The Tonic of Silence

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How silence in nature impacts our mental health

Gerry Seavo James, Niki DiGaetano, Mark Sheeran, Lauren Jones, Anastasia Allison, Sanjana Sekhar, JD Reinbott, Wade Roush, Eric Biderman, Francesca Turauskis, and Diedre Wolownick

Season 6 | Episode 3

For many of us, getting outside is more than just fun; it’s how we find inner stillness.

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, we decided to turn the mic over to you, our community. We asked how silence in nature has been significant to your mental health.

On this episode, we’re sharing some of our favorite responses.

  • 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 with that. 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 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 season is all about silence. Each episode, we’re exploring how we find stillness amidst the noise — whether that’s literal or figurative. And this is a special episode, where we’ve turned the mic over to you, our listeners.

    About a year ago, someone left us a review on Apple Podcasts that really made me smile. It said, “Willow’s stories and interviews always give me a sense of calmness almost like the feeling I have when I’m in the wilderness.”

    That’s a sentiment we hear often – that this podcast somehow evokes a sense of peace. That it harnesses the power of nature to bring about inner stillness. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. Tapping into that peace – that stillness – has always been one of my goals for Out There.

    And so today – in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month – we’re leaning into that and diving deep into the connection between nature and emotional wellness. We started by posing a question to our community. We asked how silence in nature has been significant to your mental health. And in this episode, we’re sharing some of our favorite stories and insights from all of you.

    ANASTASIA ALLISON: Hi, my name is Anastasia Allison. I’m the founder of Kula Cloth, and I’m also the violinist for a small duo called the Musical Mountaineers.

    I am a lifelong violinist. I started playing violin when I was four years old. And it was always done in a really traditional way. I would learn songs and then eventually play them at a recital, where inevitably people would clap as soon as I was done playing.

    In 2017, my friend Rose Freeman and I had this idea. We thought, ‘What if we carried a violin and a piano or a keyboard out into the wilderness and played a concert at sunrise for nobody?’ And so we woke up at 11 o'clock at night and drove to this trailhead, and we got there at two in the morning, and we hiked in the dark by the light of our headlamps up to this spot just below the summit of a peak, where we stood on these big granite slabs.

    And there was sort of this moment before we started playing, like the whole universe was just holding its breath, waiting to see what happened.

    And then there was music.

    And then when we were done, it just sort of faded back into that silence. It was like an opening to something that was always there, and oddly enough, it was something that I had never heard before. Because that moment of silence is usually covered up by applause or talking or even my own thoughts at times.

    A few years ago we had the opportunity to climb to a peak with a reporter, and we played a song on this sort of snowy rock garden. And as soon as we were done, he sort of sat there in silence and then said, “Don't take this the wrong way, but the moment after you finish playing is just as beautiful as the music.” And I knew exactly what he was talking about.

    WADE ROUSH: Last year, I moved from an apartment that was deep in the heart of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the busiest part of town, to a house in the high desert outside of Sante Fe, New Mexico.

    This is Wade Roush. I’m the producer of Soonish, which is one of Out There’s sister shows at the Hub and Spoke audio collective.

    Before I left Cambridge, I made a point of going out on my balcony with a sound meter app to measure the loudness of the traffic noise and the general roar of the city. And it was usually in the range of 65 decibels, which is sort of like putting your ear up against a dishwasher.

    Now, when I go out on my patio here in Sante Fe and sample the noise levels with the same app, it’s usually around 35 decibels, which is more like people whispering in a library.

    Now you’ve gotta remember, the decibel scale is logarithmic, so a 65-decibel sound is actually 1,000 times more intense than a 35-decibel sound.

    So now you understand part of the reason I moved. The incessant noise of the big city was starting to drive me crazy. But out here in the desert, I feel like my mind and spirit can open up a bit.

    WILLOW: This is a common theme that we heard over and over again – that many of you are intentional about chasing silence. That there’s something inherently healing about getting away from all the noise. But why is that, exactly? What is it about silence that’s so beneficial for us? Why do we seek it out?

    NIKI DIGAETANO: Hi there, my name’s Niki DiGaetano, and I am a writer, backpacker, and death doula living in Salt Lake City, Utah.

