In Between

In Between

Transcript for In Between (Full Episode)

Jonah Willinhganz: [00:00:00] From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Beth: Everything that he would say back to me sounded like a threat that would just totally end what I would hope to have of a future.

Natasha Ruck: Most of us live our lives in between two worlds, and we don't even know it, but I do, and that's because I have a lazy eye.

Everything we see in the world takes place in between two vantage points between our right eye and our left, and each eye sees the world a little differently. It's our brain that fuses the two images together. It has to, but my brain, it never learned. So I kinda had two sets of images of the world and couldn't fully merge them into one.

They were both there, and I could pick one or the other. The way I see it, my right eye wasn't lazy. My left eye was just a little too bossy.

So I looked at the world mostly from my left eye. This created some problems. After all, seeing from two eyes is what gives the world depth. So I lived in a somewhat flatter world than most people with objects on my right side, vanishing out of sight too quickly or worse. Appearing way too fast. As you can guess, I wasn't very good at basketball.

From age six to nine, I went to the doctor's office. I had to go to a special eye doctor to learn to see the world, right? I would go every Wednesday afternoon and I would sit in front of a giant green pair of binoculars. The doctor fed slides into it. These were simple, cartoonish scenes. One of these scenes was of a [00:02:00] window with red curtains and a wooden sill, and on the sill was a potted blue daffodil.

This picture was, in fact, two images, the red cursing window, which appeared to my left eye, and the blue potted daffodil, which appeared to my right eye. My job was to see these together as one image, to merge them into a single picture where the flower appeared on the window sill. When I looked into the machine, I could usually see both images at the same time, the empty window and the potted flower, but they did not seem to inhabit the same space.

The window was on my left. And the flowers on my right. For three years, I tried to make the flowers appear on the window sill for both the window and the flower to be in the same space.

After a while, I did learn to bring them together into one image, and then I tried to keep them there for as long as I could. My eyes would tear up from the strain as I tried to hold the picture whole. Eventually, I learned to see the world in between my right and left eye, putting the image together in my mind so I could live in the nice 3D world.

Most people live in. The world where you can tell how far the chair is from the table, and you see basketballs before they hit you in the head.

Seeing in between two perspectives is what gives the world depth, and we are not just talking about your right and left eyes. You're listening to State of the Human, the Radio Show of the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm Natasha Ruck. Today's show is all about what we learn by inhabiting the deep space in between two worlds.

You're gonna hear four stories [00:04:00] of people delving in between, between life and death, between human and animal, between who they are and who someone else wants them to be. In that space, they learn about themselves they change, they create a new deeper world.

First, the story of a boy who wanders into the woods and gets lost between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Second, you'll meet Beth, a girl whose best friend in high school had personal memories of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Beth hovered between history class and living history at home. But her friend, her great great-Aunt Mary, was caught between much more sinister forces. In our third story, it's the saga of the Stanford Co-op, Chi Theta Chi. For more than 30 years, the house was a place in between where students left Stanford at the door and figured out how to be adults on their own. But now students in the house are caught between the world of Stanford and the world they've created. Our fourth and final story is about yearning to see with more than just your human eyes, about being as close as you can to an animal and still longing to be ever closer. It's a story about a man and his horse.

It's not quis, but close. Stay with us.

You are listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project. Today's show is in between. Our first [00:06:00] story takes us to the Beyond. It's about a boy named Sam who walks into the forest with his friends and has to be carried out. He loses touch with this world and doesn't quite make it to the next.

Sam: So my friends and I started off the afternoon by going to a Christmas party at the home of one of my friend's crushes. Uh, that was extraordinarily awkward as things tend to be when you're 16. Uh, and, um, feeling the pain of, uh, social paralysis, we decided to strike off into the woods uh, smoke a little weed.

Um, so over the previous, I'd say month or so, we'd been constructing this little sanctuary out in the woods. Um, we had sort of carved chairs out of tree stumps and we had a little fire pit, so we were really excited to put the spot to use.

One of my friends had bought some weed at a party the previous weekend and stored it at my house, and my house was in between this Christmas party and our little spot. So we, we picked it up at my house, um, and, uh, ventured off into the woods. The spot was like probably three quarters of a mile into the woods, uh, behind our high school, sort of past the train tracks.

Took us probably half an hour to get back there. The sun is going down. There's sort of long shadows, and my friend packed it up and since, uh, I had started at my house, they were like, all right, Sam, you get greens, you can take the first hit.

So I sparked it, inhaled, passed it off to my left. Uh, and then almost immediately thereafter, um, I just, I, I couldn't move my limbs. I couldn't move my arms or my legs. I couldn't speak. I was just sort of totally paralyzed. Um, and I was sitting on this [00:08:00] log, um, so my body was totally frozen, and I just sort of started sliding backwards off the log.

And just fell straight back onto my back, like a, like a flipped turtle. And my friends looked over at me oddly, uh, and one came over and, and asked me, uh, if I was all right. And I just couldn't respond. I couldn't move my lips, I couldn't even blink. I, and asked me if, uh, if they needed to call an ambulance.

So the next thing I remember is, um, they, they're sort of scrambling around. I, I remember sort of flashes of my friend trying to describe where we were. Uh, so we were in the middle of the woods, so obviously they couldn't drive an ambulance like up to where we were. So they were trying to figure out what, what the best way to, to, uh, get me to a road was.

At this point, I, um, I had this sort of floating sensation, um, and I, I remember. It was as if I was sort of looking down at the whole scene from above and seeing my own just sort of limp, uh, motionless body on the ground.

I felt like I was just like sitting on a bed of like nicely warm sand. I just like sort of tingly all over. Um, but no sort of, uh, sensory communication with the actual world. Um, just sort of swimming in my own thoughts.

My first one actually was this is gonna get printed in the, uh, local paper 'cause they had like a police log. Um, and there would be a little snippet about me in there and I had thought about that. And then if people saw that I wasn't gonna be able to get babysitting jobs anymore. So I had thoughts like that for what, what I thought to be about 10, 15 minutes.

