State of the Human: Navigating

Ants navigate to and from food using pheromone trails; the stronger the pheromone trail, the more ants following it, like some kind of highway map. Humans use similar mapping strategies as we navigate through life, but how do we know that the paths we’re on will lead us to where we want to be? Today’s show is about navigating, with four stories and a poem about various ways that humans are moving through the world, with unique answers to these questions: How do we navigate through life without any instructions, or with instructions that might be wrong? How do we know which way to go to get whatever we’re going for? And how do we decide when to stop moving?

Transcript for Navigating (Full Episode)

Will Rogers: [00:00:00] This is State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. What we do is take a common human experience, like teaching or belonging or joking, and bring you stories that explore and deepen that experience.

Chris Leboa: When I was in fifth grade, my family went to the California Academy of Sciences. There's this huge glass enclosure, and over in one corner of the enclosure, there's like this mass. Probably like a foot tall, a foot-wide glob. Kind of a circular mound of ants.

Connie Xiao: Chris Leboa loves ants.

Chris Leboa: I know the person that was talking explained, like this is a bio vac, which is-- it's the way army ants make their colony. And they all hook their ant claws together. You've kind of seen ant hills before, but this one doesn't really look like the dirt. It's actually made out of all the ant's bodies.

In high school, we each had to choose an animal and write like an in-depth paper about the animal, and mine was the Han Belli army ant, which I went like way too overboard on and ended up writing like 80 pages about.

Connie Xiao: This is the same kind of ant Chris saw in the glass enclosure as a fifth grader, and as Chris discovered, they do much more than create giant ant globes. They also navigate the world as one giant ant group.

Chris Leboa: These ants, they live in this like central biova, so all the ants make up a giant colony out of their bodies to shield the queen while she lays their eggs. And they swarm out into a rainforest and they collect whatever insects that they can, tear 'em apart, bring 'em back.

Connie Xiao: But when they swarm, they don't just scatter about in all directions.

Chris Leboa: They swarm in a different direction each day. So they'll go out in one direction, and then the next day, they'll go out 120 [00:02:00] degrees to the right or to the left and go catch whatever insects, tear 'em apart kind of thing.

Connie Xiao: The ants gather food in a different direction every day. How they determine where they go on any given day was kind of baffling to Chris.

Chris Leboa: Yeah. And like, oh, there's the queen. The queen must be making these kind of decisions. But, the queen really is just like hanging out, when it's all the worker ants, the soldier ants that are going out and swarming, grabbing anything that they can eat.

Connie Xiao: Chris wanted to know if these insects have a compass, a map, a plan.

Chris Leboa: Each ant isn't able to think, "Oh, this is how we do it." It just happens. And I know it has something to do with pheromones. And they have this, like, kind of collective intelligence of, this is what we do together.

Connie Xiao: Ants' pheromone navigation often works as trial and error. And paths that lead to food become more traveled upon, like a pheromone highway.

It's part instinct, part random. And sometimes, it just doesn't work out.

Chris Leboa: You've seen an ant line, like all the ants going in a direction. If the ant line gets disrupted, the ants will kind of all mill about, and they're not really sure what they're doing with themselves.

Connie Xiao: What do we do when our paths get disrupted? Do we figure it out as we go, or do we have a plan?

In this episode of State of the Human, we're examining how to navigate. At a bus station, on the high seas, on lonely roads, and close to home off the shores of California.

The army ants follow the map of pheromone trails created by ants who went before them. They never question how the trails are made.

In our first piece, we'll hear about a map that early explorers used for hundreds of years, even though one important detail on the map was wrong. Producer Virginia Drummond has the story.[00:04:00] 

Virginia Drummond: Imagine you're an explorer. You've spent months at sea in search of new land.

You're hungry, and the work is hard. So you and your fellow sailors talk about a paradise island. A paradise full of plenty, full of precious stones and exotic women with trained griffins. The island is rumored to be guarded by vicious creatures, but that's not going to stop you. Sounds strange, right? It can't possibly be real. But in fact, almost 39 million people live there. And you know it. It's California.

This image of this island originated in a romance novel written in 1510 called "Las Sergas de Esplandián," which spoke of a fabled land ruled by Queen Califia, California's namesake. Spanish explorers were excited for a land of plenty and strong, exotic women.

Many explorers began to embrace this fable of a paradise island. We can't know why, but it was perhaps the promise that they wanted to hear. Whatever they didn't know, they filled in with Queen Califia's myth. And part of that myth was that California was an island. So in fact, for many years, maps showed California separate from the American continent. And as the myth passed around, people began to think of it as more of a fact.

Julie Sweetkind-Singer: This is a map from 1656.

Virginia Drummond: This is Julie Sweetkind-Singer, Earth Sciences librarian at Stanford.

Julie Sweetkind-Singer: And it shows California is an island all the way from the bottom of the Baja Peninsula, up to Cape Mendocino. And so many of the names are the names we know today. Santa Barbara. Mendocino. San Francisco. San Diego.

Virginia Drummond: She's showing us maps from the 1500s to the early 1800s, which actually depicted California as an island, completely disconnected from the mainland.

Now, these are not the maps that we're used to seeing today. They are filled with calligraphy and illustrations. [00:06:00] Mythical creatures lap at the margins of the map and non-existent coastlines weave around its border.

Julie Sweetkind-Singer: They show you a history in a way that's a visual representation of the space.

