Crisis
Crisis
Transcript for Crisis (Full Episode)
Corey: [00:00:00] From Stanford University and KCSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.
Meg Smaker: I either had to make a decision to change something or, um, well, I, yeah, I just had to make a decision to change.
Jackson Roach: Okay, so I'm just gonna pull it up here. Play missile command.
Rosie La Puma: This is my friend Jackson.
Jackson Roach: I'm Jackson Roach,
Rosie La Puma: and recently he decided to show me this infamous video game from the 1980s.
What was it called again?
Jackson Roach: It's called missile Command. And when it was actually out, you would go into an arcade and like there would be a big box like cabinet with cool drawings on the side and stuff.
Whoa. Get ready?
Yeah. This is like the fancy one. We don't want this. We don't want this. Um,
I think this one will probably be good. Yeah. Okay.
Rosie La Puma: The screen is mostly black and it's yellow at the bottom. The yellow part has these six little blue shapes on it. Jackson tells me that the yellow is the horizon, and those six little blue shapes are cities.
Jackson Roach: And um, there are like these green streaks that come in from the top of the screen, like pixel streaks, the nuclear missiles that are coming in. And what you do is like, you have these bases full of missiles and you shoot your own missiles and like try to save these six cities from like a nuclear onslaught.
Rosie La Puma: These cities are supposed to represent real cities like San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco. Um,
Jackson Roach: play one stop. So you can see like there's the cities. Ah,
Rosie La Puma: but here's the thing. You can't actually save all of the cities. As you keep playing, the game gets harder, and in order to not lose all your cities, you have to begin sacrificing the [00:02:00] ones that are hardest to protect.
Once they're gone, you can protect the other cities for a little bit longer.
Jackson Roach: You're making these really split second moral decisions about like. Should I save like millions of people in this city or should I let them die so that I can save all the rest of these people? And it's so painful when you fail.
Rosie La Puma: Even when it's just a game?
Jackson Roach: Yeah. But it doesn't, it doesn't feel like a game to me. I, I know it's like goofy graphics and crazy sound effects and stuff, but I feel like people are really depending on me, like I'm in a real state of crisis.
Rosie La Puma: On the one hand, it's like this cheesy, fun video game. And then on the other hand, Jackson said the guy who invented the game had nightmares about it For years.
Jackson Roach: He would be sitting in his house and these like pixel streaks would be coming in from the regal sky, and suddenly one would hit the ground and he'd have like 45 seconds before the wave of the blast would like hit him. And then he would wake up.
Rosie La Puma: If you were placed in this situation. And it was for real, do you think you would still use the same strategy?
Jackson Roach: I don't know if I could ever succeed in that situation. I'd probably just break down and everybody would die immediately.
Rosie La Puma: I think we can all be grateful. This particular crisis is contained, it's all digital. Our fun little worst case scenario game.
Oh, the end, the screen tells me.
Jackson Roach: It's like so apocalyptic.
Rosie La Puma: Hi everybody, i'm Rosie La Puma, and you are listening to State of the Human, the radio show, of the Stanford Storytelling Project. In each episode, we bring you an hour of stories that explore some element of the human experience. Our show today, Crisis.
On our show today, there will be no more ICBMs raining down from a digital sky. Instead, you'll hear [00:04:00] four scenarios where someone experiences intense difficulty or danger. And they only have a few options to choose from. In our first story, a Stanford film student saves herself from the worst crisis of her life by taking up an unusual hobby.
In our second story, a whole species is in crisis and an unlikely hero leaves behind his old life to save them. In our third story, an earthquake hit San Francisco and someone saves the city, or sacrifices it, depending on how you look at it. And finally, our fourth story is about the human body and what it sacrifices when it gets really, really cold. In each story, there is no emergency procedure in place, no obvious out. There's just a person who has to make a choice, and we're asking how do they decide what to save and what to sacrifice. It's all in the next hour on State of the Human.
In our first story, our managing editor, Rachel Hamburg interviews Stanford documentary film student, Meg Smaker as a traveler, Meg Smaker, has been held up by Afghani militia and been kidnapped by Colombian paramilitary groups. As a documentarian, she's made films about meth use, prostitution and pirates, so she's no stranger to disaster.
But Meg says the darkest point in her life came when she returned to the United States after six years in the Middle East, and the way she saw out of it was not something she ever would've predicted. It involved a special pair of gloves.
Rachel Hamburg: In late 2009, Meg's maker decided to leave the Middle East where she had spent most of the last six [00:06:00] years training firefighters to go finish school in the United States. When she left her partner of six years, asked her to marry him.
Meg Smaker: It was a watershed moment. This situation right now, for the rest of my life.
Am I okay with that? And I, and I wasn't. So, I, I left.
Rachel Hamburg: Meg's family had been close with her partner and they thought that she shouldn't have left him. So she and her family didn't talk for a while. Meg was already facing some intense culture shock. She had left an all male conservative environment in the Middle East to go to a women's college in Oakland, California, but losing her partner and then losing her family meant that she had basically no support system during the transition.
And then during her first months back home, three different friends passed away once the semester ended, and she didn't have school to distract her. She says she pretty much lost it.
Meg Smaker: I was probably in the darkest place that I've ever been in my life, by far. My best friend had just come to visit me and she expressed worry and she never worries about me, and she just said that she'd never seen me like that before. And when she left and it was just quiet in my apartment, I just couldn't stop crying. I went to the bathroom and turned the light and looked at myself in the mirror, and I was just kind of repulsed by what I saw. I was probably 70 pounds heavier than I'm right now. Physically, I felt disgusted with myself and.
Not wanting to, to continue the way that I was. It was the next day when I woke up and I realized that I either had to make a decision to change something or, um, well, I, yeah, I just had to make a decision to change.