And then they just sort of recessed and I realized that [00:10:00] I was unconscious. I had no, I, no real idea what was happening in that, you know, that it was a very real possibility that I was dying. I, I just sort of saw the people in my life one at a time, my sister and my mom, my dad, uh, my grandfather, and then I, I just sort of, this, this wave of acceptance washed over me and I was just like, okay, uh, like, uh, I'm ready.

And then it sort of started snapping back, like I was like rushing back towards consciousness. Um, and I was aware that I was leaning against a tree, uh, on the side of the highway. And my friend, one of my friends, the biggest in the group, had thrown me over his shoulder and carried me out the half mile to the highway that was closest to the forest.

I could move one of my hands. And I started scraping my hand against, uh, the tree that I was leaning against. 'cause the, uh, the feeling of the bark against my hand kept me conscious.

And then I remember the ambulance pulling up, pulling onto the, to the side of the highway. The EMTs were trying to load me into the ambulance. And the, and the fire chief wasn't letting them and was yelling at me to like, tell him my name. And I, I, I obviously couldn't, I couldn't speak. Uh, and he thought I was like giving him attitude or something like that.

My friends told me later that like I, I have a sort of hard to pronounce last name, and they were saying and spelling it correctly to the cop, and the cop kept saying like, how high are you guys? Like, you can't even spell your friend's last name. Uh, and giving them a hard time and actually blocking me from going in the ambulance.

Eventually I just sort of passed out the, uh, the fire chief let it go. Um, and they loaded me into the ambulance um, and yeah, at that point it, [00:12:00] it's just sort of just blankness.

So we don't really know why it happened. I found out much later that, um, they had stored it in my pool shed, so my suspicion is that there was like chlorine in it or something like that. Um, but I, I really don't know.

Part of the experience was that I had a moment where, you know, there's the, the first moment of complete panic um, then there's this, you know, the sort of bargaining stage. And then, you know, finally there was a moment at which I felt myself slipping away and I was at peace with that, and then I woke up. But it was that, that final decision that made all and continues to make all other decisions sort of seem insignificant.

Uh, and just because, you know, I did have that very sort of distinct moment where I had to just sort of accept my own, uh, ephemerality and committed to, uh, to being no more, to sort of blinking out of existence.

Prior to that, my life had been ruled by this sort of fevered ambition. You know, I'd always been a really serious kid, um, sort of compulsive and obsessive about my work and my schoolwork um, and that wasn't the case any longer. There's people that, when they're sort of at rest, are depressed. There's people that when they're at rest are bored, and there's people that, when they're at rest are content. And obviously all people, I think, experience all three states at, you know, depending on where they are in their life.

But I think I, I have a, a much stronger tendency towards contentment than I ever did before.

I had this very distinct moment [00:14:00] where I just sort of thought that I was gonna die and then accepted it. And even though it didn't. It happened. I had to actually go through that thought process once, and I don't feel like I'll have to do it again.

Natasha Ruck: Sam Clan is a junior at Stanford. That piece was produced by Irys Clayter and Sophia Paliza. Irys and Sophia are juniors.

You are listening to State of the Human, the radio show, of the Stanford Storytelling Project. Today's show is in between stories of people who linger along the borderlines and sometimes even live there. Next, a Stanford student, whom we'll call Beth, tells the story of her best friend in high school, her great aunt who was 101 years old.

Both Beth and her great aunt Mary, lived along an improbable border, but life along the border was precarious. At the beginning of this story. Beth is about to be a freshman in high school. Her parents are travelers. Her mom is a seamstress. Her dad is a carpenter. They wander never staying anywhere long, but Beth wants a home.

So she moves into a tiny house in Minneapolis with her great Aunt Mary, who at the time is a hundred. 

Rachel Hamburg: What was your great Aunt Mary like?

Beth: She was a business lady. Before her time, she was very forward thinking, 

Rachel Hamburg: was she in good health and like good mental condition? 

Beth: She was an extremely good [00:16:00] health and mental condition when I lived with her.

She was like in her twenties during the Great Depression. So she was very much a great depression era lady, and she would refuse to pay anybody to do anything. So I would like come home from school and she would be on a ladder. Like on the roof, like cleaning the gutters and she's a hundred years old.

Living with somebody that's a hundred plus when you're going through the trials and tribulations of high school awkwardness kind of puts things in a really bizarre perspective. I would go to school and be walking down the hallway and feel all this crazy social pressure to be wearing an Abercrombie polo shirt, or it would seem like the the mean girls had this crazy control over the world.

And then I would get home and she would start talking about when her parents came over in boats from Ireland and had to sneak in through Canada.

When I would talk to her about my ninth grade US History book report about the 1920s, she would start rattling off gossip from the 1920s or I'd bring up FDR and instead of being some still shot black and white photograph, she would start going on and on about his affairs and how he was kind of a wild guy.

Looking at historic perspectives of people in this way that [00:18:00] makes them, basically her peers, makes you feel like everybody that you ever hear of in history, it has always just been people, which is really weird. Um, it's not a perspective that you get in class.

Rachel Hamburg: What were you like in high school in ninth grade? 

Beth: Uh, so when I started living with her, I was really quiet and awkward and I never said anything and I was pretty much invisible. But then it was really strange because having basically my best friend be a hundred year old lady gave me this weird, timeless confidence.

And I just started seeing the whole high school game as a joke. So I started wearing the most ridiculous outfits I could find. I wore like neon peasant skirts and huge, weird, colorful grandma sweaters. And I had these boots that were totally falling apart. I looked like some strange character.

Rachel Hamburg: How long did you live with her?

Beth: Um, a couple years. Yeah. I don't know it's, it's pretty fuzzy, everything seems like a blur.

