILLOW: If you’d like your own personal mountain guide, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

  Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

  Our theme this season is “Secrets of the Earth.” Each episode, we’re harnessing the power of nature to better understand our own humanity.

  As we head into summer, many of us are thinking about swimming. Whether it’s a trip to the beach, or a lazy day at a lake, or just taking your kids to the local splash park — being in the water can be deeply relaxing. It’s a great way to escape the daily grind and release pent-up stress.

  Of course, for most of us, these activities come to an end when the weather gets cold. But what if you could go swimming year round? Outdoors? In a frozen sea?

  Today we're headed to Finland, where something called “ice swimming” is common. And we’re going to explore what can happen when we try to soothe the brain by shocking the body. Landry Ayres has the story.

  And just so you know, this episode discusses depression and addiction.

  ELIZABETH WHITNEY: Huomenta!

  LANDRY AYRES: Huomenta!

  I’m standing on the shore of the Baltic Archipelago in southern Finland, about seven kilometers from downtown Helsinki. It’s 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and while the sun is in one of its rare shining moods, the air is frigid, so much so that the entire sea before me is frozen solid. Everything, that is, but a small patch at the end of a dock that a new friend of mine is descending into.

  How does it feel?

  ELIZABETH: It’s like I’m being swaddled in a vice grip.

  (laughter)

  ELIZABETH: I had this friend — I don’t know if I told you this part — he said that at about two minutes you start to get this weird euphoric feeling like, “I could just stay here forever.” (laughs)

  LANDRY: I mean, when you got in I was expecting at least some sort of immediate, maybe unconscious, reaction. But it looks, if you didn’t know how cold it was, like you just jumped into any old swimming pool.

  ELIZABETH: I'm Elizabeth Whitney. And my official title in the world is I'm an associate professor in the City University of New York, and I'm also a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki.

  I first came to Finland as a Fulbright scholar in 2015. It was a happy accident. It was the opposite world of New York, which was exactly what I needed. It was just quiet and beautiful. And I just, I fell in love.

  LANDRY: After her Fulbright program ended, Elizabeth moved back and forth between Finland and the U.S. several times. But she kept feeling this visceral pull back to the Nordics. Eventually she settled back down in Helsinki in 2021.

  But this time, it wasn’t the magical place she remembered. This was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finland is already a society where it takes a lot of work to earn people’s trust. You don’t become best friends with people quickly there. And now, everyone was in covid isolation. So, it was lonely.

  And then, one day, she received some really horrible news.

  ELIZABETH: It was probably, I don't know, seven or eight in the morning here. And, yeah, I was alone in my apartment. And in one of those horrible movie moments where you wake up, and there are a whole list of messages on your phone, on all of the various social media platforms that we communicate on. And, you know, I'm reading like, in chronological order, that my brother is in the hospital, they don't think he's going to last another hour. And there's this garbled Google Translate voice message from my mom.

  And the first person I called was my youngest brother. And he told me that Bill had died an hour ago.

  I have two siblings. So I'm the oldest, Bill was the middle child, Ed is the youngest, and we were all very close as adults. Our nickname for each other was “Meow,” from Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, that was our nickname for each other. And we talked in meow meow, we sang in meow meow. And you know, we were just incredibly silly. We all have a shared sense of, of silly humor. Bill was maybe the silliest though. I mean, he was — he was really, really, really funny.

  LANDRY: Bill had died of liver failure. It was a result of years of heavy drinking. His death wasn’t all that surprising, but it did happen suddenly, which of course didn’t make it any easier for Elizabeth.

  In those first few days after she got the news, she kept trying to focus on the happy memories she had of her brother.

  ELIZABETH: It’s so easy to get caught up in the last few years when his drinking was unmanageable, and he was unrecognizable. And it was…Frequently you just couldn't tell who you were having a conversation with, which is just an agonizing part of loving an addict, as many people know who have loved addicts.

  So it's like this back and forth between remembering, you know what a beautiful, kind, loving, queer, feminist cat weirdo artist he was, and what, like, a precious person he was, and then my anger at his inability to get his shit together.

  LANDRY: The next few weeks were a blur. Elizabeth had to deal with all of the mundane but exhausting tasks that come after something like this: buying plane tickets to go back home to see her family, arranging for long-term cat sitters, then going to Bill’s house and sifting through his belongings.

  And then, three months later, she went back to Finland and tried to go on with life. But that was really hard.

  I moved from the States to Finland not long before Elizabeth returned, and one of the first things you realize upon settling down here is that Finland is a nation of extremes. The summers are wonderful, but during the winter, the sun barely comes above the horizon, and it’s almost always cloudy. It’s so dark that over the course of a whole month, you only get a few hours of sunlight. It’s harsh, and one of the most common reasons newcomers have a hard time adapting to life here.

  So returning to Finland in the middle of one of the most bleak times of year was already going to be tough. But when you’re still in Covid isolation and your brother has died, that’s another level of pain. A kind of pain where the grief overshadows everything else. Where it seems like there’s no possibility for relief.

  ELIZABETH: I just was desperate. I needed to do something, I was numb. Like, if that makes sense, I was so physically numb, I just wanted something shocking. I just wanted to shock myself into a different place. And I just decided, I'm going to start ice swimming.

  LANDRY: Ice swimming has been a popular pastime in the Nordics for centuries. Lots of people do it. And it’s not just for rugged, tough survivalist types. There’s actually kind of a stereotype that it’s a hobby for older women. Imagine grannies puttering out onto a dock with flowery swim caps and neoprene socks on, then jumping into a frozen lake. When COVID-19 started, there was a big uptick in younger people picking it up, too. So, Elizabeth decided to try it.

  ELIZABETH: And so it did feel a bit like, you know, Cheryl Strayed in Wild where she’s just like, “I'm just putting this backpack on and I’m gonna start walking.” And so I just was like, “I'm just going out there.” And I had like the cheapest flimsiest shoes and gloves, and I had no idea what I was doing.

  LANDRY: Elizabeth went to an avanto, which is what Finns call a hole in the ice, where they swim, or rather, dip. There are tons of them scattered around Finland: small and large, well maintained and not. And they really are just holes in the ice.

  ELIZABETH: So it's almost like you're at a Finnish mökki, which is the summer cottage where there's a sauna, and then you walk down to the water to swim. And then you walk out of the cabin and down these wooden steps. And you have to walk across this often very icy, gravelly path. And then you walk down a pretty long dock, and there are steps that go down into the water, and you sort of push off from the steps and swim.

  The first time I went in, I managed to stay for 12 seconds.

  When you go in the water your muscles seize up. You are in a survival mode, like a really basic survival mode. And you panic.

  LANDRY: One of the things experienced cold swimmers will tell you is that the most important thing to do when you first start to panic like this is to control your breath. You shouldn’t think about the pain or numbness or how badly you want to get out; you should just try to steadily breathe in and out. That focus on the most basic of human needs, to breathe, helps distract you from everything else and prevents you from being overwhelmed and hyperventilating. So that’s all Elizabeth tried to do — just breathe.

  ELIZABETH: When I came out, I felt like I was on fire. It was like someone had plugged me into an electric socket. All your nerve endings just kind of fizz out for a minute, and you can't feel anything. You actually feel warm, like almost hot, like you feel this burning sensation all over your whole body. And it was, it was just, it was in a high it was this incredible high, and I just stood on the dock like, “This is drugs.”

  And then of course, you're chasing that high, if you will, for the rest of the time that you're swimming. Like, every time you do it, you're like “Aaah, is it gonna feel that good again? Is it gonna feel that good?” And of course, it's never as good as the first time, but it always does feel like, you always do get just like that burning endorphin rush. That's the part that keeps you going back.

  ANTTI LINDFORS: People refer to this practice as an addiction and themselves as having become addicted to this cold exposure.

  LANDRY: This is Dr. Antti Lindfors, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki and co-author of Avantoon: A Winter Swimming Handbook. He says Elizabeth’s reaction is common. A lot of cold swimmers compare their hobby to an addiction. It happens because, when you’re in a stressful situation, like cold swimming, your body releases a bunch of chemicals in order to level you out. It’s immediate. It’s intense. And it actually feels really good.

  LINDFORS: I think it has to do with neurochemicals and hormones that cold exposure releases: noradrenaline and adrenaline, endorphins, which are these, basically, body's own morphine, a painkiller, and also dopamine and serotonin, these neurotransmitters.

  LANDRY: It’s kind of ironic, right? Elizabeth’s brother has just died from complications of substance abuse. And now she’s describing her one relief as “addicting.” If you didn’t know the high came from swimming it would sound a little self destructive. But actually, Lindfors says this kind of natural high can be pretty good for you.

  LINDFORS: If you're highly stressed, it helps you release those stress hormones and balances you back. But if you're, like, fatigued, you have low levels of stress hormones, it helps you to pump them up. So it has a balancing effect. And all of these have an effect on energy levels, focus, and through that, it's considered a potential treatment for depression, for instance.

  LANDRY: Elizabeth was hooked right away, so she kept with the cold swimming. Chasing the high of that first time, she returned to the avanto every day for a month straight, strengthening her diaphragm and practicing the proper breathing technique. She bought better neoprene socks and gloves, and got keys to a changing room so she didn’t have to change on the windswept dock.

  She was slowly becoming strong enough to stay in the water for longer periods: for 15 seconds, 30, then a minute, then two, the lack of feeling in her fingers and toes lasting longer and longer.

  ELIZABETH: It took me a couple of weeks before I could think about something other than surviving. And then maybe like a week after that, where I was like, “Oh, my God, this is gorgeous. This is incredible.” I couldn't believe how beautiful it was. You know, of course I've been swimming in Finnish lakes and ponds and in the Baltic in the summer, and had that experience, where I felt the stillness of it. But I'd never felt it in the winter.

  You know, Finnish winter is so beautiful. Even when there's, when the sun isn't out, there are so many shades of darkness that mix with the lightness that you can see. Gray and blue and silvers. And then there's birds circling overhead. And sometimes there's birds in the water with you, swimming and flying above and making beautiful bird noises. And immediately in front of you, you see the water, like the Baltic water, which is this sort of greenish gray color. But then there's this just vast expanse of white. So it feels like you're looking across a Tundra.

  LANDRY: Elizabeth remembers one day in particular when everything seemed to solidify — when she realized the avanto could give her more than just a high.

  ELIZABETH: I was alone in the avanto. And it was so quiet. It almost took my breath away, because it was so calming. It was like the stillness that I found inside of me matched the stillness that was around me in the nature. It was just this incredibly grounding experience. I felt like I was just part of that avanto, like I had found this incredible sense of peace right there in the middle of that ice hole.

  LANDRY: It might sound counterintuitive that being in freezing cold water in January would bring you a sense of peace, but for Elizabeth it did.

  She went back to the changing room on the shore and sat on the bench, warming up, and knew something was different. The pain wasn’t gone. Her grief from Bill’s passing was still there. And her fingers were still numb from the icy water. But it was no longer all consuming. She felt a newfound serenity. And she realized the two could coexist — that grief didn’t have to be gone for her to feel peace.

  It’s been over a year since Elizabeth lost her brother Bill. There’s been another winter, another season of relearning what cold swimming can do, another year of coming to grips with loss. She still misses Bill, still gets angry at him for the pain he caused, still feels sorry for the pain he lived with. But she’s no longer numb to those feelings, and instead, is finding ways to purposefully explore them. She’s been writing a lot, working on a book about the experience.

  What do you think Bill would say if you were able to call him up and be like, “I just went ice swimming today and told him about…”

  ELIZABETH: Yeah…He’d say, “Meow. That's crazy, meow. That's crazy, Meow! Send me a video.” I don't think he would want to do it. I don't think he would be interested in ice swimming. I tried to convince Ed, my other brother, to come by swimming. I don't think he wants to do it either. Which I respect, I respect. But yeah, I think that Bill would be like, “That's wild. And what an amazing way to commune with nature.”

  LANDRY: Elizabeth’s grief had been like a sheet of ice, hard and solid. But there was an immense amount of joy underneath it, a love for Bill and all their time together that she’d swam in since they were just a couple of silly kids. The avanto was more than just a literal hole in the ice. It was a gateway through her anguish, a door that let her enter those happy memories. It led to a small pool of joy amidst the vast tundra of grief.

  WILLOW: That was Landry Ayres. Landry is a creator living in Helsinki, Finland. You can find more from them on their Youtube channel, Finlandria, and on their podcast, You Only Guide Me by Surprise.

  Coming up next time on Out There: When was the last time you went outdoors and just sat there?

