State of the Human: Preserving

This episode investigates the act of preserving, a decision made in the present, regarding the past, looking towards the future. What can we learn from what we choose to preserve? What does preserving reveal about our values?

Transcript for Preserving (Full Episode)

Andy Lee: [00:00:00] Picture this. You awake, the thick smell of smoke. Your house has caught fire, but you have enough time to save one of your possessions. What would you choose?

This is a classic thought experiment. It's not really meant to measure what you would save. It's a litmus test for your values.

Our team visited Professor Elaine Trahan of Stanford University's English Department, where she showed us something she has saved. It's a Bible, rescued from the firestorms of time. But once, the book belonged to someone else: Elaine's ancestor, a Welsh man named Edward Evans.

Elaine Trahan: He wrote his name in it. I have counted, I suspect I'm not exactly spot on, but I've counted 29 times.

Early in the book, he writes a little poem, and then he goes, "When I'm dead and out of mind, in this book, my name shall find. When I'm dead and in the grave, in this book, my name shall have."

Andy Lee: At Stanford, Elaine directs a project called Stanford Ordinary People, Extraordinary Stories.

Elaine Trahan: It's a project to reclaim voices that are often marginalized in the record, if you like, the kind of cultural record. We tend to privilege books and artifacts that belong to celebrities, but what about all of those other books and materials that you find in junk shops? So I have set about collecting those things wherever I go. I probably have, now, something like 50 or 60 individual archives.

Andy Lee: Behind every act of preservation is a value judgment. We preserve food because it's practical. The Egyptians preserve the bodies of Pharaohs and royalty, believing they needed special preparation to travel to the afterlife. [00:02:00] At research institutions, scholars like Elaine preserve artifacts to build a historical record.

Yet for every object we save from the clutches of time, there are countless more we allow to decay and fade away.

Edward Evans' Bible has now been preserved for hundreds of years since its creation. Or, more accurately, partially preserved.

Elaine Trahan: It's been eaten through a little bit by bookworms. And you can tell from looking at the state of the spine, and the slightly battered nature of the spine, that it's really an exceptionally well used book.

Andy Lee: For Elaine, it is striking that Edward Evans chose to inscribe his name 29 times.

Elaine Trahan: I think he was trying to preserve the memory of himself. And I think that that is an absolutely overriding human desire to be remembered.

Andy Lee: Someday, your possessions might join the ranks of Edward Evans' Bible as tributes to generations past.

You're listening to State of the Human, a podcast by the Stanford Storytelling Project. Each episode, we look at a universal human experience, like dying, or imagining, or naming, and bring you stories that tackle our understanding of that experience. In this show, we will look at the experience of preserving.

I'm Andy Lee.

What does preserving reveal about our values?

Elaine Trahan: Maybe a book dealer might give me, I don't know, like maybe a hundred dollars for it. But it's my family Bible, so you couldn't give me, okay-- maybe a million. I might take a million for it if anybody's interested.[00:04:00] 

Andy Lee: Producer Regina Kong visits a northern California falconry school, founded by a woman who has dedicated her life to preserving the ancient tradition of falconry. Come along for some close encounters of the bird kind.

Regina Kong: Don Diego is a Sonoran hawk.

Kate Marden: His full name is Don Diego Alejandro Santiago Saragose Nego Montoyo Delgado. And I do a lot of school events, so all the kids would say, "Go, Diego, go!" which bothered me. But I like that, you know, they are a Sonoran Desert bird, so it's kind of "Princess Bride meets Zorro," and I gave him one of those beautiful long, you know, Californian names, so he would be noble and proud.

Regina Kong: Up close, he has dark, piercing eyes. His body is a rich russet color with white and black tail feathers. It's a deadly and powerful body.

Kate Marden: They can grab you faster than a rattlesnake can strike you. He has about 200 pounds per square inch of gripping pressure in his feet.

My name is Kate Martin, and I'm a master falconer.

Regina Kong: Don Diego is Kate's teaching partner. Kate is the founder of West Coast Falconry, a school where anyone can take a lesson and fall in love with the birds.

Kate Marden: Everybody has an emotional connection with raptors. It's just this really intense thing we, I've been read-- I read books about it, 'cause people are, tend to be more connected with predator animals. So we think it's the forward [00:06:00] facing eyes. And I think part of it is, arguably, 10,000 years of interaction with these-- with these birds.

Regina Kong: In early civilizations across the world in Mongolia, Mesopotamia, and the Middle East, falconers trained their birds to hunt small game for food. Later in Europe, it became a sport of kings-- and queens, too.

But those ways of life are rapidly disappearing. Today, there are less than 5,000 licensed falconers in the U.S. Even fewer are women.

