Wildness

Wildness

Transcript for Wildness (full episode)

From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Tell them that they're going to be hunting this whatever, put a little stuffed toy out there, whatever.

And watch them do it.

Little kids will do that from the very beginning.

You think humans have those predator instincts?

From Little Red Riding Hood to Robin Hood, people like to tell stories about the forbidden, dangerous woods where wolves and outlaws await.

They're not always fables.

Perhaps you remember the story of Chris Dorner.

In February, Dorner, a former cop, went on a deadly killing spree in retaliation for being fired from the LAPD.

He issued a manifesto alleging incidents of police brutality and racism that led to his firing.

He vowed revenge on officers and their families.

But then, there was this strange public reaction to Chris Dorner.

Some people saw him as a hero, like the mythic outlaw who robs from the rich and gives to the poor.

This view was prevalent enough that the New York Times ran an article titled Don't Mythologize Christopher Dorner.

Stanford history professor and expert on the American West, Richard White, has a theory about why some people saw Dorner as a hero.

For White, Dorner's story is deeply rooted in the romantic history of the Wild West.

And that's the classic Western hero.

It's the gunfighter.

The gunfighter is in these stories, somebody you need on your side, but the danger is they can turn against you and be extraordinarily dangerous.

What happens when you go to a place where you are no longer fully in control, which is a wild place?

And what happens when, in fact, you are no longer fully in control of yourself, which means you're a wild person, and then you're a danger both to yourself, as they see it, and to other people, and that's where things get really ambiguous and really people have ambivalent feelings about it.

And now, to be clear, there is nothing heroic about hunting and killing innocent people, and it's not Chris Dornar's actions that are ambiguous.

It's actually a relationship with wildness itself.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Christy Hartman, co-hosting with Joshua Hoyt.

Each week, we pick a common human experience, like listening or haunting, and bring you stories that explore and deepen that experience.

This week, we're exploring wildness.

When is wildness on our side, and when does it have to be eliminated?

Today, we will not be talking about wilderness, but wildness.

These ideas once meant the same thing.

The way Richard White describes it, Dornar evoked both ideas, wilderness and wildness.

He went into the woods as a wild man looking for refuge.

Instead, he found a resort with its own cleaning crew.

Dornar didn't make it very long as an outlaw.

He was cornered near Big Bear Lake, a year-round resort destination that attracts as many as 100,000 people on peak weekends.

To understand how the idea of wildness became separated from wilderness, we're going to get a quick history lesson from Professor White.

Christ goes out into the desert, into the wilderness.

So the wilderness is a place of exile.

The wilderness is a place of horror and terror and danger.

Jesus lives for 40 days and 40 nights in the desert and stares down the devil.

And it's not the last time that wilderness scares the bejesus out of people.

Fast forward to 19th century America.

In the 19th century, Americans did not trust what they regarded as frontiersmen because in fact they thought they were contaminated by wildness.

They had become wild, they'd become untrustworthy.

But of course, the West didn't stay wild.

Technology changed, populations grew, the land was surveyed and mapped, and somewhere along the way, we stopped demonizing wilderness and started conserving it.

Wilderness begins to take on a new form.

It's usually the Romantic era, where wilderness now becomes the place where in fact you can really see God.

The concept that comes into play is the sublime.

What you really want to believe is out there is something bigger than human beings, untouched by human beings, which works according to a set of rules which cannot be altered.

And there is a set of meanings which are separate from us, which we can go out and discover.

And this change in our view of wilderness affected our view of wildness.

If the wilderness is divine because it's wild, then maybe we want to be wild and divine too.

And that's how we're going to launch our show today, with this idea of wildness as both a place of terror and a place to find meaning.

And as you'll hear later, we don't have to go into nature to find it.

Today we're bringing you a whopping five stories.

We'll hear a story about what happens when you venture into nature for the first time.

We'll hear from a graduate student who holds some non-traditional ideas about his clothing and is a modern-day outlaw because of it.

We'll introduce you to someone who studied Muay Tai in a gritty gym in Oakland.

He has to be wild, right?

We'll meet a wilderness rites of passage guide who tells us what happens when we don't have elders.

And finally, we'll meet Tea.

She did something few people today could even dream of doing.

I'll just say this.

She lived in the woods in Canada for a whole year to accomplish it.

She may or may not raise wolves.

Stick around.

In our first story, one Stanford student who grew up in Los Angeles discovers what the natural world can give us.

This is author, journalist and lecturer at Stanford University, Andrew Todhunter, and he's taking his son on a journey.

I went to Death Valley over Spring Break with my family, the five of us.

And my son, who's 12, it's a really interesting, it's kind of a pivotal time in his life.

He's discovering many things.

We went out walking at night.

We went into the great dunes.

And we lay in the bowl of one of these great dunes.

And all we could see was the starlit sky and the darker field of the sand, the big shoulder of the dunes around us.

And we lay there on our backs, on the cold sand.

And he looked up at the stars.

And it was extraordinary to see him have, for what I believe to be the first time, for the first time in his life, to have this, what seemed to be kind of like a deep awakening, as a being in this universe.

And he just thought, wow, this is amazing.

These things that I'm seeing, I feel so tiny.

And yet, at the same time, I feel huge.

I feel like I might spin off this dune and fall into the stars.

These are the kinds of things that wilderness gives.

Andrew believes students should be exposed to the wilderness.

When we get out, things start to awaken.

And this is Andrew's job.

One of the courses Andrew teaches at Stanford is the rhetoric of wilderness.

Last fall, I took Andrew's class.

But writing about wilderness in a classroom isn't the same as being out in the thick of it.

So Andrew leads a trip for students every March.

Andrew takes a snow camping in Yosoni National Park to build igloos in the snow.

According to Andrew, there are lots of interesting things that happen when you're learning something with your hands and your mind.