  MYKELLA VAN COOTEN: It wasn’t long before my brain started circling. Had I forgotten anything? Had I put all my stuff away? Was the car locked? Did it even need to be? Ah, this sitting still, doing nothing, it felt so weird.

  WILLOW: Tune in on June 29th for a story letting go and uncovering some surprising personal truths.

  If you’re enjoying Out There, one thing you can do to help us out is leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you’re listening right now. I know I say this a lot, but when we get positive reviews from people like you, it makes it so much easier for new listeners to find us. And reaching new listeners is so important for independent podcasts.

  Out There is a proud member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of idea-driven independent podcasts. One of the other Hub & Spoke shows that I particularly like is called Subtitle. It’s a podcast about languages and the people who speak them.

  I personally have always loved words. And in fact, my whole family has a somewhat ridiculous fascination with grammar. It’s pretty common, when we get together at holidays, for us to have heated debates about obscure grammar questions. Like, this is normal dinner-table conversation for us.

  If you’re anything like me, and you think words are fascinating, check out Subtitle. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts, or at subtitlepod.com.

  Support for Out There comes from PeakVisor. PeakVisor is an app that helps you make the most of your time in the mountains. They have intricate 3-D maps to help you plan out hikes. Once you’re in the mountains, you can use the app to figure out what peaks you’re looking at, off in the distance. And if you need a little help staying motivated, they also have a peak-bagging feature.

  PeakVisor has been a loyal supporter of Out There for years, and I’m so grateful for their continuing sponsorship. If you’d like your own personal mountain guide, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

  Today’s story was reported and written by Landry Ayres. Story editing and sound design by me, Willow Belden. Out There’s advertising manager is Jessica Heeg. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.

  Special thanks to all of our listeners who are supporting Out There with financial contributions, including Eric Biederman, Phil Timm, Doug Frick, Tara Joslin, Deb and Vince Garcia, and the family of Mike Ludders. If you’d like to get in on the fun and support Out There financially, just go to patreon.com/outtherepodcast or click the link in the episode description.

  We’ll see you in two weeks. And in the meantime, have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.

Episode Credits

Story by Landry Ayres

Story editing and sound design by Willow Belden

Music includes works from StoryBlocks and Blue Dot Sessions

Links

Support Out There on Patreon

This episode sponsored by

PeakVisor

Queer in Appalachia

What if ‘home’ isn’t a place you feel welcome?

Newt Schottelkotte on their road trip through Appalachia (Photo courtesy Newt Schottelkotte)

“When you grow up never seeing yourself in the world around you, you start to believe you simply don’t belong there.”

— Newt Schottelkotte

Season 4 // Episode 4

As a nonbinary person, Newt Schottelkotte never felt at home in Appalachia. But then, they went on a road trip with their dad. Driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains, something started to shift.

This is a story about figuring out how to be yourself without abandoning where you’re from.

• Episode Transcript

  Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

  VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.

  WILLOW BELDEN: Alright, I am out for a bike ride, and I’m in a spot here where I can see three different mountain ranges. And I only know what one of them is. And I’m always curious what the other two are.

  This happens often. I’ll be out doing something fun. I’ll see mountains in the distance. And I always want to know what they are. Which is where an app called PeakVisor comes in handy.

  PeakVisor is one of our sponsors for this episode. When you open up their app, it shows you a panoramic image of everything you’re seeing, with all the peaks labeled. It tells you each mountain’s name, its height, how far away it is. And it works for mountains all over the world.

  If you, too, like to know what you’re looking at when you’re out on adventures, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

  Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

  This season, we’re exploring the theme “Secrets of the Earth.” Each episode, we’re harnessing the power of nature to uncover new truths and help us understand our own humanity.

  Today’s story is about self discovery. When we’re looking to find ourselves, we often go back to the place where it all started: home. From a yearly beach trip to a beloved backyard, the natural spaces we grew up in can be places of clarity and comfort.

  But what happens when those spaces come into conflict with who we are? What if home isn’t a space where you feel welcome? Newt Schottelkotte has the story.

  NEWT SCHOTTELKOTTE: You might not believe me if you saw me, but I did Cotillion. Cotillion is a formal ball or dance where debutantes are presented to society. The goal is to impress potential suitors. You go to a series of classes in a community center or high school gym and learn how to do things like foxtrot, know when to use a soup spoon, and greet the Queen of England.

  I took about two Cotillion classes before saying “Hell no,” but the impression it leaves on you is clear: this is the ideal to strive to. Putting on makeup and a nice dress and going to dinner and dancing with a man is what being a girl in the south is all about.

  The problem was, femininity never fit me growing up. I would have knock-down-drag-out fights with my mother about having to shave my legs. I pleaded to not have to wear a dress on special occasions. And it wasn’t just that I didn’t want to act like a stereotypical girl. I never felt like I was a girl.

  But to be fair, being a boy didn’t look great either. Boys in the south did a lot of things that seemed toxic to me. I didn’t want to be the kind of jerk who dissed the Babysitters Club, or who made fun of boys for crying.

  I wasn’t the only person who struggled to fit in, but that didn’t make it any easier. In the south, there wasn’t room for nuance. I remember seeing girls on the school volleyball team with perfectly curled hair and waterproof makeup, because anything less than extreme femininity when playing a sport would instantly get you pegged as an “ugly lesbian.” When I did theatre in high school, any guy that didn’t need a girl to hand-hold him through doing his stage makeup was instantly suspect. If you deviated from your assigned role, the labeling was swift and negative. And that didn’t leave room for anyone to explore their own gender. Everyone presents their gender differently, whether you identify as the one you were assigned at birth or not. My little sister is a girl in a totally different way than my mother is.

  In this kind of environment, there was one type of femininity, and one type of masculinity. I decidedly clicked with neither. Being anything other than ambiguous and in between felt wrong. Like I was doing a bad performance, and everyone watching me could tell. I was caught between a rock and a hard place, and during high school, where so much is placed on figuring out who you are, I felt trapped by either option.

  The first time I realized there might be a third option was during choir class my freshman year of high school. We were on a break, and I was scrolling through my Tumblr dashboard, when I came across a post breaking down the history of gender-neutral labels.

  The post explained that the Talmud, the Jewish book of holy commentary, lists six different terms to talk about gender. Six. They have words for cis people and words for binary and nonbinary trans people.

  Reading this, I felt a flutter of excitement in my gut. I had heard the word “transgender” before, but it was never really talked about. And “nonbinary” was a new concept altogether. Instantly, I felt less alone. The Talmud is older than the concept of Jesus, so for thousands and thousands of years, people have been out there who didn’t fit neatly into the categories of male or female. And religious texts recognized them. Not only that, but the blog post explained that thousands of indigenous cultures had a term for their version of gender-queerness.

  The post also talked about pronouns, and how we use the singular “they/them” pronoun when people don’t neatly identify as male or female. Something about that appealed to me right away, so I added “they/them” to the “she/her” that was already in my Tumblr bio. Instantly I felt a rush of endorphins and adrenaline, and a week later I removed the “she/her” altogether. As soon as I did that, people online started referring to me with they/them pronouns. It felt so good. So true to who I was. It was like they were actually talking to and about me, not this abstract idea of a female person I had never really felt connected to. I cherished that one space where I could give people the real me, and where I actually felt seen. The following year I even chose a new name for myself. One that wasn’t obviously feminine. I started calling myself Newton — or Newt, for short.

  But that was all strictly online. I didn’t feel like I could tell anyone at home that I was nonbinary. It wasn’t that I was afraid of the worst case scenario. I had heard the horror stories of trans kids getting kicked out, sent to conversion therapy, and worse. My parents weren’t bigots, but they had absolutely no idea what trans people were, much less nonbinary people. It would be a monumentally difficult and intense process of explaining myself to them. I didn’t want to go through that while I was still living with them. The whole idea felt overwhelming. Even putting aside the fact that I was still figuring myself out.

  And so, I explored my identity alone. In secret.

  I grew up during that nebulous time when shows like Glee had informed kids my age that gay people existed and didn’t deserve to be shoved in a locker (just ignored entirely), but the only resources for someone in a small town to figure out their gender and sexuality were on the Internet. Most of what the nonbinary identity meant to me came from queer spaces online, and pdfs of books the local library didn’t carry.

  I remember listening to the fiction podcast Welcome to Night Vale. The main character is gay. I would lie in bed, headphones over my ears and eyes closed, letting the world around me become one where people like me didn’t have to worry about explaining ourselves; we could just go on cool adventures and save the world. But then, the episode would end, and I’d be back in the real world. In Appalachia. In a place that seemed bigoted and inhospitable. Where the news cycle was dominated by Trump and poverty porn. Where people like me were pushed out, or worse.

  I felt so isolated. Everything about this region felt awful. I didn’t fit the social culture. I felt alienated and unwanted. When you grow up never seeing yourself in the world around you, you start to believe you simply don’t belong there.

  Finally, when I left for college, I decided it was time to come out. To my parents, and everyone else. I planned to haul my stuff into my dorm, introduce myself to my hallmates as Newt, and start my new life in college being a hundred percent out of the closet.

  The day after moving, I went out for breakfast with my parents to have The Talk. We sat down, the A/C roaring like most southern places in late August, and while my dad ordered biscuits for the table, I did the best thing I could think of to stop myself from backing out now: I went on Instagram and changed the name and pronouns on my account, then posted a screenshot of it to my story. Boom. Done. Time for the low-tech approach.

  My palms have never sweat as much as they did when I started to explain to my parents what nonbinary means. Both were in their late fifties, so it took a couple of attempts. I tried the flat Earth approach. I explained that our understanding of gender and science is constantly evolving, and just like how we’ve historically assumed the Earth was flat, we learned more as a species and moved on. We used to think there were only two genders, but, as many pre-colonial cultures knew from the very start, we now understand things are much more fluid than that. You don’t have to be one or the other.

  My dad ordered more biscuits.

  Then I told them my name was Newton.

  “What’s wrong with the name we gave you?” my dad asked.

  I told him it was instantly recognizable as a girl name, and I’m not a girl. He didn’t have anything to say to that. There wasn’t much reaction from either of them, really. It felt like I was pouring my heart out to a pair of brick walls.

  By hour two, I had successfully managed to get my mother to say a whole five words on the subject. My dad ordered another cup of coffee the moment I began my oral presentation on the history of the singular they. I explained that all the way back in the 1300s, people used “they” to refer to a single person whose gender the reader doesn’t know yet. The only real change in its use, I explained, is that now we also use it even when we do know a person’s gender. My dad still wasn’t looking at me. But then he forgot who our server was and wondered aloud, “Where are they?”

  I blotted my forehead with the last napkin at our table.

  Finally, they had to hit the road to make it back home before dinner. Nobody screamed, I did not throw up from nerves until I got back to my dorm, and we did not talk about the subject at all until I came home for the holidays. So, it could have gone worse. But, if I was being totally honest with myself, a “congratulations” would have been nice. Or a hug.

  By the end of my first semester, I had come out to just about everyone I knew, legally changed my name, and regularly introduced myself with they/them pronouns. While home for winter break, I chopped my hair off into a much butchier style and instantly felt my confidence skyrocket. My closet began to be dominated far more by the men’s section than the women’s. Aside from appreciating the much bigger pockets, I liked the way the clothes made me look and feel.

  And yet, these revelations weren’t exactly welcome. I had so many negative associations with masculinity that it felt like I was indulging in something I shouldn’t be. Masculinity was bad, femininity good, and androgyny even better — right?

  You’re probably thinking that college did the trick in helping me figure all of this out, if not from a gender studies class, then joining the campus GSA or meeting like-minded people at an event. Or I would have packed my things for a big city up north and found myself the old-fashioned way. It might come as much of a surprise to you as it did to me, then, where my biggest moment of self-discovery actually occurred.

  By the time summer vacation rolled around, I was feeling pretty stir-crazy. So when my father asked me to come with him on a road trip through Appalachia and up to Gettysburg for his sixtieth birthday, I said yes.

  Why? Well for one, I really did want to have a relationship with my parents. There’s the idea that, when you come out, if your folks aren’t immediately a hundred percent accepting of you, the relationship is a lost cause and they’ll never change. I had heard stories from friends that that wasn’t always the case, and if my father was willing to invite me, I was willing to take the olive branch. Something a lot of queer people learn as we grow up is that sometimes you have to meet the people you love halfway.

  In terms of the location, if you’d asked me where I’d like to have gone on vacation, I would have probably picked New York or even London, not a small mountain town known solely for the bloodiest single battle of the Civil War. That being said, I had been cooped up in a tiny dorm, staring at a Zoom screen for the better part of the year. He could have invited me to visit the world’s largest ball of string and I would have said yes. At least I knew I would get more biscuits out of it.