Falconry is a pretty misunderstood sport. And it has a reputation for cruelty.

Kate Marden: Because we use a wild bird as our hunting partner, so they feel like this must be a form of slavery.

Regina Kong: When Kate founded West Coast Falconry in 2005, she thought long and hard about how she would get Americans to care about an obscure and often controversial practice.

Kate Marden: I think that you can preserve something better by te-- by teaching people about it, than you can by hiding it. You know, one of my little catchphrases is, is "preservation through education."

Regina Kong: Her preservation efforts come from a place of deep awe, as well as a profound devotion that borders on something darker.

Kate Marden: It's not a hobby, it's a virus. And it'll, you know, it never goes away, and it'll make and break relationships, and make and break marriages, and you'll lose your job, or get a job. You know, it's just-- most of the falconers, we're just obsessed by it. It's just part of our life.

Regina Kong: Kate's obsession with falconry began with an impossibility. It was the late 1960s.

Kate Marden: And I think we were still wearing dresses at school, we couldn't wear pants yet.

Regina Kong: She was eight years old when a master falconer came to her school.

Kate Marden: And then he had, um, a bald eagle that John F. Kennedy had given him. [00:08:00] Now, from my generation, that's like God giving him a bald eagle. That's really impressive.

Regina Kong: The story could have easily ended there. But then the master falconer brought out a red-tailed hawk.

Kate Marden: But that was, that was where I really got the bug. That age is where, when you talk to falconers, that's where a lot of 'em get the bug.

Regina Kong: The hawk flew around the classroom before settling on the master falconer's arm. In a jolt, Kate realized that she didn't just admire the falconer. She wanted to be him. But she stayed quiet.

Kate Marden: I was too shy and too well-trained to ask, you know, "How do I become a falconer?"

Regina Kong: How do you become a falconer? Well, for starters, you have to pass an exam through California Fish and Game. Then you have to find someone with at least five years of experience as a licensed falconer to be your sponsor. When Kate started looking for a sponsor, she found herself being ignored... a lot. Most of the master falconers she met were men, and they just wouldn't talk to her.

Kate almost gave up, but then, something extraordinary happened. She was volunteering at a Renaissance Fair in Marin County when a man and his wife approached her.

Kate Marden: And I told him what I was doing, and he reaches his pocket and he says, "My name's Earl Walton, and I'm a master falconer, and if you wanna become a real falconer, let me know and I'll help you."

I felt like a door was being opened that I was wanting to open for most of my life.

Regina Kong: When you wait 30 years for something and it finally arrives, what do you do? Kate did what her [00:10:00] 8-year-old self could only dream of doing. She gave Earl a call, and Kate became a real life master falconer.

Kate Marden: It's really, really creepy. But also the thing that it does is it makes that center part of your arm the highest point. That's what he's going to fly to.

Amber Kelley: So we're gonna get in a circle, and I'm gonna say something like "left shoulder to the..."

Regina Kong: It's early morning at West Coast Falconry in Marysville, a town just outside of Sacramento, California.

The car ride takes us past farmland and hills dotted with trees. I'm with some producers from the Stanford Storytelling Project. And we're here for our very first falconry lesson.

Amber Kelley: ...shoulder to the hawk. That means I want you to turn your body.

Kate Marden: I'm the hawk.

Amber Kelley: Yep, so that your left shoulder is facing the hawk, alright?

Regina Kong: Kate is dressed in flannel and sturdy boots. She fits each of us with a single leather glove. Her assistants smear a dab of raw quail meat between our thumb and index fingers.

Kate Marden: Repeat after us:

Kate Marden and Amber Kelley, speaking together: This is the front of my body.

Crowd speaking together: This is the front of my body.

Kate Marden: So if we say, "shoulder to the hawk, arm in front of your body," you need to be able to see your fist in front of your mud.

Regina Kong: We practice together. Today, we get to work with Hancock, a Harris hawk with moddled, brown feathers.

Unidentified woman: One, two, three.

Crowd speaking together: Woo, nice job!

Kate Marden: I thought we had one more but she was over there, grinning.

Regina Kong: Finally, it's my turn.

Crowd speaking together: One, two, yeah, three... that's a good idea... yeah.

Regina Kong: Hancock swoops down from the tree and lands on my arm.

His talons dig into my leather glove. He's heavier than I imagined, and there's definitely a sharpness to him. And I'm realizing it's terrifying to be in the presence of [00:12:00] something I know could kill me if it wanted to. To Kate, the connection between a falconer and her bird is both personal and spiritual.

