September 21, 2021 • 57 mins
Imagine you live in 1870, traipsing the wild frontier of North America with little more than an opera glass, a few friends and an arguably ill-informed sense of adventure. What happens when you get lost? This is the story of Truman Everts, a hapless tax assessor who found himself at the mercy of the wilderness, hopelessly lost for a full 37 days before, miraculously, returning to civilization. In today's episode, Ben, Noel and Max hold off on their heist phase to welcome Max's brother, returning guest and creator of Ephemeral, Alex Williams, for a discussion of his latest episode, "37 Days of Peril."
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Over on the other side
of the zoom call, we've got our one and only
super producer, Max Williams. Give him a hand, folks, but
don't stop clapping. We'll keep clapping. But I'm Ben, but
don't clap for me. I need you to clap for
someone who's doing double duty. Today. We've got another super
(00:49):
producer who happens to be my near and dear co host,
the one and only Mr Noel Brown. You know it's weird, Ben.
I'm sitting here in the room with you in person,
but I'm just space. I'm still staring at a screen.
I refused to meet your gaze, Sir. I won't do it. Okay,
I'll do it. It's different. It hits different. You know
when it's not when you're not in a little box
(01:09):
on the screen. Um. But yeah, it's cool. We're here
for real. I'm doing double duty. I'm sitting in the
old producer's chair. Full disclosure, we did this whole instro
a minute ago and I had one of the mix
cute up wrong. So this is round two. Know with
that was a rehearsal all the same beats though here
we are, we are and and uh, we are so
fortunate today normal because we we rarely get to record
(01:32):
in person, but we we made an exception for today's
very special episode. As we said in previous episode, Folks,
we're going through kind of a highst face here on
Ridiculous History, but we decided to put it on hold
for a second because we have the wonderful opportunity to
speak to an actual friend of ours, a friend of
the show for a long time. You've heard his work
(01:53):
anytime you've tuned into Ridiculous History. Uh. He is also
related to our own super producer, Matt. Folks, Ridiculous Historians,
let's have a big hand for the creator of not
just our soundtrack, but the amazing podcast Ephemeral, Mr Alex Williams.
(02:14):
Nice Ben. The second introduction was even better than the
first introduction. Yeah, practice makes perfect. I love this uproarious
applause full of Max. I think it makes us all
feel really good about ourselves. Max. Is it true that
you and Alex are blood relations? That is correct, he
is eighteen months older than me. And then like four
(02:36):
days or something like that. You're the little brother, just
barely right, the little brother, yea, and in eighteen months. Yeah,
that's pretty close on Irish twins, Alex, Like, I asked
you on the way to our offices here today, did
you did you get did you get lost? Did you
find your way? Okay? Arduously lost cartoon initially lost. Now
(02:59):
I have been here many times, but I'm ashamed to
say that I did set up in the wrong studio.
There's four studios here, and I was a little late,
and I was running and setting things up and plugging
things in feverishly. And I got in and I got
the zoom open, and I saw that Ben was in
a different studio, and all the all the what do
(03:19):
you call these things? All the stuff, well, you know,
you had the benefit of modern technology, at least, at
least the zoom includes you into the fact that you
weren't in the right place. But did you at least
have some snacks to subsist on, maybe some thistles and
twigs and herbs of some sort. There's some old York
patties out front. Still, there's not very many. I have
(03:41):
been here a lot lately, shooting another show, and uh,
I have kind of subsisted on all of those. I
think there's one orange lollipop left in there. You didn't
come to that yet. We'll see how this goes. So, uh,
this is this is a peak behind the curtain, folks,
A wonderful example of what we call segways here in podcasting,
(04:01):
because no, I get the feeling. My spider sense tells
me that we're going somewhere with this. We are going somewhere.
We're going to what is today called Yellowstone National Park.
In an eighteen seventy it was just like super rough,
you know, rugged terrain, wilderness, dare I say? And a
gentleman by the name of Truman Everts got hopelessly, as
(04:24):
you say, Ben, cartoonishly terrifyingly lost for a span a
thirty seven days. And he did an account of this.
And there's a recent episode of Ephemeral that actually we
teased with Max on a recent episode of this show
that re enacts does a dramatization what'd you call it?
Of this? Uh? This events and Mr Everts own words
(04:46):
as voiced by you, Mr Ben Boling, Oh, and uh,
let us not forget that you make an appearance as well.
Mr Brown, I think I say something like we have
come for you. We have come Alex, Like, can you
stay a little with more hope? We have come for
you a little kinder, We have come for you. Yeah,
(05:08):
Alex is a perfectionist as a director, I feel like
maybe maybe we're gonna be a little more diplomatic because
he's in the room with us right now. So this Alex,
as as we know, this episode is available now wherever
you get your podcast, etcetera, etcetera. But what we wanted
(05:30):
to do today was to learn a little bit about
your inspiration for this, to get a maybe a behind
the scenes look at the process of bringing history to
life in this way, because it's a difficult endeavor, you know,
even if you're just doing something as simple as adapting
(05:51):
Shakespearean story to modern language, right or doing the really
weird thing where people update the Bible to modern language,
you know, and it's like on the seventh day, God
chilled or whatever. You know, like, what where did you
originally find thirty seven days of peril? How did you
find it? And what led to you? And Max and
(06:13):
Trevor who also was on the Inphemeral team, Uh well,
lad you all to make this into an episode. I've
been thinking about where it was that I found it,
and I wish I could tell you specifically. I spend
a lot of time, in particular back allies of the Internet,
like I think we all do. UM one place, I
spent a lot of times, like Guttenberg, looking at things
(06:35):
that are in the public domain that might make good
adaptations or inspirations or whatever. I'm sure it was somewhere
like that UM or maybe just researching, you know, national
parks or something. I'm just I'm into public land and
hiking and outdoor stuff. I think I came across this
story about two years ago, and it's you know, you
(06:57):
talk about updating language. I mean, one of the things
that's really special about it is that this guy, Truman Everts,
was lost near death thirty seven days as you know,
I'm sure we'll come up. I mean, it's the name
of the episode, of the name of the story. And
then a year after he was rescued, he sat down
and wrote everything he could remember and it was published
(07:19):
in one in Scripts monthly. Uh So it's a firsthand
account of you know, essentially being alone in the wilderness
for thirty seven days. So I really didn't want to
change anything. I want. It was important to me to, uh,
you know, if we were going to do some sort
of adaptation, to do it in the author's own words,
(07:41):
because it's just you know how many documents like that exist. Well,
it's kind of cool because like there's nothing we can
do in talking about this that would spoil it because
it really is all about hearing it in his own
words through the dulcet pipes of Ben bolan Um. But
it's got you know, amazing very subtle, beautiful sound design
and music and moments that just really kind of pull
you into it without being distracting. That's something we can
(08:01):
all agree. Uh. Sometimes in short supply and podcast that
like try to do sound design, sometimes it can be
overdone a little bit, and you do a great job
of like writing that fine line where it really feels
like you're there, but it doesn't distract from the storytelling.
So I have good producers that listen carefully and give
me really critical notes. But I mean what I'm what
(08:22):
I'm getting at is, I think, you know, one thing,
you do discuss it a little bit, and then the opening,
but um, I'd love to just briefly talk a little
bit about who this guy was, what led him to
have this fascination with exploring the wilderness. It was sort
of like, you know, it was a period of exploration
in the history of this country and a lot of
the things that we know now is like these national
(08:43):
parks were kind of untamed and that you know, no
one really planted a flag there yet. And do you
can you tell us a little bit about who this
efforts guy was and where his fascination with wilderness exploration
came from. And he was like a tax collector, wasn't he,
or like a like a tax assessor. Yeah, so Montana
and Wyoming we're not even states yet in eighteen seven
(09:04):
days like territories, right and right? And uh, he was
the Montana territories first federal tax assessor. I couldn't tell
you too much more about his back story than that. Um,
you know, most of what's you know out there about
Triman Everetts is what's contained in thirty seven Days of Peril.
But I know he was out there in Montana. He
(09:25):
was the territories first tax assessor. Whatever pointed by Lincoln,
I think, do you know what a tax assessor does? Ben, Yeah, bro,
they assess taxes. So a tax assessor is someone who
walks around. They're they're around today. They walk around and
give an area and region or whatever, and they determine
(09:45):
the value of the land or the value of a property.
So like, um, you know you have people who assess
the value of a house in the modern day. This
guy has a much bigger kind kind of responsibility, right,
They're like, go to this thing that we're vaguely calling
Montana and just figure out, you know, what's worth how
(10:06):
much does it work? And so that's that's an order
of magnitude um more difficult. Maybe he had some leeway
because you know, like like you guys point out he's
the first person to do it. But but you're right,
we we know that he didn't. He didn't really have
a big precedent, you know, for how to how to
(10:26):
pursue this. I'm sure that there were things that he
had in mind as goals, but as we'll see, they
quickly fell to the wayside when he was just trying
not to die. To put it back in biblical terms, uh,
what you're describing him being the tax assessor of this
giant swath of untamed land reminds me of God saying
(10:49):
to Adam, God, name all the all the things, name
all the things need names, that I'll help you later.
And Adam pointed to his elbow and said, awaenas and
God edit that part. But the the Yeah, this is
this is something that Noel, I know you and I
were both we were taken with this story. On our end,
(11:13):
we'd never I don't think either of us had ever
heard of it until you told us about this story.
And it's one of the best examples we've seen of
somebody getting lost. And to tow the earlier points you
guys made, I don't think it's spoiling the story because
the the cinematic sound design is really much more of it.
(11:34):
I think an experience, right, it's three D audio. It
takes you to a lot of strange places. I think
it's fine for us to talk about just how Max
beat me here, how severely this guy fucked up. Yeah,
it's true. And also I mean it really is just
about hearing it in his own words. Uh, as he
recalled it under such intense dress, I would have think
(11:56):
I would just block all that stuff out, but now
he was wanting to like reax varience it on the page.
First question, how accurate do you think his recollection was
or do you think it was maybe embellished? Well, I
(12:19):
mean we all know sort of the way that human
memory works is not infallible. It's not a it's not
a you know, a videotape. But I think if he
was really gonna embellish, he would have maybe made himself
look a little bit better, like like fought a berb
you know, like forest fire. Sure, yeah, not made not
(12:44):
tied pieces of his clothing in these ill advised ways.