Rachel Hamburg: Make. Meg says she has no idea why she made this particular decision to get outta the crisis she was in,
Meg Smaker: but I went online and I looked for gyms, and I found this website for [00:08:00] fighting, for mixed martial arts.
I got the address and I went there and it was midday and I didn't know at the time, but at this particular fight club, but during midday, mostly it's just fighters, like competitive fighters. I felt like I was like at a prison during like the hour break they get where all these really big buff dudes go and work out like really hard and really intensely.
The guy at the front desk, Jason, he's like, can I help you? I was like, I don't know. I told him that I was kind of interested in it and I, and I was expecting him to just laugh because I knew like, take one, look at me. I was like, this six foot tall, obese blonde girl saying, I wanna learn how to fight, but he was like, okay, put some gloves on you, see what you got.
He did an hour long training session with me, and I remember we went slow in the beginning and then he was like, okay, I want you to use your full force. After he taught me some of the technique, and I remember the first time that I hit the pad with everything I had. The first time I hit the pad was, I think the first time that I was present in my life for a long time.
The one thing was like to hit it harder. I mean, I was hooked. I was just hooked. It was like my drug. It was my drug, and it was such a good drug. I would totally do lines of that all day long.
Rachel Hamburg: Meg started going to the gym every single day, two hours a day, three hours a day.
Meg Smaker: The more time I spent there, the more people I met and the more people I got to know. And actually I developed a really strong support system there and, and basically like a family.
Rachel Hamburg: She started training with one of the gym's best coaches, Rob. Rob was one of the most well-respected coaches in boxing. He had trained championship fighters and cornered countless people on HBO.
Meg Smaker: After a while, like I guess I was getting better and the coach kind [00:10:00] of pulled me aside and asked if I would ever wanted to like compete. So I was just like, yeah. You know, I mean, I've done sports my whole life, but I, I thought I was too old. I mean, I was like 29 or 30 at the time. We went from like me training to learn how to fight to me fight, train, which is completely different. Like all you do is eat, sleep and fighting.
Rachel Hamburg: And then one day Rob came up to her and he asked,
Meg Smaker: did I feel ready?
And I was like, yeah, ready as I'm gonna be. He's like, well, I've scheduled a fight for you. I went online, I found who the girl was. She was like this like all American rugby player, like six foot two, like CrossFit, Olympians, some crazy bull. And I was like, okay, I'm getting my ass handed to me. So I trained even harder.
I think I was training like five hours a day, six days a week, got my like head in it. And then literally like two days before the fight, she pulled out.
Rachel Hamburg: Rob scheduled her for another fight, but it got canceled too. Meg didn't realize it then, but amateur fights get canceled all the time, and as the summer wound on it kept happening. Meg felt like...
Meg Smaker: I needed to fight and I needed to see like what my body. Was capable of.
Rachel Hamburg: She was going to be beginning a master's program at Stanford in the fall, and there was no way that she could be training four or five hours a day while she was in school.
So if she was going to fight, she had to do it now.
Meg Smaker: And there was this tournament,
Rachel Hamburg: Meg had heard Rob talking to some other fighters about something called the Desert Showdown.
Meg Smaker: It's the second largest amateur boxing tournament in the United States. And if I entered in the tournament, I was guaranteed a fight.
Rob was like, no, this is ridiculous. You're not going into the, the, the united, like America's second largest amateur boxing tournament. That's just ridiculous. 'cause [00:12:00] your first fight, you're, you're supposed to have no fights and they're supposed to have no fights. But if you enter yourself in a tournament, it's like luck of the draw.
I could have no fights and the person I'm fighting could have 15 and they would kill me, but I didn't care.
Rachel Hamburg: Can I ask you like, why ?
Meg Smaker: I, I mean, you're a girl, so I'm gonna try to explain it in like, like a different way, but, or, but like, I know, but like, so it'd be like if you went to the salon and you got like ready for like hours and then you went home and like you like got this great gown or prom dress or whatever, and like literally spent like five hours getting ready and then just like went next door to you know, go babysit, like go to prom, like get in limo and go to prom. You got a dress on. I had my gloves on. I need to go in the ring. So that's the only, I don't know, I, I explaining fighting to people don't fight's really hard to do. That was the first thing and the second thing was I had been in a place for a very long time where I kind of lost myself.
And I always was a very outgoing person and I always was a very like, strong, confident person. And being in a relationship that wasn't very healthy in the end, and, um, being overweight and all that kind of stuff, I lost that confidence and I lost that kind of feeling of who I was. And I think it was literally a, a metaphor, but also a physical kind of fight to get that back.
Rachel Hamburg: Meg kept trying to convince her coach and as it got closer to the tournament, Rob realized that Meg didn't understand the amount of danger that she was putting herself into. So to try and keep her safe, he decided to make a point of what might happen if she fought in the tournament.
Meg Smaker: He's like, you think you're ready?
You think you're ready? He is like, all right, and he goes to this, this guy mercado's his name. He is like, all right, Mercado. He is like lighter up. So I got in the ring and, and so he starts like tapping me at first, and then Rob starts yelling. I'm like, you know, harder, [00:14:00] harder, harder. And this guy's like two 30 and he's been fighting for years and he was hesitant at first, but you know, Rob, like, you don't, you don't question Rob.
And so Rob keeps harder, harder, harder and just, he hit me, MEO hit me, and everything went white and I couldn't see anything for like, about, about a second, and I dropped my hands and that's when he did the overhand right to my face and just snapped my nose and yeah. And that was it. Rob stopped it and he just said, this is what, this is what you're, you'd get into like, this is what you should expect.
Like, don't question me again. I know what I'm doing.
Rachel Hamburg: So Meg had just had her nose broken by a 230 pound boxer, so she decided to take the next natural step. She secretly entered herself into the tournament.
