Barking Up the Wrong Tree
Barking up the Wrong Tree
Transcript for Barking up the Wrong Tree (full episode)
Jonah Willinhganz: [00:00:00] From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.
Mike Greene: You spend a fortune, I mean, really a fortune on all these, uh, night vision and thermal gadgets and one thing in another, uh, and then nothing ever happens.
Xandra Clark: Sh don't move. Our producer, Rachel Hamburg, is about to uncover an important clue to one of America's biggest mysteries.
Mike Greene: Hello, Rachel? Hi, I am Mike.
Rachel Hamburg: Hi.
Mike Greene: Hello.
Rachel Hamburg: Nice to meet you.
Mike Greene: Now what can I do for you this morning?
Rachel Hamburg: Well, I had a bunch of questions about, uh, you know Bigfoot.
Mike Greene: Sure.
Rachel Hamburg: Bigfoot, the great American mystery. And when I say Bigfoot is the great American mystery, there are really two mysteries afoot here. The first mystery is whether Bigfoot exists, but the second mystery, and it is a great mystery, I think, to many, many Americans, is why people are still looking for it. This is Mike Greene. He's been searching for Bigfoot for the last 20 years.
Mike Greene: I usually go once a week and I go more often, except it so darn hot down here. Uh, I have to tell you this is, this is in one way is the most boring, expensive hobby in the world. Uh, 'cause you spend a fortune, I mean, really a fortune on all these, uh, night vision and thermal gadgets and one thing in another. Uh, and then nothing ever happens. I mean it, 99.9% of the time, nothing happens.
You just go out and camp out for the night. So it's, it's really a patient man's game.[00:02:00]
Xandra Clark: You are listening to State of the Human, the radio show, of the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm Xandra Clark. This week's show is all about the patient man's game of barking up the wrong tree. Turns out this saying is way more complicated than just a dog barking at a tree without a cat in it. Because in real life, people are doing the barking, and they're not just barking, they're arguing over their tree.
They're constantly evaluating and reevaluating the tree situation as best they can, and sometimes it's actually the right tree, or it's technically the wrong tree, but also a totally new and different and undiscovered tree. Consider Christopher Columbus, Back in the 15th century, everyone thought he was nuts because he thought he could get to the east by sailing west.
You are definitely barking up the wrong tree, they told him. But he managed to convince a couple of influential people and whoosh, he sailed the ocean blue. It doesn't really matter that he thought The Bahamas were somewhere in India. He found the new world.
It can take a long time to know whether you're barking up the wrong tree or not, and when you think about it this way, it's a little harder to feel smug about the things we think we know. You realize that it's almost never clear if we're barking up the wrong tree.
Right now, mike Green is somebody who has spent a lot of time and energy devoted to a cause that everyone else thinks is doomed, dubious or absurd. He is somebody whom history has not yet and perhaps never will prove right. But on the other hand, he might be the next Christopher Columbus.
On today's show, you'll hear three stories about barking up the wrong tree first, boyfriend as Tree, a story that asks whether following your gut is [00:04:00] any way to choose a boyfriend. Second, we take you to artisanal mining villages of Peru. It's a story about how one Stanford student couldn't escape barking up the wrong tree despite the best intentions. Last, a special case in which barking up the wrong tree was the goal all along. The strange story of the Stanford mascot that never was the Stanford robber barons.
But before all that, let's go back to Mike Green. He began looking for Bigfoot 20 years ago. Back then, he was writing a thesis about mass hysteria, which can be described as a bunch of people barking up the wrong tree all at once. Bigfoot seemed like the same thing. But Mike wasn't convinced.
Mike Greene: The more I read, the more sort of persistent and, and scattered, but the same, the reports seemed to be, and, and, and I just sort of felt that it didn't really fit the, the, the category of mass hysteria when you get people separated and having, seeing the same thing or the same kind of thing all at once. Uh, it's hard to explain how that occurs. Since a big backpacker and tamper and gadget person, uh, I started thinking, well, you know, this is something that I maybe I could look into.
And very, uh, naively, I went off to my, my veterinarian and got a prescription from him for two drugs to use in tranquilizer darts. And then I went out and I bought a tranquilizer rifle and a tranquilizer pistol and some very crude, uh, recording equipment and started carrying them along on backpacking trips.
That was perhaps 20 years ago when I really started [00:06:00] looking.
Xandra Clark: Tranquilizer guns sound a little extreme, but not if you believe you could actually find Bigfoot, and Mike did believe it. According to the Bigfoot books he was reading, he was in the perfect position to succeed. 50 or 60 people had already reported seeing Bigfoot in a swamp that was only an hour and a half from his house.
Mike Greene: So I started going there in a canoe, and one edge of the swamp was owned by the Nature Conservancy, and there was a spot on the swamp when you were paddling along where you could get through the swamp and get to the land, into an area that was surrounded by very big, steep, rocky hills with, and I don't mean to be melodramatic, lots of rattlesnakes in them also. And this is all owned by the Nature Conservancy, so you weren't allowed to, uh, uh, hunt there or spend the night, but you could, uh, hike through it. Anyway, I found a way to sneak in the back door, so to speak, to this area, which was like a little sort of maybe mile long. Sort of, not really a lost world, but a hidden little area that was very hard to get to, that people were not allowed to spend the night or hunting. And I thought, well now if I was a Sasquatch, this is where I would hang out.
So I started going up there year after year, and I actually hid camping equipment up there, uh, in the woods so I didn't have to carry it all the time. And I found, over the years, a few sighting, not sightings of Bigfoot, but signs of Bigfoot, which are snapped off trees about six or seven feet up. They'll take a a, a young tree [00:08:00] and, and apparently is a show of strength. We don't really know why they do this, but they'll sort of reach out with one hand and snap off a tree that's maybe a green tree that's maybe as thick as your wrist. Something that. You and I couldn't do, and I found large rocks the size of maybe half a garbage can that had been picked up and thrown.