This is okay, So maybe we do it. Maybe we
do it this way since we're not we're not afraid
of spoilers here. We know you're going to tune into
the episode. Uh, why don't Why don't you just give
us the rough kind of step by step plot points
of how this guy, like you said, he became attack sucsessor, right,
(13:08):
and Lincoln gives him this job go figure out how
much this ginormous thing is worth and what happens next. Well,
ostensibly he does that, and then his term is done
or whatever. He's just out in Montana, doesn't really have
a gig anymore. He's kind of looking for the next thing,
he's just vibe and he's he's very you know, he
(13:29):
writes about how he's very astonished and and and mesmerized
by the character of the rocky mountains and the and
the scenery and all those lovely uh there's all these
lovely all these lovely phrases, kind of antique phrases about
about how charming he finds it all. And there's one
of the first, if not the first big expedition going
out through yellow Stone. It's called the Langford Done Expedition. Um,
(13:52):
there's some other names attached to it too. It's like
twenty is folks on horseback. We're going to go out
for a couple of months. And they followed I think
the Snake or the Yellowstone River south and are just
going to traverse the country and you know, take maps
and drawings and do all kinds of amazing explorer things
(14:13):
that I think people and uh in our era maybe
just kind of dream about, you know, this idea that
every little corner of the globe is mapped and explored
in GPS. So from their perspective, there's a bit of
terra incognita here, right, Like the people who have lived
in this land for thousands and thousands of years. They
already know the score and they you know, they they're
(14:37):
intimately attuned to the passage of the seasons, to the wildlife,
the flora and fauna. But for these guys, would you
say it's fair it's fair to say that for most
of them, a lot of this was absolutely brand new. Yeah,
Humbo has been Vermont, like yeah, he and there, Yeah,
this was all this was all completely new to him.
(14:57):
And he probably I mean this, he doesn't straight up
and say this. He probably I thought he was a
little bit more rugged than he was. Oh, I mean
he was, you know, by most accounts, pretty feeble. And
he was like the oldest guy in the group, and
I think he was like hopelessly nearsighted and like really
had a hard time seeing, you know anything that was
like not like, you know, a couple of feet in
(15:18):
front of his face. So pretty odd choice, you know,
to to go on this like super taxing physical kind
of journey. Right. But so he gets in, he gets
in the caravan. Horses there, you know, they I think
have been out for about a month. They leave in
mid August. It's mid September. There's one day everyone's there.
(15:38):
They're you know, clearing uh, these immense windfalls of pine
trees and all this brush, and they're getting through it,
and it's just it's super taxing work. You know, there's
no trails cut or anything. Obviously. Camp that night they're like, hey,
where's Truman? Did he just like wander off? I mean
(16:00):
he just like lost you know, the trail because of
his like poor vision. Do you have a sense of
like how he got separated? So he was while clearing
one of these one of these immense windfalls. He calls it,
he wandered out of sight and and and and sound
of his comrades, Uh, you know, looking for a passage
through it, looking through his own way, and he just
(16:21):
sort of, I think maybe kind of spaced out in
the forest a little bit and was just sort of
wandering all that grandeur you speak of. Probably was just
so taken by it, and he was just distracted, and
I think he might have been a little worn out.
And uh, and then he's like a moment later, it's
kind of like, oh, where's everybody at? And he realizes
that he's wandered just away from everybody in this expansive wilderness,
(16:47):
and uh, so he gets on his horse. He's riding around.
He's trying to retrace his his his his footprints or
the horses trail, but there's pine needles everywhere and he
can't really tell what's going on. He's getting off and
like looking at the ground and scowering it to feel
like is this a footprint? And eventually he comes to
a clearing. He gets off his horse and as he says,
(17:08):
remember this part, Ben, He says, leaving my horse unhitched
as was always my custom, Right, Yeah, it's not really pro.
Move right there and no walks a few rods into
the forest. I'm sorry rods. Is that a like a parstack?
Because like it's a half a parstack? I think? And uh,
(17:30):
there's a beat and he hears this horse winning and
take off because the horse is also like there's there's
stuff that doesn't happen in this episode. So this is
almost like you know how unpopular television shows that have
people get together and they're like chat about what happened
in the episode. I feel like we're we're kind of
getting this vibe because we're pulling back a little bit
(17:52):
of curtain on on efforts. How he presented himself versus
what maybe the reality was, versus how his crew perceived,
because I was interested to learn. Like, first off, they
had this plan, right, if anybody gets lost, no matter
how like feeble or fit they are, they've gotta meat
back at that one point, you know, like people's parents
will do it an ammusing park, right, I mean that
(18:13):
works though you have like the you know, the claw
machine or whatever at the amusement park. Not so much
in the untamed wilderness that was the yellow stone of
the lad eighteen hundreds. So his horse takes off, flies
galloping away from him, and he never sees his horse.
The horse's name did you catch the horse's name? The
horse is not named in the horse's name you like
(18:34):
to name it here today? How about how about Piony Peony.
Piony takes off and is uh efforts, never sees Piony again,
and strapped to PIONI is all this stuff, all this stuff,
everything except for like five or six little things, right,
he says he's got two knives, the clothes on his back,
and a small opera glass that's always got left. Yeah.
(18:58):
And this so he is um. The military term for
this is he is food bar and there's this deal
that everybody made where they said, Okay, if anybody gets lost,
we're gonna meet at the shore of Yellowstone Lake, right
like the southern shore. And so it was interesting. After
(19:19):
we worked on this episode together, I went back and
I was like, all right, what's the what's the score?
What do other people say. There's a guy from his party,
Nathaniel p Langford, who kept a diary of how they
were trying to find Efforts. But if you from Efforts account,
he was trying to find them, and in a very
(19:40):
polite way, he's like those asked stitched me, and like
he doesn't seem to resent them when the way he's
written it, you know, um, but you get the sense
that he feels like, um, it was just a series
of unfortunate events beyond his control, and he hadn't done
meeting abnormal. He never hitched his horse. Piony would never
(20:03):
ditch someone like that, and Piony very much did, of course,
so lank for just for comparison, here he has a
diary where he says, look, we're shooting guns to try
to signal to this guy where we are, and Efforts
never mentioned that, which makes you wonder how far away
he actually went. You know, I don't think he really
(20:24):
had the survival skills for this in the first place.
Oh yeah, this moment, this is day one yo into it.
How do you how do you wander that far off? Though?
And like to what end? You know, weren't they like
betting down for the night and stuff like? Was he
just having a nice night walk like you like to
have men? It was late in the afternoon when he
got separated, when they were when they were getting through
the pine windfall? Yeah? Interesting, and and then night begins
(20:50):
to set in him. What what's his emotional state at
this point? He is terrified. He does not seem to
like the night side at all, which again begs the
question why he would embark on a several months camping trip. Yeah,
he says, his mind is instinct with terror. Now, what's
(21:12):
the weather like at this point? It's September nine. I
think it's pretty temperate. Still, it's not gonna stay that way.
Spoiler alert. Yeah, let's not forget the name of the pieces.
Thirty seven days. He's a couple of days. And just
as in a side if you were worried about the horse,
peony was recovered by the rest of the party writerless.
(21:35):
But yeah, right, so if he had just stayed on
the horse, right, because that's the thing that I thought
to like, if the horses running off, it's either running
away from something or it's running towards something. And if
it was running away from something that Everts would probably
have also clocked it. You know, it was like a
(21:56):
bear or a large cat of some sort. Yeah, And
it's interesting because you know, he had no provisions. I mean,
I don't believe any of the items that were on
him or snacks, a couple of knives he said, an
opera glass and the clothes on his body. No, no, Jesus,
we're actually running really desperately low on Jesus here at
the office too. It could end up being a wilderness
(22:17):
type scenario. If we're not careful, Yeah, we might have
to go downstairs. God can imagine. Um. But no, it's
it's crazy. Like I mean, like you said, he's very
ill equipped just in general, his constitution doesn't seem very
fit for this kind of trip. And now he's completely
you know, alone on the wilderness. And what's what's it
like out there? You know, in the days before it
(22:38):
was I mean, you know we yellow Stone still pretty
rugged obviously, but at this point would have been no
trails cleared, like you said, absolutely teeming with with beasties,
right and like you know, wildlife. Yeah. The second night,
he uh so, he so he spends time looking for
his horse, which is a mistake. He spends a half
day looking for his horse when he should have just
gone like you're saying, Ben, and found his camp. He
(23:00):
recollects that, reflects on that in his essay The second night,
I believe it's I believe. Yeah, the second night, he's
a laying at the foot of a tree, has made
himself a little bed of like pine branches and foliage,
and he's tucked in there and falling asleep for the night.
And he's roused by the sound. He calls it. He says,
(23:21):
it sounds like the sound of a human scream coming
through the forest. Scream. Yes, that's exactly it's the original. Um.
It turns out it's a mountain lion bounding for him.
Now they say mountain lions are really really rare to
(23:42):
spot in the wild, but this one charges at him,
at least according to his account, and he screams in return,
which we have a fun scream from my friend Nathaniel
in there runs up the tree and gets to the
top and is shaking all the limbs and breaking branches
and hurling them at the wildcat and just get out
(24:04):
of here. Get out of here, you that's great. We
don't watch you around here. It's like it's like an
all the sad dog movies when like you're doing the
dog of favor by letting it go, who's got to
be mean to it even though it hurts you anymore.
That's kind of what happened with Pree. No, it's definitely
much more of a like please don't like evisterate me.
(24:27):
And mountain lions can climb trees if I'm not mistaken right,
Mountain lions are dope and dangerous like they like they yes,
they d and they will get you. They are the
original d and d uh. This so we already see
this is going from whoops, too bad to worse to
worse and worse and worse. He is at this point, um.
(24:50):
He is still in possession of his mental faculties, though,
which is why he has the even though panicked, he
has the presence of mind to do, you know, base
like try to scare off predator type stuff. Um, I
mean I would imagine he's a little shook at this point,
for sure, very much. Possibly those mental faculties are beginning
(25:11):
to leave him still with it to us to a
degree at this point. Yeah, So what happens in the
mountain liin? Like I said, I mean, I thought a
mountain lion could like totally shimming up a tree, Like,
how do you think they definitely can? Yes, he says
that he was. He was screaming and breaking benches and
throwing things at him, and then he had a moment
of clarity that he should try silence. You know, let's
(25:35):
try something completely different than what I was doing before,
and now for something completely was it like one last yell,
one last get out of here you. I don't even lie,
I don't want to be your friend, one last Wilhelm
scream and wait a minute, no, on second, that hunch
falls over the forest, only the sounds of the swing
(25:55):
thickets of thistles and leaves and such in the mountain lion,
and quizzically peers around. He's like, you know what, I
think it's gonna go right, That's exactly it, And then
he slides down the tree and goes back to sleep.