Kate Marden: Every time I fly the bird, I'm letting it go. It's her choice. I think I've had three birds-- actually four birds fly away.

It's a nice, warm June day, and she just flew into this tree. And she would not come down for love or money, I went home and I got-- brought back a whole dead quail. And she sat in that tree, and I walked around that tree until the sun went down, got poison oak all over myself. And she just kinda looks at me and shakes her feathers out and spreads her wings and flies away.

Regina Kong: I think about this during our falconry lesson. As the birds fly over our heads, of course, I want them to land in our gloves. But another part of me wants them to be free-- to fly wherever they want. There's that old saying, "If you love something, let it go." But is it worth it to love wild creatures that may not love you back?

Maybe, it's about loving things because they are different from us. Because they remind us of what we are not.

Amber Kelley: I don't know. I kind of live vicariously through them, anyway. I've always thought flying would be like the coolest thing in the world-- just to be able to have wings, and just take off and leave everything behind whenever you wanted to.

Regina Kong: Amber moved in next door to Kate when she was 13 years old, and she's been working at West Coast Falconry ever since. 

Amber Kelley: Seeing that bird fly back to you is just something you don't get anywhere else. It gives you connection to nature, you know, 'cause you're working with a wild animal. Um, but it also gives you a connection to your ancestry, and you just-- you, you almost feel it when you're, when you're working with the birds. It's like, I've done [00:14:00] this before, or somebody I know, you know, down my line has. It's amazing.

Regina Kong: As access to open land shrinks, falconry is more and more in danger of disappearing. Kate hopes that the lesson she offers through West Coast Falconry preserve more than just the sport itself.

Kate Marden: The main impetus for teaching is so that we don't lose this amazing heritage.

Regina Kong: It's a heritage rooted in history and culture. But it's also a heritage about the communities formed from the passion and commitment the sport requires.

After our falconry lesson, someone asked me how I feel.

Regina Kong, after falconry lesson: I don't even know how to describe how I feel. I just-- happy, I guess.

Regina Kong: I am at a loss for words because I'm recognizing what a privilege and an honor it is to be able to interact so closely with these wild creatures.

Falconry is a sport that tests you. It demands patience, tenacity, and a willingness to connect with birds that in the end belong to no one.

Kate Marden, singing: I have seen the lark soar high at morn...

Regina Kong: Someone once told me that falconry is a sport that will break your heart in a thousand different ways.

At first, I didn't understand. But after meeting Kate, I realized that falconry will break your heart in a thousand different ways because those who preserve it put their hearts on the line. It's a love that doesn't always come back, [00:16:00] but it's also a love that's so worth it.

Kate Marden: You see a bird of prey that it rocks something in the, in the core of your being. I don't know anybody that's not impacted by a bird of prey. To see that look of wonder, and it helps me to, to, to remember what it was like for me the first time I had my bird fly to my glove.

Kate Marden, singing: If I could lure my singing bird from his own cozy nest...

If I could catch my singing bird...

I would warm him on my breast...

Andy Lee: That story was produced by Regina Kong.

If you walk down the one main street in Boonville, a tiny northern California town, you might hear a language you won't hear anywhere else. It's called Boontling. Boontling got its start in the 1890s, and it's still spoken in Boonville today. Well, kind of.

In this story, we take a closer look at language preservation.

Our producers learn that when it comes to keeping the language of Boontling alive, saving a couple thousand regional words from extinction is a decision more complex and more political than you might think.

Karen Ge: The California [00:18:00] 128 is a long, winding road cutting through a thick redwood forest.

Long, twisted branches create a canopy overhead, and sunlight fights to shine through the foliage.

Like most roads, there are many signs along the way. But one of them is impossible to miss.

Unidentified woman: Welcome to Anderson Valley, home of Hendy Woods State Park.  Gorman Ganos shies the shovel tooth.

Karen Ge: At this point, you're probably thinking,

Unidentified woman: What? Gorman Ganos shies the shovel tooth? 

Karen Ge: Here it is again. 

Rod DeWitt: Welcome to Anderson Valley, home of Hendy Woods State Park.  Gorman Ganos shies the shovel tooth.

Karen Ge: Only part of the sign is written in English. Here's what the non-English part says.

Rod DeWitt: An apple day keeps the doctor away.

Karen Ge: It may seem like an odd message for a welcome sign, but this little phrase actually speaks to the history of the valley. For a long time, Anderson Valley was primarily a place for apple farmers, shepherds, and cattle ranchers. The people here lived slow, quiet lives. Whether you were from Philo or Yorkville or Navarro, it was rare to speak with anyone outside of your town.