  The drive to Gettysburg is usually about six hours, but my father and I tacked an extra two on to take the scenic route. We headed into the Blue Ridge Mountains, meeting a thunderstorm about halfway through the day. The fields of corn and soybeans slowly became denser and denser forests, interspersed with wide fields of rolled hay. We passed small farms with produce stands and cows huddled against the rain. The air was cool from the storm, and we rolled down the windows. We kept the radio off and didn’t say anything, just listened to the hum of the engine and the birds calling overhead. The air smelled like wet soil and rhododendrons.

  As we reached the high point of the road and saw the world spread out in front of us along the highway, the rain stopped. The pavement beneath the car was still warm enough that steam poured off it. The clouds settled around the tops of the mountains as mist, and the sun punched holes through to beam down onto the fields below. My mother always called them God fingers, like heaven itself was reaching down to touch the land. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.

  The river was so loud I could feel it in my teeth. The pulse of the water over the rocks and through the valley sounded like a thousand crowded heartbeats, flowing together into a rip current of sound that made everything else around me fall away. You can’t be surrounded by that and not feel a part of something miles and miles and eons bigger than yourself. These mountains didn’t care about my baggage. They’re 480 million years old. They’d been around longer than any of all that.

  It surprised me how much yearning and love I felt. I had distanced myself from this region for so long. Maybe I was wrong to write off an entire region so quickly. I had been trying to sever my connection to Appalachia my whole life, but there was so much beauty here. Maybe I needed to give this place another chance. Maybe I shouldn’t be so rigid in labeling a place as either good or bad. Once I came to that realization, it unlocked a completely new way of seeing where I’m from — and who I can be.

  WILLOW: Hey, it’s Willow. We’ll hear the rest of the story in a moment. But first, support for this episode comes from Rumpl. Rumpl is introducing the world to better blankets with their full line of durable, premium, ultra-warm outdoor blankets and gear.

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  Rumpl blankets can help you stay comfortable and warm on any adventure. Whether you’re traveling across the country or picnicking at your local park, Rumpl has you covered — literally.

  Shop their line of over 140 prints and designs at rumpl.com/outthere and use code OUTTHERE for 10 percent off your first order. That’s 10 percent off your first order when you head to rumpl.com/outthere and use the code OUTTHERE at checkout.

  Support also comes from Kula Cloth. Kula Cloth is a high-tech pee cloth for anyone who squats when they pee. In case you’re new to the concept, a pee cloth is a reusable cloth that you can use instead of toilet paper when you’re outdoors.

  I’ve been using a pee cloth for years, and it is a game changer. It makes personal hygiene so much easier in the backcountry. You still need toilet paper for number two, but otherwise, you are set. It’s clean, easy, and eco-friendly.

  For 15 percent off your Kula Cloth order, go to outtherepodcast.com/kula and enter the promo code OUTTHERE2023 at checkout. That’s outtherepodcast.com/kula, promo code OUTTHERE2023.

  And now, back to the story.

  NEWT: The day that we walked around the town of Gettysburg was their local pride festival. Gettysburg sits smack in the middle of rural Pennsylvania, an area most people would refer to as “the middle of nowhere.” I’ve always been pretty interested in history, but if you’d asked me to list historical sites that I’d classify as even marginally queer-friendly, Gettysburg would have been near the bottom.

  After a long morning of touring Civil War battlefields flooded with aggressively heterosexual middle-aged dads, stepping into the town square and staring agog at the pride flags hung everywhere was like finding another planet in your backyard. There were parents taking their kids to the craft fair stations in fun costumes, and a circle of advocacy and health booths, and teens and tweens wearing flags like capes and cringey glitter makeup and pins and just getting to do all the embarrassing things you do at that age but as themselves. LGBTQ, in Appalachia, on a beautiful summer day in June.

  I went to one of the craft fair booths with my father and sat down in the midst of a group full of queer people of all ages: a grandmother and her grandson, a mother and her infant wearing rainbow antlers, and a college student home for the summer. We were all painting rocks, each of them a different animal. I made a frog, because I like frogs.

  Part of what is so incredible about queer spaces is that they bring people together who would otherwise have nothing in common. As much as we like to insist that our gender or sexuality is a small part of who we are, there is an important community to be had with people who share your marginalized experience. As I sat there, covering my chosen rock with green paint, I realized that our queerness wasn’t the only pivotal thing that everyone here had in common. It was the place we had chosen to gather in — the place we all called home despite everything and everyone that said we shouldn’t.

  Walking around, seeing all of these people, it reminded me of something important: we are here. We have always been here. And not just that, but we exist here joyously and are working together as a community to create spaces that celebrate who we are without abandoning where we’re from. On that day, there wasn’t a single protester or bigot looking to ruin the fun — just clear blue sky above a place where we could all be ourselves. Not just queer, but Appalachian too.

  When we sat down on the curb of town square to eat lunch, I started chatting with the lesbian couple next to me. One of them was a butch. She had short, short hair — almost a buzzcut, with a single stud earring as her only piece of jewelry. Her nails were neat and short, hands littered with calluses, and she was wearing cargo shorts and a men’s tank top. Her sneakers were the exact same kind as my dad’s. She was holding both her, and her wife’s, paper boats for their hot dogs, the keys on her belt loop jingling every time she leaned forward to take a bite. She and her wife were refurbishing their basement, and she was more than excited to tell me about the wood varnish they were using for the floors.

  Whenever I see another butch in public, it always feels incredibly special. We have this thing called the butch head nod, where whenever you see another butch out and about, you give them a quick little bob of the head and make eye contact. It can only last a second, but that moment of connection and solidarity is so important to me. It says, “I see you, I know who you are, and I am reaching out deliberately to remind you that you are not alone.”

  Sitting down with this fellow butch in the heart of Appalachia wasn’t just special because of that base kinship. It was a chance to see the specific version of myself that I wanted to be in this place. She had on work shoes like mine — the kind made for yard work that dads (including mine) go crazy for — and a drawl like mine and seemed perfectly comfortable with both of those things. I wanted to be that comfortable in my own skin. Seeing her planted a seed in my mind: that I could not only be openly queer here, but that I could embrace my masculinity and my Southern roots.

  That night, we ended the day, and the trip itself, at a cider tasting place just off the square. There were people obviously coming from the festival, and more traditionally rural-looking folks, all sitting together and enjoying the music and drinks. I certainly wasn’t old enough to drink yet, so I just sat and looked around, taking in the atmosphere. It felt pretty close to perfect.

  Before this trip, I had never gotten the opportunity to see queer people in the south and Appalachia out, in every sense of the word — thriving and living and loving in our home. The thing about so many queer spaces is that they’re online, and when they’re not online, they’re centered in, and about the experiences of, the people who live in metropolitan and northern regions. Walking around Gettysburg — getting outside and offline — helped break down the false idea that we don’t exist here, much less belong. Of course we do. There are things that need changing, but we can be here, and we can be happy too. Being gay in the south is not about being beaten to death with a shovel on the side of the road. It’s not about hating church, or leaving your family, or at least not entirely about that. There is community to be had here, and there are people being themselves in a way that I had always wanted to.

  A lot has changed since that trip. I feel a lot more comfortable now with calling myself a transmasculine nonbinary person. For me, that means that while I was raised as a girl and assigned the gender marker of female at birth, I now present myself in a more masculine way. I’m still nonbinary, still neither a man nor a woman, but I started testosterone and pretty much my entire closet is squarely from the men’s section, boots and all.

  I fall very firmly into the category of a fine southern gentleman, and I’m okay with that. I like holding open the door for not just my date, but older folks and moms juggling their kids. When we’re out on the town, my friends know they can trust me to watch their drink, or fend off a jerk at the bar, or walk on the outside of the street. I like working with my hands. I like providing for the people I care about.

  My version of southern masculinity is about being someone that your people can rely on no matter what. It’s telling someone, “It makes me happy to make your life a little bit easier in whatever way I can” — whether that’s lending a hand to a stranger or showing one of your own that they are welcome here, too.

  WILLOW: That was Newt Schottelkotte. They are a producer, sound designer, composer, and all-around podcasting person from Nashville, Tennessee.

  Coming up next time on Out There: it’s pretty common to go swimming in the summer. But what about in the winter?

  ELIZABETH WHITNEY: I felt like I was on fire. It was like someone had plugged me into an electric socket. It was this incredible high. And I just stood on the dock. And then of course you’re chasing that high, if you will, for the rest of the time you’re swimming. Like, every time you do it, you’re like, “Ah, is it going to feel that good again? Is it going to feel that good?”

  WILLOW: Tune in on June 15 for a story about ice swimming.

  Before you go, I want to share a couple of things.

  First, I’m participating in a panel that the Sierra Club is running. It’s going to be tomorrow, June 2, at 1 p.m. Eastern Time, and it’s online, so you can join from anywhere. We’re going to be discussing diverse perspectives in outdoor media, and I would love to invite you to join us. I have a link to the event in the episode description, and I hope to see you there.

  Secondly, we’re starting to plan out the next season of Out There, and I’d love your input on what the season theme should be. I’ve put together a really quick poll — it’s just one question — and you can fill it out by clicking the link in the episode description.

  Out There is a proud member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of idea-driven independent podcasts. One of the other shows in the collective is called Open Source. They like to describe themselves as “an American conversation with global attitude.” You can find Open Source wherever you get your podcasts, or at radioopensource.org.

  Alright, so I’ve opened up PeakVisor. It’s thinking.

  PeakVisor is one of our sponsors. It’s an app that helps you make the most of your time in the mountains. Let’s say you’re out on a hike or a bike ride. It’ll help you figure out what mountains you’re looking at.

  Oh wow, ok. So I am looking all the way down into Rocky Mountain National Park. Like, I can see Long’s Peak from here. That’s pretty cool.

  PeakVisor has info on more than a million summits all over the world. Plus, they have detailed 3D maps to help with planning. And they have a peak-bagging feature that lets you keep track of your achievements.

  If you’d like your own personal mountain guide, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

  Today’s story was written and narrated by Newt Schottelkotte. Story editing and sound design by me, Willow Belden. Out There’s advertising manager is Jessica Heeg. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.

  We’ll see you in two weeks. And in the meantime, have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.

Episode Credits

Story by Newt Schottelkotte

Story editing and sound design by Willow Belden

Music includes works from StoryBlocks and Blue Dot Sessions

Links

Take our poll about next season’s theme

Sierra Club Panel: Diverse Perspectives in Outdoor Media

Support Out There on Patreon

Sponsors

PeakVisor

Rumpl

Use promo code “OUTTHERE” to get 10% off your first purchase at rumpl.com/outthere

Kula Cloth

Use promo code “OUTTHERE2023” to get 15% off your order at outtherepodcast.com/kula

Rekindling Hope

How an unexpected gift from nature quelled a deep depression

Carolyn McDonald (Photo courtesy Carolyn McDonald)

“Make room for what you can’t imagine.”

— Carolyn McDonald

Season 4 // Episode 3

Carolyn McDonald was struggling — hard. The depression had gotten so bad that she couldn’t see a way forward.

Then, one day, she went to the beach.

On this episode, we share the story of what happened. It’s a story about art, wonder, and finding joy at low tide.

• Episode Transcript

  Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

  VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.

  WILLOW BELDEN: Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

  This season, we’re exploring the theme “Secrets of the Earth.” Each episode, we’re harnessing the power of nature to uncover new truths and help us understand our own humanity.

  Today, we have a story about rekindling hope. But before we get to that, I want to give a shout-out to our presenting sponsor for the season, PeakVisor.

  If you’re anything like me, when you’re out in the mountains, you probably like to know what you’re looking at. For example, if you’re out on a hike, and you see gorgeous peaks off in the distance, you want to know what they are.

  But oftentimes, it’s hard to figure it out. Because hiking maps usually only show you the immediate vicinity.

  That’s where PeakVisor comes in handy. It’s an app that’s made just for this kind of situation. It’ll figure out where you are, and then it’ll tell you all the mountains you’re looking at. It gives you their names, their elevations, how far away they are.

  The app also has all sorts of features that are helpful for trip planning. And you can keep track of your accomplishments with their peak-bagging feature.

  If you’d like your own personal mountain guide, check out Peak Visor in the app store. You just might love it.

  And now, on to our story for today.

  If you’ve ever suffered from depression, you know how insidious it can be. It has this way of seeping into every aspect of your life and sucking away the joy. No matter how hard you try to find silver linings, the world seems dark and bleak and lonely.

  So, how do you rekindle hope?

  Today’s story is about finding a way out of the pain. And it’s about what nature can give us, when the tide is very low. And just so you know, this story contains some adult language.