We've got Kathmandu curry going over here.

Oh, that's a good one.

I've had that one.

This is Andrew on the first night.

I sit down next to him with my microphone.

Wildness.

The first thing I would say is that it's distinct from wilderness.

There's wilderness and then there's wildness.

You can have wildness in the inner city in any instance.

Human beings and domesticated animals, weather, anything.

Wildness is a kind of a behavior.

To what degree do we cultivate wildness?

To what degree as a culture and as individuals do we repress it?

Do we fear it?

Dionysus.

As opposed to Apollo.

It goes back to that Dionysus Apollo split.

According to Andrew, sometimes we need to go wild, and sometimes we need to act with restraint.

Wildness, he says, is about being Dionysian, like the Greek god Dionysus, the one who was always drinking wine.

The craving for Dionysian ecstasy drives you out under the stars, into Death Valley, into Yosemite.

But what happens when you bring someone to a wild place who has always said no to wild places?

Someone who has always said no to going to parties, to hopping fences, no to hanging out, no to not worrying about anything.

Someone who believed in sacrificing pleasure for some other reward.

How does someone like Osvaldo Murro, Aussie for short, end up in Yosemite snow camping in March?

In high school, I was very much that straight A student, that, you know, school, school, school, and nothing else mattered.

You know, I felt like getting good grades and, you know, making all these sacrifices, you know, that was the key to success.

As long as you, you know, stay true to the formula, every single door would be open to you.

My name is Osvaldo Murro, and I'm from Los Angeles, California.

Freshman year, first quarter.

Is school what I'm supposed to be doing?

I felt like, you know, all these classes were taught with a certain student in mind, and I just wasn't that student.

What came to mind was a book he'd read in high school English, Huckleberry Finn.

Huckleberry Finn, this boy that, you know, did what he wanted, and it was just this, this stark example, it was, it was in direct contrast to everything that I had been doing in my life.

Huck Finn booked the rules, and yeah, and then there's me.

Ozzy wanted more of that for himself.

You know, Andrew told us about this hiking trip to Yosemite, and I just, the second I got that email, I RSVP'd and started making plans to join everyone else.

Growing up in Los Angeles, camping wasn't really a huge part of his childhood.

Ozzy didn't especially even like snow.

I just, I never had any good experiences in the snow.

Like every time I went, it didn't matter what I was wearing.

It was bone chilling.

When the time came to actually go to Yosemite, he was excited, but nervous.

And I was just this worried that, you know, what if something doesn't go right?

We've driven east from Stanford.

The highways are dead.

We get to the park, leave the car, put on our backpacks and enter the forest.

We hiked and eventually we got to this point, this turning where we hopped off the trail.

And from my perspective, it was as though we were hiking through the complete wilderness.

Andrew threw off his bag and said, this is it.

It's late, so we're only setting up tents, like we've planned.

Yeah, we went to bed in our tents.

It was freezing.

The tents were freezing.

We woke up, had breakfast.

The first thing we did was carve a large table out of the snow.

I mean, we were super impressed with ourselves.

We thought, oh wow, like this is awesome.

This is gonna be easy.

And then we started building the igloos.

And that was a completely different story.

There was five tank groups.

And so the initial plan was, all right, five tank groups, five igloos.

We had these stations and we'd rotate.

So at one station, someone sawing blocks of ice, someone else is shuttling them over to the site of the igloo and someone else is actually putting it together, patting down the blocks.

And like, you know, an hour in, less than that, 30 minutes in, we realized, okay, we'll be lucky if we can finish one.

You know, the first few times that, you know, I rotated into, you know, working in the little ice quarry, you know, I just realized, gosh, this job sucks, you know, it's getting wet, you know, it's cold and, you know, these things are, these blocks are enormous and, you know, you cut out this enormous block of ice, you spend so much time with it and when you try picking it up, it snaps in half.

And you think, damn it, I just got to start another one.

At this point, people leave the igloo and leave the quarry, they rotate to other jobs, everyone except Ozzy.

You know, after alternating for a while, I don't know what it was.

I just got into, you know, one of the quarries and started selling out these blocks of ice.

After doing that for a couple of minutes, I thought, you know what, I'm going to keep on going.

I got into this, this, this trance.

All I cared about was getting the best, most perfect block I can get.

Nothing else mattered.

Next thing I knew it, it was getting dark and just slept on a headlamp and I kept working.

I wasn't cold, you know, my back wasn't sore anymore.

And I just felt like, I have to finish.

And I spent about five hours in that quarry, without alternating.

I just got, I have never experienced that before.

I didn't stop until the igloos were essentially done.

You know, I stood up, kind of took a deep breath, and I realized, holy cow, I am tired.

And it was as if like everything just came swarming back.

If we hadn't finished the igloos, we wouldn't have died.

We had tents.

As Ozzie's carving these perfect blocks, in the balance between safety and discomfort, he lets go and experiences ecstasy.

Just like Andrew's son, protected by his father, out on the dunes in Death Valley, Ozzie, too, loses himself in work.

He feels huge, and why shouldn't he?

He just built a home out of water.

After building our igloos, we had a handful of candles, and we just kind of went in and lit them up.

And they were absolutely gorgeous.

I felt this excitement that I hadn't felt in a very long time.

And it was one of the best experiences of my life.

Who gets to do that, who builds an igloo and sleeps in it?

Yeah, I mean, it's hard work.

It takes an afternoon.

Osvaldo Murro is a freshman at Stanford University.

The story was told by Mason Alford, also a freshman at Stanford, and produced by Christy Hartman.

In our next story, we'll introduce you to a Stanford graduate student who's very frustrated by what modern society considers normal behavior and abnormal or wild behavior.

It has to do with something pretty simple.

This is Jordan.