Time. And that house was a very different quantity than it was in the hallways. Every time I think of memories in that house, it's like all part of the same hour. It was just like continuous storytelling. She would literally be telling me a story, fall asleep mid-sentence, and I'd be working on my algebra homework or something, [00:20:00] and then she'd wake up an hour and a half later and continue on the exact word where she had left off in the middle of that sentence and just keep going, as if you know, this hour and a half Catnap never really happened end,

so we were just like the odd couple, but then it gets, it gets bad. Other people come into play.

She had been an extremely successful business person. She was very outspoken, powerful lady, and she had developed a lot of areas in North Carolina. She had owned some companies. She owned a really big share of billboards, I think. So she was very, very well off. So there were a lot of relatives kind of hanging around in the background that would call every like six months and be like, oh, I love you so much.

Like, am I still on your will?

So she is in the house and my sister comes to knock on the door and she gets up to unlock the door. And while she's coming, she falls, she slips on a throw rug and she breaks her hip. And so she goes to the hospital and while she is very heavily under pain medications, an out of town relative who was an attorney in Los Angeles gets her declared mentally incompetent and uh, gets power of attorney, signed over to him and so all control over her bank accounts and where she would be going, everything became up to him.

And so he stuck her in [00:22:00] the worst nursing home. Like next to a highway overpass on the mental ward floor. And he told them because he was scared that if I had contact with her, this whole thing would kind of unravel that there is a restraining order against me without ever showing any proof. But the people that were working in this hospital really, um, didn't know what that even meant, or like they just knew that they had to legally try and keep me away.

And my great aunt Mary was more lucid and down to earth and like capable of making life decisions than I think my parents were like, like most people that I've ever met, probably like, I would've taken her advice at that point on pretty much anything. 

Rachel Hamburg: How did Mary deal with this? 

Beth: The way that she dealt with it was that she was never a person that belonged on that floor like she was there watching crazy people. She was probably the oldest person there, um, which was, must have been even weirder for watching all these mentally degraded older folks that are actually 30 years younger than her. Sometimes I'd go up there and the hospital had a run around basically there's like a center column to the building and all the rooms were around the outside.

And so there's a hallway that did a continuous circle around the edge. I'd open up the door and there would be a stampede of old folks going around in a circle in their electric chairs and in their walkers, and they'd all be chanting and everybody was kind of chanting something different. There was one particular hell raiser named Shirley who would [00:24:00] always start the riots. Uh, and so they'd be running around these circles and the most common chant, I'd say about like a third of the people would always be chanting, take us to Mexico, take us to Mexico.

And then when they'd see me, I was always on their side in their opinion, like I was the person that was there to liberate them. And so they'd all organize and come up to me and give me phone numbers of people to call to get buses to come and kidnap them and take them to Mexico.

My great Aunt Mary was always like, you should do it. It'd be funny.

I had designed projects, I'd turn all of my dresses for school dances into a really elaborate, carried out, detailed process where I'd show her all of these different fabrics and she'd help me decide what dress I was going to sew. And then when it was all finished, I'd come in and model it in the nursing home.

And so slowly the people that were working in the nursing home realized that I wasn't trying to hurt anyone. There was no practical reason for them to try and keep me out of there 'cause I would come in and walk around in my dresses and all the old people would be like, Ooh.

I always felt like I wasn't doing enough to get her out of there. You know, like I could have just kidnapped her and taken her to Mexico, or I could have tried to, you know, out laywer the lawyer. 

Were there any efforts [00:26:00] by you or your family members to outlaw the lawyer or? 

I, I tried. Um, and my parents tried, but frankly, we just, it's hard to outlaw a lawyer if you have no idea what they're saying, because everything that he would say back to me sounded like a threat that would just totally end what I would hope to have of a future. Like you'll never see the end of this case, or you don't have enough money to take me on or question what I'm doing. Or the fact that he was able to convince everyone that there's a restraining order against me when there is absolutely nothing. The whole thing was extremely crippling.

Like trying to figure out how to take on a lawyer when you're a 16-year-old girl that feels kind of powerless is really difficult.

And then I went off to college and she was still there and I wasn't there anymore to drop by and nobody really stepped in and saw her. And so I had come back when I could afford to buy a plane to get back, or I was back for the holidays. Um, and so I'd see her at most every four or six months. And when I'd get back, there'd be all sorts of issues.

Like there'd be new nurses that didn't know her, that would take everything she said as if she was like not mentally competent to make her own decisions. They would give her medications and, uh, she would ask them what they were, and they wouldn't really tell her because they think that, you know, she's just looking for something to like really argue with them about.

But she was actually just, she just wanted information, [00:28:00] so she would just refuse to take all of the pills that they would give her. So she kind of, she started falling apart and it actually happened really quick. The last time I visited her, she was sitting in the middle of the hallway and parked in her wheelchair, and I walk up behind her and then I in front of her.

And at first she completely doesn't recognize me. And then the expression on her face changes so that she knows that she's supposed to recognize me because she can recognize that I'm recognizing her. And then she gets extremely angry and just starts yelling and starts telling me that I have trapped her in there and that I have put her there and that I'm responsible for her being stuck in the nursing home, basically.

So that was pretty hard. Okay. 

Rachel Hamburg: Were you able to convince her otherwise? 

Beth: No. No. She was just, she was inconsolably, angry and not really there anymore. She had a sense of betrayal because she lives her whole life. I was like, you know, kind person. And then she gets to be a hundred years old and is treated like a child.

Her life's taken away and she's put in this hell hole. That's kind of the bane of her existence, and, and she just has to die in there. And yeah, that was the last time I saw her. 

Rachel Hamburg: What happened to her ultimately? 

Beth: Um, she refused to take any medication and she refused to eat, so she starved herself to death. She, yeah, [00:30:00] she just couldn't be there anymore.

As somebody that identified so strongly with her watching this happen to her, like her nightmare coming true, basically of all of her power being stripped away made me really angry at humanity. For a while, I was very upset that something like this could happen, that somebody would do something like this just to have a little bit more in their pockets.