Not rolled, but thrown from their beds, which is also another sign or thing you hear about people seeing Sasquatch is doing. Anyway, for years I went up there and I'd go up and I'd spend a couple of nights and year after year after year I did this and nothing happened at all until about, I guess now it's maybe been six years ago, five or six years ago,
Xandra Clark: like any good Bigfoot hunter, Mike had a routine and the right equipment. He had bought a thermal imager, which is basically a camera that records heat signatures. They're pretty common in Arnold Schwartzenegger movies. They're also perfect for tracking things in a forest where there are lots of obstacles that get in the way of normal vision.
They also help you tell the difference between a costume and a real body, which you can imagine is pretty important to Bigfoot hunters. Every night, Mike would set out some bait and wait for Bigfoot.
Mike Greene: Uh, what I'd do is set my wrist alarm and, uh, for every two hours and I'd wake up, put my boots on, and get up outside my tent and scan around with a thermal imager, hopefully trying to see something. And this one night, three o'clock in the morning, and this is way out in the middle of nowhere [00:10:00] by myself.
Uh, that's no big deal but, but I mean, the point is I was very much alone. At three in the morning, my alarm went off. I was putting my boots on and all of right, right there, it sounded like a, a bigfoot howl, like somebody yelling in my ear. I mean, this was truly a loud noise. Like the loud speakers at a football game just bellowed out and I can't really reproduce it, but it went, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop.
Just definitely loud. It sounded like the whoops, you hear monkeys do, except as though the monkey was like King Kong. It had a, a, a, a depth and, and, and a, a resonance and, and a volume to it. That was, was absolutely incredible. Uh, anyway, I put my boots on and jumped out of the tent and didn't see anything.
However, I had heard a noise, which I'd heard recordings of before, which is undoubtedly a bigfoot. The loudest noise, like that natural noise by far I've ever heard in my life. And that really, uh, reinvigorated me because I was getting very, very, uh, uh, disappointed
Xandra Clark: When Mike says he'd been feeling disappointed, keep in mind that he only heard these epic bigfoot proofing, whoops, six years ago. Until then, the only evidence was snapped off tree limbs and mysterious boulders. So Rachel asked him what kept him on the hunt for all that time.
Rachel Hamburg: Mike, when you, you said that it, it, you had been doing it for 20 years and it, you, it sounds like if I'm doing the math right, you'd been doing it for about 14 years before [00:12:00] you heard this yell in the swamp. Although you, you know, you'd had other sort of secondary signs of Bigfoot. Exactly. Exactly. Um, so that just seems like a very sort of small diet to feed a hobby like this. What, what would've convinced you to stop?
Mike Greene: Um, the last few years? It was almost more a chore than a pleasure to go up and go camping there until I heard those whoops. Uh, but after so many years, uh, when you've sort of, I don't know if staked your reputation or whatever, but you've sort of staked your reputation to yourself that you wanna prove something here and you really, I just hate to give up on things, so I, I don't know what it would've taken. I don't know.
Xandra Clark: What's really strange about this story is that Mike Green is probably the last person you would expect to believe in Bigfoot. That's because he's a professional welfare fraud investigator. He's trained to be skeptical, to think everything is a lie, but he hunted Bigfoot for 14 years before he ever saw or even heard one himself.
That's conviction for you. It can either lead to great discoveries or it can make you spend a quarter of your life at night in a swamp on a cliff covered in rattlesnakes, barking up the wrong tree. But what if it's worth it? What if you are right? What if Bigfoot's real out there just waiting to be discovered?
Mike Green had to wait 20 years to find out. So we are going to make you wait a little bit too, just until the end of the episode. For now, let's talk about another myth. Love.
Okay, just kidding, [00:14:00] folks. We at the Stanford Storytelling Project do believe in love, but there are a lot of myths about love. The story of Apollo and Daphne has got to be the proto, barking up the wrong tree story.
One of the gods Apollo falls desperately in love with a young nymph named Daphne. Even though he's a God, she doesn't like him back, so he chases her through the forest, calling her name, telling her he loves her, and so on. And when he's just about to catch her, her legs root themselves to the ground, green branches shoot from her arms and her hair changes into crisp leaves. He stops. He can't believe it. She's a tree.
The story of Apollo and Daphne is supposed to be a tragedy, but let's face it, Apollo had it easy. Once Daphne had become a tree, it was pretty clear she was the wrong girl for him. As Christina Ho discovered in real life, it's much harder to figure out whether you're with the right person.
Christina Ho: Last month, my boyfriend and I broke up. To the casual observer he and I were perfect for each other. We were the dream couple of online dating services everywhere, both Christian, both Chinese American, both music lovers who wanted to travel the world. I liked to talk. He liked to listen. I got mad easily. He was one of the most patient people I've ever met. And plus we had fun together. The kind of fun that annoys everyone else except for the people having fun singing at the top of our lungs in the car, tingling down the length of my dorm room. How do you explain ending a relationship like that to anyone?
[00:16:00]
Christina Ho: All I can say is that something felt wrong. How long I'd felt it, I'm not sure. Maybe a few months, maybe since the beginning. It was like one of those pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that shaped exactly like the space you're trying to fit it into, but maybe one edges off by a millimeter, and after 10 minutes of trying to squeeze it in and yelling at the puzzle for being stupid, you're forced to admit you've got the wrong piece.
That's how I felt. I kept trying to change him. Why can't you be more assertive? Why can't you show me you're passionate about God? Why are you watching so much tv? Somewhere inside of me was this belief that to love someone means loving who they already are, not who you think you can make them into. But I wasn't doing that for my boyfriend.
So I started asking for advice, lots of it. In fact, if you met me during the month before my boyfriend and I broke up, chances are I would've asked you for advice. Should I stay with him and try to work it out, or should I walk away? Let it go. Bonus points if you were an older friend, a pastor, or a married woman, but I guess no one wanted to be responsible for deciding the fate of someone else's relationship, so I never got a straight answer.
How do I know whether or not I love him? I'd ask and they would respond. When you know, you just know. [00:18:00] Are my standards too high? I'd ask. Well, they'd say relationships are all about compromise, but there are also things you can't compromise. Sometimes they'd ask me, what is God telling you? As if I would be asking their advice, if I knew what God was saying.