That's day too, Broo. We ain't gonna do every day,
but that we can't do every day. But so you
(26:16):
can already see just like as as you said, Alex,
from day two, this stuff is bonkers. And that's still
just the beginning of just the beginning of these misadventures.
I believe that even the weather is against him at
one point. Yeah, we're talking like day three, day for
(26:43):
that weather turns and it's basically a blizzard by just overnight,
goes from temperate to blizzard. You know, up in that
high elevation that happens. Man, It's it's dangerous up there.
They tell you that when you go, you know, hike
in the rocky mountains now like you need you know,
you need to be ready to get down the mountain
or get shelter quickly. Honest. You know, the weather can
change really really fast at high elevation. Uh so, yeah,
(27:07):
he's got this you know, crazy blizzard and storm. I
think it's it's snow and rain actually that's uh overshadowing
him and reducing his clothing to its pitiless peltings. Yes, yes,
he does say that. Yes, anyone that's into weird and
achronistic terms of phrase, it's going to be this is
going to be absolute catinet for Yeah, but he's he's
(27:31):
pretty smart. Everyone's heard of, like you know, Old Faithful
and all of the hot springs you know around this
part of the world. Those are a great source of heat,
and he'd be very smartly uses them to stay warm.
But it makes a few unfortunate calculations. If I'm not mistaken. Yeah,
I think he spots him from seeing them steaming from
a distance, and he makes his way over there, finds
(27:52):
himself a hot spring, and basically just sets up camp
for like seven days as this storm rages. He says
it was like a saw, I guess, because it's you know,
cold and wet outside, and it's warm and wet right here,
and so then he's he's living in the hot springs.
One night, he is sleeping and rolls over in his
sleep and with his hip breaks the crust on a
(28:16):
hot spring next to him and scalds his hip. What
would that be like logistically, you break the crust and
then just the steam vents out like really fast, and
it's very hot water, very hot water. Right there. Okay, Yeah,
you guys ever been in a hot spring. I have
been like in a like a not a resort, but
it's like a you know, a place that's got little
(28:37):
tubs built around the hot springs. It's actually literally called
hot Springs, North Carolina, if I'm not mistaken. It's really cool.
I don't want to stay the name of it here
because I don't want people to fly to it. But
I went to an amazing just out in the wilderness, backpacking,
like ten miles hot springs in the Olympic Peninsula and
Washington State. Oh you mentioned that. Yeah, wow, I mean
(28:57):
like the most magical for us, old giant old trees,
all mossy and stones that are like green and white
and purple from the algae that's coming from the sulfur springs. Uh. Yeah,
I'll tell you guys. So yeah, So we've had some
(29:18):
experience with hot springs. Some have been really stunning, like
the one you're describing, and some have been a little
bit of a letdown. You know. I'm not gonna name
names either, but there's a moment where you realize, hey,
these are more like warm springs. So some people will
get that. But but yes, so he is stuck between
(29:41):
two extremes of weather. Right, uh, and he for a
moment has a very real chance of either dying of
cold or dying due to the heat from these springs. Right. Yeah.
He also, I'm sure people are wondering what he was
eating for like three days or something he didn't eat,
(30:04):
and then he discovers he's staring at the ground one
day and he sees this different color of green, this
really bright color of green, and he goes and pulls
it up by the route and it's a thistle. And
basically for thirty's you know, thirty four days at this point,
he eats raw thistles. So a thistle, from what I understand,
(30:29):
is like a it's it's spiky. Right, I have never
eaten a thistle, ben I have, I have. I believe
the efforts is eating a thistle root. Yes, okay, so
this is this is funny. This is one kind of accolade.
He does get one distinction when he survives. He has
(30:50):
a thistle named after him. It's called Everett's thistle. He
deserved at least that. I mean, it's got a mountain
named after Okay. And he also, this guy is just
failing upwards. Not to be confused with Mount Everest. These
are two different things. Just just just to clear the
air there. Um, yeah, Google did tell me that I
(31:11):
typed in Mount Everest since it's like, did you mean
Mount Everest? Yeah, just to jump in here. I mean
like you can just like you know, if you ever
client Mount everetts whenever you tell people can just say
it really fast. Yeah, I climbed up Mount everests. I
didn't even have a shirt or anything. It's fine. It
took me thirty seven days, but I did it. And
(31:32):
I had a lot of this, a lot of thistles. Yeah,
it's true, though. Thistle. I'm right there, We're all right.
A thistle is it's very pretty, but it's very rough
and spiky underneath the beautiful kind of like pink flowery leaves.
So he would boil these roots, if I'm not mistaken,
when he was living in his sauna in the in
the hot springs during the storm, one of many storms. Yeah,
(31:54):
he had a little dinner pot that he would cook
his roots in. Um. I don't think that it was
a gray way to subsist, but I think probably cooking
them was nice when he could do that. Where do
you get the dinner pot? Was that attached to a
hitch to his belt or something. I thought he only
had like a little bubbling spring. He just called it
his dinner. So he's like got his feet in one
(32:15):
and his feet are already frost bitten. Now his hip
is burnt, and he's just like lounging out in the
steam bath getting parboiled and dipping roots in here. And like,
on the one hand, that sounds kind of pleasant, um,
but you know, under the circumstances, he's obviously suffering horrendously
while he's doing this. Yeah, you know, No, when I
(32:36):
was listening to this, I thought the same thing as you.
I was if that sounds kind of pleasant, honestly, and stuff, Well,
let's not forget the onset of gang green, the onset
of frost bite, and potential who knows. I mean, it
just has no medical um intervention of any kind. He
has no supplies. I mean, that hip could have really festered,
(32:57):
you know, or any number of injuries that he could
to god, you know, twisted ankle could have killed him,
you know. Indeed, And that's something I think is really
instructive for folks who enjoy out exploring the outdoors stay
but are unfamiliar with it when you are genuinely out
in the wild and you don't have you don't have
(33:17):
a safety net system or something. A broken ankle or
something would feel like a small injury in civilization can
be fatal and can be very quickly. So, uh, for
we it's in our mind, folks, it's okay to roast
effort or to parboil him a little bit because he
(33:38):
made it out. But in this situation already, he has
survived several things that have in the past spelled doom
for other explorers. Absolutely, um so, definitely props to him
for being resourceful and figuring out how to make this
environment work for him. But there are some choices that
he makes that are pretty stupid. Uh, not for him
(33:59):
and his personal safety, but like for like the whole
gorgeous natural wonder that he was so taken by. Right,
So he's he's wondering while he's sitting in the springs,
how he's gonna make fire. Oh, I thought you were
going to say, how much are these springs worth? He's
tax assessing, he's always tax assessing. He's wondering how he's
(34:22):
going to make a fire, and he's thinking about all
the ways to make fire rubbing sticks together. Maybe he
wasn't so good at that one. Have you guys, ever
done Yes, you've done that. It's a paint in the ass.
Just take a lighter with you, or a fire flint
block or something, you know, a twisted fire star the Prodigy,
remember that spiky hair. Guys, I'm the Oh my god. Okay,
(34:46):
so we'll get to we'll get to that part that's
extremely important for the story really quickly. Going to have
to point out that we really should take more advance
of the fact they're in the same room to sing together,
because over soon it's impossible to do because delay you're right,
and when you're right, you're right. So this this moment
here when he's trying to figure out how to make
(35:09):
a fire, this is a a tremendously profound moment for him,
and it reminded me about the Jack London story, Like
I think it's to build a fire, to make a fire,
and that is also about a guy who's having a
very difficult time making a fire and it becomes a
life or death matter. So you know, he he does
(35:31):
try the sticks together a method which is like friction
trying to build a spark and again from experience, it
is possible. It also stinks. Uh if they if you
are listening, you're in some survival course, and they make
you do it, they should also say, hey, if you
have to do this right now, you already messed up.
(35:52):
You should have had a lighter. But he didn't have
a lighter, right, he had nothing. He had the opera glass,
and that's where he puts it together. He once the
sun comes out, he tries it out with the opera glass,
which I guess ben is what like like half a binocular. Yeah, yeah,
I believe so. Short, Yeah it is. It's one side
of a binocular. Some opera glasses are two of them,
(36:13):
but I think you would just call those opera No,
you would call those opera glasses too, But I think
you know what, No, A proper pair of opera glasses
is two and there's a little stick usually that goes
on them and you hold them with your pinky ouch. Uh,
you know, so that you can see the tenor do
his big death scene, you know, from the cheap seats,
see the relations and and Noel is speaking from authority here, folks.
(36:37):
I hope it's okay if I say this on air,
but that was once a young drummond boy, right, and
your mother was an opera scen once an opera singer.
Alway should basically like an aged diva's kind of a
sunset boulevard type figure, you know. But it's true. We
have some vintage opera glasses around the house, so I
think actually what you would be referring to would be
a spy glass, like a single tiny uh lescope. So
(37:00):
this he calls it an opera glass, I imagine something.
Probably there's no photos or any and I don't think
it's there. There are like nine illustrations with the article,
but I don't believe that the opera glass is illustrated
in any of them, so I don't know if it was.
He always refers to my lens, Okay, so it's probably
it's maybe not binocular. It's probably some some smaller magnifying thing,
(37:23):
like a like a tiny telescope, like a tiny telescope. Yeah, yeah,
like a microscope. And so this is yes, there we are,
and so he has uh, he desperately needs fire. One
cannot live on raw thistles for the rest of their lives, right,
But that's a question he's quarreling with how does how
(37:45):
does he begin putting this together? He said, he puts
it together. It's got away for the sun to come out.
The sun comes out. He does the old like I
would never condone this, but like a frying frying the
ants kind of trick, you know, you get the light
and you concentrated, you know, you put the broad end
towards the sun and the narrow end towards whatever you're
trying to set a flame. And it's a really lovely moment.
(38:07):
Actually sees the little you know, the little bit of
bark in his fingers, the little little smoke curl from it,
and he says to himself in that moment, he says,
I will not despair. Yes, yeah, that's and that is
a powerful, primal thing, you know, because that's one of
the that that is I think one of the first
(38:27):
big moments where he is sort of exerting human ingenuity
over the wilderness and all the other things are things
where he's barely scraping by in response to a disaster,
right like I can eat these I can eat these weeds.
That'll work. Oh, I'll I'll hide from the mountain lion
who I'll run from the storm. I'll try not to
(38:50):
boil alive. And so this is one of the times
where he starts taking more active control of the situation.