I'm a graduate student at Stanford University in a program called Learning Design and Technology.

It's all about learning to design technologies for learning.

But this story starts long before graduate school.

It starts when Jordan hit adolescence.

All of the happiness that he had felt as a kid...

I was just really bubbly, really exuberant.

All of that vanished.

There was just this huge switch from the world being colorful to the world being really drab and gray.

It got worse in high school.

Jordan was already having a hard time, and he couldn't deal with the focus on grades, the enormous pressure to claw his way into Harvard, Stanford, or another top-tier school.

The heaviness was so bad that he left.

He finished in a community college.

And there, he took a course that started him down a new path, one that would lead him to find the source of the dark feelings he had felt ever since middle school.

He took a class called Sociology of Gender.

The last optional assignment in that class was to go cross-dressing in a public space.

And only four people in the class did it.

And I was one of them.

I just felt like I absolutely had to do this.

So Jordan and his four classmates decided to go to the most public space they knew of, the center of the high school social world.

Yeah, I borrowed my girlfriend at the time's dress and went to the mall and got changed in some dressing room.

You know, thinking like, okay, this is just, you know, for my sociology paper, of course.

Went and met up with the three others.

First, that walk from the dressing room to our meetup spot felt like the longest walk of my life.

You know, I was alone.

One dad in particular, like, pulled his daughter away, because she was, like, staring at me.

And I think he was one of the ones that was just like, oh, that's disgusting.

And then once I met up with my friends, then, you know, we were like a pack at that point.

So it's like, okay, we're kind of safe.

But people that we encountered in the mall were really uncomfortable, would kind of laugh when they saw us.

It would be like, hey, this is like a joke, right?

And we would play along by saying, yeah, yeah, it's a joke.

It's for a class.

Or we would kind of hyper exaggerate the way we were acting.

You know, two of us were dressed as girls.

We're like, ha ha ha, look at us, we're in dresses.

And we act like girls and, you know, there's ponytails and eye shadow.

And yeah, that experience stuck really deeply.

No, I was more like, no, no.

I mean, it was very, I don't know, I guess I didn't realize how traumatizing it was at the moment or just how much the experience meant to me.

It just like all those comments were so painful that the only way I really had to file them away was like, well, good thing I'm just doing this for a sociology experiment because otherwise this would really hurt.

And so good thing it doesn't hurt because it's like a sociology project, so it's fine, because why would it hurt?

Because it's just like, wow, people are really interesting.

I should write this in my paper, how hurtful people would potentially be if I cared about this, which I don't.

So it felt very much like that.

There were a couple of other episodes like this.

In undergrad at Berkeley, he went to a few weird theme parties where he could wear feminine things without feeling like he stuck out.

And he slowly started to realize something.

I'd been seeing a therapist for a while at that point, you know, because of those dark, heavy feelings.

And so I sat down with him that session and I was like, listen, there's something that I need to say, but I have no idea what I want to say or how to say it.

But I just feel like there's something about my gender, my sexuality or something that's not really right.

And yeah, and then that kind of changed everything.

Like, you know, not immediately, but just at some point, a few sessions in, I kind of checked in and was like, whoa, that dark feeling's gone.

What Jordan figured out is that he doesn't totally feel like a guy.

He can pass as a man, but inside he feels more feminine.

This, according to Jordan, is called being transgendered.

Now, the term is always in flux, and different people use it different ways.

But saying you're transgendered doesn't necessarily mean that you are completely the opposite gender than you were born with, or that you've had a sex change operation.

It has nothing to do with your sexuality.

Transgendered means that you don't conform to the gender identity, or the gender roles, that go with the sex organs that you were born with.

In San Francisco, where he was living at the time, Jordan found places where he could be more himself.

Even though he realized that he felt more like a girl, it still wasn't exactly obvious how to act like one.

There's so many sprays and products, and oh my god, there's like so much stuff.

There's so many hair ties, and then so many different levels of, I mean, you know, in guy training, all that stuff is just like shampoo and conditioner in one single generic giant bottle.

Just put it in your short hair.

You But Jordan got on okay, and a lot of that was due to living in San Francisco and Berkeley.

If you're going to think of the mainstream American culture, the mall, high school, the office, as the village, well, SF and Berkeley are kind of like the woods, or at least the edge of the woods.

And in the woods, you can be a little bit wilder.

There's the Castro, there's the hate, but in general, there's an air of permissiveness around dressing flamboyantly, or even not dressing at all.

You can be someone who looks like a man and dresses like a woman relatively easily.

But Jordan wanted to be able to be himself in places that were a little closer to the heart of the village.

And he had the opportunity.

Jordan had realized his new identity as he was preparing to leave SF to go to grad school at Stanford, in the South Bay, the success-oriented, more conservative South Bay.

And that, for me, was especially big, because growing up down here, I just associated the South Bay with, you know, everything here is so scripted and everything is so by the book and contained, and everything is about safety and repression.

So I was determined to come back to the South Bay and conquer that and say, okay, well, I'm, yeah, maybe that's the dominant environment down here, but that doesn't mean it's the way I have to live my life.

He was excited.

So excited to go back to school.

You know, I was taking a class that was all about, you know, using laser cutters and 3D printers to fabricate, and basically just creating toys for learning.

And so thrilled that I could be in a space like that.

That's what I could be doing every day.

But Stanford was more intimidating to Jordan than he had expected.

And he felt himself losing that sense of color he had found elsewhere, literally.

I guess I wear usually some kind of colored jeans, you know, whether it's black or maybe an ever so slightly stylish gray.

Sometimes a little khaki can even get corduroy.

Yeah, that doesn't sound like colored jeans.

No, not at all, you know, safe.

And Jordan's classes were full of deadlines, expectations and result-oriented thinking.

It reminded him of high school.