But the real winner, the mother of all platitudes, was this one, follow your gut.
Jerry Lee: You should follow your gut.
Katy Ashe: You just have to follow your gut.
Christina Ho: Follow your gut. I'd never really thought too much about what that phrase meant, but I did know that deep down inside there was a feeling of discomfort that I couldn't shake.
No matter how many times I told myself that my boyfriend and I could work it out if we just tried harder. So in the end, I followed that feeling, or since it was a mutual breakup, we followed it. And now in the aftermath of it all, I'm wondering what exactly we followed. What is a gut anyway and why should I trust it enough to go where it leads me?
Thus began my quest to uncover the real meaning of a really well worn phrase.
I started out by asking some of my friends. Alright, so if I could ask you to explain in one sentence, what is the gut?
Speaker 10: The part of you that initially leans toward one decision over others?
Speaker 11: It's that like that feeling that's kind of deep and when something is said, it makes a judgment. Like right off the bat
Katy Ashe: you go with the what feels right, even if it's not the conventional way to do something.
Christina Ho: Would you recommend people to follow the gut? Yes. Has there ever been a time in your life when you followed your gut, and how did it turn out for you? Um hmm. [00:20:00]
Jane Reynolds: So my gut, I can't think of one right now,
Christina Ho: and that's what most people said. Everyone seemed to have a pretty good idea of what following the gut meant, and plenty people said they'd recommend it to others, but no one seemed to have a personal stake in it.
Then I interviewed Yaa. If I asked you to explain what the phrase follow your gut means in like one sentence, what would you say?
Yaa Gyasi: I would say it's doing something that feels right even when there's no evidence to support that rightness.
Christina Ho: Nothing new there. It's pretty much just a rewording of what everyone else said.
But then she told me a story that made me believe her.
Yaa Gyasi: My mother, um, was born and raised in Ghana, in West Africa, and she was extremely poor, um, in a single parent household. Just her and her two sisters, three sisters. Um, and they, they're all very beautiful and basically in, in a lot of different cultures, um, probably this one included, there's this idea that if you marry someone who's not extremely poor, then you would have, um, a better chance of life.
And so, not that she was actively pursuing a really rich guy, but um, she happened upon, um, this guy who was a, like basically a prince of his village. Um, he was poised to become a doctor. Um, they were engaged, they were living together. And then one day my mom just left him a note and left. And then she went, she went back to school.
Um, she met my dad, who was her teacher's assistant, who was also extremely, extremely poor. And, and they got married. And her whole [00:22:00] family basically just didn't accept what had happened. And when, and when we ask her about her, when she's asked about it, she just, she just says it didn't feel right to marry the other guy.
Christina Ho: And that's all she ever says.
Yaa Gyasi: That's all she ever says. There's no reason she didn't feel, she didn't have, like, her life would've been great, not that it's not good now, but it would've been, she would've been like a very important person in the, in the country that she was raised in. But she just says that it didn't feel all right.
Christina Ho: Yaa's, mother's story hit a little too close to home. Just like me, she had what seemed to be a great relationship and just like me, she let it go. So, I mean, did she love him or how did she,
Yaa Gyasi: yeah, I think she did love him. I think she loved him, but I think she also just felt like there is something else out there for her.
Glen Davis: Sigma pie, Lambda, alpha, gamma, kai, new Omicron, new S, non or S nos, or Sno, depending the Greek word for gut. Uh uh, for your bowels, for your spleen, the, the deep inward parts in the Greek worldview, the seat of your emotion, just like we would talk of the heart today.
Christina Ho: That's my pastor Glen Davis. I interviewed him because after hearing Ya's story, I began to wonder if the so-called gut feeling wasn't just code for communication with the divine.
Because sure, maybe Ya's mother felt like there was something else out there, but that's something else could very well have been an abusive relationship. Or no relationship at all on top of her whole family being mad at her for leaving the rich guy. It wasn't just something else she sensed. It was something more, something better.
But how could she know It would all turn out the way it did with her meeting Ya's father and falling in love [00:24:00] and even ending up more financially secure than she would've been with the doctor. Maybe that feeling inside that compelled her to leave the doctor was God nudging her in the right direction.
And I wanna believe that it was God telling my boyfriend and I to break up too, because that means we did the right thing, or at least that we're also heading in the right direction. But divine communication wasn't Pastor Glenn's idea of the gut at all.
Jonah Willinhganz: When people tell me that they want to follow your gut or, or that they ought to follow their gut, what they seem to be indicating is they should just go with whatever makes the most sense to 'em at the moment. They should trust their intuition.
Christina Ho: Okay? Um, so. How is intuition different than say, you know, writing out a pros and cons list?
Jonah Willinhganz: Well, you're talking about your rational brain versus your emotional brain. Um, when, for example, uh, oftentimes I find people who are engaged in a pattern of destructive relationships.
They find themselves consistently attracted to someone, uh, that winds up being very bad for them. Uh, they're following their gut into this relationship. They're, they're, they're just being drawn by their hormones or their emotions, and they're not thinking rationally. You know, the last time I, I got in a relationship with a guy who had a prison record and, you know, tattoos, you know, with five girls names down his arm, it didn't end so well. Maybe I should evaluate this rationally. So, if all your gut is a, a superficial way to live, really,
Christina Ho: so would you recommend against going with your gut?
Jonah Willinhganz: Well, it depends on the type of decision you're making. If you're trying to choose what clothes to wear for the day. Um, your gut is probably a pretty good, uh, uh, guide because it's not a, a, a, a matter with huge consequences, but when you're talking about decisions for which there are strong pros or cons that you're gonna override by your gut, I think that's generally foolish.
Now, there are situations where you can't tell the, the good from the bad. It's, it's hard to say, should I take this job in New York City, or should I go to la? Should I move to Dubai, or should [00:26:00] I settle in London? Uh, and in those situations, uh, there might be some pros or cons, but a lot of it is about your personality and what you want, and your gut's probably a good instinct there or a good guide there.