I would argue, but if you are in that moment
and we've had you know, folks listening today, you may
have found yourself lost in the woods, uh, and you
know that there can be that gut sinking moment when
(39:10):
you're thinking, oh, how how do I get get out
of here? And so he has already passed that moment.
And when he's making fire, there's something Promethean about it.
To him, it's in his mind. It's a light at
the end of the tunnel. I would say, I think
that's absolutely it. I mean, it's you know, it's very human.
(39:33):
He's yeah, harnessed this power. You know, he's he's created
something and he's taking charge of his own destiny. And
yet then there's kind of a like kind of moment
and the first act on a high note, he's only
like eleven days in or whatever. Uh, that spark, you know,
(39:55):
eventually becomes a roaring flame that then you know, uh,
Smoky the bear would not approve it spreads. So he's
sleeping on a beach one night he's made it down
to a Yellowstone Lake some days later, and he's made
a nice fire on the beach. He's actually lost his
slipper that night, I think, and he's like three traumatic
thing looking for the slipper. Have you seen the Pine
(40:16):
Barrens episode of The Sopranos. You haven't seen. It's a
classic ep standal in episode where Polly and Christopher get
lost in the Pine Barrens, which is this this rugged
area of New Jersey where notoriously people go to buried bodies,
and Polly loses his shoe at one point. It becomes
a real bone of contention between the two gangsters, directly
(40:37):
inspired from thirty seven Days Apparel. I'm calling it. It's
in the public domain, so it's it's this is more
of a loafer that Polly loses. This is a slipper,
it's a it's a sandal. He's made his boots in
his sandals, and Ben and I talked about that a
lot when we really haven't been able to figure out.
(40:58):
He cuts his the counter of his boots off and
turns him into a passable pair of slippers, and he
calls them slippers. He does, but it's cold, and he's
all he's doing is walking right mountains. So we couldn't
figure that out, Like, wouldn't you want the ankles support,
You want the ankle support, you want the coverage, you know. Yeah,
So if anyone's got uh insight into that, um right
(41:21):
to Jonathan Strickland. Yes, I'm sure that's not the joke
you guys use anymore. Those addresses are still active, Yeah,
right to our complaint department, which is Jonathan Strickland house
stuff works dot com. All right, I wasn't too far off.
He nailed it twenty four hours a day, seven days
a week. So anyways, he finds his slipper and he's
(41:42):
got great relief, and he lays down the beach next
to this big fire and he mellows out and he
listens to the dash and roar of the way, and
then he wakes up and his fin he's on fire.
He yeah, his fire has gotten totally picked up by
(42:03):
the wind and his and his his hair is seemed
closer than a barber would have trimmed it as running
away from the beach and and and and into higher elevation.
And then he gets gets out there and takes a beat.
It stands on this like crest and watches this fire
turned into a giant forest fire, a conflagration, right, that's
(42:27):
the name for it. Honestly, that's some of the most
beautiful writing in the whole piece, when he's talking about
the grandeur of the burning forests surpasses all description. Uh,
it's it's great in in the in the tenor of
Ben Bolan. Oh geez, you got us up with these
and the And also he does something really really interesting
in the writing here. Uh, Lovecraft does this too, and
(42:49):
he's like, the grand deur exceeds all description, as you said,
and then he describes let's end on that pivotal note
for now. As far as the course of our story,
Uh no, I think you know you raised a really
(43:09):
good point off air. We wanted to give you some
highlights and some contexts. We're not going to tell you
the whole thing. Well yeah, I mean, even though Alex
said off Mike before we started recording, the really hard
to spoil this thing. In terms of the ending, we
do know that the guy is rescued, but there are
more adventures and misadventures to uh, to be heard if
you listen to the full episode. But again, it really
(43:30):
is all about the full experience and hearing it in
efforts own words. But Alex, you know when you're doing
something like this and in an ephemeral in general, I
mean like a lot of the audio you're mining is
like from found audio, found sound like different you know,
public domain sites on the internet. Uh, and you know,
don't no need to reveal your sources. I know that
stuff is very uh, it's very hush hush, and I
(43:52):
totally get it. But what's your approach for I don't know,
building a sonic capitually this. I know you have a
lot of help from folks like Max and Trevor, but
I mean the whole thing was your vision. The first
season was largely like you doing all this stuff and
peak behind the curtain, like you and I like mess
with music and play music together, and I think we're
both like super audio nerds. And how do you bring
that love of sonics to an audio show like this
(44:14):
that's ultimately about storytelling? Yeah? I mean it's sort of
different for every episode, right, I mean we usually do
uh it's mostly nonfiction history, so so often it's it's
an interview that we've started with and we've cut down
an interview, but we've done these sort of scored audiobook
things before. Um the difference but this one was that, yeah,
there wasn't really a really great audio book out there
(44:36):
already of it, unlike Libervox or anything, which is a
free public domain audiobook site. Um. So a like, the
first thing was finding an actor that could pull it off.
Because while it's well, it's really beautiful writing, and like
you called out, it's got all kinds of very interesting phrases,
it is not the kind of thing that you could
just hand to anybody. Uh, somebody with a lot of
(45:00):
experience talking into a microphone and able to take on
some of these long phrases and clauses and twisting sentences
and was on vacation and I think Jonathan Strickland was
deported called everybody else. Yes, yeah, Ben, your self deprecation
is killing me. You absolutely are the man for the job.
(45:20):
You have a certain gravitas to your delivery, Ben, I
mean because at first you can kind of feel the
guy's deteriorating mental state with your delivery. You the progression,
the way you kind of lose hope almost like in
the sound of your voice. It's very well done. Uh,
and no more compliments from here. On now, I promise,
but it's true. I mean, Alex makes a good point.
It really is about casting because the words are already
(45:41):
there on the page. But it's like one thing to
read something in your mind on a page, another thing
to actually say it out loud and have it like
land right. In all since Therity, it was the most
important thing for Truman to feel human so you could
sympathize with him, so it didn't just feel like I
don't know a block of old time aide text. And
(46:02):
that's something that's tough too because in these in these adaptations,
you know, this guy is writing before the rise of radio, right,
he's writing before the rise of a spoiler podcasting, right.
So so people right very differently back then. They take
their time with sentences, you know, they they have maybe
(46:25):
not to the extent of like James Joyce or Henry James,
but they do. They do tend to wind and sort
of wind on at the point where you know, you
realize half a pages passed, and so you did a
lot of work. Um, you and your team where you're saying, hey,
we want to stay true to this story, but we
(46:46):
also need to make sure that it is a viable
understandable story for people to experience. Did you have did
you have moments where you found yourself really in the
trenches of like, Okay, Truman, I know what, I know
what you're trying to say, buddy. How difficult was it
to sort of walk the line on the adaptation of
(47:07):
the text here? I uh, I went through the whole
story probably a dozen times or more editing it. I
really didn't change any of his phrasing or his words,
but I did just kind of cut it for a
little bit for a content and a little bit just
mostly for time to try and clarify and make it
(47:28):
something that would fit like an hour. So it's not
the complete unabridged text, it's very it's it's pretty close, um,
and we've got the unabridged text everywhere, but it's a
little bit more kind of clarified than that. Honestly, I
sort of sweated every every line of that, you know,
because I just want, you know, the larger project for
me here is right. It's in a really incredible story.
(47:51):
It's incredible that it's a firsthand account. It's incredible that
the guy survived, and I worried that things like this.
I'm glad it's did it eyes. I'm glad it's out
there that it's got you know, some articles and stuff
about it online. But I worry that things like that,
you know, will become irrelevant and maybe get completely lost.
And it's it's a very real possibility. It's something that
(48:13):
you and your team have already seen in the course
of UH, in the course of different episodes of Ephemeral,
you know, the two part series on video stores I
think was very well done. And one one thing that
really I think that Ephemeral really speaks to and one
(48:35):
reason that no not to speak for you, but one
reason I think we're both big fans is because each
of these episodes of this show have so much time
and care putting into them. UH. And sometimes I get
the feeling like, is is Alex out here finding a
story that doesn't want to be found or is he
(48:56):
racing some sort of ticking clock, you know, a to
which point the people who could have told you this
story are gone, right and the p and that's something
you probably run into. Or are you reaching a point
where the only record of this story was a physical
record that's never been digitized and will it go away?
You know how what disaster will strike next. So you know,
(49:20):
with that in mind, I do actually have a question here.
So with that in mind, you could just tell many
nice things about this is a great podcast. Well this
is stuff Nolan I talked about too. But with that
in mind, one of the questions I know we had
before was what motivates you and Trevor and Max to
pick a specific story, Like do you have a list
(49:43):
of sort of draft picks and then you narrow it down,
or do you do you get struck with the Eureka
moment and say like, uh, holy smokes, Stephen Foster he
had he had a Mariachi phase or something like that.
You know, I don't think just for the record, I mean,
that's the next episode, but I'm not gonna spoil that. Uh.
(50:05):
You know, they come from different from different ways, you know,
like sometimes it is sort of a larger I mean,
I mean to answer you, to really answer your question, Max,
Trevor and I have a million ideas. We have a
very long list of ideas that we meet on all
the time and are always kind of and we sort
of all have our own approaches to, uh to tackling that.
(50:26):
Sometimes it is kind of a larger cultural thing like um,
video stores like you mentioned, which is all the work
of Trevor Young. Trevor took August and made two fabulous
episodes on video stores UM and the sort of rise fall,
decline and how they really really changed our relationship with
media in this world. UM. So it's like, all right,
(50:47):
well that's a cool idea. Go find the people who
can talk about it. Found a guy named Dan Herbert
who was just on the CUSP was like around I
think he took himself on a road trip. Um. He's
a Universe a student, Michigan professor, and he took himself
on a road trip and drove all around the country
and tape recorded him going to video stores and just
talking to people, talking to someone in Cheyenne or whatever.
(51:09):
And it's like, oh, yeah, it's what's a tanning salon
and a video store and you know he's just getting
all these and some people trying to sell him their
video stores and stuff on the spot and um. And
then sometimes it's like this like the thirty seven Days
one where you find this one record, whether that's a recording, uh,
you know, audio recording or video or an image or
(51:33):
an essay like this is or a manuscript that's just
a one of a kind that doesn't you know, it's
just nothing else quite like it. It's like, okay, that's
a thing that can we breathe some new life into this,
like can we put this in whatever, you know, whatever
little influence that we have, like back on the radar
of the public consciousness. And it's not an easy process.