But I stopped being angry because I figured that somebody that can do something like that is incapable of enjoying life in a meaningful way. Um, he's, he's missing some pretty big pieces in there. I would rather focus on making, dedicating my life to making a world that doesn't look like that, instead of trying to get revenge on the people that do make it look like that.

Rachel Hamburg: If you could like ask Great Aunt Mary anything or like have a conversation with her now, what would you say? 

Beth: I mean, I'd probably just tell her what I'd been up to lately and then she would rattle on forever with about 20 stories that she thought related. Hmm. Yeah. She was always just trying to tell me stories that she would think hopefully maybe might impart some sort of wisdom to me, and then she'd get to the end and be like, well, that was just a long story.

Maybe. Maybe there's some sort of moral there or something. Maybe you can get something out of it. I don't know. Maybe it's not pertinent to you.

Natasha Ruck: Beth graduated Stanford in 2010. This piece was produced by senior producer Rachel Hamburg, who [00:32:00] graduated in 2011.

Welcome back to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project. Today's show is in between stories of stepping over a threshold into a new world and hearing the door lock behind you. Next, it's a story about being caught between what you think is good for you and what others think is best.

It takes place at Chi Theta Chai, a co-op on Stanford campus that houses about 35 residents. Students at Chi Theta Chi told us the story about fighting for the place in between you call home. 

Grant: I mean, in a regular dorm, I'd say you're truly only responsible for your own room. Aside from that, you really have no responsibilities.

Charlie Mintz: This is Grant, a freshman living in Roblee. It's one of the biggest dorms on Stanford's campus. 

Grant: It's sort of like being at home again with your mom and dad there. If you make a mess in in the kitchen and you don't want to clean it up, someone's gonna clean it up.

After I'm done eating, if I'm in a good mood, I scrape the food off that I didn't eat into the trash can throw it on a conveyor belt and walk away. 

Charlie Mintz: We tend to think of college as a place where teenagers become adults. I thought of it that way at least, but my experience was a lot like Grant's. My first two years of college, people cooked and cleaned for me, and I was actually fine with that.

I figured I'd be cooking and cleaning the rest of my life. Why not postpone the moment of reckoning? But junior year, I followed a good friend to a co-op, and at the age of 20, I finally learned how to cook pasta.

My senior year I lived in another co-op called Columbae. I could cook pasta no problem by then, and I could fry an egg too. The house divided up chores to keep the place clean. I had to scrape the wood block that we cooked on cooking and cleaning for [00:34:00] ourselves meant we didn't need chefs and janitors. But one time our hobart broke. That's the big silver machine that sterilized his dishes, and we had to call Stanford to come and fix it. A guy in a Stanford jumpsuit came and hunkered down in front of the Hobart for about half an hour. He was average size, but symbolically he was huge. Jared agrees.

Gared Hanono: So I was hanging on Columbae yesterday with one of my good friends who's a kitchen manager at Columbae.

This is Gared Hanono. He's a senior and a house manager at Chi Theta Chi. Um, and there was a university maintenance man in Colum Bay walking around with tools, making fixes around the building. Here That never happens, 

Charlie Mintz: at Chi theta Chi. When something breaks, the residents fix it. If it's something too big to fix on their own, they'll call someone a contractor, but they don't go through Stanford.

Gared Hanono: I put in a sill and a doorway. One of the great things about the house is that like the room really becomes yours. So like this is my place. Like when I was little, my dad would never let me paint my room because like he didn't trust whether I was good enough. So this is the first room I ever painted.

Charlie Mintz: It's not that unusual in the world beyond college for people to paint their rooms, to change their light fixtures. But at Stanford, this is like unheard of. 

Elif: Nobody has ever told me you can't do that. Certainly I have to ask permission like.

Charlie Mintz: This is Elif.

Elif: No, there are, there are. 

Charlie Mintz: She's a senior and another house manager at Kai Theta.

Kai. 

Elif: Like nobody said, like you're a kid. Who, how do you get to be a homeowner and like put solar on your roof?

Adam: I have an incredible investment personally in this house because I built our deck. Adam Pearson is a senior living in Kai Theta kai now on the first floor. Tell me about that. I've always been horrible with my hands, working with my hands. I, I came into Stanford thinking I was gonna be a mechanical engineer, but I decided that there was no way I could.

Now if you walk on the first floor deck, [00:36:00] you're walking on my blood, sweat and tears, literally blood. No, I, I don't think I actually cut myself, but definitely tears, probably wood chips in my eyes.

There's a culture of ownership and a culture of collectivity and independence that this house has, that all of us buy into here. It really just makes you fall in love with this place and have a, a tied identity to Chi theta Chi, unlike I feel any other house on campus does.

Nathaniel Nelson: I love, it's so hard to express this intrinsic, 

Charlie Mintz: Nathaniel Nelson lived in Theta Cai until 2011. 

Nathaniel Nelson: When you own the place that you living in, you have, I mean, you have, you have a, you have pride in it, right? You are the one who's taking care of it. You're responsible for it, and it's yours. And, and that's a huge part of the Chi theta Chi, um, identity is, is taking ownership of our place, 

Charlie Mintz: this sense of independence of ownership, it's not just a notion the residents have. It's a concrete, physical thing. Residents pay dues to the alumni board who use that money to pay Stanford and to take care of improvements. Only one other house at Stanford has this deal, and it's a fraternity, not a co-op so it's not quite the same thing because they don't really do house maintenance the way Chi Theta chi does.

The lease gives Chi theta Chi independence, so it can exist as a world apart from Stanford until Stanford changes its mind. And this winter it did. 

Abel Allison: It's become routine that the alumni board has a meeting with the 

Charlie Mintz: university at least once a year. This is Abel Allison. He lived in Theta Kai until he graduated in 2010.

Abel became president of Chi theta Chi's alumni Board about nine months ago. The [00:38:00] alumni board talks to the university for the house. It's in charge of keeping things smooth and friendly and running operations. For a while, things had been a little rough and Abel was eager to smooth things out again. So in early February, he met with officials from the university to talk about the house.