Christina Ho: Okay. So I think I see where you're going here.
Jonah Willinhganz: Mm-hmm.
Christina Ho: Your gut is actually more of an indication of what you want. Yes. Versus what might be good might be bad, but in a situation where there seems to be no clearly right answer, would you recommend to follow your gut?
Jonah Willinhganz: Yeah, I would say that is. What else will you do?
You can flip a coin, I suppose, but you might as well do what you want.
Christina Ho: But what I wanted was to be with my boyfriend. I just couldn't reconcile that desire with the growing sense of discomfort I'd had about us. The growing belief that no matter how much I wanted us to work out, it wasn't gonna happen. So, okay, maybe there was no mysterious outside force telling me what to do, but rather an inside force telling me what I already knew.
But even so, why was that desire strong enough to trump my desire to be with him and forget the fru Gogo definitions of the gut as some powerful feeling deep within the soul? I wanted to know exactly what was happening inside my body to make me feel this way. After all, the gut is a body part, isn't it?
So I went to a scientist.
Jerry Lee: The gut usually refers to anatomically, at least refers to, um, all the organs in your abdominal cavity. So that would include your stomach, um, your small intestines, your large intestine, your spleen, your pancreas, et cetera, et cetera.
Christina Ho: This is Jerry Lee, a biologist and researcher at the Cook Lab for cardiovascular research at Stanford University.
He describes the gut feeling as communication between two separate physiological systems, the digestive system and the brain.
Jerry Lee: So the gut instinct is a signal which your gut sends to your brain. [00:28:00] So the interesting part about. Um, brains and the gut is that your gut is completely on a totally different system than your brain is. It's, um, has its own system called the enteric nervous system. Your gut is controlled by the separate nervous system, which actually contains more neurons than your entire spinal cord.
Christina Ho: In effect, the gut has something akin to its own brain. It's a whole system unto itself, although it is connected to the brain and is still reliant on the brain to a great extent.
This seems to be evidence for the idea that the gut can sense something on its own and relay that message to the brain. But according to Lee, the true gut feeling that is literally feeling something in your gut and coming to a conclusion about it in your brain is actually a message from your brain to your gut.
It's called the fight or flight reaction.
Jerry Lee: Let's say I had a gut feeling about somebody. Let's say I thought somebody was dangerous or I thought somebody, you know, um, was going to inflict harm on me. That's probably my brain telling my gut to shut off its function. So there is, um, what we call a stress response, um, or a fight or flight response. And basically part of that system entails shutting off all the functions that we don't use when we're either trying to fight somebody or we're trying to fly from, or, you know, run away from somebody. So, um, what happens is that our, um, sympathetic nervous system sends a signal to our gut that tells it to not digest anymore. And so that probably contributes to that sinking feeling that we feel, um, when something is giving us anxiety. Um,
Christina Ho: so really what the gut feeling is, is a signal that goes from the brain to the gut, then back to the brain. But that begs the question, why send a message to the gut in the first place?
Jerry Lee: Our brain thinks a lot of things. You know, we, Freud has, you know, discovered the [00:30:00] unconscious mind, right? And previously it was thought that the gut, because it's such, such a metabolically powerful, uh, set of organs, that would be the area in which our brain could best get our attention. You know, because from our early human origins, uh, finding food, getting food is, you know, makes up most of our day.
So that connection, that, um, visceral connection that we feel with, with food and with eating, um, that was the best way our brain could get our intention.
Christina Ho: To recap the gut feeling is most likely a realization that comes from our subconscious and gets communicated to our enteric nervous system, which is why we feel it in the gut.
And the reason we feel it there is because our conscious mind has been trained to pay close attention to that area. It's how we know when we need to eat and how much. Basic survival skills. You can think of the gut as a kind of translation device, taking a message from our subconscious and relaying it back to our conscious minds.
But notice that the gut feeling is almost always linked to a negative discovery. That sinking feeling the sensation of our stomach turning over as our bodies prepare to fight or fly. What if the gut feeling isn't about desire? After all, what if it's about fear? Not what do I want more, but what am I more afraid of?
Because I can't answer the question, what did I want more to stay with my boyfriend or to break up with him? What I can answer though, is the question of what I was more afraid of. But first, there's something you should know. I interviewed Jerry, our biologist, in his car on top of a hill in a quiet neighborhood, a little off campus.
We used to drive into one of these neighborhoods with their vast silent houses when we needed to have serious talks. Usually after a big fight, we'd park beside a curb and sit in the dark saying nothing. [00:32:00] Him in the driver's seat, me in the passenger seat. From time to time, one of us would break the silence with a heavy sigh.
Eventually, we'd start talking, and with each explanation and apology, a bit of tension would seep outta the car, and slowly we'd let our shoulders relax into the leather seats. It was in one of these neighborhoods over a month ago that we'd stayed up until 2:00 AM breaking up. You see, Jerry is my ex-boyfriend.
Why did I choose to interview him? I guess I just wanted to talk to him. I didn't tell him this whole follow your gut thing was really about us until after the interview. He wasn't very surprised. So I asked him, did you ever have a gut feeling about us?
Jerry Lee: I have feelings about us. I don't know if I have a gut feeling about us.
Christina Ho: Okay. Well, when you had a gut feeling about us, what did you feel like the night that we broke up? Like why did you bring up that conversation?
Jerry Lee: I brought up that conversation because I thought that that was where it was leading to.
Christina Ho: So was that your gut feeling that, that it was ending and that we should break up?
Jerry Lee: Is my intuition? Yeah.
Christina Ho: So you think it was the right thing to do?
Jerry Lee: I think it was the most rational thing to do.
Christina Ho: If you had to do it all over again.
Jerry Lee: If I had to do it all over again, yeah. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't have brought it up.
Christina Ho: You wouldn't have brought it up that night? You would've just Just waited it out and just let those problems keep happening?
Jerry Lee: Yep.
Christina Ho: Why?
Jerry Lee: Because, because then we'd still be together.