(51:55):
It sounds like right. I mean, first of all, you
even identifying those gems squires a real curatorial eye and
a fascination with this kind of stuff. That's sort of
the mission of the whole show. The idea of you know,
returning things that maybe were lost to history or lost
to technology even you know, like the idea of ephemera
often has to do with outmoded technology or things that
(52:16):
are no longer as easy to play anymore, like things
like you know, seventy eight's or you know, old eight
tracks or things like that, or things that were written
and maybe never you know archive and things like that.
So I think it's awesome what you're doing. It really
is almost like a an Internet archive kind of project.
And big fan of the show and I think anyone
that likes the show absolutely like it. As well. Yes,
(52:37):
but you still have to listen to our show. Please
please just my girlfriend. My girlfriend, by the way, doesn't
listen to our show. Um. She just told me the
other day that she started listening to Ephemeral and I'm like,
she did text me some nice words about it. She
(52:58):
really likes it. Well, maybe to listen to the one.
Yeah maybe so, maybe so uh wump wump. But man, Alex,
thanks so much for joining us, Thanks for having me
and and and really it's it's worth listening for the
vocal performance as if nothing else. And no, you're you're
also in there as a hunter. He spent his life
(53:19):
among the wilderness. And I will not spoil that, but
you have a really great moment right at the end
of the episode. Nailed it. Yes, we've come for you,
you know after after that about okay, I won't won't
spoil it, but involves some kind of gross, doesn't it.
It's a it's a little gross. It's maybe one of
the grosser parts. Yeah, it's well intentioned, though we can't
(53:40):
we can't keep spoiling. Dude. It's a miracle basically, Yes, Okay,
let's what else is a miracle? Is? Is you ridiculous historians,
each and every one of you God's miracles to podcast them. Yes,
thank you so much, folks. Thank you Alex Williams for
hanging out before we head off into the wilds of
(54:04):
our own. Could you tell everybody where to find Ephemeral
where to learn more about your work, because you don't
just do ephemeral, which is really weird and amazing to
me that you do other stuff as well. I'm totally
lost right now, get it? Yes? Um, do you want
to know where to find ephemeral dot show or on
all the social things at ephemeral show? And uh, what
(54:27):
you want to talk about other things that I work on? Yeah? Yeah,
what are we doing right now? Well, we've got a
new season of Thirteen Days of Halloween coming out on
the nineteenth of October and that'll run day day or
a day for thirteen days. I will not spoil anything
about that, but because I don't want to not a spoiler.
But it is another kind of immersive storytelling podcast with
(54:50):
three D audio touches, I believe. Yeah, the first season
featured Gig and Michael Key. It's all one binural three
D audio. It's like a you know, listener to question
advised comes from Blumhouse and Aaron Manky and and us
here at I Heeart and then uh, you and the
one and only Mr Max Williams have some future episodes
(55:11):
of Ephemeral coming out, which we said we wouldn't spoil, right,
it's up to you, Max. No, no, I've been working
on this episode for a good minute now, and I
don't know it's it's a really intriguing story we were
talking about before off off Mike and Ben's like, oh
my god, that's my favorite movie. So you know, it
should become an oppeginning October. It's gonna be a lot
(55:32):
of fun to listen to some mystery and that, and
it is also a bit HALLOWEENI yes, uh, and yeah,
I wonder what Ben's favorite movie is. You let to
tun into a phemeral to find out. You guys are
boxing me in all right, Well, do check it out.
Do check out all of the shows that are available
on the Ephemeral website. You can follow them to get
a peek behind the scenes on the various social needs
(55:54):
of choice. You can also follow Ridiculous History and check
this out in old People can follow us not just
as a show, but as individuals. That's true. You can
find me at how now Noel Brown on Instagram exclusively
mess that Twitter nonsense. I'm a Twitter lurker at best.
And I will not reveal your name because you had
(56:16):
we had talked about it. Okay, you know I don't
remember what it is, so how do I know and
you don't? Okay, So you can find me at ben
Bulling bow l a N on Instagram. Uh, and you
can find me at Ben bull In h s W
on Twitter. Thanks as always to our long suffering nemesses.
Jonathan Strickland a k. The quiztions he suffering, he makes
(56:37):
us suffering. Yes he's not. He's not the sufferer. He's
the deliverer of suffering. Yes. In the next studio. Yeah,
he has to be with himself all the time. He's
like he's like pinhead for He's the kind of guy
you summoned with like a weird demon cube. You know,
I love him. I'm missing let missing. Yeah, he's going
(56:58):
to kill us for that out you're but we've got
some other folks to think, right, Well, let me sure do.
Max Williams, super producer Extordan You probably already thinks that.
But he gets a Second, thanks for me. This is
sort of a thing we do. We're like big on
thinking people. Uh, let's see Christoph Roscio is here in spirit.
He's Jeff Cote wherever she may roam. Um Alex Williams
to compose our theme. Second things for a different thing. Yeah,
(57:22):
it's you're hearing it right now. Don't just to spend
your just happening happening right now. We'll see you next time, folks.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Over on the other side
of the zoom call, we've got our one and only
super producer, Max Williams. Give him a hand, folks, but
don't stop clapping. We'll keep clapping. But I'm Ben, but
don't clap for me. I need you to clap for
someone who's doing double duty. Today. We've got another super
(00:49):
producer who happens to be my near and dear co host,
the one and only Mr Noel Brown. You know it's weird, Ben.
I'm sitting here in the room with you in person,
but I'm just space. I'm still staring at a screen.
I refused to meet your gaze, Sir. I won't do it. Okay,
I'll do it. It's different. It hits different. You know
when it's not when you're not in a little box
(01:09):
on the screen. Um. But yeah, it's cool. We're here
for real. I'm doing double duty. I'm sitting in the
old producer's chair. Full disclosure, we did this whole instro
a minute ago and I had one of the mix
cute up wrong. So this is round two. Know with
that was a rehearsal all the same beats though here
we are, we are and and uh, we are so
fortunate today normal because we we rarely get to record
(01:32):
in person, but we we made an exception for today's
very special episode. As we said in previous episode, Folks,
we're going through kind of a highst face here on
Ridiculous History, but we decided to put it on hold
for a second because we have the wonderful opportunity to
speak to an actual friend of ours, a friend of
the show for a long time. You've heard his work
(01:53):
anytime you've tuned into Ridiculous History. Uh. He is also
related to our own super producer, Matt. Folks, Ridiculous Historians,
let's have a big hand for the creator of not
just our soundtrack, but the amazing podcast Ephemeral, Mr Alex Williams.
(02:14):
Nice Ben. The second introduction was even better than the
first introduction. Yeah, practice makes perfect. I love this uproarious
applause full of Max. I think it makes us all
feel really good about ourselves. Max. Is it true that
you and Alex are blood relations? That is correct, he
is eighteen months older than me. And then like four
(02:36):
days or something like that. You're the little brother, just
barely right, the little brother, yea, and in eighteen months. Yeah,
that's pretty close on Irish twins, Alex, Like, I asked
you on the way to our offices here today, did
you did you get did you get lost? Did you
find your way? Okay? Arduously lost cartoon initially lost. Now
(02:59):
I have been here many times, but I'm ashamed to
say that I did set up in the wrong studio.
There's four studios here, and I was a little late,
and I was running and setting things up and plugging
things in feverishly. And I got in and I got
the zoom open, and I saw that Ben was in
a different studio, and all the all the what do
(03:19):
you call these things? All the stuff, well, you know,
you had the benefit of modern technology, at least, at
least the zoom includes you into the fact that you
weren't in the right place. But did you at least
have some snacks to subsist on, maybe some thistles and
twigs and herbs of some sort. There's some old York
patties out front. Still, there's not very many. I have
(03:41):
been here a lot lately, shooting another show, and uh,
I have kind of subsisted on all of those. I
think there's one orange lollipop left in there. You didn't
come to that yet. We'll see how this goes. So, uh,
this is this is a peak behind the curtain, folks,
A wonderful example of what we call segways here in podcasting,
(04:01):
because no, I get the feeling. My spider sense tells
me that we're going somewhere with this. We are going somewhere.
We're going to what is today called Yellowstone National Park.
In an eighteen seventy it was just like super rough,
you know, rugged terrain, wilderness, dare I say? And a
gentleman by the name of Truman Everts got hopelessly, as
(04:24):
you say, Ben, cartoonishly terrifyingly lost for a span a
thirty seven days. And he did an account of this.
And there's a recent episode of Ephemeral that actually we
teased with Max on a recent episode of this show
that re enacts does a dramatization what'd you call it?
Of this? Uh? This events and Mr Everts own words
(04:46):
as voiced by you, Mr Ben Boling, Oh, and uh,
let us not forget that you make an appearance as well.
Mr Brown, I think I say something like we have
come for you. We have come Alex, Like, can you
stay a little with more hope? We have come for
you a little kinder, We have come for you. Yeah,
(05:08):
Alex is a perfectionist as a director, I feel like
maybe maybe we're gonna be a little more diplomatic because
he's in the room with us right now. So this Alex,
as as we know, this episode is available now wherever
you get your podcast, etcetera, etcetera. But what we wanted
(05:30):
to do today was to learn a little bit about
your inspiration for this, to get a maybe a behind
the scenes look at the process of bringing history to
life in this way, because it's a difficult endeavor, you know,
even if you're just doing something as simple as adapting
(05:51):
Shakespearean story to modern language, right or doing the really
weird thing where people update the Bible to modern language,
you know, and it's like on the seventh day, God
chilled or whatever. You know, like, what where did you
originally find thirty seven days of peril? How did you
find it? And what led to you? And Max and
(06:13):
Trevor who also was on the Inphemeral team, Uh well,
lad you all to make this into an episode. I've
been thinking about where it was that I found it,
and I wish I could tell you specifically. I spend
a lot of time, in particular back allies of the Internet,
like I think we all do. UM one place, I
spent a lot of times, like Guttenberg, looking at things
(06:35):
that are in the public domain that might make good
adaptations or inspirations or whatever. I'm sure it was somewhere
like that UM or maybe just researching, you know, national
parks or something. I'm just I'm into public land and
hiking and outdoor stuff. I think I came across this
story about two years ago, and it's you know, you
(06:57):
talk about updating language. I mean, one of the things
that's really special about it is that this guy, Truman Everts,
was lost near death thirty seven days as you know,
I'm sure we'll come up. I mean, it's the name
of the episode, of the name of the story. And
then a year after he was rescued, he sat down
and wrote everything he could remember and it was published
(07:19):
in one in Scripts monthly. Uh So it's a firsthand
account of you know, essentially being alone in the wilderness
for thirty seven days. So I really didn't want to
change anything. I want. It was important to me to, uh,
you know, if we were going to do some sort
of adaptation, to do it in the author's own words,
(07:41):
because it's just you know how many documents like that exist. Well,
it's kind of cool because like there's nothing we can
do in talking about this that would spoil it because
it really is all about hearing it in his own
words through the dulcet pipes of Ben bolan Um. But
it's got you know, amazing very subtle, beautiful sound design
and music and moments that just really kind of pull
you into it without being distracting. That's something we can
(08:01):
all agree. Uh. Sometimes in short supply and podcast that
like try to do sound design, sometimes it can be
overdone a little bit, and you do a great job
of like writing that fine line where it really feels
like you're there, but it doesn't distract from the storytelling.