It sounds like your typical rural America. But by the late 1800s, something unusual was happening in one of those towns. In Boonville, a new lingo was being born: Boontling.

According to locals, the origin of Boontling is shrouded in mystery. Some say it was to gossip about a pregnancy out of wedlock. Others say women invented it to gossip about someone [00:20:00] else: their husbands.

And still, others say it was a way for local kids to talk behind their parents' backs.

Rod DeWitt: The pleads wanted to harp on some notch stuff, and so they kind of developed a little ling so they could kind of talk about stuff among themselves that, that, the parents or whatever didn't get. And then they gradually became parents and grandparents, and the lingo kind of grew.

Karen Ge: That was Rod Dewitt. Rod's one of the last Boontling speakers in town, and he doesn't just speak Boontling. He's actually created a dictionary filled with Boontling words, past and present.

Whenever someone makes a new Boontling word, Rod adds it.

Rod says that, as more people learned Boontling, local schools began teaching it as if it were a second language.

The lingo then evolved into an essential part of Boonville's culture.

Doug: You would have parties where you would "harp Boont"-- "harp" means speak and talk, and they would sit around, get drunk, and make up new Boontling.

Karen Ge: That was Doug, a regular at the Anderson Valley Brewing Company. For people who don't speak Boontling, it can be hard to follow.

Unidentified woman: Yeah, what's it feel like to hear the full fluency?

Unidentified man: Baffling, because you have no idea what they're saying.

Karen Ge: How did Boontling become so baffling?

Doug: There were a number of different ways they made the words. Um, one, one of the most amusing ones was they would take somebody's name in the valley, and it wouldn't mean them, it would mean some idiosyncrasy about them.

Karen Ge: One of the most iconic examples of this is the Boont word for phone booth: Bucky Walter.

Rod DeWitt: Bucky is, is a nickel, and that's because the old buffalo nickel. It had an Indian head on the one side, so the, the Boontling name for for Indian is "beak inch." So it was "buck Indian." So "beak inch," so it was a Bucky. And, uh, the, the payphone took nickels. And [00:22:00] Walter Levi was the first guy with a phone in the valley, so, Walter Levi, or Walter was, was a telephone. So Bucky Walter was a payphone, 'cause you put a nickel in the payphone.

Karen Ge: If you travel through Boonville today, you won't find any Bucky Walters anywhere. In fact, if you ask someone if they know Boontling, chances are you'll get a response like this.

Montage of interviewees: Nope. I don't either. What is that? Never heard of it. I, I was gonna say, is it a beer?

Karen Ge: At most, you find a few wines and beers that use Boontling on their labels.

Joe Webb: Um, it's all made up words. It's made up, made up places, names-- I, it's, it's just not applicable anymore. I mean, maybe 30 words. Maybe.

Karen Ge: That was Joe, one of the owners of Foursight Wines.

And if there are really only 30 words left, is Bootling even a language at all?

While Bootling may contain many unique words, it lacks its own grammatical structure.

Bootling isn't a language, or even a dialect of English. Lingo or jargon is more like it. It has barely 1500 words. So why preserve a jargon?

We spoke with Stanford professor and sociolinguist, Dr. Penny Eckert, to better understand the process behind language preservation and why languages die.

Penny Eckert: Violence, cultural violence. Languages don't just say, "Okay, I'm sorry," and walk away, right? Languages get killed. They don't just die of natural causes.

Karen Ge: There's value to preserving niche languages. They help us understand how the members of a community like Boonville perceive the world. And while that's noble in all, Penny's not optimistic about the odds.[00:24:00] 

Penny Eckert: Language preservation has not been a real success. Um, it's really fighting against a very strong tide if you ask me.

Karen Ge: Boontling is deeply tied to the community of Boonville, especially for older folks. But at the same time, it was created to exclude people. Is Boontling, with its strange words and historical anecdotes, something we want to preserve?

There aren't that many  Boontling speakers left, but one of the most well known is Wes Smoot.

Wes Smoot: I woke up the other day and dreamed a word, uh, word for, uh, "hotcakes." Uh, that's "horse blankets." Well, I got this thinking, you know, uh, "hotcakes"? Yeah, that's fine. But there's "waffles" too. Now, this little word looming for "waffles."

What in the world would a waffle be? And I thought, I thought, and finally I called Tub up. I said, "I got a new Boont word. See what you think about it." "What's happen?" I said, "checkerboard." Said, "checkerboard?" "Yeah." "Well, what's that?" And I said, "Well, a 'horse blanket' is 'hotcake.'" Oh, he said, "That's a waffle, innit?" I said to him, "Checkerboard's a waffle."