The heaviness came back, the heaviness that had made him leave his high school.

It all came to a head at the end of fall quarter.

Jordan was giving his second major presentation of the day.

It was for a cell phone app.

We had literally 30 seconds to get up in front of 500 people and just pitch this final project that we'd worked on all quarter.

So we got up in front of this crowd of judges and other students and did our little skit.

Bite-sized learning just makes it so fast and easy and it's just so intuitive and user-friendly.

And now I love learning programming over my mobile phone.

Bite-sized learning, I love it.

And that was it.

And that was, wow, so why did I lose so much sleep and work so hard and stress so much and all that?

Oh yeah, for this 30 seconds on the stage to show this mobile app product in this environment that's all about mobile app products and startups.

Yeah, that was pretty indicative, especially how I was by the end of the fall quarter.

And then one day he took a walk.

Suddenly singled out by someone who said, Hey, you, and I turned around and said, Yeah, you look like you would really enjoy joining us for a ecstatic dance on Sunday mornings.

And I was very taken aback.

I had no idea what that meant in any way whatsoever.

But, you know, that day the sun was shining, I have, you know, my hair tied back in a ponytail.

Maybe I looked like someone who was a little more free spirited.

So, so I said, okay, well, tell me more.

What does that mean?

She said, well, you just, you come, it's Sunday mornings, 10 to 12, no shoes, no talking.

And we just put on tribal music and you dance.

And I thought, I guess that's something to keep in my back pocket.

And then a few weeks later.

I threw on my comfy green flowy pants and just kind of a flowy t-shirt.

And I rode my bike over to the community center and took off my shoes and stepped inside.

And it was pretty much what you would expect for it to be.

People dancing like crazy.

Crazy.

Pumping tribal music and people silently, they're dancing by themselves or doing contact improv, kind of rolling off of each other.

You know, at first I was a bit shy, and kind of went to the back and just meditated for a little bit and thought, you know, it seems like a non-judgmental place.

I can kind of just sit back here and just close my eyes and just listen to the music and probably no one's gonna have a problem with that.

So I'll just do that for a little while.

And then gradually, as the dance went on, you know, I just went through this whole journey of, you know, at first dancing a little bit and then dancing a little more and then dancing a little more.

And, you know, at first not really wanting to dance with anyone, just kind of wanting to dance in my little space and just kind of wanting to twirl around and hop around and just kind of move a little bit.

And by the end I was really, you know, like contact improv-ing with the rest of them.

Yeah, it felt very non-judged.

I guess I got hooked.

There was a feeling that I had there of release that I think I was in need of, especially at Stanford.

And as it happened, that was part of the key.

Yeah, so then the next week, I came back.

And this time, I came in a dress, lovely purple dress that I love.

And Jordan kept coming back, wearing a dress.

This was the first place in the South Bay where he felt free to explore his identity, where he felt non-judged.

Okay, so I come in, go over to the front of the room where there's usually a little bit of space, and I close my eyes, and I just dance in a really contained manner just on my own.

Twenty, thirty minutes into it, I'll just feel the need to kind of step away, go over to the meditation section, feel all the emotions that would come.

That would be, you know, sometimes terror, you know, like, what am I doing?

Why am I wearing a dress?

This is crazy.

Sometimes just a lot of joy, empathy, like, you know, good for you for doing this.

I'm really proud of you.

Sometimes anger, just a lot of anger.

Anger might be the last emotion you'd expect someone in a dress at a crazy hippie dance party to feel, but Jordan says it makes sense because he doesn't want to have to take off the dress at the end.

You know, usually when I'm there, there's this infuriating realization that, you know, I'd probably do this more often if I wasn't so terrified of how people would react.

You know, this is good, this is being true to myself, but if I were to go to a class like this, probably most people would be extremely uncomfortable and that would make me extremely uncomfortable.

Feeling like I need to confine myself to these kind of radical outside of the normal world spaces to feel like I can sort of explore myself without feeling threatened.

I'd be happy not to like tear down the safe world so much as just expand it to encompass so many more things.

You know, like it's totally okay to go and let go and dance like crazy.

Like that's not some sort of wild transgressing thing.

It's just a normal healthy thing to do.

It's normal and healthy to sort of explore wearing different things and explore different kinds of ways that you want to identify or think about yourself.

That's not like wild and crazy.

That's really healthy and ideally people would embrace that.

You Ecstatic dance is kind of a practice for that.

It's a space to practice letting go of his anger and his self-consciousness.

He sits until he's ready.

And then I'm just dancing, you know, the more I twirl, the nicer it feels.

It feels really nice to let my hair down and just twirl in a dress.

That's really fun.

Gosh, I feel more like a ballerina, you know, I just like long, graceful movements.

I like twirling a lot.

I like to take up space.

I like to sort of find open spaces and then be able to, you know, dance and twirl around.

And I'm thinking of Billy Elliot right now.

There's a very last scene in that movie where they're one of the last scenes where, you know, he's interviewing for this ballet school and they ask him, you know, just one last question, Billy, before you go, what does it feel like when you're dancing?

I don't know, he kind of stared off and he says, you know, it feels kind of stiff at first and then, you know, then it feels like I'm flying, you know, like a bird, or like electricity, you know, it sort of feels like electricity.

So yeah, those aren't my words, but that's very much how it feels.

It's kind of, yeah, free.

Jordan, whose name we have changed, is a graduate student at Stanford.

The story was told by Annalise Lockhart and produced by Rachel Hampton.

Thank Our next story is about the most quintessential wild behavior.

Well, one of the most.

It's somewhere up there with survival of the fittest, and conquering that which is trying to eat or destroy you.

I got punched by a close childhood friend in high school.

Okay, we were wearing oversized boxing gloves, but I know she wanted to make it hurt.

It was our school's day on the green, junior year of high school.