Meg Smaker: It wasn't about winning, it was about fighting, which are two different things. I secretly entered myself into the tournament unattached.
And then I told him about a week or two later. He was not happy. He was not happy at all. He dropped me as a fighter and stopped training me.
Rachel Hamburg: By this point, Meg was in a difficult position. Learning to fight had been the way that she first stepped out of the crisis that she was in, but to feel like herself again.
She thought she needed to go all the way. She had to compete, and it turned out that doing this meant sacrificing her relationship with her coach and also some of the family that she had at the gym. A few of the fighters were so angry with her that they wouldn't speak to her, but with or without them, she still needed to get ready for the fight.
So she turned to Jason, the guy who had originally taught her how to box.
Meg Smaker: I was talking to him, I just started crying. I'm like, like I can train as hard as I want, but I need someone to like take me to that next level before this fight. And Jason was like, okay, I'll train you 'cause like I can see you're hungry. And he is like, and that's all I ever [00:16:00] want from my fighters. I want them to want it. And you obviously want it if you're willing to piss off Rob. So he trained me in secret. We trained before and after the gym opened, and on Sundays when it was closed. But he also said that he couldn't go down to, um, the fight with me.
He couldn't go to the tournament with me because he was a trainer at the gym, and so he couldn't take me on as a fighter. So I would, once I left the gym, I'd be on my own.
Rachel Hamburg: The date of the fight was approaching. Meg drove down to Palm Springs.
Meg Smaker: My weight class as a female is, there's not a lot, so there was like three fighters, including myself.
And so it's single elimination, and I got down there and I was supposed to fight the next day, but it turns out that I got the buy. So if there's three fighters and it's single elimination, then those two fight and whoever wins I fight in the finals. So I went directly to the finals.
Rachel Hamburg: So to recap, Meg had never fought it all before, and here she was enrolled in the second largest amateur tournament in the United States, and she was fighting the final round.
Meg Smaker: I was scared, like my grandfather lives in Palm Springs and I was staying at his house and I told him like, I didn't want him to come to the fight. I'm gonna get the crap beat outta me. You're not gonna wanna see that. He's like, yeah, I don't wanna see that. And I actually called a friend of mine. I was saying like, what did I get myself into?
Like seeing some of the fights I, I might literally get killed in the ring. And he's like, just find your corner and be comfortable with your corner.
Rachel Hamburg: A corner, by the way, is usually your coach. They're supposed to know you well enough to recognize when you're seriously hurt. When the fight needs to stop, they're the ones that throw in the towel.
And while we're at it, let's explain the other rules of amateur boxing. Basically, whoever has the most points wins. You'd get points for hitting the other person on the body or the head, but you can also win by knocking your opponent unconscious. You have three, two minute rounds to either hit the other person more or to hit them [00:18:00] in the face so hard that they pass out.
Six minutes might seem like a really short amount of time compared to other sports. But boxing is also way more intense than other sports.
Meg Smaker: The way I can describe it is every single muscle in your body, from your pinky toe to your tongue is fully engaged and flexed and going as hard as it can. Do that for like 30 seconds.
Now, add on top of that adrenaline and people yelling at you and screaming at you and lights and you can't breathe. And on top of that, someone's hitting you in the face.
And so I went to go find myself a corner and I went around to all the different coaches and talked to them. And then I remember the first one I went to this big guy, a big, big, big, uh, Hispanic guy. And I told 'em, I was like, you know, I'm, I'm looking for someone to corner a corner for, for a fight. And he was like, who do you need a corner for?
Like what fighter? And I was like, well, well, me and he, and he looks me up and down like these elevator gaze like this. And he goes, baby, I'll corner the shit outta you. And I was like, all right, you, not you then. And then I finally found this one guy, Jeff, who was like, he had a fight club up here and he, he actually knew of my coach and knew what kind of trainer he was. He was like, oh, I, I'll, I'll, uh, I'll corner you. 'cause Rob has a reputation for making pretty tough fighters.
Rachel Hamburg: Finally, it was time to fight.
Meg Smaker: They were giving me a pep talk. I have no idea what they were saying though. I really wasn't listening. I was just thinking like crap I just hope I don't like really up my face 'cause I'm still single and I gotta work with this. They wrapped my hands, loved me up, put me in the, in the blue corner. She was in the red corner and um, [00:20:00] the bell went.
Up until that point, I'd never fought a woman before. The first time she actually landed a clean hit. It was like a 10th of the force that Mercado had hit me that one day. And so all my like, fear it went out the door. I'm like, ah, that's all you got? Or I, I got this.
There's five fights going on at once. So they're all right next to each other. So there's bells going off all the time. So like halfway through the first round, I heard a bell. I thought it was the end of the round, like what mean? That was fast. So I stopped fighting and the, the ref comes up to me, he's like, what are you doing?
I was like, what's the bell? So that's the other ring fight. And like, oh, that first round I just went all out like you're supposed to pace yourself. And I did not pace myself. They did a standing eight count, which means you hit your opponent and they were obviously stunned. And so they stopped the fight for eight seconds and which means that if you basically won that round, and um, I went in the corner and they're giving me a pep talk and the guy, my corner said, you have to knock her out.
You can't go to points because if you go to points you're gonna lose. It's like, what the fuck? Like, I just like, I just dominated the first shot. He is like, he's like, that's not how it works down here. So I was like really scared. And I also wasn't, I wasn't throwing a lot of punches. I was just throwing a lot of hard punches so she could have actually been winning on the, on the point system.
So the second round, halfway through the second round, it hit me. I hit a wall like I was gassed, like I had just unloaded so much on the first round that I was just spent halfway through the second round. And I remember my corner yelling at me like we had a code word for when they wanted me to ramp it up.
And they thought it was funny that I went, that was gonna Stanford so that our code work was Stanford there. So they were yelling Stanford at me, you know, you only have 30 seconds left. And then I just had nothing like my arms were just done my, I was [00:22:00] barely breathing. I couldn't, like, I couldn't see straight.