Christina Ho: but he [00:34:00] didn't ignore his gut feeling and neither did I. And while I can't necessarily tell you what his gut was more afraid of, I can tell you about mine. I was so scared that if we stayed together, I would continually be finding things about him to criticize, to be frustrated about. I had this image in my head of myself as the mean nagging wife who never let her husband feel loved and appreciated.
I was scared of the person I saw myself becoming. Maybe that's what my gut was telling me to fly from. And since I couldn't run away from myself, I had to run from him.
Not that knowing any of this changes or solves anything. I still have a lot of questions about the gut, like is it possible not to follow your gut? As a friend pointed out to me recently, you either follow your gut or it follows you. That's one thing I didn't think to ask anyone. Have you ever ignored your gut?
And what happened when you did? Also, what if you follow your gut feeling and it turns out to be wrong? Will you still tell people you followed your gut, thus revealing that your gut betrayed you? Or will you simply conclude that you made a mistake? Whether or not I ever find the answers to these questions, the fact remains to the best of my ability.
I followed my gut and one month, one week and six days later, I'm still not sure if I did the right thing.
Xandra Clark: Christina Ho, graduated from Stanford in 2010.
Welcome back to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project. Next up the story of a tree that was barked up for all the right [00:36:00] reasons, not that that made a difference.
Two years ago, Katy Ashe went to Peru to work on her honors thesis studying the water in the Amazon River. But when she made friends with the locals, they gave her a new research direction, mercury.
In the town she visited, a lot of people made money from artisanal gold mining. Doing this kind of mining meant evaporating a lot of mercury into the air.
Mercury is poisonous. Exposure over a long period of time can reduce people's IQs or cause birth defects, but its effects aren't obvious. Still, there was enough evidence for officials to declare artisanal gold mining illegal. This led to a huge fight. Gold miners said the problems were exaggerated and kept mining illegally.
Everyone else insisted they were being poisoned. They needed a scientist to say who was right. Someone who would go back to the camps and tell them whether the mercury levels were really dangerous. That's where Katy came in.
She went back to Peru the summer after doing her water research, but after spending some time in the illegal gold mining camps, she realized that despite her good intentions, she was barking up the wrong tree. Sort of, the real problems were much bigger. You might say she was barking at a twig.
Katy Ashe: So I spent three months up in a national preserve to do my undergraduate honors thesis research on water quality in the Amazonian Headwaters, collecting water samples for about 12 hours every day, and I had analyzed them [00:38:00] for oxygen and pH and temperature, and then I wrote my thesis about it. But while I was down there and I'd talked to Peruvians that were from the area, they were all asking me if the river was poisoned from gold mining.
Because massive amounts like tons and tons and tons, literally tons of mercury are being poured into the rivers through gold mining processes that people are doing along the river banks. And so everybody that lives there is scared of being poisoned. But I wasn't measuring anything that would've told them if it was being contaminated from Mercury from the artisanal mining that's happening there.
I came back completely convinced that I had to study Mercury. I, in fact, promised that I would come back and study Mercury to a lot of my friends there that were very concerned about it. So I spent the whole next year that I was back in school when I was supposed to be focusing on my honors thesis, writing up the stuff about water quality on writing a new series of grant proposals to go back and study Mercury, learning all the techniques that I had to learn and just getting ready to go back and try again.
Last winter, mining became illegal in the area that I was studying. So there is a violent backlash and all sorts of government officials were trying to get the miners out and the miners were [00:40:00] protesting fairly violently. Everything kind of shut down and people were in the streets.
People that are opposed mining make the claim over megaphones in the town center, that everyone is being poisoned and that the miners are jerks for poisoning everyone and the miners go out and they shout on their megaphones about how nobody's being poisoned. They're just fine. So in the winter when I was writing the grant proposals, I was scared that I wouldn't be able to go back. Um, to study or that they wouldn't let me go back to do this research.
I've been talking to local organizations about what I wanted to do, and so people started kind of interested. So when I got down there, I walked into the Amazon Conservation Association's headquarters in Puerto De Maldonado, and the second I walked in the door and told the lady. At the desk, my name, somebody grabbed my hand and said, we've been expecting you weeks ago.
And she just dragged me down the street, um, in Puerto Maddo and she said, hurry up. We're late, we're running late. And I couldn't figure out what we're running late for.
She drags me down like streets of extremely crowded people and I'm just, I have my luggage and I don't know what's going on. I've never met this lady. And she drags me up through the town center, up through the [00:42:00] town hall, past, you know, groups of meetings and town council members and this like huge swarming building full of people. And we get up to the top story in front of this organization meeting for the women of Puerto Maldonado, like women's leaders. I didn't really have time to figure out what was going on.
She pushed me onto the stage and told me to tell everybody what my research was about. So I started to try and remember my Spanish,
tell these people about my project and how I wanted to study people and see if the people in the area were being poisoned. But right when I started talking, right when I got the courage to start explaining to these old women what my research was about. The Town Plaza fills with shouting on megaphones from miners that are protesting.
And so I am shouting at the top of my lungs trying to remember Spanish, and, and these people down in the plaza are shouting on their megaphones about how mercury has no bad effects, how they're not being poisoned, how they even swallow mercury, and they haven't had any effects.
I remember them looking at me like I was insane, uh, because no researcher had ever tried to go into the mining zones before. And the ones that had hadn't been successful [00:44:00] and they'd been shot.
I had a conversation with a couple researchers that had bullet wounds from going in or had been shot at, but not hit. At that point, I pretty much decided that I wasn't going to go into the mining camps. I didn't have a death wish. My plan was just to study on the fringes of the mining zones. Uh, just camping out at the medical centers outside of the mining zones where people would come if they had an ailment, and just ask everybody that came in for a doctor's appointment for if they wanted to participate in my study and collect a hair sample from them and have them fill out my questionnaire.
The first couple times I went, I went to a doctor's office outside the mining zones. And I'd ask everybody that came in if they wanted to participate in my study, and about a third of the people would participate and I'd collect a hair sample from them, but only about 10 people would come in a day, so hardly anybody, and I'd just sit there and wait all day long in this hot, dark doctor's office.