Kara and I were friends, but she'd been holding a grudge against me.

She thought I'd taken her place in our circle of friends.

All this was pent up for years until the day we wandered out of class up onto the grass soccer field and got in the ring.

Barely after I even got the gloves on, she came at me.

I could feel her weight pressed on me, her pent up anger coming through those absurdly large gloves.

As she wailed at me, I realized something.

Inside of a ring, wildness can just erupt out of you.

Fighting is a chance to go wild.

Maybe it's obvious why fighting is wild, but in case it's not, here's why I think so.

Fighting means encroaching on someone's being.

It's the ultimate domination.

Sometimes it means life or death.

That's why I try to avoid it.

What could motivate someone who spends all his time thinking about fighting?

Someone like Liam.

My name is Liam Purvis.

So if you turn on the TV in the United States and you see guys fighting in a cage or a ring, it's probably, it's called MMA, mixed martial arts, that's a sport.

You don't gouge the eyes or go for the groin or pull the hair, like you can't kick to the head of a grounded opponent.

And that's more or less it.

Liam's been kicked, choked, elbowed and hurt in just about every way imaginable.

And he's done the same to other people.

He had a match coming up in a few weeks, and I thought it would be a good time to interview him, to figure out where his craving for wildness comes from.

I was like a barrel-chested, really energetic kid.

Always growing up, I felt like I never had this outlet for this physicality that I wanted, you know.

Liam's parents suggested he try football.

He didn't know the rules, but that didn't matter.

I was like, what's happening?

And the coach was like, don't worry, you're defensive line.

I'm like, okay, I'll tackle the guy with the ball.

But Liam decided football wasn't quite right either.

Next, he tried wrestling.

It seemed like a good option.

It was physical and very combative, but a technical complication due to Liam being homeschooled got in the way.

So I couldn't wrestle.

I was just like, come on.

But then some girls he knew asked if he would join their ballet troupe, which would later tour through Europe.

That's really, yes, totally.

So actually, from most to high school, I danced.

Okay, so far, Liam wasn't the person I expected him to be, not in a lot of ways.

Modern was kind of the base, and they did a lot of clogging.

He's poised, he's smart, he likes ballet.

Ballet is by far the hardest thing I've ever done.

Just pure difficulty.

It was easy to forget that he's built his life around beating people to a pulp.

I figured he had to have an underlying driving impulse that he can't ignore, something within his nature, giving him an intense craving to fight.

So I asked about what led him from ballet to fighting.

I figured I'd see where the wildness took hold of him.

I moved to California when I just turned 19, and I really wanted to try and fight and do this thing.

So I found this gritty Muay Tai gym in Oakland.

Muay Tai is the national sport of Thailand.

It's a more than 500-year-old sport based, as far as I can tell, on repeatedly kneeing your opponent in the face.

The teacher was like straight from Thailand with like crazy sacred geometry, Buddhist tattoos all over, and like barely spoke English, you know.

Liam had been searching for something that would give him that thrill of competitive physicality.

MMA is kind of the epitome of that.

For his whole life, Liam only suspected he'd like fighting.

He'd only ever been in one fight in grade school.

He kicked me, and I hit him like three or four times, and like stopped for a second.

I remember thinking like, okay, then all I needed to do is defend myself.

Then I'm like, oh, this feels pretty good.

And I hit him a few more times, and then like it got broken up.

That was the only time I can ever remember getting into a fight like that.

Liam knew it was a powerful feeling to win a fight, but to become a fighter, he also had to take a beating.

Years after his only fight in grade school, he got that lesson at the Muay Tai gym in Oakland.

Sometimes I've literally been like crying while I'm sparring just because like that's the only normal reaction to like this much punishment received at the hands of another human being.

You know, you're just like, I really hope they think this is sweat right now, because I am crying.

Like, you know you want to give up so bad, but if you do, then maybe you're not cut out for fighting because why would, if you can't like, they just want to make sure that you'll push through in times like that.

Liam took his licks at the gym in Oakland, then a job transfer brought him to another gym in the peninsula.

He found he was pretty good at fighting.

He had a sense that he was doing what he was meant to do, that he was becoming in tune with himself.

There is that deep curiosity of like, how good can I get?

How can I, how will I do in these extremely stressful situations, you know?

But Liam still didn't know if he was a fighter.

All he had was his intuition.

So he did something wild.

He went to Thailand to fight.

I traveled for 18 months between now, when I moved to California and now.

And I was in Thailand for about three and a half months and I was there to focus entirely in Muay Tai.

He went to the city of Chiang Mai and found a coach.

His name is Chun and he was like 4'10.

This tiny Tai guy who fought at like 95 pounds or something.

I think probably the best coach I've ever had.

And under Chun's tutelage, Liam won some fights.

The bell rang and I was like, let's do this.

And I knocked him out in the second round.

And I was like, all right, cool.

Three and a half months passed.

He won more fights.

His reputation grew.

You have to weed your way through some lesser opponents initially before you bypass the bartenders and taxi drivers so you actually get good opponents.

Liam became convinced that his place in life was in a ring.

I'm doing what I love to do.

This is my dream to be doing this right now.

I'm in this most safe and comfortable space.

I'm exactly where I need to be right now.

At the time of his final match, Liam's goal in life had become very specific.

It's all about kicking in Muay Tai.

And even though of my four fights previously in Thailand, I already knocked out two of the guys with head kicks, my coaches still weren't satisfied with my kicks.

They were like, no, not quite there yet, Liam, not quite there yet.

But his opponent had other ideas.

This guy was really good.

He would just eat whatever I had to come in and clinch me and then just totally dominate me in the clinch.

He'd throw me to the ground and my knees hit the ground, but I'd still be kneeling in front of him and he'd knee me right in the solar plexus as I was facing him.