And um, I started getting sloppy and I dropped my hands and she landed a really good shot. It kind of stunned me 'cause I wasn't expecting it. And then all of a sudden the round was over and I was like, crap. That might have gone to her. I go to the corner, the corner guy was just like, what's, what's going on?
Da, da, da. And I was like, I think I'm gassed. And he's like, like, once you're gassed, you're gassed. You can't get it back like you're spent. And so he's just like, okay, then you, you literally need to knock her out in the first 10 seconds. You need to set it up and land your overhand, right. He's like, 'cause your overhand right. It is like a gift from God. Just set it up.
I went in there and I couldn't, I couldn't set it up, and then he was yelling at me from the corner, like, you need to take care of her. He's just like, take care of her. You need to do it now. And so I just started going to town and doing a lot of cre, like really, really hard body shots, and it caused her to drop her hands to protect her, her abs.
As soon as she did that. Like with all the power I had left, I just dropped an overhand right, right to her nose. She stumbled back and she started to wobble and go to her knees, and then they called the fight and it was a technical knockout in round three, and I won.
And then they gave me this really gaudy, awful looking belt that looked like Donald Trump and J-Lo designed it. It was horrible, but yeah. And I didn't, it didn't hit me until I got outta the ring and my grandfather, who's this like old crusty, old school miserable bastard, like comes walking up and he is like snot running down his like cheeks and like tears, like just pouring out of his eyes and like literally bawling like a little girl. And he was like, I'm so proud of you. And so I was like, oh shit. I won. Like I [00:24:00] did win. Like someone's there to cheer me on.
Rachel Hamburg: Meg drove the 10 hours back to Oakland triumphant, imagining her reception at the gym.
Meg Smaker: And normally when a fighter comes back from a fight, they announce to the like to the whole like gym that they've won and they put the belt up and stuff and that didn't happen. I walked in and Jason, he, I mean, cry. He doesn't cry. Jason does not cry. He doesn't have tear ducts, but like, he looked like he was misty and he was like, really, you know, really proud. And, but I wanted to give the belt to Rob because, you know, he had, I was nothing before him. I couldn't fight at all before I met Rob, and so I went over to him and he kind of just walked the other way.
And didn't say anything to me and we didn't talk for a long time. But then I think Rob had a chance to cool down and then I had a long heart to heart with him and told him that I didn't go down there and fight to win. I went down there to the fight 'cause they had no other choice and I would've loved for him to be in the corner of my first fight.
Like that's all I wanted. I wanted a familiar face. I wanted him there. But I wanted to fight more.
I think in the end, I don't know if he forgave me, but he started talking to me again, which is a, a step in the right direction. But, but yeah. And then Jason, a couple weeks later to my belt, put it up in the gym. So yeah, it was, it was never the same. It was never the same at the gym. It, it used to be the sanctuary for me.
Rachel Hamburg: Meg says that ultimately going down to Palm Springs was not a decision. She didn't choose to leave Rob behind. She loved the gym and the family that she had there, but sometimes [00:26:00] to save yourself you need to sacrifice even the things that make you feel safe. You have to leave everything behind. You have to get in the ring.
Meg Smaker: It wasn't stepping out of the ring with a belt, it was just stepping into the ring to fight. So yeah.
Rosie La Puma: Meg's Maker is a graduate student in documentary film at Stanford. That story was produced by Rachel Hamburg with help from Pat Maced Miller, who does sound designed for the radio show Snap Judgment. The story featured original music by Bosch Purvis. You are listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.
This week's episode is about when huge forces hit our lives and our options run down to one. Our second story is about an entire species in crisis, and it might just be that its best hope for survival is a hunter. Laura Cussen has a story.
Laura Cussen: This is a story of an animal that lives in the forests of the Dominican Republic. The ground here is like petrified Swiss cheese and underground tunnels stretch in every direction. Our animal sleeps in that underworld. In English, it's called the solenodon. In Spanish, solenodonte.
Nicolás Corona: The first time that I caught a solenodon, I remember that we were fishing in the river at night.
Laura Cussen: That's Nicola, a hunter with a thick mustache who lives near the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. When this story happened, he was nine years old,
Nicolás Corona: and then when the solenodon was next to the road, I remember my uncle saying, A red mouse. A red mouse! And we didn't know that [00:28:00] it was a lenon. He hid it in the neck and my uncle brought it home. He said, last night I killed a red mouse.
Laura Cussen: The Solenodon is the size of a rabbit, and I'll be honest with you, it looks pretty strange. It has tiny ears and a crazy long nose. Nicolás didn't know what it was when his uncle killed it.
This is actually a common story. In Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, estimates say that one in 10 people have ever heard of the animal. Some people called the animal exotic, and it is a pretty interesting animal. Even though it's a mammal, it can inject venom through its teeth enough to kill a dog. But it's not exotic,
it's been around on the island of Espanola much longer than any human, and that's precisely why local biologist, Pedro Martinez says,
Pedro Martinez: Es un animal extraordinara
Laura Cussen: not just the venom that makes it extraordinary.
Pedro Martinez: People compare it to a big rat or mongers. But really it looks more like a shrew only bigger, and it actually is related to shrew.
Laura Cussen: As pedo points out the solenodon's closest cousins are the shrew, the mole, and the hedgehog. And if we compare the Solenodon's DNA with the DNA of a shrew, we can find out how different they are at a molecular level. Then we can figure out how long it's been since they were the same species. When scientists performance calculation, they were stupefied.
It is lineage split off from shrew 76 million years ago. At that point, the strawberry blonde beast was roaming the earth with the dinosaurs, and then when a miles wide space rock flew into the earth and killed nearly everything on the planet, the salenodon lived to tell the tale, it might've looked a little different, but based on its genome, it was there.