The doctor just took pity on me because I kept coming back and spending all day there asking everybody that came in if they wanted to participate. And I talked to him about it and he just, at some point he just said, get on my motorcycle. I said, okay. So I went out front and I got on the back of his motorcycle and he just drove me into the mining camp.[00:46:00]
So once I got on the back of the motorcycle, I'd ride through Rainforest for about seven miles, usually unwinding footpaths through just gorgeous primary rainforest with monkeys hanging from trees and, and then all of a sudden the rainforest just stopped cold and all of a sudden you're just in the desert and you can't see the trees on the other side.
It's just this huge sandy pit.
It's weird because I think the thing I noticed most was that there was no moisture in the air anymore. In the rainforest, it's so humid, you can hardly breathe, and then all of a sudden you're just getting hit by the full power of the sun, and all of a sudden that moisture that was on your skin is just gone.
So the mining zones are along the highway and they're pretty heavily guarded. And so we'd go into these little kind of gas station looking things. I usually didn't say anything. Usually the doctor did the talking for me. He would just say, this is my friend, she's doing a study on Mercury. She wants to figure out if people in the mining zones are sick or not.
And so they'd open up the gates and let us in.
Everybody lived in shacks, made out of tarps. Shandy towns that were sprawling, you couldn't see [00:48:00] the edge of them. They just went on forever and ever. In the the mining camps, it's like the wild West in the worst possible way. It's just a series of bars and discotecs, which basically just means brothels and most of the women in the communities are in the sex trade somehow.
Mm. So it was a very strange dynamic spending most of my time there. I'd go in and I'd be doing my mercury study, but the doctor would also have a line of pregnant women coming up to him asking him for help, asking if certain things were normal because the doctor goes into the mining zones and does pro bono work, helps people that are sick that usually wouldn't come to a doctor.
So it gave my study credibility and acceptability within the community.
I just felt like a very little fish in a very big pond. Like the general demographic of the people in the mining zones were people in their early twenties. So everybody was about my age and, and so I just had conversations with thousands of people, and I came to understand that none of them wanted to be there, that they'd only ended up there through a series of unfortunate events.
And it was just, it was almost comically out of place for me to be trying to help these people with information about Mercury, because frankly, mercury is the least [00:50:00] of their problems. And telling a 16-year-old girl who got tricked into becoming a prostitute that Mercury is bad for her, just doesn't, is missing the point, is missing What I really wanted to be talking to them about and it just felt silly that even the best case scenario of my study didn't get at what could actually help these people.
So then I spent the next six or seven months in a basement analyzing all of the samples that I'd taken. Um, so just melting hair samples and acid and very carefully weighing things into glass files for months and months while trying to take all my classes and get everything else that I needed to do, done.
It just felt crippling to be in a lab. Analyzing all of these samples accurately to the sixth digit when everybody's just shooting at each other and, and I'm getting news reports about how soldiers are coming in and trying to like violently remove miners. Just, it's such an extreme disconnect from what the problems actually are.
But I finished it and now I'm working on publishing the study. I mean, my research isn't [00:52:00] getting at the main, the core of the problem at all. But a lot of people are interested in the study and a lot of people wanna know and even if it doesn't help the people in the mining zones, it helps convince the people that aren't in the mining zones that mercury is a bad thing. Because even the people that are living in the city that aren't doing anything in relation to mining, they're still being poisoned with Mercury.
You know, I don't know how much more I can really do. I'm not a politician or somebody that has a lot of sway, um, but I kind of learned where I need to go and what I need to do with my life. How to get myself into a position where I'd be able to make those calls or prevent things like this from happening.
I don't know. I've just spent so many months thinking about it now. I can't not think about it. I'm constantly thinking about it. What can I do to help the people that I met this summer?
Xandra Clark: Katy Ashe graduated from Stanford in 2011.
So far you've heard stories where barking up the wrong tree was a bad thing, but our next story is about some people who did it on purpose. They barked up the wrong tree in order to help point out that somebody else was also barking up the wrong tree also because it was fun. Next up, Jane Reynolds interviews Stanford alumni [00:54:00] about the mascot that never was the Stanford robber Barons.
Jane Reynolds: In the early 1970s, Stanford's football team won two straight Rose Bowl championships. Their mascot was a cartoon Indian.
In 1972 that changed the population of native students at Stanford convinced President Dick Lyman that the Indian mascot was offensive and denigrating. So Lyman made an executive decision and changed the mascot. But change is never easy, and this one created its fair share of problems.
It didn't help that the replacement lineman chose wasn't a real winner. Stanford Indians became Stanford Cardinal, not the bird, the color. And if you've ever been to a Stanford football game against say the Bears or the Trojans, you know, it can be hard to believe in the ferocity and undying resolve of... a muted shade of maroon. But the real problem was that many, many people still loved the Indian and they didn't think that it was up to Lyman to get rid of him. So in 19 5, 3 years after the Indian had been officially and unilaterally asked by the university president, a group of students decided to take the matter into their own hands.
Bob Ottilie: My name is Bob Ottilie, class of 1977, and I was in the student senate my junior year. And, uh, I was a traditionalist and, uh, a conservative at the time. So I subsequently helped form a group called the Conservative Student Union. Then we were approached by various alumni groups that wanted to bring [00:56:00] the Indian back.
And so in, uh, my junior year, that is 1975, that nucleus of people came up with the idea that we would have a referendum on campus to see if there was still support to bring back the Indian, which we were, we felt confident there was.
Jane Reynolds: Their confidence was not unfounded. The Indian was a tradition, and tradition is a mighty force. On top of that, the American Indian movement was still pretty new. The vast majority of students didn't know anything about Native American history or culture and didn't get what the big deal was about the mascot.
Bob Ottilie: It wasn't that we, we didn't have empathy. It's we didn't understand the issue. To us it was, you took the mascot, screw you. We're gonna get it back.
Jane Reynolds: But there was another set of students that Bob and the conservatives weren't counting on.