Virginia Drummond: Scenes to pick the landscape as green, lush, and sunny, the European version of paradise. Everything from tropical birds to Christian faith spreading among accepting natives. Again, always as a giant island. Map historians call this a cartographic fallacy.

Julie Sweetkind-Singer: It's one of probably the largest cardiographic fallacies in the history of map making. So when we first started going out and exploring the planet and trying to move, bit by bit, around the world to understand it.

Virginia Drummond: It was difficult to explore, so they never made it to the northern point of what we now call the Gulf of California.

It was foggy. Coastlands were hard to see and different from anything they'd ever encountered. Land travel was even more difficult. Hot, barren deserts blocked easy access to the South, and the Sierra Mountains loomed on the west side of the state.

So what they didn't know, or couldn't explore, they filled in with Queen Califia's Mythic Island.

Julie Sweetkind-Singer: It took years and years for information to be known and then to be disseminated through channels. Some of it, which was open for people to know; others, which the kings and the queens and the emperors would take the information and hoard it, because information is power. So when you're also looking at going out on a ship and sailing, if you can steal their maps, you've got a lot of information about what was known at the time and what they knew that you might not know.

And so this idea of California as an island persisted at for a very long time.

Virginia Drummond: The myth was passed around over and over again, to the point that not only did people believe in the island-- people would claim that they themselves had sailed around it, too.

California as an island persisted for a long time. [00:08:00] Now, of course it might not be surprising for a few decades, because there's imperfect information and people's fantasies do run wild. But this myth of California as an island lasted for almost three centuries.

Glen McLaughlin: This was the state of knowledge.

Virginia Drummond: This is Glen McLaughlin, a venture capitalist and map collector.

Glen spent decades collecting over 700 maps of California depicted as an island.

Glen McLaughlin: The myth wasn't declared over until 1746. This is the state of the world.

Virginia Drummond: The last California as an island map was printed 300 years after the rumors began, and the last one of these maps comes from the mid 1800s from Japan, even after California had already become a state.

In order to settle this mystery, a Jesuit priest, Father Keno, took a long journey by foot. He made his way by land along the Baja California Peninsula, taking measurements and notes. Notably absent from this journal were mythical creatures and Amazonian women.

Based on the measurements, Father Keno confirmed he was not actually on an island. But cartographers and sailors continued to disagree for the next 40 years until...

Glen McLaughlin: Another Jesuit priest, uh, sailed his boat all the way up and around. He said, "It's connected." And so they petitioned the king.

Virginia Drummond: The king made a declaration that

Connie Xiao and Glen McLaughlin, together: California is not an island.

Virginia Drummond: By Royal Decree, California was no longer an island, and the myth was dead.

Glen McLaughlin collects maps as a hobby. For him, the maps were a reprieve from his work.

Glen McLaughlin: My work in the financial area and venture capital can be extremely intense. It can be confrontational. It can be nasty. Come back to maps, they're quiet, they don't yell at you.

Virginia Drummond: And these maps can show us how knowledge is transferred and give us a new way to look at California today.

In some ways, California continues to be separate [00:10:00] from the rest of the country.

Julie Sweetkind-Singer: Now we think of California as an island, as sort of a state of mind, or as a geographic space that's bounded on the east coast of California by a huge mountain range that leaves us in a ecological and geographical space that's quite different from the United States.

Virginia Drummond: And it's not just an ecological island either. It's a liberal bubble that's sometimes politically alienated from the rest of the us. Not to mention, California is its own economic powerhouse.

So California is still an island, although not quite what the explorers imagined. And what's more than that? California is still a myth. It is a place where we hope to find fulfillment, riches, or a new start, whether it's in Hollywood or Silicon Valley.

We've heard that story so many times, and we know that for so many people who actually come to California that it's not true. But we like that story. And we continue to perpetuate it and so many others because we want to believe in them.

Glen McLaughlin: And once you get a myth going, it is very hard to change it. And I find we're in a similar kind of situation now. You know, we've got a lot of myth, false news or fake news or whatever. So we have the same problem. It's a human nature problem.

Virginia Drummond: And like the explorers, we grasp onto this myth. This paradise place called California. The story's a little different now, but it's a place that still inspires wonder.

After all these centuries, the myth of California remains. A sunny, golden paradise. Full of innovations in technology. Filled with neon lights and endless glamor. A place full of promises in which the explorers, too, once believed.

Connie Xiao: That story was produced by Yue Li and Virginia Drummond. It featured original music by Latifah Hamzah, [00:12:00] a master's student at Stanford.

The maps from the story can be found at the David Rumsey Map Center, located in the Green Library at Stanford.

For many, California is a destination. For others, it's a place along the way. In our next story, four student producers visit a Greyhound bus station in Oakland, California and find out how people navigate in the middle of their journeys.

Hollie Kool: On the day we went to the Oakland Greyhound station, there was a handyman out front fixing a giant neon sign. The guy told us that he'd spent his whole life fixing neon signs. The one at the station had three-foot tall letters that just spelled "bus." There are four of us, Cathy, Isabella, me (Hollie), and Mark.

Mark Mendoza: That's me.

The plan was hunkered down in the waiting area all day to catch people when they got on and off the buses. We were here to ask them how they'd wound up here on the Greyhound, but maybe also in life. When we got there, the station was quiet and mostly empty. So for a while we just stood around in the waiting area, staring at two or three people in their suitcases and feeling stupid.