This is why they're an evolutionary biologist, fantasy.
Alexis Mikylo: It's a survivor.
Laura Cussen: Alexis Mikylo, Stanford graduate student.
Alexis Mikylo: It survived the KT impact.
Laura Cussen: That's the one that took out the dinosaurs.
Alexis Mikylo: It survived humans arriving in several different waves. Up until now, [00:30:00] it's survived invasive predators like cats and dogs. Before humans arrived, there are over 20 species of land mammals, and now there are only two.
Laura Cussen: Science is only beginning to find out how such an awkward creature can be the ultimate survivor. It's hard to get data on an animal that's so hard to find, but sometimes animals find scientists rather than the other way around.
To meet our scientist we are in a mountain town in the Dominican Republic, far from the resort beaches. Cesar is a Peruvian biologist who has become the town wildlife healer. One afternoon, two years ago, a park ranger knocked on his door.
César Avril: It was afternoon and I was already home watching a bit of TV and relaxing.
They knocked on my door and there was one of the park rangers and he tells me. I've brought you a little present.
Laura Cussen: It's usually a bird with broken bones or an animal lost in a hurricane. This time the animal looks different. It's bigger.
César Avril: I said, well, what could it be? And I saw the Ranger was holding a sack, right? A sack that's bulging a little bit at the bottom. Well, let's take a look at my present. The first thing I imagined was it's a big snake. Then I opened the sack and took a look.
Laura Cussen: César was looking for something scaly and smooth,
César Avril: so I suddenly saw a mass of hair in there. Curled up.
I looked at it carefully and it was a solenodon. That was the first time I had seen a solenodon so close up, and for me, it's beautiful. It's a rarity of nature.
Laura Cussen: He was delighted with his new roommate, but he had a lot of work to do. The animal was wounded.
César Avril: It was incredible because the first night I didn't know what to feed him. I said, so now what do I feed my muchacho so that he can get better?
Laura Cussen: That day, César got some cans full of worms.
César Avril: The hour of the experiment had come, so we give him a few worms and he launched himself at them right there, and he ate them up with such appetite. [00:32:00] You would hear he and he'd eat one. He'd eat another like spaghetti. He was so excited that I said, wow, that must be really good.
I was tempted to eat worms. With that, I tell you everything. It was incredible. It was almost as though we started to coexist.
Laura Cussen: Even though the solenodon was venomous and César was a little afraid at first, they were really bonding. Soon enough, the solenodon's bruised leg was better.
César Avril: The third night he was ready, so that day we decided to set him free again. We went to a biological preserve and well, we let him go so that he could go back to his house.
Laura Cussen: Of course César's hope is that the solenodon will go back to its den and continue life as usual. Even though it's right next to protected areas, the town of Puerto Escondido isn't a walk in the park for a solenodon to survive in.
César Avril: There's an avocado plantation here and they sometimes have cat traps there, and unfortunately, Solenodon fall in those little traps.
Laura Cussen: Why cat traps are necessary in an avocado plantation is Beyond me, but this is a small example of a very big problem for the Solenodon.
The ultimate survivor is endangered. Humans, their dogs and habitat encroachment pose a significant threat to the solenodon. People burn native forests to make coal even in national parks. I talk to people who have solenodons living on their property, and they didn't know what it was. The reason it isn't part of Dominican culture is that the indigenous Taino people are long gone.
Many Taino died in wars against the Spaniards or from disease. Some integrated into the richly multiracial population of the Dominican Republic, but their environmental folklore has all but disappeared. So stories about the solenodon aren't being passed down. Part of why it's going extinct might be because its story is going extinct. Nobody talks about it, but it doesn't have to be this way. Let's return to the story of Nicolas, the man with a mustache whose uncle killed a lenon [00:34:00] when he was a boy
Nicolás Corona: I was hunting inside the protected area hunting doves. I had nine or 10 in my hand that I had already hunted.
Laura Cussen: Nicola was 16 deep in a Dominican forest.
Nicolás Corona: Suddenly a group of people appeared and I was surprised.
Laura Cussen: Nicolas didn't expect much empathy. He was in a protected area,
Nicolás Corona: so they started asking me questions and I answered them.
Laura Cussen: He was scared. One of the men, a cameraman approached him.
Nicolás Corona: He said to me, you shoot a bird and take away her life, and she's dead forever.
I shoot her with my camera and she stays alive.
Laura Cussen: The cameraman's words changed something in Nicolás.
Nicolás Corona: I was very moved by that moment. They gave me some binoculars, and so the next day I went out to study birds and I was moved. I realized that by observing birds and studying them, I contributed more than by destroying them. I never hunted endemic birds again. From one day to the next, I immediately stopped hunting.
Laura Cussen: Nicolás didn't realize that his hunting was putting other species at risk, and when he learned this, he changed his ways. He gave up his life as a hunter becoming a conservationist instead. The discovery of the plight of the native species changed how he defined himself.
Nicolás Corona: After I found out that out of 25 mammals that were here in Hispañola, we now only have two. I said, no, we have to protect them. And I realized the importance of conservation and so far I don't regret dedicating my life to conservation.
Laura Cussen: Les never went to college, but his early years in the forest and the decades he has spent with conservation scientists in the field have taught him more than a degree ever could about the solenodon's behavior.
Nicolás Corona: I don't think anybody in the Dominican Republic has the vast practical knowledge I have about the solenodon. I know how they live, how they move, where you can see one, how much they can walk at night, how many square meters they can walk. I know when they are lactating, when I catch them. When a female is [00:36:00] pregnant, I naturally know which insects, the Lenon eats and all these things.
I have a vast knowledge of that species.
Laura Cussen: So I asked him whether he knew the answer to the solenodon's deepest secret. Why has the Solenodon been able to survive for so much time? He thinks he has an idea. In February, 2013, the Solenodon did something very strange.