Rod DeWitt: [Sentence in Boontling.] What I said was, uh, was uh, "It seemed like a good time to go to the bathroom. That coffee goes right through you."

Karen Ge: And then there's Rod DeWitt, the one with the dictionary. He and Wes are lifelong friends. These two men are some of the last people in town to harp Boont.

Rod DeWitt: [Speaking Boontling] Rupen harby harps with my kidneys in town here.

Karen Ge: Rod also considers himself a bit of a musician.[00:26:00] 

That's how Rod got his Boont name, Tubs. Tubs in Boontling means drums, 'cause Rod's a drummer.

The story behind how Wes got his Boont name is a little longer.

Wes Smoot: My name was Deacon. When I was young in school and that I was backwards and shy and bashful. But I looked, I looked around. Well a deacon in Boontling is to look, to look is to deacon.

Then I was looking around, and I said, "Well, where's Wes? He's deacon again." Deacon just stuck with me the rest of my life.

Karen Ge: Wes grew up in Yorkville, a town neighboring Boonville. He says he didn't learn Boontling until well into his adult life. After he got married, he moved into Boonville and found out about the Boontling Club.

Wes Smoot: And I didn't understand a word that was going on, and I decided then that I'd better learn something about that because I'm pretty sure they're talking about me and I don't understand it.

Karen Ge: Rod has a similar story of growing up outside of Boonville, hearing people speak in Boontling and deciding to learn it himself.

Rod DeWitt: We'd be up on a, on a, you know, up a deer camp, sitting around the fire and they'd be talking naughty Boontling, which got my interest. But then also, I wanted to find out what they were saying about me.

Karen Ge: Boontling is impossible to separate from the culture of Boonville-- the sheep, the apples, the cattle.

Rod DeWitt: Is it agrarian lifestyle, things were slower. People had a good sense of humor about themselves and about other people. Um, you know, people just didn't take stuff as personally, and they weren't in such a hurry. Any, anytime you go way back in time like that, things are gonna be slower and simpler.

Karen Ge: Boontling is an integral part of [00:28:00] all of that. A way of life that's gone... 20 years.

Wes Smoot: I'd like to see Boonville set back about 50 years. Get back to the old days. The old timers, we came, we came about this world just throughout the right time. 'Cause it's not gonna get no better, I don't think.

Karen Ge: Wes speaks Boontling because it represents that world-- the one he wants to live in. Speaking doesn't just remind him of that time. It keeps it alive. But is this desire to go back in time also driving Boontling towards extinction?

Wes Smoot: The reason for it is we got no young people interested in it. This valley, the population is roughly 80% Hispanic, and they can't even speak English, much less Boontling. And they're not interested in it whatsoever. They're not gonna learn it.

Karen Ge: So is Boontling doomed? West doesn't think so.

Wes Smoot: In my mind now, Boontling will never die. There's been too many documentaries, newspaper articles, television articles. There's too many, too much Boontling out in the media right now. It'll never die. Once you learn, you never forget it.

Karen Ge: Maybe it's not just the new people moving in who are killing Boontling. Maybe, it's the people who already live here.

Fal Allen: Anderson Valley is a quirky little place, um, and it's hard to ever be, uh, an, an insider here unless you were born here or your great grandparents were born here.

Karen Ge: That was Fal Allen, Head Brew Master of the Anderson Valley Brewing Company. He's a new Boontling speaker. And here's Joe again, on that same idea of [00:30:00] exclusion.

Joe Webb: You were only allowed to speak Boontling in the valley. If you got caught speaking outta the valley, that was grounds for a beat down.

Karen Ge: After all, lingo built for gossiping is bound to have some colorful words. And because of that, it mainly attracted men.

Rod DeWitt: So, so the women, they'd understand it, but they wouldn't, you know, be potty mouthing, kind of thing. And that may be why the women didn't speak a lot of Boontling.

Karen Ge: Here's Doug on some of the underbelly of the jargon.

Doug: I always split the vocabulary up into, you know, one fifth of it is stuff to see or do in the woods. Stuff to see or do on the farm. Drinking, fighting, and sex. Molly had some big ones, so that meant boobs.

Mage was-- Mage was the brothel madam in Ukiah, so that meant prostitute.

Karen Ge: And Boontling isn't just sexist. It's also racist.

Rod DeWitt: A borch would be a Chinese person. A bork would be a Jew, like a boorkike.

Wes Smoot: Borg is really politically incorrect. A borg is a Mexican, from borg reeser.

Rod DeWitt: It's all in good fun. I mean this, this language is so politically incorrect, it'd be shut down in a heartbeat.

Karen Ge: For Joe of Foresight Wines, the culture that Boontling came from is not one he wants to revisit.