Hollie Kool: But then at 3:00 PM, a bus pulled up. Suddenly, there are people everywhere. And this is when Mark first met Alex.

Mark Mendoza: So Alex, he's this kind of young guy, maybe mid thirties. He's got curly brown hair and. But I noticed him because his guy was moving fast and a station full of people trying to figure out where they were going next, he had already bounded right off the bus and made a beeline straight for the door. So I chased after him into the rain.

Alex: Do you know if, uh, the BART station is this way, or--

Mark Mendoza: We're not completely sure.

Alex: Yeah, me neither.

Mark Mendoza: Less than a minute after we had met, we were somehow pounding the pavement side by side through downtown Oakland, while I looked up his own directions to the nearest BART train station.

Alex: Pull [00:14:00] up a map maybe...

Mark Mendoza: And he answered interview questions that I hadn't even asked.

Alex: Since I moved to Los Angeles two years ago, um, this has been my only, my only trip.

Mark Mendoza: Before I even had my microphone out, he had already told me that he was on his way to SF, and he needed to meet this guy who was gonna give him a 360 camera to work on this show that somehow involved mines.

Alex: It is a story about travel. Uh, we are going to travel to different locations in order to produce it. It's got the, the departure, initiation, return, and lots of chapters on the way.

Mark Mendoza: He told me he'd been out of a job for the past few years. He'd just been kind of stuck in LA crashing around, and then all of a sudden, this chance landed in front of him.

You can leave everything behind to come here and make this crazy play happen.

Alex: I'm not in my twenties anymore, and I'm starting to think about wanting to settle down. To decide something, you kind of have to destroy everything else, right? Your other options, you gotta let 'em go.

Mark Mendoza: Being stuck in one place like these last couple of years, he said that wasn't really like him, or at least, that wasn't how things used to be.

Alex: I've identified as a traveler for a long time now, since I was about 10 years. I, uh, I grew up in Chicago, and uh, my first taste of the road was on a tent show tour through Iowa. So we lived outside the whole time. Is this-- Oh, that's 18th? Or, so is this 19th?

Mark Mendoza: I think so. Oh no, that's 19th. So we gotta go that way.

Alex: Yeah. Okay, cool.

Mark Mendoza: Perfect.

By this point, I was pretty focused on just getting our map turned in the right direction. But as we jog interviewed our way through Oakland, I started to realize that maybe a map wasn't what we really needed to figure out where Alex wanted to go.

At first, he told me that he was done with travel, with going places. He said he was getting older. He said he'd been thinking about settling down.

Alex: For me, all the travel in my life, it sort of got old. So I needed a change of changes, you know, I needed to choose. You see this...

Mark Mendoza: But by the time we rounded that next corner, it started to sound like that wasn't really what he wanted at all.

Alex: So like, how do you see this, this play as being a part of that?[00:16:00] 

Mark Mendoza: If you make a good play, you can tour it. And it's funny because I don't wanna stop traveling. I want to tour-- I, I want to keep going.

And my, my dream is to get me on the road, you know, indefinitely. But I like to go the long way in my life, you know, I like to, uh, go the scenic route. And, uh, you know, what people say about, "Oh, it's not about the, the destination, but the journey." That's true, isn't it?

Do you know if we're still going the right way?

Alex: Yeah, I believe so. I think.

Mark Mendoza: At this point, Alex had basically given up on me and had flagged down a couple of girls who were just crossing the street.

Alex: Excuse me, do y'all know where the BART station is? The nearest BART station...

Mark Mendoza: And he seemed pretty eager to get where he was going. Or at least just to keep going.

Oh, and we made it there, eventually. The BART station, at least.

Alex: For me, that first travel was an experience that, you know, I can't shake. I gotta get my BART card here. 

Mark Mendoza: Yeah.

Alex: Gotta get on this bus over-- this train-- and meet this guy.

Mark Mendoza: Yeah.

And then, that was it. He rushed into the station, and then he was gone. I hope he met the guy. I hope he made his mime show work. I hope he's on the road again, and then he got exactly the change that he needed.

Hollie Kool: Well, he made it this far, right? It's like he said-- at some point you gotta destroy all your other options and just go. He's already made it all the way here.

Mark Mendoza: Yeah. Actually, it makes me think of this thing that the woman told us when we first got to the station. Her name was Annetta, and Cathy and I met her right when we arrived.

She was sweeping the waiting room floors while things were quiet, and she told us that she had been working at the station for 11 years. So we asked her about the craziest thing that she'd ever seen at the station, and she just waved her hand over the whole place and said, "You know, everything happens here."

And when she said that, there was a part of me that thought, "Really? This is everything." Because in the grand scheme of things, that's not how I saw the Greyhound at all. You're not supposed to stick around at the station. It's about [00:18:00] getting to the next stop that matters. But then I talked to Cathy, and she told me that while I'd been chasing Alex, she had met this girl, Lorraine.

Cathy Wong: I caught her right when she got off the bus.

Hey, uh, we're actually doing a class project on people traveling.

There was this huge crowd of people streaming at the door, and I ran up to her as she was heading out.

Lorraine had short bleach-blonde hair, a silver ball in her tongue, polarized sunglasses. And she told me she was headed from Reno, Nevada to Eureka, California.

Lorraine: To, uh, help a friend, their parents, well their parents had passed away.