    Two years ago, I went on a 900-mile-long section hike of the Appalachian Trail. And for most of that trip, so basically from West Virginia up through Vermont, I didn't use my earbuds at all. I didn't listen to any music when I was hiking.

    It gave me some clarity as to some struggles I was dealing with off trail, such as the racist treatment of my ex, my now ex-partner's parents. They had given me like this giant crisis around being Chinese American. Like I had never really thought about it in the context of, ‘Oh, my face is problematic for people.’ But now I was, because they explicitly said, “If you date an Asian girl, we'll disown you.” And they were talking to their son, of course, who was my ex.

    And I remember this one morning, just kind of immersed in the emptiness that is the nature and the silence of it, of just walking through this sunlit field, and I kind of stopped dead. And I thought to myself, ‘Does any of this matter?’ Like when it comes to my partner's parents, like, ‘Does any of this matter?’

    And the answer was, ‘It doesn't.’ You know, I had been so affected by the racist comments and treatment that like I was, before I left for trail, I had been doing things like googling plastic surgery to alter my face, to please these people. And I was just really hyper fixated on it.

    And I believe that being out there in the woods and on the trail, on this journey, in this silence of nature, was really healing to just, I guess, my soul. It really gave my mind space for clarity. And I very much understand now why like forest bathing and forest and wilderness therapy is such a huge component, and I wish it was more talked about nowadays. So thank you.

    JD REINBOTT: Hi there, my name is JD Reinbott, and I am a marine conservationist as well as a queer rights activist who is currently based in the Florida Keys.

    SANJANA SEKHAR: My name is Sanjana Sekhar, and I'm a writer, filmmaker, and climate activist.

    JD: As a diver, I spend obviously a lot of time out on the water. It is my happy place. And I always find that whenever I have a lot on my mind, whether it's good things or bad things, the moment I back roll or giant stride off of a boat and slip below the ocean surface, all of those thoughts just go away.

    SANJANA: The immersive sensory experience of being outside takes you out of your mind and into your body. It allows me to just connect to what's happening around me right now and not be worrying about yesterday or tomorrow.

    MARK SHEERAN: Hello, my name is Mark Sheeran. I am 64 years old, and I'm a retired high school teacher and cross country coach. When I go running, I never take any music with me. I never listen to any podcasts. Rather, I just allow myself the silence of letting nature sort of come to me, whether it's through the wind, the birds, the trees.

    SANJANA: The roar of a rushing river or the gossip of the birds.

    MARK: The sound of my feet hitting the ground as one and feeling really connected to the earth.

    JD: There's no outside noise. You're just sitting underwater, and the only thing you can hear is the sound of your breath and the crackling of life underwater.

    SANJANA: It interrupts the otherwise non-stop flow of thoughts and simulations and worries, the way that the information age has all of our minds constantly on. I feel like being outdoors flips that switch and silences the buzz.

    JD: And looking up at the sun glistening through the water and reflecting down on me, and just looking around at the fish living their lives, the small little critters — everything that you see when you're diving —it just makes my mind go blank and makes me stop thinking about my bills or the work that I'm doing or the awkward conversation that I wish I had said things differently.

    MARK: What it does for me more than anything else is it allows me to process emotions and allows me a lot more clarity.

    SANJANA: It quiets my overactive mind.

    JD: And just finally allows me to go still and to stop thinking.

    MARK: An example of this is while I was teaching, frequently I would hit a stumbling block on a lesson plan, and when I would go out and run and think about my class, when I would finish, I would always have a solution.

    JD: And for me, I've always found that peace, that bliss, that state of stillness, such an escape.

    SANJANA: And this should be accessible to everyone, but much like outdoor recreation itself, physical and mental health are also gate kept in our society because of racism and classism, sexism, ableism. I think that because of that, tapping into healing in nature is a pretty radical act, whether it's just sticking your head out the window for a breath of fresh air or sitting in a patch of grass, a family park day or hiking, biking, climbing. When you let that healing flow through you, that's powerful for you and for your community, and for our planet as a whole.

    GERRY SEAVO JAMES: My name is Gerry Seavo James. I live in Frankfort, Kentucky, ancestral homelands of the Cherokee, Osage, and Shawnee, and I serve as one of the deputy campaign directors for the Sierra Club's Outdoors for All campaign.