So I have good producers that listen carefully and give
me really critical notes. But I mean what I'm what
(08:22):
I'm getting at is, I think, you know, one thing,
you do discuss it a little bit, and then the opening,
but um, I'd love to just briefly talk a little
bit about who this guy was, what led him to
have this fascination with exploring the wilderness. It was sort
of like, you know, it was a period of exploration
in the history of this country and a lot of
the things that we know now is like these national
(08:43):
parks were kind of untamed and that you know, no
one really planted a flag there yet. And do you
can you tell us a little bit about who this
efforts guy was and where his fascination with wilderness exploration
came from. And he was like a tax collector, wasn't he,
or like a like a tax assessor. Yeah, so Montana
and Wyoming we're not even states yet in eighteen seven
(09:04):
days like territories, right and right? And uh, he was
the Montana territories first federal tax assessor. I couldn't tell
you too much more about his back story than that. Um,
you know, most of what's you know out there about
Triman Everetts is what's contained in thirty seven Days of Peril.
But I know he was out there in Montana. He
(09:25):
was the territories first tax assessor. Whatever pointed by Lincoln,
I think, do you know what a tax assessor does? Ben, Yeah, bro,
they assess taxes. So a tax assessor is someone who
walks around. They're they're around today. They walk around and
give an area and region or whatever, and they determine
(09:45):
the value of the land or the value of a property.
So like, um, you know you have people who assess
the value of a house in the modern day. This
guy has a much bigger kind kind of responsibility, right,
They're like, go to this thing that we're vaguely calling
Montana and just figure out, you know, what's worth how
(10:06):
much does it work? And so that's that's an order
of magnitude um more difficult. Maybe he had some leeway
because you know, like like you guys point out he's
the first person to do it. But but you're right,
we we know that he didn't. He didn't really have
a big precedent, you know, for how to how to
(10:26):
pursue this. I'm sure that there were things that he
had in mind as goals, but as we'll see, they
quickly fell to the wayside when he was just trying
not to die. To put it back in biblical terms, uh,
what you're describing him being the tax assessor of this
giant swath of untamed land reminds me of God saying
(10:49):
to Adam, God, name all the all the things, name
all the things need names, that I'll help you later.
And Adam pointed to his elbow and said, awaenas and
God edit that part. But the the Yeah, this is
this is something that Noel, I know you and I
were both we were taken with this story. On our end,
(11:13):
we'd never I don't think either of us had ever
heard of it until you told us about this story.
And it's one of the best examples we've seen of
somebody getting lost. And to tow the earlier points you
guys made, I don't think it's spoiling the story because
the the cinematic sound design is really much more of it.
(11:34):
I think an experience, right, it's three D audio. It
takes you to a lot of strange places. I think
it's fine for us to talk about just how Max
beat me here, how severely this guy fucked up. Yeah,
it's true. And also I mean it really is just
about hearing it in his own words. Uh, as he
recalled it under such intense dress, I would have think
(11:56):
I would just block all that stuff out, but now
he was wanting to like reax varience it on the page.
First question, how accurate do you think his recollection was
or do you think it was maybe embellished? Well, I
(12:19):
mean we all know sort of the way that human
memory works is not infallible. It's not a it's not
a you know, a videotape. But I think if he
was really gonna embellish, he would have maybe made himself
look a little bit better, like like fought a berb
you know, like forest fire. Sure, yeah, not made not
(12:44):
tied pieces of his clothing in these ill advised ways.
This is okay, So maybe we do it. Maybe we
do it this way since we're not we're not afraid
of spoilers here. We know you're going to tune into
the episode. Uh, why don't Why don't you just give
us the rough kind of step by step plot points
of how this guy, like you said, he became attack sucsessor, right,
(13:08):
and Lincoln gives him this job go figure out how
much this ginormous thing is worth and what happens next. Well,
ostensibly he does that, and then his term is done
or whatever. He's just out in Montana, doesn't really have
a gig anymore. He's kind of looking for the next thing,
he's just vibe and he's he's very you know, he
(13:29):
writes about how he's very astonished and and and mesmerized
by the character of the rocky mountains and the and
the scenery and all those lovely uh there's all these
lovely all these lovely phrases, kind of antique phrases about
about how charming he finds it all. And there's one
of the first, if not the first big expedition going
out through yellow Stone. It's called the Langford Done Expedition. Um,
(13:52):
there's some other names attached to it too. It's like
twenty is folks on horseback. We're going to go out
for a couple of months. And they followed I think
the Snake or the Yellowstone River south and are just
going to traverse the country and you know, take maps
and drawings and do all kinds of amazing explorer things
(14:13):
that I think people and uh in our era maybe
just kind of dream about, you know, this idea that
every little corner of the globe is mapped and explored
in GPS. So from their perspective, there's a bit of
terra incognita here, right, Like the people who have lived
in this land for thousands and thousands of years. They
already know the score and they you know, they they're
(14:37):
intimately attuned to the passage of the seasons, to the wildlife,
the flora and fauna. But for these guys, would you
say it's fair it's fair to say that for most
of them, a lot of this was absolutely brand new. Yeah,
Humbo has been Vermont, like yeah, he and there, Yeah,
this was all this was all completely new to him.
(14:57):
And he probably I mean this, he doesn't straight up
and say this. He probably I thought he was a
little bit more rugged than he was. Oh, I mean
he was, you know, by most accounts, pretty feeble. And
he was like the oldest guy in the group, and
I think he was like hopelessly nearsighted and like really
had a hard time seeing, you know anything that was
like not like, you know, a couple of feet in
(15:18):
front of his face. So pretty odd choice, you know,
to to go on this like super taxing physical kind
of journey. Right. But so he gets in, he gets
in the caravan. Horses there, you know, they I think
have been out for about a month. They leave in
mid August. It's mid September. There's one day everyone's there.
(15:38):
They're you know, clearing uh, these immense windfalls of pine
trees and all this brush, and they're getting through it,
and it's just it's super taxing work. You know, there's
no trails cut or anything. Obviously. Camp that night they're like, hey,
where's Truman? Did he just like wander off? I mean
(16:00):
he just like lost you know, the trail because of
his like poor vision. Do you have a sense of
like how he got separated? So he was while clearing
one of these one of these immense windfalls. He calls it,
he wandered out of sight and and and and sound
of his comrades, Uh, you know, looking for a passage
through it, looking through his own way, and he just
(16:21):
sort of, I think maybe kind of spaced out in
the forest a little bit and was just sort of
wandering all that grandeur you speak of. Probably was just
so taken by it, and he was just distracted, and
I think he might have been a little worn out.
And uh, and then he's like a moment later, it's
kind of like, oh, where's everybody at? And he realizes
that he's wandered just away from everybody in this expansive wilderness,
(16:47):
and uh, so he gets on his horse. He's riding around.
He's trying to retrace his his his his footprints or
the horses trail, but there's pine needles everywhere and he
can't really tell what's going on. He's getting off and
like looking at the ground and scowering it to feel
like is this a footprint? And eventually he comes to
a clearing. He gets off his horse and as he says,
(17:08):
remember this part, Ben, He says, leaving my horse unhitched
as was always my custom, Right, Yeah, it's not really pro.
Move right there and no walks a few rods into
the forest. I'm sorry rods. Is that a like a parstack?
Because like it's a half a parstack? I think? And uh,
(17:30):
there's a beat and he hears this horse winning and
take off because the horse is also like there's there's
stuff that doesn't happen in this episode. So this is
almost like you know how unpopular television shows that have
people get together and they're like chat about what happened
in the episode. I feel like we're we're kind of
getting this vibe because we're pulling back a little bit
(17:52):
of curtain on on efforts. How he presented himself versus
what maybe the reality was, versus how his crew perceived,
because I was interested to learn. Like, first off, they
had this plan, right, if anybody gets lost, no matter
how like feeble or fit they are, they've gotta meat
back at that one point, you know, like people's parents
will do it an ammusing park, right, I mean that
(18:13):
works though you have like the you know, the claw
machine or whatever at the amusement park. Not so much
in the untamed wilderness that was the yellow stone of
the lad eighteen hundreds. So his horse takes off, flies
galloping away from him, and he never sees his horse.
The horse's name did you catch the horse's name? The
horse is not named in the horse's name you like
(18:34):
to name it here today? How about how about Piony Peony.
Piony takes off and is uh efforts, never sees Piony again,
and strapped to PIONI is all this stuff, all this stuff,
everything except for like five or six little things, right,
he says he's got two knives, the clothes on his back,
and a small opera glass that's always got left. Yeah.
(18:58):
And this so he is um. The military term for
this is he is food bar and there's this deal
that everybody made where they said, Okay, if anybody gets lost,
we're gonna meet at the shore of Yellowstone Lake, right
like the southern shore. And so it was interesting. After
(19:19):
we worked on this episode together, I went back and
I was like, all right, what's the what's the score?
What do other people say. There's a guy from his party,
Nathaniel p Langford, who kept a diary of how they
were trying to find Efforts. But if you from Efforts account,
he was trying to find them, and in a very
(19:40):
polite way, he's like those asked stitched me, and like
he doesn't seem to resent them when the way he's
written it, you know, um, but you get the sense
that he feels like, um, it was just a series
of unfortunate events beyond his control, and he hadn't done
meeting abnormal. He never hitched his horse. Piony would never
(20:03):
ditch someone like that, and Piony very much did, of course,
so lank for just for comparison, here he has a
diary where he says, look, we're shooting guns to try
to signal to this guy where we are, and Efforts
never mentioned that, which makes you wonder how far away
he actually went. You know, I don't think he really
(20:24):
had the survival skills for this in the first place.
Oh yeah, this moment, this is day one yo into it.
How do you how do you wander that far off? Though?