Abel Allison: I, I distinctly recall, shaking hands with someone and him introducing himself to me as Greg Boardman.

Charlie Mintz: Greg Boardman is Vice Provost of Student Affairs for the whole university.

Abel Allison: And you know, I kind of thought to myself right away, I was like, that's odd. He would not typically be in such a meeting. A red flag went off in my head, you know, my first just like, thought was like, just stay calm.

Roger Whitney, basically the director of housing, kind of launched into essentially kind of explaining that they, they didn't intend to renew the lease. 

Elif: And so we're like, what? Like we were just really taken aback, not at all expecting this.

Charlie Mintz: There it was, the university was taking back the lease, so all that independence the lease had given them that was gonna be over. Unless Chi theta Chi could do something about it, 

Adam: I, I have never felt more responsible over anything in my whole entire life.

Deborah Golder: I, I think the university, um, programmatically is very enthusiastic about Chi Theta Chi, but the other end of the continuum of freedom is responsibility. 

Charlie Mintz: This is Deborah Golder, she's Dean of Residential Education at Stanford. She said Chi theta Chi had a number of fire and health code violations [00:40:00] that contributed to Stanford terminating the lease.

Deborah Golder: Part of the, the role that we have as university administrators is to think of worst case scenarios and to anticipate worst case scenarios. And Roger and I, both in our careers have been at universities where there have been fires, where there have been student deaths, where the unthinkable has occurred.

And we have an expression we wanna put our head on the pillow at night knowing that we've done everything we can to make sure students are as safe as possible. And then, you know, the winds are freedom blow.

Charlie Mintz: Inside the house, about 20 smoke detectors had been disconnected. There were also some health code violations in the kitchen and there was some infrastructure stuff to concern over whether the house could handle the renovations a century old historic building needed. Those were the official concerns.

But people around the house, like Nathaniel Nelson, had the impression that losing the lease was about more than just fire in health code violations.

T: We had this one kid named patches. He was a great guy and um, he had a, a thing for fireworks. 

Charlie Mintz: This is a guy we'll call t, he lived in Chi theta Chi a couple years ago 

T: and he was just setting him off out in the parking lot, closer to Mayfield and, um. Yeah, one of them went in the house in someone's window when they were asleep in their room. And then he had another one, like lit off, went off in his hand and he fractured his thumb because it was like in a a tube. It was, and that was like a regular night that, that wasn't 4th of July.

Charlie Mintz: T told us this story at an annual Theta Kai event, known as the Great American Challenge. [00:42:00] It's played in teams of four. Each team has to drink a case of beer, eat an entire pizza, consume one other substance we won't mention, and then finish a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle. So 

T: the first team to do that wins and it's, that's about it.

Charlie Mintz: Wait, what tonight was the, what T told us showed a complicated side of independence. Residents at Chi Theta Chi love being on their own. They can learn how to build a deck. How to paint a room, how to live cooperatively and harmoniously with 34 other people. But independence also means they're free. Free if they wish, to take risks.

T: There's a kid that was in the band named Bollocks. He and many other kids in the house had a healthy interest in lighting things on fire and throwing it off the roof. And so they had a watermelon that they were gonna do this to and they covered it in, um, lighter fluid and some, so two people were holding it, third person was lit it, and then they were both, the two people holding it were like, ah, crap, I'm holding a burning, like fireball, a watermelon on fire.

And so they threw it off the roof like they originally intended, but because they were like startled by, I guess lighter fluid lighting on fire, they didn't throw it very well. And it went straight into the back windshield of one of the manager's cars. So it was a three story watermelon fireball through your window.

Nathaniel Nelson: The idea of exploration, yeah. Can it go wrong? I, I don't think so. I mean, yes, we've thrown things off the roof. Um, and that's, there's, I mean, there's no denying the fact People have seen it, it's been documented. Um, but yeah, I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with that. 

Charlie Mintz: This is not an opinion held by most people at Chi theta Chi, [00:44:00] this year's alumni board in the house's management. People like Abel and Jared and Elif say they absolutely do not condone the behavior t is describing in this stuff, I should emphasize took place a few years ago. Current residents say the culture is different now. No more firecrackers, no more flaming watermelons. So the World T knew that's not the Kai Theta Cai of today.

T: You know, I had my own rough spot in living at Theta Cai in terms of being in school and being healthy and making smart decisions. Um, I mean, it was just, yeah, substance stuff. Um, and it resulted in a fair amount of financial problems between me and my family. 

Charlie Mintz: Things kind of got out of control for T at Chi theta Chi. He had to drop out of school for a little bit because of these problems he got himself into at the house. In a weird way though. Even though being in the house sort of pushed him into this spiral, t thinks it was good for him. 

T: Not that like you want to have it, but like this is the, like the safest but most realistic place to like test out how good you are at being self-sufficient and like healthy and happy. Like you have to do it all for yourself at that point. Whereas before you're at home and afterwards it, it counts after you graduate and you're doing just the whatever, like you're no longer in the kind of like the bubble you have. Like, oh, you fucked up at Stanford, but it's okay. Like you're not there yet.

Charlie Mintz: T says Chi Theta Chi made him confront a truth about himself. He wasn't ready to be on his own, but he had to really be on his own to learn that. In a way that was only possible at Chi theta Chi. 

T: It was bad. A lot of it was very bad, and the memory of it is now strong enough to keep me from having it happen again hopefully. Yeah, and that wouldn't have happened if I had been somewhere else, or it, it may have happened, but it wouldn't have had the same like [00:46:00] absolutely like majestic, disastrous, spiraling downfall because of the freedom here. 

Charlie Mintz: T'S story isn't the one Chi Theta Chi residents want associated with their house, and they point out that he was an exception and that year was an exception.