Nicolás Corona: We went out one time to look for a solenodon. We looked for them, and then when we walked into the forest at eight that night, I didn't see a single active Solenodon. They weren't active in a place where you can usually see 20 or 30 solenodon, and we didn't see a single one. I looked until two in the morning and I couldn't find them, and so I started asking myself, why aren't they here?
Laura Cussen: The solenodon refused to come out of their caves even though they needed to forge for food. Nicolás was frustrated for all his experience. He couldn't even explain what was going on.
Nicolás Corona: The next night, I went earlier and I started looking, looking, looking for them, and they didn't come outta their caves. They didn't come out. That was the day the meteorites fell In Russia.
Laura Cussen: Nico is talking about meteorites half a world away. The Chelyabinsk meteor fell in Russia this past February. Nobody saw it coming, and several hundred people were injured.
It was a stunning sight on our TV screens. A fireball brighter than the sun exploding in midair and shattering windows.
Nicolás Corona: I think the solenodon survived because it kept itself in caves that are seven to eight meters deep. So for example, a climatological phenomenon wouldn't affect it, and they last a very long time without leaving their caves.
They're scared to come out.
Laura Cussen: What Nicola saw might explain why the solenodon outlived the dinosaurs in the KT asteroid impact. When a meteor falls from the sky, they hide in their tunnels far below the surface.
Nicolás Corona: So when the farmer cuts down trees and burns them, the solenodon doesn't die because it is in a very deep tunnel. And I think that one of the reasons the solenodon lived so many years and is still living is because [00:38:00] of its habitat. The house it lives in and the way it lives.
Laura Cussen: Going underground is a lenon strategy for surviving. But you can only stay underground for so long. Eventually they have to come up and eat. And if above ground, the forest is gone. So is the solenodon food. By deforesting people are unknowingly pushing the animal towards extinction. But what if that's because they don't know this animal exists in the first place?
Nicola is providing scientists with observations that they can test to understand the survivor, but to truly help the solenodon survive into the future. He's going further than that.
Nicolás Corona: It seems that they know when a natural phenomenon is about to happen.
Laura Cussen: He thinks the solenodons knew the meteorites were coming ahead of time when no scientist did, and he's spreading his story.
Everybody in the border town of Les knows Les. They respect him, and they know how much he has to say about his crazy animals. He answers people's questions, and now when kids ask why the solenodon is still around if it lived with the dinosaurs, he tells his story.
But his answer to this solenodon's continued survival isn't really an answer. It's a question, how can the solenodon know about natural events ahead of time? This is outside the realm of science, but what is interesting is that Nicolas has managed to turn the solenodon into a mythological creature. Now, being part of folklore isn't always a positive thing for a species conservation.
Some animals are associated so much with myth that they're hunted for use in traditional medicine. I wonder how the survival stories Nicolás weaves are going to impact the solenodon. My hope is that the stories are going to help the Solenodon form part of local culture again. Now, Nicola is a solenodon's public relations officer, and he is spreading the word in a digestible way.
He's turning the Solenodon into a quirky anecdote to tell local farmers over a steaming cup of Kalia swinging in their rocking chairs at mid-afternoon. This story might just allow Dominicans in the world to take notice of the animal at last. To thirst for more information about it, [00:40:00] and ultimately to help it amble on its ancient unwavering path to survival.
It's long nose digging for grub and its tiny ears listening for the smallest sign of danger.
Rosie La Puma: That story was produced by Laura Cussen, who was a junior at Stanford. Laura received help from Natasha Ruck and Will Rogers. The music you're listening to was produced by Nicholas Corona, who appeared in the story. Laura's work in the Dominican Republic was funded by a braden grant from the Stanford Storytelling Project.
To learn more about our grant program, head to storytelling dot stanford. DO edu.
Welcome back to State of the Human. Our episode . Week is Crisis and we've seen crisis experienced by a person and a species. In our next story, an entire city is in crisis. In 1906, a huge earthquake rocked San Francisco Homes collapsed. 3000 people died. Stanford graduate, Leslie Chang says There was one man who thought he knew what to do.
His name was General Frederick Funston, and his solution required dynamite.
Leslie Chang: On the morning of the big 1906 earthquake, San Francisco was under some questionable leadership. The military man who was supposed to be in charge was General Adolphus Washington Greeley, but he was out of town, so the city was left in the hands of his second in command. General Frederick Funston.
Simon Winchester: An Army, brigadier General Frederick Funston, who was a pretty unsavory character by all accounts.
I mean, he had been in the Philippines beforehand and had done some pretty unpleasant things and got a very bad [00:42:00] reputation.
Leslie Chang: That's the voice of author Simon Winchester, who wrote a crack in the edge of the world about the 1906 earthquake. People really didn't find general funston trustworthy. He actually tried to run for president,
Simon Winchester: but had failed because he was such a obvious sort of loud mouthed bully.
Leslie Chang: The earthquake struck at five in the morning, so like most of the City General Funston was asleep when it happened.
Simon Winchester: Well, he lived on Nob Hill and he of course felt the vibrations and realized something awful had happened when he got outta bed or thrown outta bed and went out into the street and saw fires developing all over the city.
Leslie Chang: If you're not familiar with the story of the 1906 earthquake, this is a twist that you might not expect. It wasn't actually the earthquake that caused most of the damage in San Francisco. It was the fires that happened afterwards. The day of the earthquake was also unusually windy, which made things even worse.
Here's Julian Lozos, a seismologist.
Julian Lozos: So you had this artificial canyon of buildings basically on Market Street in particular. Then you had like fire, tornadoes, rampaging, down market street
Leslie Chang: fire tornadoes!
Julian Lozos: And they realized quite quickly that they were kind of screwed in terms of water because the ground lit with action, it just broke all the water lines.