  2020 was a rough year for pretty much everyone. But it was especially hard for Carolyn McDonald.

  CAROLYN MCDONALD: I had gone through a horrible breakup, and I was just so heartbroken. And the same day this my guy suddenly, out of the blue, ended it, in the middle of a sentence, you know, my sister passed away six days later.

  WILLOW: It was like double grief.

  And then, Carolyn got covid. Not once, but twice. Both times, she was sick for months. Remember, this was long before there was a vaccine. The symptoms were excruciating: crushing headaches, stabbing pains in her organs, difficulty breathing, brain fog.

  But what made it even worse was the isolation. Carolyn had just moved to California from the east coast, and she didn’t know anyone. Besides, this was the point where people were going into lockdown. Even if she’d had friends locally, they wouldn’t have been able to see her.

  CAROLYN: I was very depressed. Like I remember waking up and just literally praying, just: “Is this going to lift?” And being on the verge of tears all the time. And just feeling hopeless. I’d never felt that in my life before, and I’ve been through some troubling times and challenges in my life. But this was the first time that I really honestly felt hopeless. And that was a little frightening for me.

  WILLOW: Month after month went by. The symptoms of long covid lingered. The isolation continued. The depression worsened. It got to the point where she couldn’t see a way forward. Couldn’t imagine a future in which things would be ok.

  CAROLYN: The mornings were the worst. I’d just be very heavily woeful in the morning, and oftentimes waking up in tears.

  WILLOW: She tried to cheer herself up as best she could. She listened to podcasts. Motivational sermons. Self-help books. But those things only offered a temporary reprieve.

  CAROLYN: Like, you know, taking an Advil or a painkiller. It works for a while. And then it goes away.

  The beach was the one saving grace. Because, you know, nobody was allowed to go anywhere. You couldn’t, certainly to cafes, barely to the grocery store. So it was so cathartic to be able to go to the beach.

  Just being there, sitting on the sand, watching the sun. And birds. I became a bird — not a bird watcher or aficionado— but just getting into watching the sandpipers versus the seagulls versus the birds I still don’t have the names for. But just watching them patter around and go out and run to the sea and come back with the wave.

  So I went every day, because I literally live a seven-minute walk. You know, so I would take my time when my energy wasn’t as much. But I would go out, I have this little blanket, and I’d just sit there. And that was, and still is, my thing.

  WILLOW: The beach was soothing. But, just like the podcasts and sermons, it was only a temporary Band-aid. Once she got home, she’d sink back into gloom. And the next morning, she’d wake up as sad as ever.

  And then, one day, something happened. Something that would help her in a way she could never have imagined.

  CAROLYN: Man, that was one of those days. It was just one of those days where I remember weeping that morning. I remember waking up just like, ‘When is this shit going to be over? When am I going to wake up one morning and not be in pain? What morning am I going to wake up and not feel heavy and not cry?’ And it just wouldn’t leave. And that was just one of those melt-down days. It was a melt-down morning. And I just at my dining room table, I just, “OK, ok,” and I just stopped, like “Go to the beach.”

  And I was walking along, and I was angry. I remember just being angry. Is anything going to change? I just want this shit to be over. And so I remember thinking, like, ok, and again that sense of hopelessness too. Like, ‘Ok I’m not even going to look up because if I look up, I’ll think there’s going to be hope, and I know there’s no hope. This shit is not going to change. Every morning I’m waking up like this. So I might as well keep my head down, cause nothing good is going to happen. And I’m just going to keep my head down.’

  WILLOW: So she’s walking along the beach, chin to her chest, staring at the ground. And then all of a sudden, something catches her eye. A pattern in the sand. And then another. And another. Some looked like trees. Some looked like people. Animals. Egyptian glyphs. All carved into the sand by the ocean. They were extraordinarily detailed, and just gorgeous.

  CAROLYN: It was low tide, and the water, as it was trickling in, on each wave, it would, you know, the water would run up to the beach, and it would just kind of carve these amazing, intricate forms into the sand.

  And I kept thinking when I saw them, of the word spectacular. And all those words – you know, spectacular, stupendous. I was just blown away by the detail, the intricacy of what water could do into sand at low tide. And it’s the first time I remember feeling awe. You know, because again, it’s a word we use, but how many times do we experience awe? You know, but I was very aware of awe.

  WILLOW: Carolyn had walked this beach many times. And sure, waves often make patterns in the sand. But this was different. She had never seen anything like it. These etchings were ethereal. Otherworldly.

  CAROLYN: I don’t know how to say it and not make it sound too woo-woo. But I felt like they appeared for me that day. And they were a sign that everything’s going to be alright.

  WILLOW: Instinctively, Carolyn pulled out her phone and started taking pictures. She had always loved photography, and something about these shapes compelled her to capture them. And once she started, she couldn’t stop. She took photograph after photograph after photograph, circling around the shapes, experimenting with different angles.

  CAROLYN: I remember tiptoeing around them. I remember not wanting to disturb them or mess them up or put footprints. Because there were some that had footprints, and people were, you know, you could tell were walking over them and walking through them and stepping on them. And I was like, ‘How could you step on these things?’

  WILLOW: Carolyn has no idea how long she stayed out there. All she knows is she didn’t want to leave. The act of photographing these sand patterns was so joyful. She was totally and utterly in the zone. And as she took picture after picture, she felt something shift inside her.

  CAROLYN: I forgot completely about my own woes. I remember getting caught up in awe. Just utter awe.

  WILLOW: There on the beach, surrounded by nature’s art, Carolyn felt something she hadn’t experienced in a very long time.

  CAROLYN: Hope. Because I had no concept of nature creating something like this. I had no concept of the sea water, tricklings of sea water, being able to carve such beautiful images into the sand. I did not know that could occur.

  WILLOW: And so she thought to herself: ‘If nature can create something so marvelous — so unexpected — so out of the realm of anything I could have imagined — maybe there are more surprises in store, too.’

  CAROLYN: Just maybe, maybe though I can’t see my life getting better, just maybe there’s possibility for something amazing to occur that I couldn’t conceive.

  WILLOW: We’ll hear the rest of the story in a moment. But first, since we’re on the topic of the beach today, I want to pause for a moment and tell you about one of our sponsors, Rumpl.

  Rumpl is on a mission to introduce the world to better blankets. And it all started when the founders went on a surf and ski trip through California. On this trip, they got stuck in the back of their car in freezing temperatures. And so, while they waited for rescue, they bundled up in sleeping bags to stay warm. And that’s when they realized how much better the materials in their sleeping bags felt than what was on their beds back home. And so they came up with the idea for a “Sleeping bag blanket.”

  Rumpl’s Original Puffy Blanket pairs durable, Ripstop Nylon with a DWR finish that is water, stain, and odor resistant. The blankets are machine washable, and they’re a great way to stay comfortable and warm on any adventure.

  You can shop their line of over 140 prints and designs at rumpl.com/outthere and use code OUTTHERE for 10 percent off your first order. That’s 10 percent off your first order when you head to rumpl.com/outthere and use code OUTTHERE at checkout.

  Support also comes from Kula Cloth. Kula Cloth makes premium pee cloths.

  And in case you’re new to pee cloths, they are just what they sound like. They’re reusable cloths that you can use instead of toilet paper when you pee outdoors. They’re designed for women and anyone who squats when they pee.

  I’ve been using a pee cloth for years, and it is a game changer. It makes backcountry hygiene so much easier.

  For 15 percent off your Kula Cloth order, go to outtherepodcast.com/kula and enter the promo code OUTTHERE2023 at checkout. That’s outtherepodcast.com-slash-K-U-L-A, promo code OUTTHERE2023.

  And now, back to the story.

  That day at the beach brought back memories for Carolyn. Memories from her childhood. Memories of falling in love with photography. She remembers sneaking into her mother’s bedroom as a little girl and borrowing the camera.

  CAROLYN: You know, she’d put it back on the dresser in the bedroom, and I would sneak it, you know I would like just take it off the dresser, and I would go to the door and take a picture real quick. And then I’d go put it back, and of course get busted when the film comes back, you know. Like, “Where did this extra picture come from?”

  WILLOW: Eventually, she saved up enough money doing chores to buy her own camera. And she started photographing everything: waterfalls, airplanes, her family, people at school. She loved every minute of it. It brought her so much joy. But then, life got in the way.

  CAROLYN: Growing up in a, you know, like a lot of us, not all of us, but for me, growing up in a working class, lower socioeconomic household, you know, you’re guided and groomed to get a job. And not being from a family or community that knew you could possibly have a job as a photographer. And so when it came time to earning a living, I kind of just put it aside.

  WILLOW: Over the years, she dabbled here and there. Took a course in college. Photographed things she saw around town. She even had a show or two. But it never turned into anything serious. Photography was always just a hobby for her. Relegated to the sidelines. And as we all know, it’s hard to keep a childhood passion alive, when you’re just trying to get through the difficult task of being an adult.

  But now, here at the beach, she felt that same giddy excitement she’d felt as a kid.

  CAROLYN: I was so aware of being back in that zone of joy. Being aware that you love this.

  WILLOW: Carolyn photographed every single sand pattern that day. She didn’t want to miss a thing. These images were so special.

  When she was done, she raced home and uploaded the photos onto her computer. And when she looked at them, she was blown away. These photos were good. Really good. She had never prided herself on her own work. But even she could see the artistry here.

  CAROLYN: I’m looking at this, ‘That thing right there is dope. That image right there. That frame, now, that’s amazing. Ok. I created that. But even if I wasn’t me and I would see that in a gallery, I would want to buy that.’

  WILLOW: And it was then, as she allowed herself to admire her own work for the first time, that Carolyn had a surprising thought. These photographs she’d created — these were art. And she was an artist. She had never thought of herself that way before, not in her wildest fantasies.

  CAROLYN: Even though, as I said, I had taken photos and had photography exhibits, it was something about these images specifically that gave me permission to say, “You’re an artist.”

  WILLOW: The thought was a little scary. But it was also liberating.

  Over the next few weeks, Carolyn sifted through her photos. She edited them. Sorted them. Gave them names. And she started to think about what she could do with them. Perhaps they could become a series. Maybe they could even be the start of a new career for her. A career as a photographer.

  She started making inquiries. Reached out to galleries. Brainstormed ideas for generating income. And then, she took one final step. Something she’d been kind of avoiding.

  CAROLYN: It’s so funny, I was having lunch with my daughter on Saturday. And she hadn’t seen the new stuff, because I’d kind of hidden it, in a way. You know, it’s like everybody has that person, whether it be a parent, a child, a mate, or whatever, that you hide stuff from. You’re like afraid: what they gonna think of it? And so I hadn’t showed her anything.

  And so I almost kind of mumbled – I literally mumbled, “So now, since I’m an artist….” You know, it was like, “So I’m an artist.” It was like, there’s only one other person you feel like you need permission from. I didn’t care about anybody else, you know what I mean? But there’s always one person you feel like, whether it’s a parent, it’s like I needed her validation. And she’s like, “Oh this is cool, this is really cool.” And I’m like, “OK.”

  WILLOW: One morning, several months after the fateful beach day, Carolyn woke up feeling different.

  CAROLYN: I believe it was a Saturday morning, and I remember distinctly, ‘Wow, I’m not in pain today.’ And I felt lighter. And I was just like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t wake up in pain today.’

  WILLOW: She’d been distracted from her sadness before. But now it was just gone. It was like, she had so much joy in her heart from her photography work that there wasn’t space for depression, too.

  When we’re at our lowest, it can be hard to see a way out. It can be hard to imagine that the pain will ever end, or that there’s a way forward. But it’s also at low tide that some of the most beautiful things can happen. Things that spark wonder and rekindle optimism. Surprises in the sand that offer hope.

  The beach had taught her to have faith. It had taught her to trust that good things are out there, even if you can’t quite conceive of them.

  CAROLYN: Just because I can’t see it, or can’t see the how, this let me know that there is hope beyond my conception of things. You know what I mean? You know, there’s room for what you can’t imagine. Make room for what you can’t imagine.

  WILLOW: The sand patterns may not be solely responsible for Carolyn’s emotional recovery. She still listened to motivational podcasts and sermons. She went to therapy. But that magical day at the ocean was the spark. It’s what enabled her to see a future. A future in which her happy place — her art — could be front and center.

  And no, she hasn’t discarded her old life. She didn’t quit her day job. But she’s intentionally working to create a career out of the thing that brings her joy. And she has the beach to thank for that.

  If you’d like to see some of Carolyn’s photos from that day at the beach, head over to our website, outtherepodcast.com. You can also follow Carolyn on Instagram @createdbycarolyn.