The university, I should say, didn't explicitly cite anything like what T talked about as a reason for terminating the lease. Its language was pressing life safety concerns. Stanford administrator, Deborah Golder says that she gets it, independence is valuable to the residents. Ideally, Chi theta Chi would stay that way, but she and the university would rather have it be safe.

When they first terminated the lease though, it wasn't clear exactly what that would mean. Would residents still be able to paint murals? Would they still be able to do their own fixes? Would they still feel independent? What's at stake? Like what? What do you care if the university ends your lease? It's not like it's gonna stop being a co-op.

Abel Allison: The, the university like essentially re Reed, the Department of Residential Education is working really hard to convince everyone that they want to preserve as much of the house culture as possible. I fundamentally believe that what makes the house culture unique is directly based on the autonomy and independence of the house.

They'll mention things such as like, you know, we'll talk about letting y'all paint the walls and we're talk, we'll talk about like letting y'all do projects, but there's very little, like, I have to go on to believe that the house will remain in any way like it is today.

I mean, I guess the fear comes from not being able to control what's gonna happen in the future and understanding that there's definitely a risk of the house becoming [00:48:00] watered down, diluted, boring.

Adam: Stanford is very much about its image, and that's, I mean, that's part of why this whole thing with the house is happening. The reason that all the students that are in the house or in the house is because they were dissatisfied with what Stanford housing had to offer or what the mainstream campus culture was like. So, um, yeah, Chi Theta Chi is really important. It's, it's, it's a whole existence. It's rooted in this fighting of what the typical Stanford experience is.

Charlie Mintz: Stanford had threatened to end Chi Theta Chi's Lease before Abel said usually it was an ultimatum, take care of this or else. And so the alumni board did and they got to keep their lease. Now, many wonder why Stanford chose this moment to really go through with the threat. It just doesn't seem fair or proper.

So when Stanford made its decision, Chi Theta Chi residents said no. A bunch of alumni pledged to stop donating until Stanford changed its mind. And inside the house, residents began organizing a challenge, but first they needed to come to terms with what had happened.

Adam: We received an email from Autumn, who's the ra?

Charlie Mintz: We are back in February now room. We need to talk. It's the night after the university first announced it was revoking the alumni board's lease. 

Adam: And I just remember feeling like so shellshock, so tiny, so like insignificant, so upset. I was so upset that I was shaking, sitting there. Um. A few of the girls on on staff started crying.

Nathaniel Nelson: I mean, this was a slap in the face that made us all realize that things you love can be taken away very quickly. Um, and that [00:50:00] if you really love it, you really have to fight for it. Um, and so we are.

Elif: Then Bear and Abel, who are the main kind of like representatives of the Ellum board, um, met with Autumn and, and me and we kind of pow out and were like, geez, we need to like mobilize some serious, like community effort. And we sent out an email to the, to the alums that night and got like a sweep of responses and it just like became this huge, huge thing.

Charlie Mintz: Chi Theta Chi residents and alumni put together teams, work groups. They mobilized. 

Elif: Like we have a PR list, like we have like a PR team, Google group, we have like, um, all of the alumni board. We have like students in the house right now doing like awesome, um, displays of like why our independence matters to us. Basically, it's just been like this really, really awesome, really inspirational like community effort to preserve. Yeah. Um, preserve our house and our, 

Charlie Mintz: it's late February now. Abel, the alumni board president is hosting a conference call to discuss the future of Chi theta Chi.

Wait, how many, who, who do we have here?

We've got Abel Ilia. So, Gary Bear, 

Abel Allison: Stanford gave us notice about a week and a half ago that they intend to, uh, terminate the house's lease effective immediately. Um, and so my life for the last week and a half has basically been spending almost like every free minute of time. Leading kind of the group, the our alumni board, the house managers, and anyone else who is willing to help, which is a large number of people, 

Charlie Mintz: Abel and the others who wanted to get the university to slow down.

So they put together a 200 page document showing how they corrected the [00:52:00] mistakes, the smoke detectors, the health code violations. 

Abel Allison: I stayed down at Stanford the whole weekend, this past weekend, um, digging through files, documenting things about the work we've done in the last year and looking at communications over the last five years.

Charlie Mintz: The documents cited, all the work residents had done the more than a million and a half dollars they'd invested doing seismic retrofitting and replacing the floorboards and all kinds of other stuff. Just to be able to really show that like, hey, like we're not doing a bad job.

Chi theta Chi has always been special to the people who live there. But the threat of losing it is teaching Abel and the other residents to understand just why it's special and how much they risk losing if Stanford takes it back. 

Abel Allison: I fundamentally believe that I wouldn't be the person I am today if I had, like, if I had lived in a different place, I, I know this I'd like, deep down in my heart, 

Charlie Mintz: Chi theta Chi residents are caught between who they believe they are and who they fear Stanford wants them to be.

Abel Allison: This happened on my watch as I took my term as president and like when it happened, I, it, it, it's, it's not even, it wasn't even a question like, like, could I, could I, can I do this? It's just like I have to do this. And it's not just for me, it's for the hundreds of people that this house has touched and for the hundreds of people that it can touch in the future.

What do you fight for? This is what we're fighting for and there's not much else I actually really fight for in this life.

Charlie Mintz: Ultimately, the [00:54:00] university decided that Theta Chi would lose its lease, but it offered a way to get it back. If the house behaves itself, does everything the university wants, then in two years Theta Chi will get its lease back. That means if all goes well, sophomores living there next year will be seniors. When the house regains independence. 

Adam: Certainly losing the house, it sort of crystallizes what, what is special about the house. It makes you start articulating it and so you become aware of it. And so everything you do in the house becomes deliberative, purposeful. Um, tonight I had my last cook. Uh, I made, uh, mole poblano. It's like a Mexican dish. We made nopales, which is like cactus and you making like the salsa salad and Mexican wedding cookies.

Charlie Mintz: What were you thinking about as you were making that meal?