Lee Rosenbaum: There was a lot of hostility to, um, to, to people flouting what had been a very clear decision many years earlier, uh, to abandon the Indian mascot.
Jane Reynolds: That's Lee Rosenbaum in 1975, he was one of the co-presidents of the ASSU.
The associated students of Stanford University. In other words, the student government, which at the time was dominated by self-proclaimed radicals.
Chris Hobbles Gray: Um, yeah. My name is Chris Hobbles Gray and, uh, in 1975, actually I graduated back then when I first got to Stanford, it was still the sixties, even though it was fall of 71 and there was still massive protests all over campus and there were malice were very strong. During that period, uh, the left took over the student government for like five years. We pretty much controlled the student government.
Jane Reynolds: Chris and his group, the Alliance for Radical Change were extremely effective organizers. They got the university to divest from South Africa and they understood the native student's perspective.
Chris Hobbles Gray: There were really sound arguments from my point [00:58:00] of view against using, uh, especially, uh, denigrating, um, images of Native Americans as mascots.
Jane Reynolds: When Chris and Lee and other activists in the student government got wind of this conservative referendum, they got active.
Lee Rosenbaum: As a result of the backlash of the bring back the Indian movement was, uh, a student initiated referendum to find a new mascot.
Jane Reynolds: So before the conservative student union could even hold their referendum, the student government whipped up a counter referendum. This one would ask the students to pick a totally new mascot. If the Pro Indian crowd wanted democracy, they'd get democracy.
All the student government had to do now was put together a list of viable candidates for the new mascot. And in the spirit of democracy, they organized a committee to collect suggestions. Vlae Kershner was the editor of the student newspaper at the Daily, and he was on that committee as was Bob Ottilie, who we heard from earlier.
Vlae Kershner: All I remember was a bunch of us were in a room and everybody's throwing out names and you know, we had about 20 nominations, different people threw out. And then outta those, we picked, I think it was seven to go on the ballot. And the names they came up with were
Bob Ottilie: the spikes. Gold spike, you know, the railroad
Vlae Kershner: great for a volleyball team,
Bob Ottilie: the Railroaders,
Vlae Kershner: which was kind of dumb, you know, but the Leland Stanford thing,
Bob Ottilie: the Huns,
Vlae Kershner: which was an in joke.
'cause there was an A SSU Senator named BobOttilie people called Ottilie the hun
Bob Ottilie: uh, Cardinals, but with an S, uh, which would've been a bird, I guess. And then, um.
Vlae Kershner: The trees, which is the band's [01:00:00] choice because they, they had the tree, you know, even then as sort of an anti mascot. They had just started that, you know, as sort of as a joke, really A joke on mascots,
Bob Ottilie: uh, sequoias.
Vlae Kershner: And
Jane Reynolds: last but not least,
Bob Ottilie: and robber barons.
Chris Hobbles Gray: I actually wanted ARC to support running dogs of imperialism, but the group would not support running dogs of imperialism. So they ended up supporting robber barons, which was almost as good.
Jane Reynolds: Once the nominees were decided, all that was left to do was put it to the vote. Here's Bob.
Bob Ottilie: So we had the, uh, election, which was sometime in the fall of 75, and we had two simultaneous elections, and they were conducted on the same day, same location, side by side, same hours. Everybody cooperated on that part of.
Jane Reynolds: Remember the first vote was yes or no on the Indian, and the second was, if not the Indian. Then what?
Bob Ottilie: So we have the election and the Indian referendum turns out was 69% opposed. The Indian 31% supported. So the newspaper, the Stanford Daily, played that up as a major defeat for Indians.
Jane Reynolds: This was more than a little surprising tradition, resoundingly rebuked and the surprises kept coming. The path was now clear for a new mascot, a new symbol to lead Stanford into the future. And in the second referendum, the students decided that that shining example of the excellence of the school's heritage would be,
Lee Rosenbaum: what I remember is that Robert Barons won overwhelmingly.[01:02:00]
Jane Reynolds: The robber Baron, in case you're not in on the joke, was a slap at University founder Leland Stanford, a railroad tycoon who built his riches on, among other platforms, the backs of Chinese laborers. Not exactly official mascot material, but the student body apparently couldn't resist the joke.
Bob Ottilie: Because how funny is this, you know? Like the trustees are gonna go along.
Jane Reynolds: And of course the trustees did not go with it.
Lee Rosenbaum: Whoever in the administration or or board of trustees or whoever is empowered to make such decision immediately, um, uh, declared that, uh, the Robert Barons would not be the mascot and the student referendum had no effect. Um, and that was kind of the, the end of that.
Jane Reynolds: That was Lee again, one of the student body presidents, remember. Guess which nominee he and his co-presidents endorsed? Yep. Robert Barons.
I'm curious, did you have, uh, any hopes that Robert Barons would actually be adopted as the mascot?
Lee Rosenbaum: Um, hopes, maybe. Expectations not at all.
Jane Reynolds: So wait a minute. I can see why the Alliance for Radical Change would've loved the robber baron. Sock it to the man, okay. But didn't student government really want to find a new school mascot that everyone could agree on? Why would they support a candidate that they knew would in effect totally [01:04:00] nullify the results of their own referendum?
Or maybe the plan was to really rub it in the administration space and make the robber baron an unofficial mascot charge ahead with printing robber baron t-shirts and robber baron decals and pins. But that didn't happen either.
Bob Ottilie: I don't recall any reaction to it. It was just sort of thud.
Jane Reynolds: So was it all pointless?
Lee Rosenbaum: I think the point was to make the point, and I think that was done. The tremendous irony of the, um, conditioned out, but can't take it. Hypocrisy of the conservatives who, um, refused to acknowledge that, um, the Indian as a mascot could in any way be taken as insulting or, um, derogatory. Their defense was that they were honoring the tradition of the Noble Savage. Um, as soon as we suggested, um, that the Robber Baron was a more appropriate, um, mascot for Stanford, um, they, they got in high dungeon that we were, um, uh, impugning the integrity and, uh, and slandering, uh, the honor of our founder Leland Stanford.