  Coming up next time on Out There: Newt Schottelkotte grew up in Appalachia. But they never felt welcome there. The whole region seemed antithetical to who they were. And then one day, they went to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  NEWT SCHOTTELKOTTE: It surprised myself how much yearning and love I felt. I had distanced myself from this region for so long. Maybe I was wrong to write off an entire region so quickly. Maybe I shouldn’t be so rigid in labeling a place as either good or bad.

  WILLOW: Tune in on June 1st for that story.

  It’s hard to believe, but we’re already starting to think about our next season. And we’d love your input on what that season should look like. What theme do you want us to focus on? We put together a poll, and I would be so grateful if you’d fill it out. It’s super quick — just one question. And you find the link in the episode description, or at outtherepodcast.com.

  Out There is a proud member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of idea-driven independent podcasts. One of the other shows in the collective that I think you’ll enjoy is called Iconography. They share stories about the icons — both real and imagined — that define our sense of place. One episode I particularly enjoyed is the one about the Boston Marathon and the Citgo sign. You can find Iconography wherever you get your podcasts, or at iconographypodcast.com.

  This season of Out There is supported by PeakVisor. PeakVisor is an app that helps you make the most of your adventures in the mountains.

  They have intricate 3D maps to help you plan out your trips. They have navigation features that help you stay on the right path. They have peak-bagging challenges to keep you motivated. And, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, once you’re out on adventures, you can use their peak identification feature to figure out what mountains you’re looking at.

  If you’d like your own personal mountain guide, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

  Today’s story was produced by me, Willow Belden. Story editing by Corinne Ruff. And special thanks to Lori Mortimer for feedback on the sound design.

  Out There’s advertising manager is Jessica Taylor. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.

  Special thanks to all our listeners who are supporting Out There with financial contributions, including Eric Biederman, Phil Timm, Doug Frick, Tara Joslin, Deb and Vince Garcia, and the family of Mike Ludders. If you’d like to support Out There too, go to patreon.com/outtherepodcast. Patreon is a crowd-funding platform for creative endeavors, and I have a link in the episode description.

  We’ll see you in two weeks. And in the meantime, have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.

Selections from TIME + TIDE: AS REVEALED BY LIGHT

by Carolyn McDonald

View fullsize

Kitty Moved On

View fullsize

Love Dances Loud

View fullsize

Respect for Rain

View fullsize

Bold Ass Love

Episode Credits

Story and sound design by Willow Belden

Script editing by Corinne Ruff

Special thanks to Lori Mortimer for sound-design feedback

Music includes works from StoryBlocks and Blue Dot Sessions

Links

Buy one of Carolyn’s photos

Follow Carolyn on Instagram

Take our poll about next season’s theme

Support Out There on Patreon

Sponsors

PeakVisor

Rumpl

Use promo code “OUTTHERE” to get 10% off your first purchase at rumpl.com/outthere

Kula Cloth

Use promo code “OUTTHERE2023” to get 15% off your order at outtherepodcast.com/kula

Moonlight

Getting back on track when you lose your way

Stepfanie Aguilar camps at Red Rock Canyon State Park (photo courtesy stepfanie aguilar)

“I learned something meaningful that night in the desert. I learned how important family stories can be, when you’re trying to move through this world.”

— Stepfanie Aguilar

Season 4 // Episode 2

We’ve all had moments when we feel lost. Sometimes it’s literal — getting lost in the mountains or at sea. Sometimes it’s emotional — where we question our place in life. 

Either way, it’s unnerving. And lonely.

This story takes us from the deserts of California to the jungles of the Philippines, and explores how one young woman got back on track, when she lost her way, both literally and figuratively.

• Episode Transcript

  Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

  VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.

  DENIS BULICHENKO: We went on a skiing tour, a back-country ski tour. And the thing was that the weather was unreliable on that day.

  WILLOW BELDEN: This is Denis Bulichenko.

  DENIS: So we went to the summit and started our descent. But at the same time, the clouds arrived, and it was like clear whiteout. We weren’t able to see anything at all. And we were quite lost.

  WILLOW: Lost. In the mountains. In a snowstorm. This is NOT a situation you want to be in.

  But luckily, Denis had a tool at his disposal. An app that he’d developed. It’s called PeakVisor, and it helps you navigate in the backcountry. And in this case, it was a lifesaver.

  DENIS: Using 3-D map and the terrain visualization, we were able to track back our steps and to find a safe descent to the valley.

  WILLOW: PeakVisor is our presenting sponsor this season. Check out their app in the app store. You just might love it.

  Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

  This season, we’re exploring the theme “Secrets of the Earth.” Each episode, we’re harnessing the power of nature to uncover new truths and help us understand our own humanity.

  Today’s story is about losing your way.

  We’ve all had moments when we feel lost. Sometimes, it’s literal — getting lost in the mountains, or at sea. Sometimes, it’s emotional — when we question our place in life.

  Either way, it’s unnerving. And lonely.

  On this episode, Stepfanie Aguilar takes us from the deserts of California to the jungles of the Philippines, and explores how you get back on track, when you lose your way, both literally and figuratively.

  STEPFANIE AGUILAR: I was at the top of this ridge. And I was by myself. The wind was so strong that I thought it would knock me off the cliff. I kept saying to myself, “Don’t look down, don’t look down.”

  Because I’m really scared of heights.

  But let’s back up.

  At the time, I was in my mid twenties, and I was going through a quarter-life crisis. I didn’t know what kind of work I should do, I was under a lot of debt, and I wasn’t sure what I was passionate about. It was an unfulfilled life.

  I was carrying a lot of shame and disappointment because I couldn’t get myself together. I was getting more and more insecure about myself. It was a downward spiral.

  The one thing that helped was getting outdoors. I found myself drifting into the mountains, forests, and deserts. Away from where people crowded. In places where I didn’t have to perform.

  There was one year when I kept my camping gear in the trunk of my car all the time, because I was camping so much.

  Camping and hiking was therapeutic. Hiking was embodied meditation, reflection, and knowledge-seeking. It also seemed to symbolize the obstacles in my life. Like struggling and wanting to turn back. Measuring to see if I can push myself a little further to pull it off.

  But one day, that therapeutic practice became something else. Something unexpected. Something frightening.

  STEPFANIE (field recording): Packing for an overnight camping trip, and I’m missing a flashlight.

  STEPFANIE (narration): My destination was Red Rock Canyon State Park. It’s in the desert, an hour away from where I live in southern California.

  It was one of those weeks where I felt mentally drained, and I just needed a quick getaway. So at the last minute, I packed up the rest of my camping gear and hit the road.

  When I got to the campground in the afternoon, I was amazed. I hadn’t expected it to be this beautiful. I pitched my tent at the foot of these dramatic cliffs.

  STEPFANIE (field recording): It’s like I’m gonna camp in between some giant’s toes.

  STEPFANIE (narration): After setting up my tent, I decided to go for a sunset hike. I wanted to stretch my legs before making dinner and take pictures of plants during golden hour. Taking pictures was another meditative activity for me.

  I looked at my map. There was a short nature trail nearby. It’s just what I needed: gentle and easy.

  STEPFANIE (field recording): I’m all packed for my little hike. Let’s see what this trail is all about.

  STEPFANIE (narration): As I hiked, I photographed Cholla cacti, the ones that look like prickly teddy bears. There were Joshua trees. Yucca plants. And it was a very clear sky. Even the moon was already out.

  The sandy trail led me up to a viewpoint high above the campground. And the view. Ah, the view was spectacular.

  From the top, I saw a panorama of hoodoos, these tall, thin rock formations that remind me of chess pieces. I saw shallow caves in the cliffs across from where I stood.

  I had planned to turn back at this point. But I was so curious about this place. It looked mystical. It was also my first time here, and I only had this one night. I wanted to keep exploring.

  Judging from the map, it looked like there was a trail that would take me down into the canyon in front of me. I could then pick up another trail and loop back to the campground. Easy.

  I decided to try it.

  But it didn’t take long for me to wonder if this was a good idea. First of all, the trail was very exposed. And remember, I have a fear of heights.

  STEPFANIE (field recording): Okay. (laughs nervously) It's so high.

  STEPFANIE (narration): Secondly, the terrain was rough. This wasn’t an easy nature trail anymore. It was steep, slippery, and rocky. And I wasn’t prepared.

  STEPFANIE (field recording): This is the first time I brought my running shoes, which isn't really for hiking. I didn't bring my hiking boots.

  STEPFANIE (narration): But I figured that once I got down to the bottom, it would be okay. It would be worth it. So I took a deep breath and scrambled down, clinging to rocks and loose dirt. I kept slipping. The wind kept trying to blow me off course. But then I finally made it to the bottom.

  The trail wasn’t very clear down here. But I saw footprints and even some tire tracks. So I followed them.

  By now, the sun had gone down, and it was twilight. I could still see, but I knew it would be dark soon.

  I felt a twinge of fear in my gut saying maybe I should turn back. But my fear often plays tricks on me. It tells me not to do things, even when they’re perfectly safe. So I tried to ignore it. I told myself to focus on the beauty around me and stop worrying.

  After a while, I came to a group of Joshua Trees clumped together, and it reminded me of a typical family portrait. It felt like they were saying, “Welcome to this side of the canyon.”

  See? There was nothing to be scared of.

  The canyon was gorgeous in the soft evening light. Looking around, I could see the contours and silhouettes of plants and the hoodoos against the canyon walls and all of the beautiful rock formations.

  I kept walking and walking, and the stars came out.

  But eventually, the fear came creeping back into my mind. My gut tugged at me like it was saying, “Hey, you sure you wanna keep going?”

  Again, I tried to ignore it but it lingered.

  STEPFANIE (field recording): Oh my gosh. I'm still walking. What the heck?

  STEPFANIE (narration): I took out my phone and opened up Google Maps. I didn’t have reception in the canyon, but I had downloaded a map of the area ahead of time. It’s a precaution I often take, when I go hiking somewhere new. I looked at the little blue dot on the map, showing me where I was. It looked like I was more than halfway back to the campsite. OK. I can do this. I kept walking.

  But then, the path began to get steep. And the opposing cliffs got closer to each other. And then they joined together like two hands intertwining their fingers. It was a dead end.

  I reached out and attempted to climb the rock, but it felt too dangerous. I didn’t know how to rock climb.

  I checked my map and compared it to Google Maps. And that’s when I realized that I wasn’t where I thought I was. And not only that — I was sort of trapped.

  As panic started to set in, I also felt myself disconnect from my body. Like a scene from a thriller movie, where I’m the audience, and I’m watching this character struggle at the bottom of this tiny canyon.

  And then, thoughts started crowding my mind: This can’t be happening. I should’ve listened to my gut. Why did I think it was okay to go on this hike alone when it was getting dark? What if there’s a creepy person following me? What if I don’t make it back to the campground tonight?

  I felt so alone.

  This hike was supposed to be short and easy. But I had already been out for two hours. And it was anything but easy.

  The fear in my gut intensified.

  WILLOW: Hey, it’s Willow. We’ll hear the rest of the story in a moment. But first — if you’ve ever faced an unexpected night in the backcountry, you probably spent some time worrying about how you were going to stay warm. So I want to tell you about our sponsor, Rumpl.

  Rumpl is on a mission to introduce the world to better blankets. Their Original Puffy Blanket is designed for adventure, and built with the same technical materials you find in your favorite outdoor gear. Rumpl blankets are durable, water and stain resistant, ultra-packable and super warm.

  They’re perfect for keeping cozy around the campfire, layering up in your tent, or - perhaps - tucking into your day pack, just in case.

  Shop their line of over 140 prints and designs at rumpl.com/outthere and use the code OUTTHERE for 10% off your first order. That’s 10% off your first order when you head to rumpl.com/outthere and use code OUTTHERE at checkout.

  And now, back to the story.

  STEPFANIE: By now, it was completely dark. And since I was at this dead end, I had no choice but to turn back. I hoped I’d be able to retrace my steps and get back the way I came.

  I dug out my headlamp, but it didn’t do much to help me orient myself. If anything, it made me more scared. Illogical fears started crowding into my brain. Like in those horror films where a monster could pop out of nowhere.

  I was starting to get paranoid.

  In the distance, I heard yelping. Maybe a pack of coyotes. A few minutes later, I heard a noise, like something scuttling in front of me. Could it be a lizard? A mouse? A snake?

  I shone my headlamp on the canyon floor, trying to see my footsteps so I could follow them back. But I couldn’t see them. It was like the sand had swallowed up any trace of where I’d come from.

  I squinted my eyes, trying to read the cliffs and search for clues. But their shapes looked too similar.