Adam: Um, at the end I was sort of stirring the last dish and I looked up and I was just sort of like, whoa. Like this is it. This is the last one. It's time to move on. It's kinda scary.

Natasha Ruck: Thanks to all the Chi Theta Chi residents who contributed to that story, and thanks to the university as well, especially Debra Golder and Roger Whitney.[00:56:00] 

Welcome back to State of the Human. I'm your host. Natasha Ruck, and today we're talking about being in between. In our last story, student Logan hen helps us understand a very different kind of, in Betweenness, he bridged the space between himself and his horse. Next, he tells the story of creating a play about that experience.

Joshua Hoyt: Logan Hehn is a rare breed. Around the time most babies are learning to walk, Logan was learning to ride. So maybe it's not too surprising that this is the person brave enough to bring the equine world and the theater world together. In his first play, philipo, Logan deals with the inarguably difficult and intensely rewarding experience of oneness with the horse.

Logan Hehn: I'm Logan Hehn. I'm a senior at Stanford. Uh, I'm majoring in drama, minoring in creative writing. I grew up on my family's cattle ranch, the an langu ranch in Leith, North Dakota. Tiny town of, well now 38 people. I left and the mayor died. And my family has been there almost a hundred years on those 2000 acres. Uh, all of us kids, my brother and my younger sisters, uh, knew growing up and learned to ride on. I can definitely believe that my father would tie us into the saddle, give the horse a slap on the rear and say, go get the cow.

The purpose in riding growing up on the ranch was go get the cow. Go find the cow. Go check the fence. 

Joshua Hoyt: Logan grew up riding the ranch horses, but decided ultimately to get one of his own. In September, 2006, Logan attended the Kiss Livestock auction in Mandan, North Dakota, finding his horse number 52. He named her Maleficent and they grew up working the ranch together, but their communication [00:58:00] wasn't perfect.

Logan Hehn: Um, I remember one time we, so the river flooded us out incredibly and redug the channel basically and recarved the banks and so everything was brand new. And we went to cross somewhere and she said, don't go. And I was like. Well, there's really no reason it's shallow here. It's perfectly fine. She's actually like, let me know physically. No, don't go. I don't want to go. She planted her feet. She would shift her weight side to side from the right shoulder to the left shoulder. She didn't want to move forward. She wanted to move back. Her body was rocked backwards that she could try and get away from the bank and she would turn her head around to look at me and be like, do we really have to do this?

Do you really? No, I don't want to go here. Do you really want me to go here? Because I can tell you that something is not going to happen well, it is not going to end well. And I was like, well, I'm human and I'm smart and I know what I'm doing and the river looks fine. So go. And she went, okay.

And the way it wound up was she wound up up to her knees in mud and I wound up falling off of her when that happened.

And then when we got to the other bank on the other side, we made it through all of that, thank goodness, and no harm, no foul. But she looked back at me and said, stupid, why'd you make me go? I went, I'm sorry.

Joshua Hoyt: That was before Logan came to Stanford. When he did arrive, he began training at the Red Barn so he could continue working with horses. 

Logan Hehn: They took a look at me and said, you know your way around a horse. You know how to ride, but you don't know what you're doing, do you? And I went, well, what? 

Joshua Hoyt: The equestrian team taught Logan to think more carefully about his partnership with his horse, to work on his equine communication skills, to listen.

It completely changes. Experience riding even back home on the ranch. 

Logan Hehn: Uh, so I went home between my freshman and sophomore summer and got on my horse and just started. I was like, this is a completely different way of riding and she was a little like, wait, you're kind of listening to me now and you're talking to me and you're doing all these other [01:00:00] things differently, but a little the same, but.

The epiphany kind of came riding more miles and miles in the saddle over those 2000 acres that we own, that there's a whole other dimension of being to this animal. 

Joshua Hoyt: That was the beginning of two bodies becoming one. Now, Logan began working together with the horse to achieve a common end, be it navigating a river or getting the cow.

Logan Hehn: I had spent 18 years running over, crying, bleeding, sweating over those 2000 acres. She'd only spent say four, but she was out there every day running it, working it. She had her feet into that ground. I mean, I come in at the end of the day, slip my shoes off, walk on the linoleum floor and crawl into my bed.

Her bed is the ground, it's the grass. It's that land. She knows it better than I do. I was like, I'm never going back because this just feels completely different. And we still were able to do cattle work. We still were able to go get the cow, but it just felt so much better.

Joshua Hoyt: Back at Stanford after summer break on the ranch, Logan continued both his equestrian work and work in the drama department. As he spent more time in both worlds, parallels between the equestrian world and the theater world began to reveal themselves.

Logan Hehn: Managing a horse show here is basically the same thing as stage managing a theatrical production. Yeah, I mean like you have horses instead of actors and you have, you have actors in this case too, really, the riders. It's amazing how much like theater this is. I mean, to ride. We get into costume, the horse gets into costume.

You have the ritual of practice. 

Joshua Hoyt: So for his senior project, Logan planned to stage Equus by Peter Schaffer. The play Equus follows, Alan, A young man brimming with passion for horses. In E Equus, Alan blinds six horses with a hoof pick, perhaps trying to destroy the passion he feels [01:02:00] for horses so he can experience that passion for a woman.

Logan Hehn: The original script has actors in chestnut, velvet tracksuits. The general rule in theater is don't put animals and children on stage. 

Joshua Hoyt: But for Logan Peter Schaffer's script felt a little counterfeit. After all, humans in track suits are still humans. In Equus Humans don't ever enter into dialogue with real horses.

Then there was the matter of an assignment from Leslie and Helen's production and performance class students had 30 minutes to write a two minute performance based around the through line or plumb line of the script. Logan sat everyone in a circle and weaved in and out of them speaking lines from Equus.

Logan Hehn: Then Helen, I believe it was said, do all that again without moving and then Leslie said, just do this gesture. 

Joshua Hoyt: They cut the lines away one at a time until there was just the through line. Then they told him, now don't say the through line. 