Cathy Wong: Mm-hmm.

Lorraine: And, uh, I used to be an RN, so I'm helping him with his dad now.

Cathy Wong: And then she kind of shrugged and that was it. As she was walking away. I saw that she had this intense, bright blue, sprawling tattoo, peeking out from under her shirt, covering her whole collarbone. And right after I shut off the tape recorder.

I was kinda like, [expletive], why didn't I ask her about that? A little later, I'd gone outside to talk to some women, smoking on the curb, and suddenly, there she was.

She rushed up to me. Wanted to know if I had a cell phone. And it was like this amazing second chance.

Lorraine: You allowed to make, uh, outside calls, like to Nevada?

Cathy Wong: Yeah.

Lorraine: You're my lifesaver.

Cathy Wong: No worries. Here you go.

Lorraine: Thank you.

Hey, it's me. You're probably at work. Um, I'm in Oakland. Just wanted to let you know, um, I love you, alright, bye...

Cathy Wong: I figured it was maybe her family back home. The friend, she was going to help.

You have a pretty sick tattoo.

Lorraine: Thank you.

Cathy Wong: Can you tell me a little bit about it?

And right away it was like, wow, there was so much more here that I'd missed the first time around.

Lorraine: The candle means my sobriety. Um, I was really bad into meth, and, uh, it-- I had to go through drug court, and, uh, probation and parole and whatnot. And so like the, that's what the candle signifies. Sooner or later, I'll get the flames that go right there. And then the roses mean like life.

Cathy Wong: Do you have any others?

Lorraine: Oh yeah. [00:20:00] I got "memories" tatted on my, uh, what left underarm. And then I got a skeleton key 'cause I collect skeleton keys. My older sister and my twin sister, we all got 'em as like a family thing. And my mom's supposed to get a lock.

Cathy Wong: I asked her, you know, why skeleton keys? And she didn't really have an answer.

Lorraine: And uh...

Cathy Wong: she said she'd been told she was an old soul, and maybe that explained why she was so into collecting things from the past. Although she didn't have the keys anymore.

Lorraine: When I was, uh, doing a bunch of drugs, everyone stole 'em from me. But I did have a key-- I had a skeleton key collection probably for any old house you could think of.

I found one when I was really young. Just been collecting 'em since.

Cathy Wong: Do you know what they open?

Lorraine: They open all kinds of different things. I have had the one ones for like the actual jail handcuffs, but you get those taken away if you get arrested. Like if they see it on your key chain, and they'll take it away from you.

Cathy Wong: So what's on your key chain right now?

Lorraine: This one is my dad's high school class ring. He committed suicide when I was two years old, so it's the only thing we have left of his. He was schizophrenic, so he thought that, uh, people were trying to kill him.

Cathy Wong: Mm-hmm.

Lorraine: The fun stuff [laughs].

Cathy Wong: She was wearing the ring on a chain around her neck.

I asked her what it meant to her, to carry that around with you all the time.

Lorraine: Um, everything and nothing at the same time. Because he wasn't there, in my life. But I guess it shows that I still had a father. My mom didn't give it to me until I was almost at-- well, I, I, I kind of just never went to high school, but I, I've had it ever since, like middle school or so.

Cathy Wong: Mm-hmm.

Lorraine: And I've kept it since. And it's been through some shit because like I, when I was doing drugs and stuff, people like to steal things from you. And uh, my baby ring got stolen, like gold bracelets from when I was a baby got stolen. I didn't care about my baby ring, I didn't care about any of that. Like, this is the only thing [00:22:00] we have of our father.

Cathy Wong: She'd managed to get the ring back every time it was stolen.

Lorraine: It's happened more than once. It's happened several times, so I keep it here now.

My re-- stuff recently got taken in to impound because it was in a ca-- vehicle that I was using to get out here, but I ended up not. It was late, and we were waiting on a gas money to get out here. And this is the only thing I was wearing. Everything else I owned-- and I mean, I mean everything-- my clothes, my birth certificate, everything was in that vehicle and it's gone. I honestly believe it was like God telling me, like, "Quit your [expletive] and go do something with your life."

Cathy Wong: She had this casual way of describing these moments when her entire plan just to get out would come right to the brink of crashing completely down.

Lorraine: Yesterday, last night, um, I was with kinda like my boyfriend. We went to go get a room 'cause I was gonna leave today, and cops pulled us over. And I was handcuffed, and I was put on the side of the road, and I, I thought I was going to jail. Because every single time I've been handcuffed, I've gone to jail. Every single time I've been pulled over or seen a cop, I've gone to jail. So, uh, I'm sitting there, like, on the side of the road and I'm like, "[Expletive.] Well, you know, like, I know I'm not gonna get bailed out. I've never been bailed out. No one's ever came to the rescue."

The cops say, "Alright, now, and I'm gonna have you stand up, turn around, and I'm gonna take these handcuffs off."

And I'm like, "What? You joking, right?"

And then they let me go, and I was like, alright, I'm out. Peace out. I'm out of Nevada. I'm done with Nevada. I'm so done. I'm going back to-- I was born out here, in Hayward. So I was like, I'm gone. I'm going home.

Cathy Wong: Is your boyfriend back, still back in Nevada?

Lorraine: Yeah.

Cathy Wong: So [00:24:00] that's who she'd been calling earlier, when I'd first met her.

Lorraine: Hey, it's me. You're probably at work. Um, I'm in Oakland.