  I walked and walked, but I kept hitting dead ends. I was starting to get tired.

  I checked Google Maps for hints but it wasn’t much help.

  As I walked, I started talking. Out loud. I talked to the ground, the animals I couldn’t see, the cliffs, the moon. I asked everything around me, “Could you help me find my way? Please?”

  Of course, I wasn’t expecting any of them to actually say something. But I didn’t know what else to do. I just had to tap into my spirituality, to keep me grounded in some way.

  It helped a little. But only for a moment or two. Then the panic would set in again.

  Finally, I sat on a rock to take a break. I was so nervous I couldn’t think straight. All I knew was that I really didn’t want to spend the night in this canyon.

  And then, I happened to look up at the moon. It was full. It laid a blanket of soft light over the canyon, just barely enough to see shadows.

  As I sat there, gazing at the moon, a memory drifted into my mind. Or rather, a story my mother had told me.

  A story from her childhood.

  JENNIFER AGUILAR (montage): The moonlight. The moonlight. Moonlight. Guided by the moonlight.

  STEPFANIE: My mom grew up in the Philippines. And when she was nine years old, her mother — my grandmother — was offered a job, far away from home.

  JENNIFER: And she has to take it even if it's so far from us. Even if it means she has to be separated from us, from her kids and her husband. She needed to get the job because she has to help support the family.

  STEPFANIE: My grandmother — Lola — left with their two babies to work in the mountains while my grandfather — Lolo — stayed behind and took care of the older kids, including my mom. By the way, Lola means grandmother in Tagalog and Lolo means grandfather.

  Every few months, Lolo would travel with the kids to visit Lola and the babies. And the trip they made — it’s something my mom remembers so vividly. Because it was really hard.

  JENNIFER: We have to get up early, like 4 a.m., because we need to take the bus.

  STEPFANIE: This wasn’t a simple trip. The bus would take hours to reach the coast, where they would wait for a bangka, which was a dugout canoe.

  JENNIFER: We stay in the boat for at least four to five hours.

  STEPFANIE: At the time, my mom didn't know how to swim. There were no life vests either.

  JENNIFER: You have to keep still while you are sitting down because they will get mad at you. You might outbalance the bangka, and you might fall and capsize.

  STEPFANIE: Capsizing was a very real risk. And it was extra scary because my mom’s imagination ran wild.

  JENNIFER: I was looking for ghosts or something scary because it was so dark at night.

  STEPFANIE: After the boat ride, they had to walk for six or seven hours. Alone. Through the jungle.

  JENNIFER: It was hard for me and for my two brothers, who are still small, to walk in a very dark, dark place. We didn't even have a flashlight. Only the moonlight.

  My father is an expert of navigating even if there is no trail. I sometimes see him looking at the vegetations, the trees, the forms of the mountains, the forms of the hills.

  STEPFANIE: They walked on fallen trees, branches, and bamboo with only rubber slippers on.

  JENNIFER: We pass by the swamp, where our legs are buried. Sometimes it's knee deep, sometimes it's waist deep. So my father has to pull us out from the mud. Sometimes, my father would tell me, “Step on my footsteps, after me.” So that's what I did, because it means that, when he steps on it, it's already safe.

  STEPFANIE: So, reality check. This was in the 1960s, in the rural Philippines. My mom and Lolo were doing all this without any outdoor gear. No hiking shoes. No compass. No map.

  JENNIFER: We only packed two sets of clothes. We don't have food or snacks to pack up.

  STEPFANIE: What about water?

  JENNIFER: No.

  STEPFANIE: How did you, how did you–

  JENNIFER: We don't have bottled water before.

  STEPFANIE: How did you drink water?

  JENNIFER: We didn't, we did not until we reached the house.

  STEPFANIE: You mean it would take a whole day?

  JENNIFER: Yeah. Yeah. So…

  STEPFANIE: Did anyone cry at any point?

  JENNIFER: No. We cannot even complain.

  STEPFANIE: My mom had shared this story with me a handful of times. But until now, I had never connected with it very strongly. Her stories were like photos in a dusty old album. They felt so distant.

  But now? Lost and alone in the desert, the story felt much more relatable. The fears my mom had felt, as a 9-year-old hiking through the jungle at night? They weren’t that different than the fears I was feeling. Navigating in the dark wasn’t easy for her and Lolo either.

  As I thought about everything she had been through, my own situation started to feel less dire. I had more than enough to survive a night. I carried plenty of water and snacks. I had a jacket for extra warmth. Worst-case scenario, I’d have to sleep outside without a tent. Which is not life-threatening. It would just be uncomfortable. An inconvenience.

  At that moment, I felt a bit ashamed. Not just about me getting lost in the desert. I felt shame in my quarter-life crisis.

  Even though I was jobless, I had somewhere to go. My parents welcomed me home. I was still on their health insurance. I had my own car. Having a job was important, but I didn’t need to figure out all my career or life goals right away.

  As I sat at the bottom of the canyon in the moonlight, thinking all these things, I felt myself softening. It was still dark, and I still didn’t know how to get back to the campground. But I wasn’t so scared anymore. And my heart had calmed.

  Finally, I could think and see more clearly. And once my mind was clearer, I realized I could handle this. I had the skills to find a way out of this mess.

  I thought back to my mom’s story. Lolo was able to figure out the way without a map or a compass. He just needed to read his surroundings using the moonlight, his memory, and his own knowledge.

  I felt that if he could do it, I could somehow pull this off. And I began to trust that I was going to be alright.

  I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and retraced my steps in my mind, scanning my memory.

  Then I remembered seeing the family portrait of Joshua Trees. If I could locate them, then I’d be able to find that one trail that first connected me to the bottom of this canyon.

  It wasn’t easy. There were so many Joshua trees. I encountered more dead ends. But I could feel that I was getting closer. That’s what my gut was telling me.

  And then finally, I found them. The family of Joshua trees. A crowded bunch in the blue shadow. From there, I found the trail and…

  STEPFANIE (field recording): I made it to the top. Wow.

  STEPFANIE (narration): I was back at the viewpoint, where I could see the nature trail.

  STEPFANIE (field recording): Okay. Now it's time to go to my campsite.

  STEPFANIE (narration): I made it back to the campground just fine. There were no animal attacks. No injuries. No need to sleep outside without a tent.

  Remembering my mom’s story had calmed me down enough that I was able to think clearly and find my way.

  But more importantly, I learned something meaningful that night in the desert. I learned how important family stories can be, when you’re trying to move through this world.

  Since that trip, I’ve turned to my mother’s stories over and over again. Stories like why we migrated to another country, stories about eating and sharing what little food was available, and how it was hard to find a job in the Philippines.

  These stories are humbling. And I’ve come to learn that they offer me solace in my own life. When we go through tough times, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. And remembering that my family members went through their own hardships and were able to navigate them, it makes everything less daunting.

  Whatever I’m facing, if I tap into their stories — their memories — I stop feeling so alone. And often, that’s all you need to find your way in the world.

  WILLOW: That was Stepfanie Aguilar. She’s an audio maker living in California. She’s also a recipient of the Whicker Awards, which support emerging documentary makers throughout the world. You can see more of her work at www.stepfaniea.com, and I have a link to that at our website as well.

  Music in this story included works from Marc Merza and Blue Dot Sessions.

  Coming up next time on Out There, Carolyn McDonald was struggling. Big time.

  CAROLYN MCDONALD: That was just one of those melt-down days. It was a melt-down morning. And I just, at my dining room table, I just like OK, ok. And I stopped, and I said, “Just go to the beach.”

  WILLOW: Tune in on May 18 for a story about rekindling hope, when the tide is at its lowest.

  One thing you can do to support Out There is leave a review on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you’re listening right now. We’re always eager for new listeners, and your recommendation is our best form of advertising. If you’ve already left us a review, thank you so much.

  Out There is a proud member of a podcast collective called Hub & Spoke.

  One of the other shows in the collective is called Print is Dead. (Long Live Print!). It’s a podcast about magazines and the people who make (or made) them. You can find Print is Dead. (Long Live Print!) wherever you get your podcasts, or at longliveprint.co.

  I’d like to give a big thank you to our presenting sponsor, PeakVisor.

  PeakVisor is an app that helps you make the most of your time in the mountains. It’s got intricate 3D maps and other features that help with trip planning and route finding. And they have a peak identification feature, to help you figure out what mountains you’re looking at, when you’re out on adventures.

  If you’d like your own personal mountain guide, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

  Today’s story was written and narrated by Stefpanie Aguilar. Script editing and sound design by me, Willow Belden.

  Out There’s advertising manager is Jessica Taylor. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.

  We’ll see you in two weeks. And in the meantime, have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.

Credits

Story by Stepfanie Aguilar

Script editing and sound design by Willow Belden

Music includes works from Marc Merza and Blue Dot Sessions

Links

Support Out There on Patreon

Sponsors

PeakVisor

Rumpl

Use promo code “OUTTHERE” to get 10% off your first purchase at rumpl.com/outthere

Living Without Hope

What if the problem you’re facing can’t be fixed?

Jacob ERickson (photo courtesy Jacob Erickson)

“Going outside is my church. ... Backpacking is my devotion.”

— Jacob Erickson

Season 4 // Episode 1

When someone is diagnosed with a terminal illness, there’s often a flood of difficult emotions. Grief. Depression. Learning to live without hope.

But more and more, people are experiencing that kind of anguish even when they’re perfectly healthy.

In this episode, we bring you the story of a young man named Jacob Erickson, who almost died from climate anxiety — before a pivotal moment in nature rekindled his will to live.

• Episode Transcript

  Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

  —

  VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.

  WILLOW BELDEN: Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

  This season, we’re exploring the theme “Secrets of the Earth.” Each episode, we’re harnessing the power of nature to uncover new truths and help us understand our own humanity.

  But before we get to that, I want to introduce you to someone.

  DENIS BULICHENKO: My name is Denis Bulichenko. And everything started in 2015 when I moved to Italy. And I moved from a relatively flat area, well, so the mountains were like really, really exciting thing for me. And I started to go hiking really, really often.

  And also, I have a daughter. She was small back then. But she also was kind of really curious, asking me all the time, “What’s the name of that mountain?”

  WILLOW: I think a lot of us have been in this situation. You’re out in the mountains. You see a peak off in the distance, it looks tantalizing. But you can’t figure out what it is.

  So, what do you do?

  Well, if you’re Denis, you create a new app.

  The app he made is called PeakVisor, and they are the presenting sponsor for this season of Out There. PeakVisor is on a mission to help you make the most of your time in the mountains.

  Check it out in the app store. You just might love it.

  Jacob Erickson is a wilderness guide in western North Carolina. He takes people out in nature to do healing work — dealing with grief and that sort of thing. It’s a process he’s been going through himself for years.

  Jacob’s been facing up to his own mortality since he was around 16. But the life-threatening situation he's reckoning isn't what you might think. He hasn't been diagnosed with cancer. He's not suffering from organ failure. He’s actually not sick with anything.

  I'm going to let Heather Kitching pick up the story from here.

  And trigger warning: This story discusses depression and suicidal ideation.

  HEATHER KITCHING: To be honest, Jacob didn’t really didn't grow up around nature. He’s originally from Phoenix. It's like a concrete jungle built on a desert. And the small strip of lawn in his yard? Well, “lawn” was a generous word for it. It was more like a patch of dried up grass and dirt. He wasn’t even allowed to touch the bushes near the street because they were oleander. They were toxic.

  Jacob was what you might call a sensitive kid, highly attuned to the world around him. He was like a sponge for information.

  JACOB ERICKSON: I remember being like present watching the 2000 election between Bush and Al Gore, and asking my parents, “Why didn't Al Gore win? Because he won the popular vote.” And then they're like, “Jacob, you're like, seven. This is too big of a question for you.”

  HEATHER: Notwithstanding Jacob’s rather unusual fascination with grown-up topics, he had a pretty typical childhood in a lot of ways. He had a sandbox in his yard. Got into video games and space aliens. Played on a soccer team for a while.

  For Jacob, the first clue that something was wrong came when he was eight.

  JACOB: I remember my dad waking me up in the morning, and he tells me, “Jacob, this is a day that will change your life for the rest of your life.

  And I just was like, 'Oh my gosh, mom's dead.'

  And I asked him, like, “Is mom dead?”

  And he was like, “No, someone flew a plane into the Twin Towers.”

  And I was like, “Where's the Twin Towers?” I had, like, no idea.

  And he's like, “It's New York City.”

  And I was just like, “Where's New York City?” Like it was just totally beyond my eight year old brain.

  HEATHER: Jacob gets out of bed. Goes into the living room.