Logan Hehn: It was this bare minimum gesture of me basically pawing my foot like a horse, and it felt a lot more genuine than just spitting out Peter Schaffer's written lines.

Joshua Hoyt: Logan decided to create his own play with real horses and stage it at the barn. He called it Phillipos, meaning Love of horses. The production weaves elements from Equus with real stories, dance and poetry, written by the cast, Tory Green, Richard Newton and Dan Priestley. The personal stories center around the connection between horse and rider.

Performer: Good communication consists of patience and empathy. A stroke on the neck can reassure a horse that it is safe, a twitch of an ear. 

Logan Hehn: The revelation that that can happen with so simple of a set of actions with a being that isn't human, that we can't fully communicate with, that you can't say [01:04:00] words to and know they'll understand. Can't really do that with humans either but there's, there's no communication link. There are no, I mean, there's a communication link, but there's no direct way of saying, I love you. I can say that to my horse all day. I don't know if he'll understand it or she'll understand it, but, but when you know, when you know that of someone and someone knows that of you, then you don't need those words.

And that's the sort of passion and desire and sensuality that we're dealing with, with this show 

Joshua Hoyt: shows oneness between horse and human, and talks about communicating without words. It can be sensual, maybe even sexual. 

Logan Hehn: One of my first things my advisor asked me was, do you want to deal with sexuality? And I said, there's really probably no way that we can avoid it.

We're gonna have to drag it in because it's just so close. Um, I mean, two bodies become one. It's, it's the spiritual essence of of, I mean of sex, I guess you could call it that. We're not dealing with sexuality as in the horse, as object of sexual desire. It's, it's the desire of that feeling of oneness.

Joshua Hoyt: There's something about Phillipos that feels kind of dangerous. It feels new. Logan is intimate with both people and horses as his audience. He's bringing us up to speed about what that feels like we're entering that place. 

Performer: I couldn't feel her at all. I looked right at her and I couldn't do it. I wanted the bone off his neck, his sweaty, hide, not flesh, hide horse, hide his his side, waiting for my ham. The streaks on his belly, his [01:06:00] legs, I couldn't even kiss her.

Joshua Hoyt: You'd think having horses on stage would be distracting or at least challenging. But the horses, the ones with the right personalities, they love it. 

Logan Hehn: Given their backgrounds, example, Stanley, a master who've had show careers, they know what it is to perform and they, they enjoy having an audience. They enjoy being watched.

Uh, their public needs them, so to speak. It's kind of the a, there's a little bit of diva too in those horses. Patrick, he loves an audience. He knows that people are watching him and he says, yes, I'm going to prance and act all fancy. I'm going to hold my body perfectly. I am going to give you a show and he does, and it's beautiful and it's gorgeous.

And if you're linked in with him, uh, as his rider, then he sticks with you and he shows you too. You're speaking with the horse on a level, I mean that physical level, you can eliminate your actual physical voice and ride without it. You can basically think in action, think walk to lope and it happens 

Performer: last time. Now collect him, prepare him. Prepare yourself and ask for the lope. Yes. 

Logan Hehn: Once you trust yourself to know what your body is doing, that muscle memory is there and you trust your horse a bit to let them tell you what to do. We especially don't want to say, I don't know when you let yourself do that, the horse is okay with that.

You don't know, okay, I might or I might not. Let's try this. Let's try it together and we'll see what happens. And like once you start doing that, that's when you start that dialogue back and forth. You work on it constantly, but when when you get on the horse, you automatically go into that happy place. At least for me, this is, it's, I love that I, I want to be there and so [01:08:00] I don't resist it.

And it feels dangerous when you allow yourself to let go and to release some control to admit to yourself that even though you can't understand something, that you enjoy it, you enjoy yourself, that you like, what happens, what the result of whatever action you're going through is there's a danger in letting that consume you. 

Performer: With one particular horse. He embraces the animal digs, its sweaty brow into his cheek, and they stand in the dark for an hour, like a necking couple. Mm-hmm. I have all nonsensical things. I keep thinking about the horse, not the boy. I keep seeing this huge head kissing him with its changed mouth, nudging through the metal, some desire absolutely irrelevant to filling its belly or propagating its own kind.

What's that desire? Could that be? Not to stay a horse any longer, not to remain rained up forever in those particular genetic strings?

Is it possible at certain moments that we cannot imagine that a horse can add up its sufferings? I know one thing for sure is this, a horse's head is finally unknowable to me. 

Joshua Hoyt: By dropping his voice, getting out of his head, and entering into a physical dialogue with the horse, Logan gives himself over to the world of the horse.

Both human and horse search for each other during the ride and in doing so, create a kind of overlapping space. A new world created when two beings momentarily become one. 

Logan Hehn: There is this just [01:10:00] acknowledgement and want to be that just be yourself and be bare, and be open and be you and be gorgeous, which very few of us feel we can do.

And they're willing to share. They really are. That's where the connection, I think, um, comes from is they know you're searching for something and they know that they can help you find it, and they like to share that they really do.

Singer: You wired me awake and hit me with the hand of broken nails.

You tied my lead and pull my chain to watch my blood begin to boil.

Natasha Ruck: Logan Hehn is a senior at Stanford. Joshua Hoyt narrated the piece.

Thanks for joining us today on State of the Human. Today's program was produced by Charlie Mintz, Rachel Hamburg and Jonah Willinhganz. With help from Christy Hartman, Xander Clark, Austin Meyer, and me Natasha Ruck. Thanks to our contributors today, Beth Logan, Sam, and the residents and former residents of Chi Theta Chi, Abel. Eif. Jared, Adam and Bayer. Thanks to Deborah for representing the Stanford administration for their generous financial support. We'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergrad Education, the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, the Center for Teaching and Learning, and Bruce Braden. Remember that you can find [01:12:00] this on every exciting episode of State of the Human on Stanford's iTune, and on our website storytelling.stanford.edu.

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Natasha Ruck.