Joe Webb: You know, we're talking about women not voting, and I mean there's just like, how much do we want to regurgitate? Like it... I don't, I don't know. It, uh, it was a tough time here.

Other than the nursery rhymes, everything else is so derogatory, and so cuss word, and so-- it's just not applicable. There's no sheep ranchers left. Why are you gonna talk about a white spot? There's no white spots anymore.

But that's why it has to die. That's why it's dead.

Karen Ge: Some newcomers to Boonville want Boontling gone, but others are really enthusiastic [00:32:00] about it. People like Martha, a woman who works at Boonville's old general store and moved to Boonville a few months ago. 

Martha: That's one of our projects, is to learn the Boontling, because it's amazing. And it's really developed, I mean it's a really extensive dictionary and funny.

Karen Ge: For Fal, it's worth learning because it's one of the few regional languages of its kind.

Fal Allen: As far as Boontling goes, I've tried to learn as much as I can. And, like the idea of supporting the language, you know, it's only one of three American lingos that are recognized, um, along with Hawaiian Pidgin English and Cajun.

Karen Ge: And for Wes, the reason for keeping Boontling alive is very personal.

Wes Smoot: When I was a kid, um, I was pretty much a loner because there was no other kids around me. The closest one was about, oh... three quarters of a mile from me.

Karen Ge: This kid's name was Stanley. Stanley was paralyzed.

Wes Smoot: And uh, I would go play with him, but I'd have to help hold him up and walk him around, 'cause he was completely paralyzed from infant. And, uh, that was the only kid that I had to play with.

Karen Ge: As someone who didn't have many people to talk to growing up, Wes sees himself now as someone who is always talking.

Boontling is an important way for Wes to express himself. It is also a crucial part of the way many people, including Wes, hold on to the history of the valley.

That's one thing I learned when I was learning the language was-- and I tell everybody that wants to learn about it-- first, uh, auditor businesses learn the history of the valley.

Once you learn the history, and know what the old timers did and how they done things, it language will come a lot easier.

Unidentified man: It just falls in place.

Karen Ge: For Wes, it comes down to respect.

Wes Smoot: I had all respect in the world for the people that I run around with that spoke the language 'cause I learned from them. I've been in foreign countries and everything else, and I never picked up [00:34:00] their language like I did this one.

Karen Ge: For the current Boonville old-timers, people like Wes and Rod, Boontling reminds them of a time when they felt closer to the community-- when they knew everyone who lived here. That's not the case now. For years, new people have been moving in, specifically Hispanic migrant workers who follow the grape harvests.

Maryanne, Wes' companion, is a little uncomfortable with the change.

Maryanne: I mean, they were nice people-- some, most for the most part. Then they start bringing their families, and then it started getting crowded. And of course, they took over all the jobs because they worked cheap. And their ranchers started selling off their properties to big business. So it's, it's been tough for a lot of them.

Karen Ge: Boonville is changing. Today, it's defined by different industries than it used to be. Tourism, instead of ranching. Wineries instead of logging. The town has become a place that people stop in on their way to somewhere else. And so, people look for that lost sense of community in a lingo their grandparents used to speak.

So after all this, when we talk about language preservation, what does that really mean?

It means not just documenting the words. But letting the language breathe. Letting it change. And for Boontling, that means adding new words that reflect how people in Boonville live today. Maybe not using old Boontling words people find offensive. And most of all, inviting everyone in the community to learn.

This ability [00:36:00] to change, to let go of even the most idyllic past, and to evolve is what keeps a language, and all of us, alive.

Unidentified man: Boontling is, is really a, a real part of this area. And so, I think it's important to preserve it and the culture that, uh, surrounds it.

Rod DeWitt: It's all in good fun.

Unidentified woman: Yeah.

Rod DeWitt: It's all in good fun.

Joe Webb: That's, you know, maybe part of, out of, you know, isolation and frustration where something like that even comes from.

Unidentified woman: It's, it's probably when they're drunk, I'm just guessing.

Martha: That's okay if it's passed on. You know, as long as it's gentle enough and kind enough. Yeah, and it's just a really good lesson I think in, like, community and in the power of community.

Wes Smoot: At one time, that's all this country had: apples and sheep. Now it's changed all together different now. They were just changing faster than I could change with 'em.

Andy Lee: That story was produced by Karen Ge, Cat Fergesen, and Carolyn Stein.[00:38:00] 

When you walk into a museum and look at a piece of art hung on the wall, do you ever think of its life off the wall? Turns out, every piece of art in a museum has a lot going on when it comes off display. All of it to keep the piece the best condition possible, so as many people as possible can see it for as long as possible.