  His mom and two sisters are watching TV. He starts watching with them.

  And he sees those images that we've all seen a million times now. The north tower with a giant gash near the top. Smoke billowing into the air.

  JACOB: I do remember this sense of like a shock wave hitting me, mixed with the feeling like the floor just dropped out underneath you. It was just like this sense of, that things aren't really safe.

  HEATHER: This is the day that Jacob starts to notice symptoms of a disease that's not in his body, but in society. In his case, though, that disease will just about kill him, before he discovers what you might call “a natural remedy.”

  After 9/11, Jacob wants to learn more about this “sickness” he perceives in the world. He watches Mississippi Burning. Reads about the civil rights movement.

  And when he's 15, he goes to this leadership camp. It teaches young people about things like race riots, genocide against Indigenous peoples, the holocaust, Rwanda and Darfur.

  He says it gives him a language for what ails the world – a diagnosis. Several actually: colonialism, xenophobia, white supremacy, antisemitism.

  And it motivates him to start fighting them. He joins his high school social justice club. Gets involved in activism.

  And then something happens that makes Jacob realize that the sickness is even worse than he imagined. He goes to Australia on this student ambassador program called “People to People.” He gets a chance to go snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. And what he sees shocks him.

  JACOB: It's a graveyard. Everything's bleached.

  HEATHER: There's nothing but miles and miles of pale white coral against a blue ocean. He sees, like, ONE fish — a big flat thing about four feet long. And a couple of sea cucumbers. And that's it.

  JACOB: I mean, I was expecting a gorgeous mosaic of, like, Finding Nemo. Like, I thought I was gonna see like clownfish and starfish. And what I got was like, Hades underworld.

  HEATHER: Jacob is totally taken aback by this.

  JACOB: I was feeling like a pit in my stomach. I was feeling a certain amount of emptiness. This desire for you know, this underwater magical garden to be a mosaic of Van Gogh's paintbrush. And to see it dying and dead was a wake up call.

  HEATHER: Jacob decides that he needs to take on another battle: saving the planet. What he doesn’t realize is that, on some level, the planet is also going to save him.

  So, I should mention here: Jacob is a voracious reader. When I ask him questions, oftentimes his first instinct is often to quote a favorite author or cite an idea he read in a book somewhere. It can take a minute to get past that, to hear his feelings in his own words.

  And when he gets back from Australia, he starts to read like crazy. Stuff about climate change and sustainability. Starting with the novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. You might’ve heard of it. It’s a work of fiction, but the message is that our current lifestyle is unsustainable.

  Jacob says this is the point where he starts to slide into depression.

  JACOB: Fear mind took over, where I was like, ‘Oh my god. Collapse is gonna happen. Like I need to get the hell out of the desert, and I need to get my family out of the desert too because, good God, like we're gonna run out of water.’

  HEATHER: Jacob starts reading non-fiction books in a similar genre. Things like Endgame by Derrick Jensen and Collapse by Jared Diamond. Books that argue that humanity might be headed for a massive die-off.

  When he gets to university, he starts looking up climate science in academic journals. He grows concerned that climate change could cross a threshold where feedback loops feed into each other and collapse the entire ecosystem, killing us all in the process. Or that the fall-outs from climate change, like food shortages and mass migration, could lead to social unrest and war, as humans destroy each other trying to compete for scarce resources.

  And remember, Jacob lives in Arizona. He goes jogging on a dried up river bed. It's not hard for him to believe that life as we know it is on its last legs.

  He says he started to become like Chicken Little, telling anyone who would listen that the sky was falling.

  JACOB: I don't know how my mom and my sisters did it. But I would bring all this stuff to the dinner table. And I'd just be like, “Look at this, like, look at these statistics, like 300 species go extinct, like every week.”

  And they're like, “Oh, wow, you're, you're like in a little too deep, Jacob. Like maybe you should, like, pull out,”

  And I was like, “Are you kidding me? This is like, we all need to learn this.”

  HEATHER: So, it’s possible you’re thinking it all sounds a bit extreme. But I think it's important to point out here that what Jacob fears is not out of the realm of possibility.

  Just lately, scientists have been calling for more discussion about this.

  The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University published a paper last summer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences saying we need more research on a possible climate endgame.

  Dr. Kristie Ebi is a coauthor of that paper. She's a professor at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington.

  KRISTIE EBI: There is a possibility of a climate catastrophe.

  HEATHER: According to Ebi and her coauthors, we could cross thresholds this century that led to mass extinction events in the past. They say climate change could trigger other catastrophes, like international conflict, or exacerbate the spread of infectious diseases. Or trigger system failures that unravel societies.

  And that could all happen at even moderate levels of warming.

  Jacob is not the only person who is consumed by fear over this. A study in The Lancet that found that 59 per cent of young people worldwide were either very or extremely worried about climate change. And 45 per cent of them said it’s affecting their daily life and functioning.

  It was Dr. Derrick Sebree Jr. who told me about that study. He’s a core faculty member and the master's program director at the Michigan School of Psychology. He’s registered with the Climate Psychology Alliance as a climate-aware therapist. And he says climate grief can cause people to give up on life.

  DERRICK SEBREE JR: I mean, it's a form of fatalism. Like, the idea of like, ‘Why would I go to university? The university I want to go to is in a place like California, where they might not be here, by then. So why would I even try to go there?’

  HEATHER: You can see these fears reflected on online forums, too. There’s a massive community on Reddit for people who are concerned about social and ecological collapse. It’s the kind of place where people post questions like, “Should I even bother saving for retirement.”

  Nearly half a million people take part in these forums.

  And Jacob was just like them. He had started asking himself, “What was the point in even living if everyone was just going to die?”

  JACOB: I kept thinking, ‘Am I going to bear witness to this? Am I going to watch the cascade of climate change, you know, like, extinguish millions of species and people?’

  HEATHER: At this point, Jacob is sympathizing with climate radicals. His friend Quincy, who's Black, starts calling him the white Malcolm X. He draws a picture in his journal of a polar bear with a rocket propelled grenade blowing up a gas pump. He's become cynical of the climate movement. He thinks the game’s already over.

  JACOB: I was like, ‘Oh, my God, there's no saving this. Like, I can't save anything. None of this.’ Yeah, like, that was rock bottom.

  HEATHER: Flash forward to July of 2013. Jacob's back in Phoenix for the summer after his first year of university in Flagstaff. He's staying with his sister in the family home they grew up in.

  He's by himself one night. Sitting on the sofa.

  He's got a bottle of Sailor Jerry rum in his hand. And his mind is filled with images of death and destruction.

  JACOB: I mean, birds falling out of the sky, putrefied rivers, and seeing you know, trans women's skulls bashed in. I'm seeing Black boys murdered. I'm seeing like exploded bombs and just like nuclear war. Like it was just like a cascade of imagery of just like the bleak darkness of, you know, reality, honestly.

  And I'm just like, 'Man, this is so bad.'

  And I was just, yeah, trying to wash the images away, drink by drink. And it would hold for like five seconds, and then I would take another drink.

  And the images came back worse and worse and worse.

  And for whatever reason, I don't know how, my 38 revolver was on the table. And I remember the way the lamp light was reflected off the end of the barrel. And it was a matte black revolver, snub nose revolver, and I'm looking at the end of the barrel, and there's this glint of light. And I just remember thinking, 'That's my out. This is how I get rid of these screams.’

  And I think I remember, like, 'Might as well just finish the bottle first.'

  And I remember having the bottle on one hand and the gun and the other hand, holding it, and I remember taking a swig from the bottle, and then everything kind of fades to black.

  WILLOW: Hey, it’s Willow. We’ll hear the rest of the story in a moment. But first: Out There is supported in part by Rumpl.

  Rumpl is introducing the world to better blankets with their full line of durable, premium, ultra-warm outdoor blankets and gear.

  Rumpl blankets are a great way to stay comfortable and warm on any adventure. Whether you’re traveling across the country or picnicking at your local park, Rumpl has you covered — literally.

  And since we’re on the topic of climate change today — let me say right away, that Rumpl is a certified b-corp, climate neutral company. They are also a 1% For The Planet partner, which means they donate 1% of their sales to helping protect the environment.

  You can shop their line of over 140 prints and designs at rumpl.com/outthere and use code OUTTHERE for 10% off your first order.

  That’s 10% off your first order when you head to rumpl.com/outthere and use code OUTTHERE at checkout.

  And now, back to the story.

  HEATHER: Jacob regains consciousness behind the wheel of his car. He’s alarmed to discover that he’s essentially been driving while blacked out.

  He knows he's got a problem, but the wait-list for counseling at his college is like months long.

  So for two months, he kind of goes through the motions, trudging through life in this really dark space.

  And then, one day, something unexpected happens. Something that brings about a lasting change for Jacob.

  He wakes up in the morning. The sun is coming through the window. Room is bright.

  But it's still all darkness and gloom inside his head.

  But his dog, Jack, needs to go outside so Jacob takes him out for a walk.

  JACOB: It's a cool day. It's like a nice 75-degree sunny day. Slight breeze in the air.

  HEATHER: They walk through the neighborhood and then up a hill.

  JACOB: And it's this mesa, where it's flat on top. And I just go to go sit with my back up to a ponderosa pine, and I can smell their butterscotch vanilla aroma, and I can feel the sun on my skin and the warmth.

  And I just feel like the well and that pressure of coming up from my lungs, coming up from my chest, into my throat, feeling that, like, throat quiver of tears.

  And like I'm on my knees weeping.

  And it was the weirdest thing, of, like, this sense and feeling of serenity, this sense and feeling that, like, everything is going to be okay. Like, it’s like I was being held. And my grief started to disappear, it started to loosen its grip. And I just felt like everything was going to be okay. That the earth that I loved so deeply was going to be alright.

  HEATHER: So, just to be clear, it's not that Jacob suddenly concluded that climate change isn't happening, or that violence and inequality aren't serious problems. That's not what he meant by the earth being all right.

  It was more that he saw himself as part of a much larger picture, in which life and death are part of a natural cycle. He is going to die. But his body will nourish new life, by becoming food for bacteria and insects, who will in turn feed other animals and plants.

  And this whole cycle — all of humanity — is just a blip in the earth’s history. And the earth itself is just a blip in a much larger universe.

  JACOB: When I reach out and go big, it's not as existential of a crisis as I once interpreted it to be. Scientists have discovered, like, 100 million galaxies, and inside each galaxy is another 100 billion stars. And around each star is an untold number of planets. And then here we are, and our one planet and our one star. And that smallness in the grand scheme of the universe, is quite helpful.

  HEATHER: Jacob spends the day kind of basking in the afterglow of this moment.

  And then the next morning, a part of him is like, “Did that even happen? Was that even real?”

  Call it what you want, but it changes Jacob’s life completely.

  He goes out and buys a backpack, starts spending all his free time outdoors. He's backpacking or mountain biking every weekend and every spare moment he can get.

  But he says it's not like he just stops being depressed. He just stops running from it. He turns toward it. And he lets nature comfort him.

  He says he probably still wakes up with a dark cloud over his head between four and six days a week. But the first thing he'll do is go outside and listen for the birds singing.

  JACOB: I often tell people now that, like, going outside is my church. Like, going outside backpacking is my like devotion.

  HEATHER: As time goes on, Jacob’s focus starts to shift — away from death, to questions of how he wants to LIVE, for whatever time we have left on this planet. Because he’s still not convinced that he has that long.

  He’s basically going through a process like one that Dr. Sebree described to me. A process of learning to live without hope.

  SEBREE: If you knew that tomorrow isn't promised to you, would you still go to work? Like, what would you do with that day knowing that, you know, tomorrow might be the last?

  HEATHER: For Jacob, finding the answer to that question means going to grad school. Studying sustainable communities. Even going on a vision fast.

  And he eventually becomes a full-time wilderness guide.

  Two years ago he and his partner finally left the desert of Arizona, for a place with an abundance of water: North Carolina. They set up a company with some friends that takes people out on the land to do healing work. And they call it Remembering Earth.

  A couple years back, Jacob was guiding a day hike in the Smoky mountains for a young guy in his 20s. Suddenly, out of the blue, this guy asked Jacob: “If you knew you only had a year to live, how would you live your life?”

  JACOB: I just chuckled to myself. I just laughed. Because it was a question that I, in one way or another, ask myself most days I wake up: ‘Is this my last day on earth?’ Or I would just tell myself today was my last day. And how would I live that day?

  HEATHER: So how does Jacob answer the question now? Last year he told a version of his story to the Collapse Support forum on Reddit. That’s the forum I mentioned earlier. It’s for people who are struggling with climate anxiety.