And like to what end? You know, weren't they like
betting down for the night and stuff like? Was he
just having a nice night walk like you like to
have men? It was late in the afternoon when he
got separated, when they were when they were getting through
the pine windfall? Yeah? Interesting, and and then night begins
(20:50):
to set in him. What what's his emotional state at
this point? He is terrified. He does not seem to
like the night side at all, which again begs the
question why he would embark on a several months camping trip. Yeah,
he says, his mind is instinct with terror. Now, what's
(21:12):
the weather like at this point? It's September nine. I
think it's pretty temperate. Still, it's not gonna stay that way.
Spoiler alert. Yeah, let's not forget the name of the pieces.
Thirty seven days. He's a couple of days. And just
as in a side if you were worried about the horse,
peony was recovered by the rest of the party writerless.
(21:35):
But yeah, right, so if he had just stayed on
the horse, right, because that's the thing that I thought
to like, if the horses running off, it's either running
away from something or it's running towards something. And if
it was running away from something that Everts would probably
have also clocked it. You know, it was like a
(21:56):
bear or a large cat of some sort. Yeah, And
it's interesting because you know, he had no provisions. I mean,
I don't believe any of the items that were on
him or snacks, a couple of knives he said, an
opera glass and the clothes on his body. No, no, Jesus,
we're actually running really desperately low on Jesus here at
the office too. It could end up being a wilderness
(22:17):
type scenario. If we're not careful, Yeah, we might have
to go downstairs. God can imagine. Um. But no, it's
it's crazy. Like I mean, like you said, he's very
ill equipped just in general, his constitution doesn't seem very
fit for this kind of trip. And now he's completely
you know, alone on the wilderness. And what's what's it
like out there? You know, in the days before it
(22:38):
was I mean, you know we yellow Stone still pretty
rugged obviously, but at this point would have been no
trails cleared, like you said, absolutely teeming with with beasties,
right and like you know, wildlife. Yeah. The second night,
he uh so, he so he spends time looking for
his horse, which is a mistake. He spends a half
day looking for his horse when he should have just
gone like you're saying, Ben, and found his camp. He
(23:00):
recollects that, reflects on that in his essay The second night,
I believe it's I believe. Yeah, the second night, he's
a laying at the foot of a tree, has made
himself a little bed of like pine branches and foliage,
and he's tucked in there and falling asleep for the night.
And he's roused by the sound. He calls it. He says,
(23:21):
it sounds like the sound of a human scream coming
through the forest. Scream. Yes, that's exactly it's the original. Um.
It turns out it's a mountain lion bounding for him.
Now they say mountain lions are really really rare to
(23:42):
spot in the wild, but this one charges at him,
at least according to his account, and he screams in return,
which we have a fun scream from my friend Nathaniel
in there runs up the tree and gets to the
top and is shaking all the limbs and breaking branches
and hurling them at the wildcat and just get out
(24:04):
of here. Get out of here, you that's great. We
don't watch you around here. It's like it's like an
all the sad dog movies when like you're doing the
dog of favor by letting it go, who's got to
be mean to it even though it hurts you anymore.
That's kind of what happened with Pree. No, it's definitely
much more of a like please don't like evisterate me.
(24:27):
And mountain lions can climb trees if I'm not mistaken right,
Mountain lions are dope and dangerous like they like they yes,
they d and they will get you. They are the
original d and d uh. This so we already see
this is going from whoops, too bad to worse to
worse and worse and worse. He is at this point, um.
(24:50):
He is still in possession of his mental faculties, though,
which is why he has the even though panicked, he
has the presence of mind to do, you know, base
like try to scare off predator type stuff. Um, I
mean I would imagine he's a little shook at this point,
for sure, very much. Possibly those mental faculties are beginning
(25:11):
to leave him still with it to us to a
degree at this point. Yeah, So what happens in the
mountain liin? Like I said, I mean, I thought a
mountain lion could like totally shimming up a tree, Like,
how do you think they definitely can? Yes, he says
that he was. He was screaming and breaking benches and
throwing things at him, and then he had a moment
of clarity that he should try silence. You know, let's
(25:35):
try something completely different than what I was doing before,
and now for something completely was it like one last yell,
one last get out of here you. I don't even lie,
I don't want to be your friend, one last Wilhelm
scream and wait a minute, no, on second, that hunch
falls over the forest, only the sounds of the swing
(25:55):
thickets of thistles and leaves and such in the mountain lion,
and quizzically peers around. He's like, you know what, I
think it's gonna go right, That's exactly it, And then
he slides down the tree and goes back to sleep.
That's day too, Broo. We ain't gonna do every day,
but that we can't do every day. But so you
(26:16):
can already see just like as as you said, Alex,
from day two, this stuff is bonkers. And that's still
just the beginning of just the beginning of these misadventures.
I believe that even the weather is against him at
one point. Yeah, we're talking like day three, day for
(26:43):
that weather turns and it's basically a blizzard by just overnight,
goes from temperate to blizzard. You know, up in that
high elevation that happens. Man, It's it's dangerous up there.
They tell you that when you go, you know, hike
in the rocky mountains now like you need you know,
you need to be ready to get down the mountain
or get shelter quickly. Honest. You know, the weather can
change really really fast at high elevation. Uh so, yeah,
(27:07):
he's got this you know, crazy blizzard and storm. I
think it's it's snow and rain actually that's uh overshadowing
him and reducing his clothing to its pitiless peltings. Yes, yes,
he does say that. Yes, anyone that's into weird and
achronistic terms of phrase, it's going to be this is
going to be absolute catinet for Yeah, but he's he's
(27:31):
pretty smart. Everyone's heard of, like you know, Old Faithful
and all of the hot springs you know around this
part of the world. Those are a great source of heat,
and he'd be very smartly uses them to stay warm.
But it makes a few unfortunate calculations. If I'm not mistaken. Yeah,
I think he spots him from seeing them steaming from
a distance, and he makes his way over there, finds
(27:52):
himself a hot spring, and basically just sets up camp
for like seven days as this storm rages. He says
it was like a saw, I guess, because it's you know,
cold and wet outside, and it's warm and wet right here,
and so then he's he's living in the hot springs.
One night, he is sleeping and rolls over in his
sleep and with his hip breaks the crust on a
(28:16):
hot spring next to him and scalds his hip. What
would that be like logistically, you break the crust and
then just the steam vents out like really fast, and
it's very hot water, very hot water. Right there. Okay, Yeah,
you guys ever been in a hot spring. I have
been like in a like a not a resort, but
it's like a you know, a place that's got little
(28:37):
tubs built around the hot springs. It's actually literally called
hot Springs, North Carolina, if I'm not mistaken. It's really cool.
I don't want to stay the name of it here
because I don't want people to fly to it. But
I went to an amazing just out in the wilderness, backpacking,
like ten miles hot springs in the Olympic Peninsula and
Washington State. Oh you mentioned that. Yeah, wow, I mean
(28:57):
like the most magical for us, old giant old trees,
all mossy and stones that are like green and white
and purple from the algae that's coming from the sulfur springs. Uh. Yeah,
I'll tell you guys. So yeah, So we've had some
(29:18):
experience with hot springs. Some have been really stunning, like
the one you're describing, and some have been a little
bit of a letdown. You know. I'm not gonna name
names either, but there's a moment where you realize, hey,
these are more like warm springs. So some people will
get that. But but yes, so he is stuck between
(29:41):
two extremes of weather. Right, uh, and he for a
moment has a very real chance of either dying of
cold or dying due to the heat from these springs. Right. Yeah.
He also, I'm sure people are wondering what he was
eating for like three days or something he didn't eat,
(30:04):
and then he discovers he's staring at the ground one
day and he sees this different color of green, this
really bright color of green, and he goes and pulls
it up by the route and it's a thistle. And
basically for thirty's you know, thirty four days at this point,
he eats raw thistles. So a thistle, from what I understand,
(30:29):
is like a it's it's spiky. Right, I have never
eaten a thistle, ben I have, I have. I believe
the efforts is eating a thistle root. Yes, okay, so
this is this is funny. This is one kind of accolade.
He does get one distinction when he survives. He has
(30:50):
a thistle named after him. It's called Everett's thistle. He
deserved at least that. I mean, it's got a mountain
named after Okay. And he also, this guy is just
failing upwards. Not to be confused with Mount Everest. These
are two different things. Just just just to clear the
air there. Um, yeah, Google did tell me that I
(31:11):
typed in Mount Everest since it's like, did you mean
Mount Everest? Yeah, just to jump in here. I mean
like you can just like you know, if you ever
client Mount everetts whenever you tell people can just say
it really fast. Yeah, I climbed up Mount everests. I
didn't even have a shirt or anything. It's fine. It
took me thirty seven days, but I did it. And
(31:32):
I had a lot of this, a lot of thistles. Yeah,
it's true, though. Thistle. I'm right there, We're all right.
A thistle is it's very pretty, but it's very rough
and spiky underneath the beautiful kind of like pink flowery leaves.
So he would boil these roots, if I'm not mistaken,
when he was living in his sauna in the in
the hot springs during the storm, one of many storms. Yeah,
(31:54):
he had a little dinner pot that he would cook
his roots in. Um. I don't think that it was
a gray way to subsist, but I think probably cooking
them was nice when he could do that. Where do
you get the dinner pot? Was that attached to a
hitch to his belt or something. I thought he only
had like a little bubbling spring. He just called it
his dinner. So he's like got his feet in one
(32:15):
and his feet are already frost bitten. Now his hip
is burnt, and he's just like lounging out in the
steam bath getting parboiled and dipping roots in here. And like,
on the one hand, that sounds kind of pleasant, um,
but you know, under the circumstances, he's obviously suffering horrendously
while he's doing this. Yeah, you know, No, when I
(32:36):
was listening to this, I thought the same thing as you.
I was if that sounds kind of pleasant, honestly, and stuff, Well,
let's not forget the onset of gang green, the onset
of frost bite, and potential who knows. I mean, it
just has no medical um intervention of any kind. He
has no supplies. I mean, that hip could have really festered,
(32:57):
you know, or any number of injuries that he could
to god, you know, twisted ankle could have killed him,
you know. Indeed, And that's something I think is really
instructive for folks who enjoy out exploring the outdoors stay
but are unfamiliar with it when you are genuinely out
in the wild and you don't have you don't have
(33:17):
a safety net system or something. A broken ankle or
something would feel like a small injury in civilization can
be fatal and can be very quickly. So, uh, for
we it's in our mind, folks, it's okay to roast
effort or to parboil him a little bit because he
(33:38):
made it out. But in this situation already, he has
survived several things that have in the past spelled doom
for other explorers. Absolutely, um so, definitely props to him
for being resourceful and figuring out how to make this
environment work for him. But there are some choices that
he makes that are pretty stupid. Uh, not for him
(33:59):
and his personal safety, but like for like the whole
gorgeous natural wonder that he was so taken by. Right,
So he's he's wondering while he's sitting in the springs,
how he's gonna make fire. Oh, I thought you were
going to say, how much are these springs worth? He's
tax assessing, he's always tax assessing. He's wondering how he's
(34:22):
going to make a fire, and he's thinking about all
the ways to make fire rubbing sticks together. Maybe he
wasn't so good at that one. Have you guys, ever
done Yes, you've done that. It's a paint in the ass.