And, um, I just kind of felt like, you know, well, shoes on the other foot and it doesn't feel so good, does it?
Jane Reynolds: That was Lee's reason, at least. The other Robert Baron supporters probably weren't after such a nuanced political statement. But they were making one and it wasn't aimed at the administration because it wasn't the administration defending the Indian mascot.
So [01:06:00] were they just barking up the wrong tree? Yes, and they knew it. But that is exactly how satire works. You bark up the wrong tree to remind other people that they are too. Robert Barons might have been a bad mascot, but a lot of people thought the Indian was too. If one offensive caricature was fair game, the why not another? Robert Barons Indians.
Vlae Kershner: You know Robert Barons are just, people just thought of as too darn funny.
Xandra Clark: Jane Reynolds graduated from Stanford in 2010.
Remember when I promised you that you would hear more about Bigfoot? Well, it's the end of the episode, and guess what?
Rachel Hamburg: One thing I was sort of thinking about when I was asking you about barking up the wrong tree is that with something like Bigfoot, I mean, you either find him or you haven't found him yet, you know?
Mike Greene: Exactly. Exactly. But now I have.
Xandra Clark: Three years ago, Mike Green attended a Bigfoot hunting expedition in the URA National Forest in North Carolina, and he got lucky. Really lucky.
Mike Greene: That night, three o'clock in the morning, I was sitting at my picnic table with four or five other people, uh, in the darkness, just idly chatting. And, uh, I was tired and sleepy. I wanted to go to bed, but I didn't wanna be the first one to give up. And, uh, every few minutes I'd stand up and turn on the thermal and just sort of scan the woods.
And the last time I stood up and scanned the woods about [01:08:00] oh, 80 to a hundred feet away, there was one walking sideways, uh, slowly and deliberately, and I got an extremely clear picture of it for about five or six seconds. From about mid-calf upwards, and it looked just like a Bigfoot.
I mean, there it wasn't a bear, it wasn't a person in a costume. It was this great big hulking thing, walking slowly sideways.
Xandra Clark: Mike didn't get a good video that time because of technical problems. Yeah, you've heard that before. But he knew what he'd seen, and the next year he successfully caught a thermal video of his Sasquatch examining some bait. It made him a celebrity in the Bigfoot hunting world because it's the most convincing footage to come out since the 1970s.
But according to Mike, it's not going to matter after this year, after this year. Everybody is going to be convinced that Bigfoot exists.
Mike Greene: Rachel, I can tell you with absolute authority that within the next few months, perhaps it'll take a year because of legal matters, there is going to be Bigfoot news, which will go worldwide and is going to put this whole matter to rest completely conclusively and Bigfoot's existence will not be in doubt anymore, and I'm not allowed to talk about it any further.
Xandra Clark: Let's say that Mike is correct about his assertions. That means in a couple of months you and I are going to be Bigfoot believers. The world will finally be convinced.
You would think Mike would be happy about [01:10:00] being right, but strangely enough, this story does end with Mike barking up the wrong tree, just not in the way you might expect.
Mike Greene: I'm gonna be very disappointed when that evidence I told you about comes out shortly because now I, what am I gonna do with $80,000 worth of electronics? You know, all of a sudden, this hobby, which has consumed me for 20 years.
It won't be, it won't be nearly as much fun anymore. Because now that everybody else agrees that yes, indeed. Okay, you were right, Mike. They exist then. So what's the point of doing it anymore? There won't be any point for me.
Xandra Clark: So in the end, maybe just, maybe big feet exist, but it's finding them that's actually barking up the wrong tree. Because what is a true believer without a hoard of true doubters, maybe Mike would be happier to keep on looking just a little crazy, just a little like he's barking up the wrong tree. Maybe being proved right is the worst thing that could happen, at least for Mike.
But until then, Mike keep barking or howling, whatever it is you do,
Mike Greene: we will do a wood knock or a howl and once in a while you get a reply.
Rachel Hamburg: Do you, uh, do you do the howl yourself?
Mike Greene: Yeah.
Rachel Hamburg: Oh. Can we hear it?
Mike Greene: That's what it sounded like. Sure
[01:12:00]
Xandra Clark: Today's program was produced by myself, Xandra Clark, Rachel Hamburg, Charlie Mintz, Jane Reynolds, Christina Ho, and Jonah WIllinhganz. Thanks also to Katy Ashe. Mike Green, Bob Otley, Vale Kirschner, Lee Rosenbaum, and Chris Gray.
Original music for the show was written and performed by Noah Burbank, Chris Carlson, Kevin Scott Joyner, everyday People, and Michael Wilson. You also heard Music By Battles. Tom Waits, Nick Drake, Chris Smither, Rachel's and MosaNamJew. For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity on the Arts, stanford's Oral Communication Program, Stanford Continuing Studies and the Hume Writing Center. KCSU Would also like to thank the law offices of Fenwick and West for their continued underwriting support. Remember that you can find a podcast of this and every episode of the Stanford Storytelling Project on Stanford, iTunes, and on our website storytelling.stanford.edu.
For the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Xandra Clark. Thanks for listening to the show. Now go find a tree and then you know what to do.
Speaker 20: And it's a pretty long journey. It's a pretty long how, from the birth to the, from the spring to the fall when you know you're coming, you have no fear at all. So let's bring it on journey.
Let's bring it on home. And it may exceed your reach, but it can exceed your step.
You get.[01:14:00]
And it may exceed your reach, but exceed your step. You get, you get, and it's a really hard struggle. It's really hard from the shadow to the Sunday, from the night to the day, when you see the spark battle in you, you can not betray. So it's really hard struggle. It's really hard way, and it's pretty long journey.
It is pretty long haul from the brother to the, from spring to the fall,
you'll have no fear at all. So it's a pretty long journey. It's pretty long haul and it's a fairly good distance. It's a fairly good run. From the gutter to the heaven, from the earth to the song. When you are your own, the competition you can never be at. So it's a very good distance. It's very good run.
It's very good distance. It's very good run.
Good run.