  This is part of what he wrote - quote: “If I only had one year, I would still float rivers, hunt, garden, play music, write poetry, wrap my arms around my lover, laugh with friends and family, but most of all I would want to be rekindling the fire of life within others.” End quote.

  JACOB: I have such a vivacious desire to live. And like, know that when I do die, oh my gosh, I'm gonna just be so sad to leave this place. Because even with all the horrors happening, I know it will be difficult and you know, it's like I know I will lose everything that I love.

  And it's a price that I'm willing to pay again and again and again. To steep myself in the beauty with other people, no matter how dark and bleak it is.

  HEATHER: You know, I was drawn to Jacob's story because it made me think of people I've known or read about who've been diagnosed with terminal illnesses. The intense grief and depression. The learning to live without hope. But also, for some, that kind of spiritual journey. Finding comfort in natural beauty and human connections. Trying to find meaning in the time they have left.

  And I think to myself, ‘This is what we're doing to young people with our inaction on climate change. This is what happens when we scream at our politicians to do something about gas prices but not about our climate targets. This is what happens when we egg on the culture wars on Twitter and Facebook, instead of fighting to end social inequality.’

  It’s older generations like mine who are the ones who should have the maturity and resilience to face up to what's happening to our planet. We are the ones who should be demanding real solutions and WELCOMING real sacrifices.

  But instead we've left it to teenagers to make peace with the possibility of dying young.

  WILLOW: That was Heather Kitching. She’s a freelance radio producer based in Thunder Bay, Canada.

  If you want to check out Jacob’s company, it’s called Remembering Earth.

  If you liked this story, please share the link with a friend! We are always eager for new listeners, and your recommendation is our best form of advertising.

  Coming up next time on Out There…

  STEPFANIE AGUILAR: Thoughts started crowding my mind: This can’t be happening. I should’ve listened to my gut. Why did I think it was okay to go on this hike alone when it was getting dark? What if there’s a creepy person following me? What if I don’t make it back to the campground tonight?

  WILLOW: How do you get back on track, when you lose your way — both literally and figuratively? Tune in on May 4 to find out.

  Out There is a proud member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of idea-driven independent podcasts.

  One of the other Hub & Spoke shows that I think you’ll love is called Rumble Strip. It’s based in Vermont, and the host, Erica Heilman, tells these really beautiful, intimate stories about everyday people. She invites herself into their homes and talks to them about what they love, what they hate, what they’re afraid of — and how they’re probably a lot like you.

  Rumble Strip was named the #1 podcast of 2022 by the New Yorker, and it won a Peabody Award that year as well. It’s also gotten recognition from the New York Times and The Atlantic. In other words, it’s the real deal.

  You can listen to Rumble Strip wherever you get your podcasts or at rumblestripvermont.com.

  A big thank you to PeakVisor for supporting this season of Out There.

  As I mentioned, PeakVisor is an app that helps you make the most of your adventures. You can use it to figure out what mountains you’re looking at. And you can take advantage of their 3-D maps, when you’re planning a trip.

  Plus, they have a peak bagging feature so you can keep track of all your accomplishments.

  If you’d like your own personal mountain guide, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

  Today’s story was reported, produced, and sound designed by Heather Kitching. Story editing by me, Willow Belden.

  Out There’s advertising manager is Jessica Taylor. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.

  Special thanks to all our listeners who are supporting Out There with financial contributions, including Adam Milgrom, Elana Mugdan, Matt Perry, Eric Biederman, Phil Timm, Doug Frick, Tara Joslin, and Deb and Vince Garcia. It’s your support that makes this podcast possible.

  We’ll be back with another episode in two weeks. In the meantime, have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.

Credits

Story and sound design by Heather Kitching

Script editing by Willow Belden

Links

Jacob’s company is called Remembering Earth

Support Out There on Patreon

Sponsors

PeakVisor

Rumpl

Use promo code “OUTTHERE” to get 10% off your first purchase at rumpl.com/outthere

Secrets of the Earth

TRAILER // Season 4

In Season 4, we’re exploring the theme SECRETS OF THE EARTH.

Each episode, we’ll share a story about an outdoor experience that uncovered new truths.

Through introspective personal narratives, we’ll harness the power of nature to make sense out of our lives and give us a fresh look at humanity.

Here’s a little taste.

This Is How You Win the Time War

What if we redesigned time to work better for us?

“We could start to see clock time for what it is: an artificial construct that we humans designed and that we can also change.”

— Wade Roush

BONUS EPISODE // Guest story from Soonish

Clock time is a human invention. So it shouldn’t be a box that confines us; it should be a tool that helps us accomplish the things we care about.

But consider the system of standard time, first imposed by the railroad companies in the 1880s. It constrains people who live 1,000 miles apart—on opposite edges of their time zones—to get up and go to work or go to school at the same time, even though their local sunrise and sunset times may vary by an hour or more.

And it also consigns people who live on the eastern edges of their time zones to ludicrously early winter sunsets.

For over a century, we've been fiddling with standard time, adding complications such as Daylight Saving Time that are meant to give us a little more evening sunlight for at least part of the year. But what if these are just palliatives for a broken system? What if it's time to reset the clock and try something completely different?

This is a guest story from the podcast Soonish, first published in 2021.

Episode transcript here.

Virtual Happy Hour!

March 10, 2023 // 7:30 p.m. ET

Out There is turning 8, and we’re celebrating with a virtual happy hour for our Patreon patrons!

Become a patron by March 5 to get an invitation.

Become a Patron

Episode Notes

Credits

Story by Wade Roush, produced for Soonish in 2021.

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music in Wade’s story from Titlecard Music and Sound.

Mark Chrisler from The Constant performed the voice of Dr. George Renaud.

Additional Links

Tom Emswiler, Why Mass. Should Defect From Its Time Zone, The Boston Globe, October 5, 2014

The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar

Follow Out There on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you stream podcasts.

New kids’ podcast!

Once Upon a Meadow brings you gentle, uplifting stories for 4- to 9-year-olds.

The characters are a community of animals and plants who live in a meadow and work together to flourish, despite their differences.

Each episode is richly interwoven with original music.

Learn More

Notes in the Trees

Why the Dutch get their kids lost in the woods — on purpose

Artwork by Magdalena Metrycka

“It’s part of the Dutch culture ... that you are basically on your own in life, and you have to figure out your own way.”

— Pia de Jong

BONUS EPISODE // Guest story from Nocturne

Most parents would never consider leaving their kids in the dark woods at night, and letting them find their way back. But the Dutch do just that. They call it Dropping.

On this episode, Vanessa Lowe explores how Dropping shapes young people’s ability to handle life.

This is a guest episode from Nocturne, a podcast that explores the night and how thoughts, feelings and behaviors transform in the dark.

Episode Notes

Credits

Story by Vanessa Lowe, produced for Nocturne in 2021.

Music in Vanessa’s story by Janet Feder, Myles Boisen, Pollen Music Group, and Kid Otter. Nocturne theme music by Kent Sparling.

Episode art by Magdalena Metrycka.

Additional Links

Out There’s forthcoming kids’ podcast, Once Upon a Meadow, is set to launch Feb. 7.

Out There and Nocturne are members of Hub & Spoke, a collective of smart, idea-driven independent podcasts.

Support Out There on Patreon and get an invitation to our virtual happy hour.

Follow Out There on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you stream podcasts.

Fallen Sky

A sculpture that lets you see the world anew

Sarah Sze’s “Fallen SKy”, located at Storm King Art Center (Photo courtesy Tamar Avishai)

“When you’re interrupted by a sculpture in the middle of a landscape, it’s not really the sculpture you notice but the landscape itself.”

— Tamar Avishai

BONUS // Guest Episode from The Lonely Palette

“Fallen Sky,” a work of installation art by Sarah Sze, is like a moon map etched into a hillside. On display at New York’s Storm King Art Center, its stainless-steel pillars are created to look like stone and mirror, ancient ruins that reflect the ever-changing sky.

On this episode, Tamar Avishai explores how Sze’s striking sculpture helps visitors pay attention to the world around us — and the world inside our head.

This is a special guest episode from The Lonely Palette, a podcast that returns art history to the masses, one object at a time.

Read the episode transcript here.

Follow Out There on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you stream podcasts.

Episode Notes

Credits

Story by Tamar Avishai, produced for The Lonely Palette in 2021, with support from Storm King Art Center

Music in Tamar’s story: Django Reinhardt, “Django’s Tiger” • The Andrews Sisters, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" • The Blue Dot Sessions, “Plate Glass,” “Leatherbound,” “The Onyx,” “Silent Ocean,” “ZigZag Heart,” “Curious Case,” “On Top of It” • Evan Blanch, “Where The Streets Have No Name (Instrumental)” (U2 cover)

Additional Links

“Fallen Sky” is on display at Storm King Art Center

Out There’s forthcoming kids’ podcast, Once Upon a Meadow, is set to launch in February.

Out There and The Lonely Palette are members of Hub & Spoke, a collective of smart, idea-driven independent podcasts.

Support Out There on Patreon

Fear Is the Thing with Fins

What if your own anxiety is the most dangerous part?

Photo by Gerald Schömbs on Unsplash

“Life is a risk. And I’m not about to stop because there are some fears.”

— Pat Gallant-Charette

BONUS // Guest Episode from The Briny

Fear is a powerful indicator that something could hurt us. But sometimes, the fear itself is the most dangerous part.

This is the story of marathon swimmer Pat Gallant-Charette. Because of something that happened to her when she was a teenager, Pat has to overcome a fear of deep water every time she competes. But she doesn’t let that stop her.

This is a special guest episode from The Briny, a podcast about how we’re changing the sea, and how the sea changes us.

Read the episode transcript here.

Follow Out There on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you stream podcasts.

Episode Notes

Credits

Story and sound design by Matt Frassica

Additional Links

This story is from The Briny. It first aired in 2021.

You can find Pat Gallant-Charette here and see her swimming records here.

Out There and The Briny are members of Hub & Spoke, a collective of smart, idea-driven independent podcasts.

Support Out There on Patreon

This episode sponsored by

About the Journey

High on Failure

Why hitting your breaking point could make you happier

Jordan Wirfs-Brock competes in the inaugural Infinitus race (photo by Victoria Petryshyn)

“I had been building up this hard, heavy shell of stress, and when my body broke, the stress broke away, too.”

— Jordan Wirfs-Brock

Season 3 // Episode 8

Every year, in the mountains of Vermont, a group of ultra runners gather for a 550-mile race called Infinitus.

It’s one of the toughest trail running races in existence.

Jordan Wirfs-Brock was no stranger to ultra marathons, but Infinitus broke her: she failed to finish. Surprisingly, though, the failure turned out to be one of the best things that's ever happened to her.

On this episode, Jordan takes us with her to the race course and shares the story of what happened.

This story first aired in 2016, and it won a gold medal for best independent podcast from Public Radio News Directors, Inc., or PRNDI.

Read the full episode transcript here

Follow Out There on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you stream podcasts.

Episode Notes

Credits

Story and sound design by Jordan Wirfs-Brock

Script editing by Willow Belden

Music includes selections from AudioBlocks

Additional Links

Support Out There on Patreon

If you’re really into suffering ultra-running, check out Infinitus

Follow Jordan on Twitter @jordanwb

PeakVisor

Athletic Greens

Get a FREE one-year supply of Vitamin D and 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase at athleticgreens.com/outthere

About the Journey

Pedaling and Paddling

What if the thing that brings you together also pulls you apart?

Dewey Gallegos on a mountain bike and Jessica Flock on a river (photos courtesy Dewey Gallegos and Jessica Flock)

“When I saw what Jessica did — like, when she showed me a video of what rafting was ... I just remember thinking she was insane.”

— Dewey Gallegos

Season 3 // Episode 7

Dewey Gallegos and Jessica Flock bonded over their passion for the outdoors. But they soon realized that the thing they had in common was also one of their biggest differences.

Their story takes us from the mountains of Wyoming to the rivers of Arizona and explores how hard it can be to share the thing you love most, with the person you love most.

This story first aired in 2015.

Click here to read the episode transcript.

Follow Out There on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you stream podcasts.

Episode Notes

Credits

Story and sound design by Willow Belden

Script editing by Leigh Paterson

Music includes selections from AudioBlocks and Blue Dot Sessions

Additional Links

Find Dewey Gallegos at the Pedal House and Jessica Flock at the Paddle House

Pitch a story for our next season

Check out the series “Illuminations” from Ministry of Ideas

Support Out There on Patreon

This episode sponsored by

PeakVisor

Athletic Greens

Get a FREE one-year supply of Vitamin D and 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase at athleticgreens.com/outthere

About the Journey