    You know, when you think about nature, you think about outdoor recreation, a big thing is going there for freedom. Going there to be silent and going there to, you know, kind of like free your mind. And, you know, that's a large part for me. Like I go into nature to have fun, to challenge myself, to reset, to see really awesome scenic vistas and kind of like, be carefree.

    I'm a big paddle boarder. I'm a kayak, stand up paddle boarding, canoe instructor, like certified through the American Canoe Association. I've paddled thousands of miles across this country.

    One day, I went out to go paddle Laurel River Lake here in Kentucky. And I was just paddling my paddleboard, you know, getting my miles in, getting my scenic vista quota in, and these folks saw me in a powerboat and they immediately began hooting and hollering at me and saying stuff like, “Can you swim? Great to see someone like you out here. Let's see…” And then what they did was, they spun the boat around, and they waked me in the boat, waked me with their boat's wake to see if I would fall off my board.

    And that was just very interesting how, you know, for me, I was going out there to get that silence — quote unquote “silence” — but, to get that peace, get that zen, and have fun. And here, because of who I am and what I look like, you know, that was disrupted. It puts you on alarm. It's like, am I going to go out there and get that silence and get that Zen and have that fun without having, you know, someone be threatened by me or view me as an oddity?

    I don't necessarily go out in nature and I'm looking for complete silence, complete quietness. Like, I don't mind someone having like a boom box or playing their music and stuff like that. But when I say “silence,” I guess I'm using it as like peace. Like, we are, we are all out in nature respecting each other, having fun, smiling, being happy, and just like holding space for each other.

    WILLOW: So Gerry raises an interesting point – this idea that silence isn’t always literal. A lot of times, when we’re searching for silence, what we actually want is metaphorical silence, inner stillness. And in fact, as a few of you pointed out, literal silence isn’t even always attainable.

    FRANCESCA TURAUSKIS: My name is Francesca Turauskis. I am an audio producer and a writer, and I’m based in West Sussex.

    DIERDRE WOLOWNICK: I’m Dierdre Wolownick. I am an author, a marathoner, and Alex Honnold’s mom.

    FRANCESCA: I don’t think I have ever been in silence in nature.

    DIERDRE: There is no silence in nature. Step out into your backyard.

    FRANCESCA: Right now, I am sat outside.

    DIERDRE: No matter where you live.

    FRANCESCA: And I can hear birds.

    DIERDRE: You will hear birds. Even if it’s just pigeons cooing outside your highrise city apartment.

    FRANCESCA: I can hear a squirrel in the trees.

    DIERDRE: You’ll hear insects.

    FRANCESCA: I can hear some of the leaves rustling in the wind.

    DIERDRE: Have you ever had the pleasure of hearing a tree filled with cicadas?

    FRANCESCA: But also, being in nature, I think we shouldn’t have silence.

    DIERDRE: In our busy lives, we’re taught to focus on what’s important, and to block out the rest.

    FRANCESCA: A silent nature is something that is desolate.

    DIERDRE: Nature is an incredible symphony. It is not silence. It’s life happening all around us.

    FRANCESCA: And it is that noise in nature which helps with my mental health.

    DIERDRE: It’s very important to our mental health.

    FRANCESCA: Because if I’m left to my own devices in silence, that’s when thoughts might start ruminating in a way which aren’t necessarily healthy. If there is some external noise, some external nature that I can focus on, that’s what helps me to clear my head.

    DIERDRE: And it allows us to hear the things that are important and can heal us.

    ERIC BIEDERMANN: I’m Eric Biedermann, and I’m from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Silence in nature is something I can never truly have. I live with chronic tinnitus, a constant ringing of the ears that I’ve had as long as I can remember. Essentially, my brain fills any sound void or silence with a constant “eeeee” noise that only I can hear.

    I’m fortunate that my case is mild. It’s just a nuisance that I can suppress with other sound. However, severe cases of tinnitus can be debilitating, with the most extreme cases having catastrophic impacts on mental health.

    So I’m grateful to nature because it often solves this problem by providing a soundtrack. Whether it’s a cool breeze, the flow of a mountain stream, or birdsong, nature often obliges by giving my brain something else to latch onto. So while silence in nature isn’t possible for me, focusing on the music it provides is a good alternative.