Cathy Wong: She told me her mom was still in Reno, and both of her sisters too. I started to realize how much of her past she'd put behind her to get on that Greyhound bus, and it struck me that what she'd managed to do-- not the destination, not where she was headed, just the very act of going-- that was this pretty incredible thing.

She'd told me that she'd only met her boyfriend a few months ago, and I asked her how he felt about this. To have fallen in love with someone who's gone so quickly.

Lorraine: It's kind of [expletive], but he just got a job. He is about to be assistant manager at like this dog grooming place. I was not having assistant manager jobs when I was 18. I was out selling drugs. So, I mean, anything's better than what I was doing, right? So I told him he couldn't come with me.

He knew I was going, even when I met him. Um, so it was, it was-- it probably wasn't as hard for him, but it was hard for me because I didn't expect to like someone so much. And I didn't want to because I knew I was leaving, you know? So it hit me pretty hard.

Cathy Wong: What do you mean that you knew that you were leaving?

Lorraine: Oh, I've known, for like, almost all this year that I needed to go. It's just I didn't-- I don't know, something kept me around. [Unclear], maybe he'll do something with his life, and I'll be able to come back and live a life. But I'm not letting him not try for something, you know. It hurt more than anything, but it had to have been done.

Now, I am here today, with nothing [slight chuckle]. But when I go to Eureka, hopefully it'll be a lot more easier. I really wanna help my friend and his dad. I feel really bad for him, and he helped me out when I was [00:26:00] down, down and out when I was in Nevada. So might as well come back out here and help him.

Cathy Wong: When we were saying goodbye, I asked her what she hoped would happen in Eureka.

I asked her where all this was headed, what she thought the very best possible outcome could be.

"I don't know," she said. "A new life."

"What's a new life?" I asked, and she said, "I don't know. I'm making it up as I go along. Maybe it's better that way."

Hollie Kool: So that's how you get unstuck, then. You just go. Alex, Lorraine, everything was going wrong, and so they ran like crazy. And if they're lucky, they'll get unstuck and leave it all behind.

Mark Mendoza: I mean, that's one option.

Hollie Kool: What's the other option?

Mark Mendoza: Well-- well, obviously you could just stick around. And wait.

Trucker: You know, I, I've been in the city all my life. And it, it, I, it doesn't serve me well.

Mark Mendoza: I'm just wondering what your guys' experiences are with, like, what, you're traveling right now? I mean, why?

Trucker: I'm a trucker, so--

Mark Mendoza: Oh, really?

Trucker: I travel all the time. I'm, I'm making it back up to where I gotta go. Uh...

Mark Mendoza: To him, the Greyhound isn't anything special. It's just a part of work by now. He takes the Greyhound Upstate, drives right back home to Oakland. It's routine.

Trucker: You know, my plea is up there, so.

Mark Mendoza: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And he's been doing it so long, that this time-- well, maybe this is the time, he said, that things were going to change.

Trucker: I love Oakland. But um, I don't wanna live here no more [laughs]. When I came back this time, I was like never coming back, just never coming back.

But my daughter, she travels with me a lot. We see places and I'm like, this is where I want to live. This would be great. You know what I'm saying? I've stopped some places, and I just pull the truck over and, and, uh, I drive a 53-footer. I come to, uh, [00:28:00] Arizona and, you know, the mountains-- just, it just makes it, it look like a taco truck.

The awe of it. You just feel like you-- I'm so small here, you know?

Mark Mendoza: So, so do you think that's, that's where you want to move to? Is that?

Trucker: It's gonna be a ranch. It's gonna be a ranch, and yeah. I've been thinking about Arizona or Oregon. So, that's why I do what I do. That's why I do, what I do,

Know what I'm saying? The money's not a problem.

Mark Mendoza: Mm-hmm.

Trucker: It's just, it's just where, you know, what I mean? Where I just feel like I want to be. I, I, I like the wide open. And then, when it's dark, it's dark. I'm a cowboy. More than modern cowboys.

Mark Mendoza: Mm-hmm.

Trucker: You know what I'm saying? It's over with now.

Mark Mendoza: Alright. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Hollie Kool: So once he gets-- if he gets this ranch-- is that the end?

Mark Mendoza: What do you mean?

Hollie Kool: I don't know. Like, he keeps going in circles, up to his trucks and back, every day, until he leaves forever. And then he just lives happily ever after?

Mark Mendoza: I mean, I guess that's the whole point of the dream, right? I mean, it's something to keep him going.

Hollie Kool: Okay. Well, I mean, I think of this one guy my friend told me about who had everything figured out. He was going to grow up, become a professional organist, marry the love of his life, move back to the small town he came from, and have three kids. And we used to joke about that, but I also think I kind of envied him.

He knew where he was going, and I think he was actually the only person I've ever known who had a single dream that he saw that clearly. [00:30:00] That is...

Shoda: [Laughs], okay, okay. Let's go.

Hollie Kool: ...until I met Shoda.

Shoda: I'm from Japan.

Hollie Kool: Okay, cool.

So I saw this guy, kind of during a lull, and he was standing at a counter. Not in the main station where most people wait for buses. But anyway, he was bobbing his head very much into his music.

Shoda: Music. Do you know DMX, hip hop music?

Hollie Kool: He had this big, scraggly beard and this huge backpacker's pack. He was just so much into his own world, and I wanted to know what that world was. He told me his name was Shoda.