Liam ended up losing the fight.

He was pretty beat up.

Like, super bruised shin.

I could like rip the leg hair out of my shin and feel no pain because it was so like trauma, traumatized.

But it was what happened after the fight that mattered most to him.

I remember like motorbiking back to the gym late at night with like my coaches and some of my teammates, you know.

And it was like the day before, I was like flying out of Thailand and got some like fish and chicken, like soup going and I bought everyone some beers, you know, kind of sitting on the chicken and like Ty's like, Liam, your kicks were good tonight.

And I was like, hell yeah.

Like, yes.

Sitting next to Liam and Palo Alto, I'm listening closely, trying to hear something wild, but instead I hear something very different.

I hear motivations that I can relate to, community, learning, relationships.

It turns out what drives Liam is very un-wild.

He agrees.

That's really funny that you bring that up because I was like, it's cool they're doing this thing about wildness, but like actually being a fighter is like the least wild thing.

You're like, totally restrictive diet, training every day, like with the same people that you totally trust.

A lot of old school fighters like abstain for sex for like months beforehand.

It's like, it's almost like the very opposite of what it would be considered to be wild, you know?

I think the only wild thing is like people wondering like why would people do something like that?

Why am I getting in a cage and like in front of some cheering crowd of people and like locking the cage door and like I do not know why I would do that.

That's a wild thing to be doing.

That's wild for me.

A few weeks later, I'm at Liam's fight.

It's his first sanctioned MMA match in the United States.

I'm here because I understand why Liam fights, but I have a new question.

Why am I so eager to watch him fight?

It's your typical expo scene.

Ring girls in booty shorts, groups of supporters in matching neon t-shirts, vendors selling Muscle Mulk and hot dogs.

Bright lights illuminate people in fold out chairs.

The chairs circle a thick chain link cage, the focal point of the event.

The air smells fresh as if a ritual bath has taken place, like people came ready to partake in something sacred.

Liam's match is the first fight of the night.

Liam and his crew make their way to the ring.

Liam's opponent rushes forward, kicking and punching.

Liam sees a window of opportunity between them, gets hold of his opponent.

Liam pulls him down, legs pinned to his opponent's side.

Liam swings slow, controlled punches at him, like two steady swimming pendulums.

Left fist, right fist, a grounded pound, till the ref calls it a knockout.

The whole fight is over in one minute, 51 seconds.

Liam wins the match.

Liam seems to be radiating.

Friends and family, teammates and coaches, they all give Liam hugs and shouts of congratulations over the music.

I get swept up in the excitement of Liam's win.

I could feel the energy build up in my chest, but I felt like I had to keep myself in check.

After Liam, the weight classes noticeably increase.

I stay to watch these other fights.

I don't even know these other guys.

I didn't come invested in them, but I begin to feel that the intensity might bring me to tears.

I'm excited to see these fights play out, but part of me is worried what that says about me.

It's not basketball or football.

In fighting, wanting your guy to do well means you want the other guy to go down and get knocked out.

But then you're like, oh, well, you don't actually want the other guy to get hurt.

It's not like one team is scoring more technical points than the other.

It's one guy down on the mat getting punched in the face until the ref decides he's had enough.

A guy is down, and I see a man in the crowd who wince his heart.

His friends stand on their chairs, screaming his name.

A man directly behind me is yelling with focused intensity.

I turn around to look, and I see a young toddler bouncing on the shoulders of this man.

And in this moment, I understand the appeal of fighting.

Family, friends, everyone unites in intense anticipation, intense thrill, intense sympathy.

All eyes are on the fighters, and our hearts are compelled to follow.

But then the fight ends, we're released.

When I think back to that day in high school, getting knocked down by my friend in that fake ring, I realize the rings we create sit on the edge of wildness.

Thank you Liam Purvis is a Muay Tai fighter currently living in Palo Alto.

This story was told by Darlene Franklin and produced by Charlie Mintz.

Now, we meet up with Dr.

Martin Shaw, guest lecturer at Stanford, who tells us what happens when we don't have elders.

There's a lot of energy for the word wild at the moment.

Which is good news in a way, but you can bleed, you know, you can bleed a word dry very quick, you can drag the salt out of it.

Wild is in great danger of that happening to it.

I would only have to start putting wild more repeatedly into workshop titles or evening events and it fills seats.

It touches in on a longing that we all have that, you know, the media driven world that we're all being propelled through at hyper speed cannot touch.

We ache for a deeper life and wild seems to be connected to that.

This is Martin Shaw.

My name is Martin Shaw and I come from Devon in the United Kingdom.

On paper, I am an author, a mythologist, storyteller and a wilderness rights passage guide.

But to be honest with you, the thing that I suppose I'm most interested in and aspire to is an old Gaelic word called a Shanakai.

And a Shanakai is really a cultural historian of a place.

So in other words, they're the go-to woman or the go-to man for a small geographic region that they've spent a lot of time in.

And they know the gossip of the place.

They know something about the hedgerows.

They know about the plants.

They know about the big epic sagas that people have told about this place.

They know the small, intricate, witty stories of their family's relationship to that place.

But they are a kind of a little cosmos.

I always say grass does not bend under such a foot.

You know, they're magical people.

And if ever we needed enchanters in the world, it is right now.

Being in Northern California where we're doing this interview, I'm going to make sure the stories of the redwoods that surround us in this particular patch, I'm going to dig into this and I'm going to know about this as one of the great Californian poets Gary Snyder says, Be famous for five miles.

When a story comes to me that I feel motivated to tell, it's normally when I sense that smell or that taste has come into the story.

Like, all my life, I had not known this color or this taste or this smell existed.

And I go, oh, it's alive.

I didn't know they brewed this anymore.

These smells, these tastes are significantly lacking, especially for youth.