Leslie Chang: The earthquake damaged water pipes all across the city, so there was no water available. General Funston had to find a way to stop these fires from spreading and burning down all of San Francisco. And he came up with what sounds like a bad idea.
Julian Lozos: At that point though, they were just desperate because, you know, their city had been knocked over by an earthquake of forces they had never experienced. And everything was on fire and there was no water, and at this point it was either we try the bad idea or we try the nothing.
Leslie Chang: And the bad idea that General Funston had was dynamite. He was going to fight fire with fire.
Simon Winchester: It's exactly the same method that's used by the us you know, forest service in combating fires in the national parks today, you, you set artificial [00:44:00] fires to create fire breaks so that the big fire comes up against a barrier of stuff that it cannot burn, and so it stops and its tracks.
Leslie Chang: It's standard to do this in National Parks now, but in the case of the 1906 fires, this method was more extreme because what had to be burned down was buildings. General Funston was planning on blowing up people's homes with dynamite. It was an emergency. The fires were escalating quickly, and Funston had to work with what he had.
And what he had was barrels of dynamite. His troops blasted a corridor of city blocks across San Francisco. The fires couldn't jump the brake and General Funston, this sketchy military guy ended up saving San Francisco.
Simon Winchester: So I would say to Funston, we owe the fact that the fire spread was as limited as it was.
I mean, it was a disastrous fire, as we all know, but it would've been a heck of a lot worse had not, uh, Funston, really Funston was the main man blowing up buildings and stopping the fire from spreading.
Leslie Chang: That's one version of the story anyway. Other people who have studied the 1906 earthquake and fires aren't so sure that Funston's plan worked.
Julian Lozo says that the idea of creating a fire break made sense,
Julian Lozos: but it really didn't work, um, because everything was just so hot and the wind was so strong that it, it just hopped right over their fire brakes. It just didn't work. Um, and really the things that stopped it, it did rain. Really, it was nature that made things so bad and nature that stopped it with the rain.
Leslie Chang: So what's the truth here? Maybe General Funston helped save the city and reduced the amount of fire damage, but maybe he also just destroyed a bunch of property and didn't help at all. In the crisis of the 1906 earthquake, though no water in the city, fire spreading everywhere, general Funston had to make a choice.
His choice involved sacrificing homes and properties to try to stop the fire, even though people might disagree on whether it was the right choice or whether or not it worked. We have to live with the choice Funston made. And in spite of his un savoriness as a person and his terrible reputation, it has to be said, [00:46:00] general Frederick Funston was a man who was unafraid to make a decision and charge forward into a disaster determined to save San Francisco.
Simon Winchester: He was very assertive, as I mentioned, he was a bully and he, he took their prisoners and faced with this problem, he essentially said, if there is a fire, and I'm going to do whatever's necessary to curb and to use a British military expression, create bags of smoke and charge right up the middle.
Rosie La Puma: The original version of this piece was produced by Leslie Chang, miles Trayer and Mike Osborne as part of the 24 hour radio race from kcr W'S Independent Producer Project. Those producers also produce another podcast at Stanford called Generation Anthropocene. We'll have a link to their work on our website. Check 'em out!
In our fourth story, Stanford freshman, Kate Nelson interviews Corey. He's a recent Stanford graduate. He's also a human disaster testing ground as a teaching assistant for an unusual course on how the human body reacts to extreme environments. He has flown upside down in a fighter jet, gone to the top of Pike's Peak and jumped out of an airplane.
And according to Corey, watching the human body save some things and sacrifice others, can teach you a lot about how to respond to other kinds of crises.
Kate Nelson: This is Corey.
Corey: Yeah, my name is Corey.
Kate Nelson: There are two different cos to introduce.
Corey: The first side is student by day and by night my superhero disguise is his Guinea pig.
Kate Nelson: After graduation, Corey teamed up with a Stanford physiology professor to create a new course about what happens to the human body in extreme environments.
As the research assistant, Corey subjected his body to different environmental stressors. By [00:48:00] studying how his body reacted, they were able to help teach students about the science of human physiology in a more interesting way.
Corey: We had, uh, six different. Environmental stressors, so got in ice cold tubs, insulated suits, working out in really hot jobs, jumped out of airplanes. We went up in some fighter jets, exposed to different pressures, suits, to simulate what it's like in the body to be 80, 85 years old.
Kate Nelson: First up was the cold tub.
Corey: The cold experi experiment is a really fun one to talk about because it was our first and we had no idea what we were doing. We went over to the thermal regulation lab and. They have a big metal box, half the size of a classroom. You can make it whatever temperature, whatever humidity you want.
Cranked it down, made it pretty darn cold, and uh, there was an ice bucket there waiting for me. I put in an esophageal probe, which is a big, long tube that goes into your nostril and down the back of your throat to measure your core body temperature. And we had my heart rate. Uh, you know, the protocol starts with standing in, in the cold room and then getting into the tub, which I remember being quite unpleasant.
It was really cold. We had this really cool, um, thermoregulation camera. Where you can see hot spots and cold spots on the image, so you could see my body getting progressively colder and colder. There's something really interesting that happens when you get cold, when your body does to protect itself.
And it's called peripheral vasoconstriction, but what it means is basically the vessels, you know, on the arms and legs of the body clamp up to send blood back to the core of the body so that warm blood can stay warm and protect what's most important, which is sort of your internal organs in your brain and sort of sacrificing your limbs, letting those get cold, but making sure that the important [00:50:00] stuff stays warm.
I remember just being like, whoa. The human body is just preprogrammed to adapt to a lot of these different environmental stressors where you're not even aware of what's happening, but your body and the systems within it, they have these nuanced strategies to deal with, with something like cold.