In this next story, we look in on the world of art preservation and discover the perils and paradoxes of keeping art alive.

Michelle Barger: One that still, uh-- it still stays with me-- were a pair of leather sandals.

So leather that's a couple thousand years old is like, you know like those cheese doodles? Not Cheetos, but the doo-- you know, they're, that are just airy.

And then I had this moment where I just froze, and the hair on my neck just went up because the area where the owner's big toe was was just really indented.

Just took you right to this human connection, right? Someone wore these. You look at like a pair of Birkenstocks or something where you just wear into those sandals and you own them in this way. It was just a chilling moment, you know, took you millennia.[00:40:00] 

Female producer: That was Michelle Barger, the head of conservation at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Michelle's job is to care for art pieces and some very old, delicate objects, like thousand year old leather sandals. Leather is a natural material, and obviously over time, it will fall apart. So why is she putting so much energy into preserving it?

We thought about that one for a while and realized it's all about the toe imprint. It's not really the leather Michelle's preserving, it's the connection to the person that wore them.

So museum conservation preserves two things: the physical existence of an art piece, and its intangible value. So much of art conservation is about slowing the natural process of aging. So what happens when we can't slow that process anymore? What's left? Does art die? Can art die?

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Before we get to that intangible value, first we have to understand just how careful museums are with the physical objects in their care.

Picture this: a giant bookcase made of steel and lead with straw woven throughout the books. As it's being installed in an SF MoMA gallery, a quarter inch piece of straw falls off. Disaster. A team of people swarm the sculpture, catalog the sample, photograph it, save it in a baggie, and meticulously record it for posterity.

That seems insane. [00:42:00] Why do that? Is it so bad if a quarter inch piece of straw falls off, would anybody even notice? Of course straw's gonna fall off. It's straw. And after all that fuss-- get this-- they don't even reattach the straw.

Trying to put it back on might further damage the piece. And anyway, it's so hard to know exactly where the straw came from.

Even though it's just a quarter inch piece of straw, it's valuable because it is part of this famous sculpture. In the world of art preservation, every tiny physical component of an art piece really, really matters.

Though reattaching the straw isn't possible, if a larger chunk of the sculpture fell off, that's a different story.

Then the piece would be taken to Michelle in the conservation studio.

We actually got to go visit Michelle in SF MoMA's Conservation Studio.

Michelle led us down a series of hallways and up a back stairwell into the conservation space. Traveling through these secret passageways right behind the regular gallery walls admittedly made us feel special.

The space contained two levels. On the upper level, there were four large tables set up around the room with these special chairs, which were designed specifically for endless hours of detailed conservation work. Then we went downstairs. It kind of looked like an art studio. We all had this whoa moment.

It was just so expansive and well kept. It felt like we should be really quiet and careful not to touch anything. Michelle showed us around, opening drawers filled with pieces from past projects and mockup samples for repairs.

Michelle Barger: And took pieces of, uh, newsprint. You guys can touch this and [00:44:00] feel it, it's pretty cool.

Female producer: But we were most curious about this huge sculpture near the floor to ceiling windows, looking out onto the financial district.

Michelle Barger: To me, it looked like sort of a tall kilometer form with, um, panels in it between, um, light tan and dark brown and amber. And, uh, there's sort of a lace like network on the top of these three layers in the panels, and that's-- it's 16 feet tall. So it really is demanding in the space. You walk in and you definitely notice it-- one of the first things when you walk into a room.

Female producer: This piece is Neri Oxman's Aguahoja. Michelle and her team are preparing it for an exhibition in 2021.

It is shaped like a huge cocoon, made out 3D printed panels that are sort of transparent and have a lattice pattern like the veins of a leaf. What's particularly interesting about this piece is how it's made out of super unconventional materials.

3D printing is usually just used for prototyping, not for objects that are supposed to last.

Michelle Barger: Our curator is interested in telling the story about this, but she wants to tell it near the beginning of that cycle. So if we're showing this work, if it continues to degrade at the rate it is now, it's gonna look pretty degraded for the exhibition.

Female producer: It's even more vulnerable to deterioration because it's made out of cellulose, pectin, and chitin.

Shrimp shells and dragonfly wings are made out of them too. And while pectin and chitin might be durable enough to last the lifetime of a shrimp or a dragonfly, [00:46:00] they're not ideal for an artwork that's meant to be dismantled and assembled again and again to be shown in museums.

This is all to say that Aguahoja is aging faster than most art pieces, testing the role of conservation.

In the conservator's ideal world, Aguahoja would always look like it has never aged. But with this piece, that's just not possible. So the museum has to find some compromise between conserving it and showing it.