Never in history have people of the same age initiated each other.

It is not appropriate for a 17-year-old girl to know what another 17-year-old girl needs in terms of an initiation.

A woman knows what a 17-year-old girl needs, and that's the place to go.

And when you take away the notion of elders, the desire for wildness doesn't go, but the possibility is that it grows savage, savage is not the same thing as wildness.

You know, it's the difference between having your brains knocked out in a mosh pit and the glorious aura of a flamenco dance.

We can see there's passion in both, and actually I like both forms, but we can see in one that there is skill attached to it and steps and a certain kind of embodied elegance.

So in other words, the last 20 years of my life, certain periods of it have been spent working with at-risk youth and kids on the streets and gangs.

All of that behavior, gang behavior, the naming of a gang, the initiation rights to be in it, the marking out of territory, is to have an experience of wild material.

If you don't create a situation like a vision quest, fasting on a mountain, if you don't create an avenue out into the wild where that young person brushes up against the lord and lady of death, if you don't do that, they'll find a way of doing it themselves without anyone around to keep the thing boundaryed and in what I would call, to use an old fashioned word, a sacred context.

Martin knows that we have this problem in the US.

We lack an authentic connection to our wildness.

We lack a relationship with elders.

But the wildness is in us.

It's just a matter of turning to the land, tuning into our dreams, of dipping our hands into ancient stories.

That's really, I think, a crucial part of work for modern Americans is can they get still enough, even if it's just a few hundred people a year, to go out into the deserts or the black hills of South Dakota or to the great forests of the Pacific Northwest and just sit and see what happens because there's a conversation ready to be had.

And if it doesn't happen, you know, we all know where that's heading.

We are living in a place absolutely adrift with ghosts.

We're adrift with ghosts and we do not have the psychic depth and the broadness of spirit and the holding of community to know what to do with it.

And that is a tremendously difficult and sad place to be.

And it is also a place of great opportunity if you have the gumption to try and get into it.

Thank Dr.

Martin Shaw was a visiting professor at Stanford University during winter quarter of 2013.

The story was told by Stanford University senior Melina Lopez and produced by Rachel Hamburg.

While we were talking about doing a show on wildness, producer Joshua Hoyt remembered someone from his past who he thought might be able to shed some real light on wildness.

She's kind of a mentor, or maybe an elder, like Dr.

Martin Schall talked about in our last story.

Her name is Teresa Yammamoto, or Tea, and she's about to school, I mean, mentor, producer Joshua Hoyt in the ways of the world.

In 2006, I went along with a family friend to volunteer at a strange kind of magical place called Wolftown.

Wolftown is on Vashon Island in Washington State.

It's only about a 15 or 20 minute ferry ride from Seattle where I was living then.

Even though it's geographically close to downtown Seattle, Vashon is sort of isolated, intentionally isolated.

You can only get there by ferry because residents have fought off numerous bridge proposals.

Vashon is the kind of place where you find those keep Vashon weird bumper stickers.

Vashon is the kind of place that's famous on the internet for a tree with a bicycle grown into it.

Like, fully grown into the trunk and eight feet off the ground.

It's that kind of place.

That day, as we drove into a wooded area off the main road, I found myself in a world that felt a lot further than an hour from downtown Seattle.

Through the trees, I saw these enormous wolf fences, fences that immediately announced the power of what they were keeping in.

I remember my family friend warning me about not staring into the wolves' eyes.

And the whole thing created this mix of fascination, fear, and admiration for the wolves.

I remember feeling something similar about Tea Yammamoto.

Did you have wildness in your life from the very beginning?

Well, you have to define wildness, because to me, it isn't wild.

To me, it's just normal.

Tea runs Wolf Town.

Wolf Town takes in all kinds of injured and orphaned animals, but it specializes in predators.

Most of the animals they deal with are returned to the wild, but that's not always an option.

The wolves that give Wolf Town its name are now too used to depending on humans, and will never be wild again.

But, as you'll hear later on, for Tea's first wolf, that was not the case.

What I did, my college, I didn't go to school.

My college was following my grandfather and my father around and learning directly from them.

And that was a very good way of learning.

Something that was normal.

That was how people normally learn.

They don't do that now.

Tea has always been around animals.

She grew up in a family of horse trainers and started working with horses at a very early age.

Her work with wolves actually started by accident.

I was asked to rescue a wolf pup.

This was in the late 80s from a sanctuary that was closing down.

And after talking to a couple of friends of mine that were biologists and naturalists, I decided to go out and hunt with her for a year and let her go.

And that's what I did.

And of course, letting her go and letting her be free, she risked her life.

So did I.

But, you know, what's life for, huh?

Yeah.

It's better to be free than captive.

Tea wrote about her experience in a book called The Wolf, the Woman, the Wilderness.

But it's now been more than 20 years since the events in the book.

So you come upon this wolf, you're asked to adopt it.

And then what do you do with it to begin with?

Well, I mean, it's just common sense, isn't it?

You have to go out into the wilderness where there's prey that the animal can hunt and where there are other wolves that she can interact with.

And so that's what I did.

But I had to take her to a place where there wasn't a lot of wolves around because wolves are also very, very territorial.

Do you know what that means?

Yeah.

What does it mean?

Do they have their own territory staked out?

Yes, what happens if you cross into their territory?

And they'll attack you?

They'll attack you?

They either drive you out or kill you.

Wolves are an apex predator.

And what does apex predator mean?

Does that mean they're sort of at the top?

They're top of the food chain.

Can you name another apex predator?

Humans?

Yeah.

Maybe a little bit in biology, but not really.

I mean, how do you...

So were you teaching this wolf how to hunt?

I could not teach her because obviously I was not a wolf.

How did you physically deal with it?

I mean, even how did you transport it?

Where did you keep it?

Well, of course, I was living on the island for part of that time.