Shoda: I'm Shoda.

Hollie Kool: Very enthusiastically.

Shoda: Showtime. 

Hollie Kool: And he was on this huge trip across America.

Shoda: Using a Greyhound bus. Oh my God.

Hollie Kool: He actually pulled out this map of the United States on his phone with stars at every location he had been.

Shoda: New Orleans, Texas. I used Greyhound bus. I don't like Greyhound bus.

Hollie Kool: So why did you choose to come here now, to America?

Shoda: Uh, because. American culture. So cool. Al Pacino. I like Al Pacino movies. So, uh, America, oh, cool man!

Hollie Kool: So actually, a lot later when I was listening to this again, what's funny is that I realized that one of the first things he said to me--

Shoda: Forget about it.

Hollie Kool: --was actually a quote from an Al Pacino movie.

Shoda: Forget about it. Forget about it.

When I was, uh, 12 years old, I watched, uh, MTV. Wow, wow, America is so cool! I wanna go! Everybody say to me, "Why you go to America? I don't understand. Watch out terrorism. Watch out ISIS." Forget about it. Forget about it.

Hollie Kool: So for this guy who loves America so much, this is like a trip of a lifetime.

He made me so excited about the fact that I live here in America. I was born into the dream he wanted so badly. This trip, right now, in this Greyhound station. [00:32:00] This is everything he's dreamed of.

Shoda: And now I'm 28. 16 years later! Finally, yes, America! Like this, my dream to go to America. So my dream was finish [laughs].

Mark Mendoza: So wait, what does he mean when he says, "My dream is finished?"

Hollie Kool: That's the thing. His dream, I think, is over. I asked him what it'll be like when he gets back home and what kind of life he's going back to. And it turns out, he didn't really have anything to go back to.

Shoda: No, I quit job.

Hollie Kool: To come here, or?

Shoda: Yes.

Hollie Kool: Really?

Shoda: So, I have to find another job in my country.

Hollie Kool: Just quit?

Shoda: Yeah. And save money, and quit. And come here. And my dream is over because come to America.

Hollie Kool: He has his family, but like the drive and the energy for what's back in Japan just isn't the same as what he has for America, right now. Right at this moment.

And so I started to realize that this thing that sounded so amazing-- this trip of a lifetime-- this is his one shot. He dreamt of America, and now he was here. And it was over. And so I asked him, what the next America-like dream would be.

Shoda: Next dream? I don't know.

Hollie Kool: What do you, what do you wanna do?

Shoda: I don't know [laughs].

Hollie Kool: I actually found myself fighting to convince him that his next dream would be possible. I really wanted it to happen.

What do you like?

Shoda: Next job? Uh, I like pizza. But Japan-- Japan is no pizza store. I want to make own company. Pizza store is my dream.

Hollie Kool: But it didn't honestly seem like he thought he could pull it off.

Shoda: Very too hard for me.

Money's necessary, so.

Hollie Kool: But as we were leaving, after I'd recommended him four [00:34:00] different pizza restaurants in San Francisco, I realized that he had made it to America. And it might've taken him 16 years, but he was here. So I'm hopeful for the pizza company. I think he'll make it happen.

Shoda: Yeah, I--

Hollie Kool: You'll learn.

Shoda: Yeah.

My parents have a...

Hollie Kool: Or at least, I hope he'll try.

After Shoda left, after we'd all left, really, after we'd packed up at the Greyhound and went home, I realized that behind all of the interviews, there was always this bigger, looming question. We would always ask, "Where are you going?" And it should be an easy question because they have the destination written right on their ticket. But, after a few questions though, it became clear that the answer was so much more complicated.

Mark Mendoza: There was actually this thing that Alex said to me around the end of our interview, before we got to the BART station, that I remembered later.

Alex: Back about six years ago, I thought, I need to see America again with a no interstate rule I made for myself, because...

Mark Mendoza: No interstates, he said, because off the interstate, you can get more scenery. Even if you don't get there fast, or even if you don't get there at all, at least on the way there, you'll see some beautiful things.

Hollie Kool: And maybe that was it in the end, the best everyone was hoping for. At least they had made it all the way to the station, even if they didn't know how to take it from there. Everywhere they'd been, there is this good scenery. And I think I can be okay with that, figuring out the next destination, over and over again, and in between being lost, seeing some beautiful things.

Connie Xiao: That piece was produced by Cathy Wong with help from Holly Kool and Mark Mendoza.

You are listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling [00:36:00] Project. In this episode, we navigate the theme of navigating, asking, "How do we move through the world without a map?"

In our next segment, narrated by Aparna Verma, we zoom into one person's pursuit of The American Dream.

Saptarshi Majumdar: Like, I've seen most of, more of America than most of my friends, and they have been living here for, God, [expletive] 18 years.

I'm Saptarshi Majumdar, uh, I go by Sap.

Aparna Verma: And during the winter, Sap took a

Saptarshi Majumdar: 35 hour Greyhound to Austin from LA. And then, like, I, I took an 11 hour bus ride to, uh, New Orleans from Austin,

Aparna Verma: which amounts to a grand total of 1,892 miles. A journey across America that was

Saptarshi Majumdar: grimy, greasy, long distance.

When you are, like, telling a story of how you are doing a trip to New Orleans by yourself, and you are in a wheelchair, people appreciate the fact that doing something like that, especially if you're not from America.