Conservators put so much time into preparing art to be shown. But ultimately, they aren't the ones choosing when it's going to be shown. That's up to the curators.

Aleesa Alexander: So my name is Elisa Alexander. I'm the assistant curator of American art here at the Cantor. Um, and so that means that I am in charge of the American Art Collection, which spans from colonial to the present day.

My particular area of specialty is modern and contemporary art. So most of my work, um, revolves that part of the, around that part of the collection. Um, but you know, it's many thousands of objects that are under my purview.

Female producer: Elisa feels like an art piece is really alive when it's up on a wall being shown and seen. Or in other words, its true life is a public one. But that poses a problem.

Aleesa Alexander: If you don't show things, and they don't get to, like, live in a certain way, so you're like, "Well, do I push the amount of exposure time so that I can get the work out there, 'cause it's so important and interesting and everything's gonna deteriorate anyways?" Or do you really limit it?[00:48:00] 

Female producer: Let's go back to Aguahoja. On the one hand, showing it exposes the piece to less than ideal temperatures, which speed up the deterioration of those delicate natural materials. But on the other hand, allowing museum goers to experience it preserves it in a different way. People remember it.

Aleesa Alexander: Maybe a student chooses to write a paper about it. Maybe a scholar comes in and, you know, it sends them down this whole entire intellectual path. Um, maybe people come and they bring their friends and they show an object off because they just, they're very excited about it. Maybe an artist sees it, um, and becomes inspired. Maybe the artist comes and sees their work hanging, right, and that is also a very powerful experience.

Female producer: Everyone who sees Aguahoja will see something different. You might see a cocoon. Your mom sees two leaves folded together. Your little sister, a tube of lipstick. Everyone perceives the same physical object, but they react differently.

Aleesa Alexander: Because once you're an artist and you create something and you put it out into the world, no matter how hard you try, you can't control what people think about it or what is written about it.

Um, and that... is a really powerful and interesting thing that an art object starts to have its own life and its own biography.

Female producer: While no one can tell you what to think of a piece of art, when you're inside a museum, they tell you this: don't touch it. But... there are some exceptions. One is Andy Goldsworthy's Stone River, which is located just outside the Cantor Center for Visual Arts and the Anderson Collection on Stanford's [00:50:00] campus.

None of the "don't touch" rules apply to Stone River. It's a really long, winding stone wall that looks a bit like a rattlesnake or a curvy spine. Goldsworthy didn't alter the stones, but assembled them so carefully and methodically that the wall is pretty sturdy. Though you can definitely move the stones, just like a loose tooth.

Interacting with Stone River feels totally different than seeing art at one of the museums across the street. We could actually touch it. There was even a guy lying on a yoga mat against it with his dog. There was no one hovering over us, worrying about protecting it and conserving it. You can just tell by looking at it that it's aging.

There was moss in the crevices, bird poop staining the rocks, and weeds growing up around the base. In other words, the piece is deteriorating. But that's exactly what Goldsworthy wanted.

Goldsworthy's vision was about natural change with the environment. As Stone River deteriorates, the artist's vision is actually being preserved at the same time. What some conservators or curators might think of as degradation is just part of Stone River's intended life. But what if degradation wasn't part of its intended life?

Would it be dead if it melded with the environment past the point of recognition?

Aleesa would say no.

Aleesa Alexander: There is, uh, no death of an art piece in my opinion. Even if the art object is destroyed.

Female producer: So what lives on? Returning to Michelle's sandals-- remember the cheese doodle ones-- even when they fall apart and [00:52:00] degrade beyond the point of preservation, they'll still mean a lot to Michelle, and they'll still make her wonder about whoever wore them.

We can serve art physically until we can't, and even when we stop trying, the art lives on.

Andy Lee: That story was produced by Liv Jenks, Lola McAllister, and Grace Zhang.

You've been listening to State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. This episode was produced by Liv Jenks, Lola McAllister, Grace Zhang, Karen Ge, Cat Fergesen, Carolyn Stein, Regina Kong, Allie Wollner, and me, Andy Lee. With support from Tiffany Naiman, Christy Hartman, Jenny March, and Jonah Willihnganz.

Special thanks to Jacob Langsner, Chris Laboa, Will Shan, Rachel Thompson, Aparna Verma, Melina Walling, and Aaron Wu for the reporting work for "Mother of Falcons." For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the Program on Writing and Rhetoric, the Office of the Vice President for the Arts, and Bruce Braden.

You can find this in every episode of State of the Human through our website, and find out more about the storytelling projects, live events, grants, and workshops. We're at storytelling.stanford.edu.