And then when I was up in the mountains, she was loose when I was up in Canada.

And I had taught her to jump into the jeep.

And when she was young, she would do it.

As she experienced more and more freedom, she became more and more reluctant to get into the jeep.

And so this became kind of a race to teach her how to do this before she finally said, to hell with you.

You know what I'm saying?

Mm-hmm.

And what about, were you physically afraid?

Why not?

Well, are you physically afraid of your siblings, your mother or your father?

Thankfully not.

No, because she was, acted like family.

I had raised her, I trusted her.

When you fear something, you're much more likely to have problems.

So what about the first time you went hunting together?

Or you took her to hunt?

What happened?

Well, I mean, it's just common sense.

You have to know how to track a little bit.

You have to know where the prey is going to be.

And so you have to decide, okay, what are we hunting?

Is she going to catch field mice?

Is she going to catch rabbits?

What size is she?

What age is he?

How quick is she?

You know, what's going to happen?

You take her, she hops in the jeep, you drive into the mountains, you let her out.

And then what?

You sort of start looking around and she follows you?

Have you ever been to the mountains?

A little bit.

Okay, well, number one, I had to hunt with her during all seasons.

So you start thinking about that real carefully.

Because the mountains are dangerous.

And I would have to take gear.

I'd have to take my backpack and supplies for myself, because I was up there, I wasn't up there just overnight.

You know what I'm saying?

I was up there for a long time.

And we would have to go up into the mountains and look for, I would have to look for likely places when she was young.

She did not follow me.

She would range away from me and then come and check back.

And as she started to go back, she would check back less and less often.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Did you see her make kills up close?

No.

One time she brought a leg back for me, which was kind of touching, the leg of a deer.

And were you proud of her?

Well, I was happy that she was going to go back.

I think that was a better life for her.

I suppose you could say I was proud of her, yeah.

Did you have to prompt her to hunt at all, or it was just instinct?

Hell no.

No, no.

She has it in her.

Maybe you can tell me when you knew that you were ready or that she was ready to be let go.

Well, she just chose.

I mean, she just decided, I'm done and left.

When she got to be of an age, she was about a little over a year old.

And she had to go and do her thing, and I had to go and do mine.

And she said, well, this is where we're going to part company.

She was an adult, and that was it.

So she did.

Tea has worked with wolves since the late 80s.

She's one of the only people that can go in the wolf enclosures at Wolftown.

Some of the wolves even let her touch them.

She's also very matter of fact about what wolves are.

They're predators, and Tea never forgets that.

And we have to realize we live in a world where life lives on death.

That is the way it is.

You have to just accept that.

We have a tendency not to teach people that and to hide them from that fact.

But that is the truth.

I guess what you said is my definition.

Wildness is like that part of nature that is so closely associated with death.

And that's why we are uncomfortable with it.

That's because you are looking at it without seeing both sides.

When I was a kid, my granny said, we had a lot of people die in my family when I was young.

My granny said, look at the grass.

And I said, okay, so I'm looking at the grass.

She goes, what does the grass do?

So now I'm going to ask you that.

What does the grass do?

Grows?

Yeah.

When does it grow?

I don't know.

All the time.

Really?

You think it grows all the time?

When things are good.

I'll tell you how the grass story is.

It's all right.

I mean, someone had to tell me.

The grass in the spring, when there's warmth and sunlight and moist soil, grows.

That's when it grows.

Then in the summer, as it starts to dry, it heads, it forms seeds.

And then it turns brown.

It seeds, the seeds are scattered into the ground.

And the grass dies back.

So then the life starts going into the roots of the, of the grass.

And then in the fall and winter, the grass dies.

The only part of the grass that's really alive is under the soil.

You know, there's maybe a little green on top.

But most of it, it's not growing then.

It's dormant.

And then in the spring, it comes back.

So my sheep and my cattle and the wild animals, the deer and the moose and the elk and all that, fertilize the grass, fertilize the trees, fertilize everything.

That's that circle.

And when they die, they do that too.

There's a huge system of life living on death everywhere you look.

And that happens not only on different ecosystems on Earth, but probably on a planetary scale as well.

Maybe on a solar system scale, on a universe scale.

That should comfort you.

That should make you feel okay.

You should say, okay, it just gets recycled.

Including you.

You don't have to be afraid of death.

This is an old thing.

I mean, this is not something I just made up.

This is a very old thought process.

It's just that we've walked away from it and don't see it.

Yeah, it can be hard to remember.

Yeah, remember it.

Teresa Yammamoto runs Wolftown on Vashon Island.

This story was told by Joshua Hoyt and produced by Joshua Hoyt, Christy Hartman, and Charlie Mintz.

This episode of State of the Human was produced by You, Christy Hartman, Joshua Hoyt, and Jonah Willinghans.

Special thanks to Osvaldo Murro, Andrew Todhunter, Dr.

Richard White, Liam Purvis, Darlene Franklin, Jordan, Dr.

Martin Shaw, Joshua Hoyt, and Teresa Yammamoto for sharing their stories.

Thanks also to Mason Alford, Annalise Lockhart, Marnie Crawford, and Melina Lopez.

And thanks also to our staff, Natasha Ruck, Rachel Hamburg, Charlie Mintz, Zandra Clark, Victoria Hurst, and Sophia Polisa.

A warm thanks to all the musicians who made music and shared it with a Creative Commons license so we could use it on our show today.

You can find a complete list of all the music we used on our website.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity in the Arts, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and Bruce Braden.

Remember that you can find this and every episode of State of the Human on iTunes.

You can also download them and find out more about the Storytelling Project's live events, grants, and workshops at our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Joshua Hoyt.

And I'm Christy Hartman, reminding you that...

No, honey, you can't have a wolf in the house.

It will rip your house apart.