Aparna Verma: Sap was born in India and dreamed of traveling. Until his freshman year of high school.

Saptarshi Majumdar: I had a tumor in my back, uh, in my freshman year of high school, and like, doctors had to, like, operate it, and it was like a eight-hour surgery. After that I became weak, and like, uh, had to be in a wheelchair.

Like, I mean, I didn't know how to speak English because I never really had like a proper English teacher in high school. I, I ended up like reading a lot, watching a ton of films and teaching myself English through the usage of set films and books. It was pretty nuts.

Uh, that's like how I started, like, learning that there is a thing called America.

Aparna Verma: The first time Sap left India was to come here, the United States of America, for school.

Saptarshi Majumdar: India in general [00:38:00] isn't particularly friendly to you if you are a, a disabled human being because of the fact that most roads are inaccessible. Uh, so you, you have like next to no independence. Yeah, I fucking hated it.

Ended up getting into Stanford and on like, and like my, my parents were initially opposed to me coming here, but then I also got a full ride here, and they were like, I mean, "Okay, I guess, like, you're, you're your own man. Like, we have to let you go."

Aparna Verma: When he got to Stanford, Sap was given a motorized wheelchair, a full ride in a double sense.

Saptarshi Majumdar: I could fucking zoom around and look, do whatever the fuck I wanted to do. And like, yeah. I mean, I was like really enjoying freedom for the first time.

Aparna Verma: And with this newfound freedom, Sap took a road trip to New Orleans, when he just decided,

Aparna Verma and Sap, together: let's fucking go.

Saptarshi Majumdar: I took a 35 hour Greyhound to Austin from LA. The guy sitting next to me, his name was Juan de la Rosa. And Juan de la Rosa, he was spending his first day of freedom after serving seven years, uh, in jail, and he was on his way to a halfway house.

We became so close. He told me stories that, like, just being at that level of vulnerability with someone was, like, very powerful for me.

I didn't have like close friends back in India because you're always looked down upon. Making yourself vulnerable is the key to actually connecting with people.

Aparna Verma: And then--

Saptarshi Majumdar: People in Texas are so fucking friendly, man.

Aparna Verma: Sap reached Austin.

Saptarshi Majumdar: And that's the thing about doing a trip by yourself. Fleeting moments of loneliness inspired me to talk to strangers. Just go and have a conversation. I think there is a lot to learn from other people's perspective. Like, it's not about seeing the sites, it's about having an experience, having a journey.

Aparna Verma: And so, Sap knew that he could redo--

Saptarshi Majumdar: redo, restart, renew my American dream. Be independent for the first time in my life, fight like hell to, like, make my place in this country.[00:40:00] 

Aparna Verma: Sap is always finding his way back on the road.

Saptarshi Majumdar: This is it for me, like if I die, I would rather die doing this.

Connie Xiao: That piece was produced by Aparna Verma and Jenny Han.

Sometimes, just making a small shift in direction can make the difference between reaching your destination and missing it completely. Fresh out of college, Jennifer Johnson decided to sail with her boyfriend from Japan to Hawaii on a small, very small sailboat.

Jennifer Johnson: Every wave-- with every single wave, like you think the boat is gonna break. It would just be constant, constant, like waves bashing the side of the boat. And you're just like, grabbing the rail, holding on, hoping it's gonna be over.

And then the sun comes out, and it's incredible when that clears. That's the moment that makes it really special.

So I think I was about 25, a couple years outta college after having worked in Japan for the Ministry of Education for a couple years, teaching. It was a time in my life where it was just a moment, you know, everybody's got a moment in their life where they feel ready to move and try something different and go somewhere.

We had such a small boat, it was 27 feet that we had to be really selective, especially for the first voyage. Provision with a lot of dry food. Things like potatoes and onions and cabbage can last up to three weeks. Eggs can last if you turn them. I remember sitting through storms, just like dreaming about salads and cold food, cold Coke or anything.

I never, I don't even [00:42:00] drink Coke and I would crave, like, I'd love to have a can of Coke, you know.

My parents didn't travel much, hadn't left the country, you know? Um, I think I was the first one to like leave the country in my family. I didn't actually have their support in a lot of ways 'cause they thought I should work, pay for college. That wasn't gonna be a productive experience, but I did it anyways.

There's gonna be a moment in your life where you're faced with this opportunity to do something that you never would've expected to be doing.

I worried about my mom. We couldn't co-- our radio wasn't working so, uh, we couldn't make any land contact.

Well, you're just a dot on a map.

Once, we didn't see any kinda ship or any, anything for 30 days. So you do feel like you are just this speck in the ocean, and no one knows you're there. No one knows where you are. And you look at the chart, and you're just like a little dot on that chart, every day, moving just-- maybe the chart was huge, you know, it'd cover our whole chart table-- but we would only move like half a centimeter every day.

The compass is right, when you're sitting on the cockpit, it's right in front of you where you're sitting and doing your watch and so forth, but you're constantly making sure, like, if you're shifting a little bit, just like one degree on that compass, that means it's gonna take extra time, or that means the wind shifted. And so you're always watching to see if you get the best heading possible.

You sleep when you can. You sleep when I, it's safe. And you sleep because it's safe. There were times when I would be so tired, and I would set my alarm every five minutes, just to do the watch, but I would allow myself five minutes to sleep and just like look up. Like I'd be in the cockpit and look up. No boats, no boats. Look up. Look this way. Look back. Back to sleep. Set the alarm again.