    WILLOW: Medical conditions like Eric’s can have very real impacts on our mental health. And several of you talked about this — about needing a distraction from health-related issues.

    Our last guest is someone named Lauren Jones. And while her situation is nothing like Eric’s, she too found that nature provided a kind of remedy or solace as she navigated a tough reality.

    LAUREN JONES: Hi there. They call me Yard Sale. The true essence of Yard Sale was my thru-hike on the Colorado Trail during the summer of 2020, after the loss of our first embryo via IVF. We have since then lost six more embryos in the last four years.

    So I found my trail journal, and on day 28, day 28 of 40 – because I chose the last 40 days of my 40th year of life to thru-hike the Colorado Trail, I literally hiked out on my 41st birthday – but back then on day 28, I'm about 100 or something miles away from being complete, and I mooned the moon.

    It's just me and the moon. It's quiet. My cheeks kissing the sky that's dark and starlit, with this giant brightness of moonlight, charging my spirit, charging my soul, charging me to keep going, to continue feeling what the trail has taught me, which is that I'm not broken. That my body isn't broken. That we aren't broken.

    We can do hard things. Every climb is temporary. Every decline and descent is relief, and it's met with water and nourishment and gentleness. And yet we keep climbing and keep aiming, and the trail provides. It's phenomenal, what the wilderness and what silence does for our mental wellness, for our self care, and the forever teachings of just living life in general.

    In the last 24 hours, we have just lost our seventh embryo. So as I record this in 2024, the silence in the wilderness found in 2020 has brought me forward in so many more of my life journeys. And I know that I can get through it. I trust the trail. The trail provides. We will get through this. I'll continue to moon the moon, and we'll see ya on the other side. In the silence, in the wilderness, in our aspiring journey to become parents, we will begin again.

    WILLOW: This episode was produced by Sheeba Joseph and me, Willow Belden, with help from Katie Reuther and Maria Ordovas-Montanes. Sound design by me, Willow Belden. Music includes works from Blue Dot Sessions, Story Blocks, and the Musical Mountaineers.

    Coming up next time on Out There…

    AMBER VON SCHASSEN: I am literally ear-to-ear grinning, smiling.

    WILLOW: What if you challenged yourself to spend a thousand hours outdoors? Tune in on May 16 for a story about going outside in order to overcome your fears.

    This summer, Out There is co-hosting an evening of campfire stories here in southeast Wyoming. And we’re looking for storytellers who’d like to participate.

    If you’d like to be one of our storytellers, please get in touch by May 11. Just click the link in the episode description to learn more.

    Alright, I am out for a bike ride, and I am at 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.

    Lucky for me, there’s an app that can help. It’s called PeakVisor.

    Alright, so I’ve opened up PeakVisor. It’s thinking.

    The app shows me a panorama of everything I’m looking at, with all the mountains labeled.

    Oh wow, okay. So I am looking all the way down into Rocky Mountain National Park.

    PeakVisor is our presenting sponsor this season. Their app has information on more than a million summits all over the world. Plus, they have detailed 3D maps to help you with your planning. If you’d like to be a superhero of outdoor navigation, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.

    A big thank you to everyone who participated in this episode, including Anastasia Allison, Eric Bidermann, Niki DiGaetano, Gerry Seavo James, Lauren Jones, JD Reinbott, Wade Roush, Sanjana Sekhar, Mark Sheeran, Francesca Turauskis, and Dierdre Wolownick.

    You can find links to the guests at our website, Outtherepodcast.com.

    Thank you also to everyone who submitted voice memos. We received more submissions than we were able to include in this episode, but we loved hearing from all of you, and we hope you’ll stay in touch.

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

 

Storytelling opportunity!

Out There is co-hosting an evening of campfire stories with Common Outdoor Ground this summer, and we’re looking for storytellers.

The event will be in southeast Wyoming in June. If you’d like to tell a story, please get in touch by May 11.

Tell Your Story
 

Episode Notes

Credits

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

  • Sound design by Willow Belden

  • Music from Blue Dot Sessions, Story Blocks, and the Musical Mountaineers

Guests

Links

 
 

This episode sponsored by PeakVisor

 

My Dad’s Depression

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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.

  • 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

 
 

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.

  • 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

 
 

This episode sponsored by PeakVisor

 

TRAILER: Silence

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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.

  • 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