Kate Nelson: Your body knows how to react to make it through the cold. It sacrifices your fingers and toes. And retreats inside to protect your core. Corey says that this isn't the only time that this has happened to him.
Corey: This was sort of like I come how unpackaged, you can't hear me 'cause you can only hear my voice, but I'm a male, mid twenties, consider myself to be, you know, athletic and sort of more on the masculine side. Having had an experience that I would call heartbreak is something that is harder for somebody like me, or hard for anyone to really to share and to talk about.
So I met Austin when I was a, a freshman and very much was excited about this girl. Crazy about her. So cool, she still is really cool. And we started dating in the end of my freshman year and dated throughout, uh, almost our whole college experience. But the, but you know, the bottom line is, is that we arrived at a point, you know, at the end of college where we were sort of looking off into post-college, more serious life and considering what that meant.
And if we wanted to continue investing in our relationship with each other, we were both outside of the dorm. Where I lived, there was this big oak tree. I still love to climb trees. And so anyway, we were, uh, just go around and climbed up in the tree and we were talking and, um, ended up [00:52:00] having that big important conversation where, uh, we ended up arriving at the point where we're looking at each other and that I hear from her that, uh, this is not something that, that she wants to do anymore and that it's over.
You know, I remember we, you know, we ended up making our way back to my dorm room and parting ways isn't something I remember vividly about that moment was holding onto her to her hands and not wanting it to end, not wanting her to go, you know, having some sort of expectation for what I wanted it to be and that it wasn't gonna be that way.
And she, she pulls her hands away from me and turns and walks out the door. And that moment is, um, yeah, I remember, I remember just feeling, it's not just sad, but just shocked. You know, kind of like that moment of getting into that ice water in the cold room. Maybe i, I, I could have, I could have seen it coming, but you get in and you're like, it hurts.
You know, you send the blood, which is like the re the life of your body back. To your heart, you know, to try to keep it warm. I found myself having a very similar experience where I clamped off, uh, in some ways to the world to sort of help protect myself, to help myself survive and sort of deal with what had happened.
Kate Nelson: When Corey was in the cold room, there was a team of researchers monitoring his core body temperature. Who told him when he had gotten too cold, when it was time for him to start warming up, but when his heart was broken, the decision to make a change was up to him.
Corey: And [00:54:00] so I had this moment, this the moment where things tipped, I was coming back to my dorm and happened to run into Austin.
I was leaning against a palm tree and I was kind of like kicked back into that moment where her hands were being ripped away from me like I, I felt the heaviness of it. And I'd been feeling the heaviness of it for a while and it was really, it's hard to describe. Kids are just biking past me. You're scootering past me or walking past me, or whatever they're doing on their way to class, and I'm just having this totally different experience. It's a physical experience. It's not just a, a mental pain, but a physical pain like I felt aching in my body.
I felt pain in my chest, like I could actually feel pain in my heart. There's like this one particular spot is really strange. I remember exactly where it's, and I remember having this moment. I was just watching, you know, feeling like I'm being hit by this sort of mental, psychological wave. And I felt like in that moment I made the choice like, this feels terrible. I don't want to continue living this way. This is bad for me. Not another minute, not another second, not another moment if I wanted my life to con, to be great again that I was gonna need to start making some different choices.
Kate Nelson: Before this moment, Corey kept returning to the heartbreak, kept closing himself off to protect his core, but in that moment, he knew that it was time to get out of the cold tub, start opening up again. He started trying to focus less on the pain he felt and more on the world around him. And eventually he built momentum in that direction.
He started warming up again.
Corey: I think the reason that I could feel comfortable sharing is because this happened a while ago and that, you know, the heaviness. That is, that experience is part of something that's not with me [00:56:00] anymore. Eventually, I wanna get to a place where I can share this story and like other things in life, be able to add value to people who really do feel the heaviness where you're sort of in the tub and you can't see past the point where your body's gonna be okay. And I think the same is true with, you know, people who are going through what we, you know, we call heartbreak. We're really resilient creatures, just like in our body. Uh, our minds, I believe, are the same way.
Rosie La Puma: Cory is a research assistant at Stanford. And that's it for our show today. We brought you as close as we could to the end when there was only one way out, and then we asked how people make the decision of what to save and what to leave behind. These people had to let go of what was closest to them, their house, their livelihood, their love, their limbs.
But as Corey told us, sometimes the feeling of crisis stays with you long after the smoke is cleared, and then you have to stop lean against that tree, take a few deep breaths, and decide to live your life again.
This week's show was produced by Rachel Hamburg, will Rogers, Jackson Roach, Laura Cussen, Kate Nelson, Natasha Ruck, and Jonah Willinhganz with help from Charlie Mintz. Christy Hartman, Nina Foche, Josh Hoyt, and Miles Seaver. [00:58:00] Most of the music from this week's episode came from the free music Archive, and you can go to our website to find links to all of it.
Original music in the Boxer story came from Bosch Purvis and guitar music, and the Solenodon story came from Nicholas Corona. The Dynamite Boom sound came from B Man 87 on free sound.org. Special thanks to the Extra Credits YouTube channel for the inspiration behind the missile command story and Professor Elizabeth Hadley for advising Laura Cussen. Graham Roth, and Western Gaylord did voice acting for the Spanish language material.
Thanks also to the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and to Bruce Braden for his generous financial support. To learn more about the Stanford Storytelling Project, go to storytelling.stanford.edu for the Stanford Storytelling Project and State of the Human. I'm Rosie La Puma,
by the way. Recently I found my options whittled down to one. So I was standing in arillaga dining and trying to figure out what drink I wanted, and they had the normal coffee, but they also had the decaffeinated coffee. And you know, the regular coffee would actually work to keep me up. Decaf probably would be less addictive, and I didn't know if I wanted to start down that path, especially since I'm only in college. Didn't wanna wait until I was a junior and.