The stillness when the wind isn't howling at [00:44:00] 30 miles an hour. You feel the stillness. It's a strange kind of loneliness. You start talking to fish. You crave talking, uh, to people, to new people, to new things. So you end up creating certain dialogues with your environment, uh, watching fish following you.

I mean, you'll see like thousands of fish jumping at once, and you'll feel comforted by that. During a storm, when you're doing watch, it's hard, 'cause you're like in full weather gear and it's cold, it's rainy. And you just sit out there in five hours of rain until it's your turn to come in.

The disorganized waves are scary. I mean, they would hit you from every direction. You don't know where they're coming from. The wind would be all over the place. Your body is really tense. You are holding on at all times because you are literally sideways. Swells would be this, you know, you go up on top of the swell, and then you'd go down the swell. And you swear that wave behind you is gonna like roll over you, but it never did.

You just want the pounding to stop. 

Perception feels weird because you've just been staring at a horizon for 45 days. And then you finally see the speck of land on the horizon, you're like, "Wait a minute." And you're arguing over, is it really land? Is it really land? I think I see. Get the binoculars out. Get the binoculars out. Is that really land?

We had like a land bird come. Um, the land birds are different than the, the birds that are at sea. And it would sit and chirp, and we got so excited for this land bird to come visit us. We must be close.

Just imagine if you don't see anything but the sea for 46 days. Land was so green, like everything was so vivid, it like shocks you. The color shock you.

There's a fullness and an emptiness to it all at the same time. You appreciate things that you don't really understand exist. It really is a voyage. It's like a [00:46:00] voyage of the mind, the body, it's everything.

Connie Xiao: That piece was produced by Katie Wolfteich.

After that journey, Jennifer Johnson and her partner continued sailing around the Pacific for over a year. Today, Jennifer lives on a boat moored in the San Francisco Bay.

In this episode, we have explored what it means to navigate through the world with maps that are constantly being revised, like pheromone trails. Or to navigate through the world without a map at all. But what if there was one map, one guide, that really did explain it all?

To answer, we turned to former National Student Poet Louis Lafair.

Louis Lafair: The first poem is called "Writer's Block," and that's the whole poem.

Alright, the next poem's a little longer. It's called "If There Were a Manual."

I arrive at the local library. At the front desk I ask, "May I please have a manual for life?" And the librarian responds, "Right this way." She slides quietly. Is she still there, slipping through the corridors of guidebooks, until I'm left wandering.

When are we stopping? Which author will it be? I imagine what the manual will look like. Maybe it will be a human diagram with clearly labeled body parts. Feet, made in China. Lungs, please recycle. Wrist, tear here. Gray hair, keep out of reach of children. Heart, handle with care. Brain, lost and found. Ears, for lease.

Or maybe it will be a Google map, From here to Happiness. Head [00:48:00] South. Dead end, turn right onto despair Avenue. One way. Continue until out of gas. Do not enter. Make next possible U-Turn. Stop. Turn left. Detour. Turn left. Winding road. Turn left. Visit the site of your own grave. Construction ahead. Cross watershed, bridge, yields to pedestrians.

Take ramp on the freeway. Speed limit, infinity. Continue several years. Exit. Destination.

Or maybe, the manual will be a carefully measured recipe for success. Four broken bones, several tablespoons of tragedy. 18 tablespoons of hope. A full bottle of perspective. Several ounces of a secret ingredient your mother forgot to reveal before she passed away.

Mix well. Cook at six degrees of separation.

Still treading in the wake of the librarian, in the absence of the quintessential volume, I stopped moving and realized that if there were a manual, the one would read it because no one ever reads instructions. Because maybe we're not supposed to. Maybe on the hands of the human diagram are scars that say, "Figure it out for yourself."

Maybe, on the Google map, you ask for driving instructions. But really, you're walking the whole way. So the time estimates are entirely inaccurate, and you're able to cut through crooked meadows that aren't even on the map in the first place. Maybe, for that one stretch of uninterrupted highway, you can catch some public transport, asking strange questions on a bus full of strangers because you've decided discomfort is the secret ingredient in your recipe for success.

Maybe, we're all supposed to write the manual ourselves. Since only so many people can [00:50:00] have the same number of broken bones. Since everyone can choose with the spoon labeled "attitude," exactly how many smiles to add to the cauldron before mixing well.

Connie Xiao: Alec Glassford recorded Louis Lafair reading his original poetry.

Today's program was produced by Will Rogers, Alec Glassford, Rosie La Puma, Yue Li, Cathy Wong, Virginia Drummond, Katie Wolfteich, Aparna Verma, Jenny Han, An-Li Herring, and me, Connie Xiao.

Special thanks to Chris Leboa, Deborah Gordon, Julie Sweetkind-Singer, Glen McLaughlin, Saptarshi Majumdar, Jennifer Johnson, and Louis Lafair. Thanks also to Jonah Willihnganz, Jake Warga, Jenny March, and the rest of the staff and students of Stanford Storytelling Project.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Stanford Continuing Education, the Program in Oral Communication, and Bruce Braden.

You can find this and every episode of State of the Human through our website, storytelling.stanford.edu. Our website also has more information about the Storytelling Project's live events, grants, and workshops.

You've been listening to State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. [00:52:00] I'm Connie Xiao.