Just take a lighter with you, or a fire flint
block or something, you know, a twisted fire star the Prodigy,
remember that spiky hair. Guys, I'm the Oh my god. Okay,
(34:46):
so we'll get to we'll get to that part that's
extremely important for the story really quickly. Going to have
to point out that we really should take more advance
of the fact they're in the same room to sing together,
because over soon it's impossible to do because delay you're right,
and when you're right, you're right. So this this moment
here when he's trying to figure out how to make
(35:09):
a fire, this is a a tremendously profound moment for him,
and it reminded me about the Jack London story, Like
I think it's to build a fire, to make a fire,
and that is also about a guy who's having a
very difficult time making a fire and it becomes a
life or death matter. So you know, he he does
(35:31):
try the sticks together a method which is like friction
trying to build a spark and again from experience, it
is possible. It also stinks. Uh if they if you
are listening, you're in some survival course, and they make
you do it, they should also say, hey, if you
have to do this right now, you already messed up.
(35:52):
You should have had a lighter. But he didn't have
a lighter, right, he had nothing. He had the opera glass,
and that's where he puts it together. He once the
sun comes out, he tries it out with the opera glass,
which I guess ben is what like like half a binocular. Yeah, yeah,
I believe so. Short, Yeah it is. It's one side
of a binocular. Some opera glasses are two of them,
(36:13):
but I think you would just call those opera No,
you would call those opera glasses too, But I think
you know what, No, A proper pair of opera glasses
is two and there's a little stick usually that goes
on them and you hold them with your pinky ouch. Uh,
you know, so that you can see the tenor do
his big death scene, you know, from the cheap seats,
see the relations and and Noel is speaking from authority here, folks.
(36:37):
I hope it's okay if I say this on air,
but that was once a young drummond boy, right, and
your mother was an opera scen once an opera singer.
Alway should basically like an aged diva's kind of a
sunset boulevard type figure, you know. But it's true. We
have some vintage opera glasses around the house, so I
think actually what you would be referring to would be
a spy glass, like a single tiny uh lescope. So
(37:00):
this he calls it an opera glass, I imagine something.
Probably there's no photos or any and I don't think
it's there. There are like nine illustrations with the article,
but I don't believe that the opera glass is illustrated
in any of them, so I don't know if it was.
He always refers to my lens, Okay, so it's probably
it's maybe not binocular. It's probably some some smaller magnifying thing,
(37:23):
like a like a tiny telescope, like a tiny telescope. Yeah, yeah,
like a microscope. And so this is yes, there we are,
and so he has uh, he desperately needs fire. One
cannot live on raw thistles for the rest of their lives, right,
But that's a question he's quarreling with how does how
(37:45):
does he begin putting this together? He said, he puts
it together. It's got away for the sun to come out.
The sun comes out. He does the old like I
would never condone this, but like a frying frying the
ants kind of trick, you know, you get the light
and you concentrated, you know, you put the broad end
towards the sun and the narrow end towards whatever you're
trying to set a flame. And it's a really lovely moment.
(38:07):
Actually sees the little you know, the little bit of
bark in his fingers, the little little smoke curl from it,
and he says to himself in that moment, he says,
I will not despair. Yes, yeah, that's and that is
a powerful, primal thing, you know, because that's one of
the that that is I think one of the first
(38:27):
big moments where he is sort of exerting human ingenuity
over the wilderness and all the other things are things
where he's barely scraping by in response to a disaster,
right like I can eat these I can eat these weeds.
That'll work. Oh, I'll I'll hide from the mountain lion
who I'll run from the storm. I'll try not to
(38:50):
boil alive. And so this is one of the times
where he starts taking more active control of the situation.
I would argue, but if you are in that moment
and we've had you know, folks listening today, you may
have found yourself lost in the woods, uh, and you
know that there can be that gut sinking moment when
(39:10):
you're thinking, oh, how how do I get get out
of here? And so he has already passed that moment.
And when he's making fire, there's something Promethean about it.
To him, it's in his mind. It's a light at
the end of the tunnel. I would say, I think
that's absolutely it. I mean, it's you know, it's very human.
(39:33):
He's yeah, harnessed this power. You know, he's he's created
something and he's taking charge of his own destiny. And
yet then there's kind of a like kind of moment
and the first act on a high note, he's only
like eleven days in or whatever. Uh, that spark, you know,
(39:55):
eventually becomes a roaring flame that then you know, uh,
Smoky the bear would not approve it spreads. So he's
sleeping on a beach one night he's made it down
to a Yellowstone Lake some days later, and he's made
a nice fire on the beach. He's actually lost his
slipper that night, I think, and he's like three traumatic
thing looking for the slipper. Have you seen the Pine
(40:16):
Barrens episode of The Sopranos. You haven't seen. It's a
classic ep standal in episode where Polly and Christopher get
lost in the Pine Barrens, which is this this rugged
area of New Jersey where notoriously people go to buried bodies,
and Polly loses his shoe at one point. It becomes
a real bone of contention between the two gangsters, directly
(40:37):
inspired from thirty seven Days Apparel. I'm calling it. It's
in the public domain, so it's it's this is more
of a loafer that Polly loses. This is a slipper,
it's a it's a sandal. He's made his boots in
his sandals, and Ben and I talked about that a
lot when we really haven't been able to figure out.
(40:58):
He cuts his the counter of his boots off and
turns him into a passable pair of slippers, and he
calls them slippers. He does, but it's cold, and he's
all he's doing is walking right mountains. So we couldn't
figure that out, Like, wouldn't you want the ankles support,
You want the ankle support, you want the coverage, you know. Yeah,
So if anyone's got uh insight into that, um right
(41:21):
to Jonathan Strickland. Yes, I'm sure that's not the joke
you guys use anymore. Those addresses are still active, Yeah,
right to our complaint department, which is Jonathan Strickland house
stuff works dot com. All right, I wasn't too far off.
He nailed it twenty four hours a day, seven days
a week. So anyways, he finds his slipper and he's
(41:42):
got great relief, and he lays down the beach next
to this big fire and he mellows out and he
listens to the dash and roar of the way, and
then he wakes up and his fin he's on fire.
He yeah, his fire has gotten totally picked up by
(42:03):
the wind and his and his his hair is seemed
closer than a barber would have trimmed it as running
away from the beach and and and and into higher elevation.
And then he gets gets out there and takes a beat.
It stands on this like crest and watches this fire
turned into a giant forest fire, a conflagration, right, that's
(42:27):
the name for it. Honestly, that's some of the most
beautiful writing in the whole piece, when he's talking about
the grandeur of the burning forests surpasses all description. Uh,
it's it's great in in the in the tenor of
Ben Bolan. Oh geez, you got us up with these
and the And also he does something really really interesting
in the writing here. Uh, Lovecraft does this too, and
(42:49):
he's like, the grand deur exceeds all description, as you said,
and then he describes let's end on that pivotal note
for now. As far as the course of our story,
Uh no, I think you know you raised a really
(43:09):
good point off air. We wanted to give you some
highlights and some contexts. We're not going to tell you
the whole thing. Well yeah, I mean, even though Alex
said off Mike before we started recording, the really hard
to spoil this thing. In terms of the ending, we
do know that the guy is rescued, but there are
more adventures and misadventures to uh, to be heard if
you listen to the full episode. But again, it really
(43:30):
is all about the full experience and hearing it in
efforts own words. But Alex, you know when you're doing
something like this and in an ephemeral in general, I
mean like a lot of the audio you're mining is
like from found audio, found sound like different you know,
public domain sites on the internet. Uh, and you know,
don't no need to reveal your sources. I know that
stuff is very uh, it's very hush hush, and I
(43:52):
totally get it. But what's your approach for I don't know,
building a sonic capitually this. I know you have a
lot of help from folks like Max and Trevor, but
I mean the whole thing was your vision. The first
season was largely like you doing all this stuff and
peak behind the curtain, like you and I like mess
with music and play music together, and I think we're
both like super audio nerds. And how do you bring
that love of sonics to an audio show like this
(44:14):
that's ultimately about storytelling? Yeah? I mean it's sort of
different for every episode, right, I mean we usually do
uh it's mostly nonfiction history, so so often it's it's
an interview that we've started with and we've cut down
an interview, but we've done these sort of scored audiobook
things before. Um the difference but this one was that, yeah,
there wasn't really a really great audio book out there
(44:36):
already of it, unlike Libervox or anything, which is a
free public domain audiobook site. Um. So a like, the
first thing was finding an actor that could pull it off.
Because while it's well, it's really beautiful writing, and like
you called out, it's got all kinds of very interesting phrases,
it is not the kind of thing that you could
just hand to anybody. Uh, somebody with a lot of
(45:00):
experience talking into a microphone and able to take on
some of these long phrases and clauses and twisting sentences
and was on vacation and I think Jonathan Strickland was
deported called everybody else. Yes, yeah, Ben, your self deprecation
is killing me. You absolutely are the man for the job.
(45:20):
You have a certain gravitas to your delivery, Ben, I
mean because at first you can kind of feel the
guy's deteriorating mental state with your delivery. You the progression,
the way you kind of lose hope almost like in
the sound of your voice. It's very well done. Uh,
and no more compliments from here. On now, I promise,
but it's true. I mean, Alex makes a good point.
It really is about casting because the words are already
(45:41):
there on the page. But it's like one thing to
read something in your mind on a page, another thing
to actually say it out loud and have it like
land right. In all since Therity, it was the most
important thing for Truman to feel human so you could
sympathize with him, so it didn't just feel like I
don't know a block of old time aide text. And
(46:02):
that's something that's tough too because in these in these adaptations,
you know, this guy is writing before the rise of radio, right,
he's writing before the rise of a spoiler podcasting, right.
So so people right very differently back then. They take
their time with sentences, you know, they they have maybe
(46:25):
not to the extent of like James Joyce or Henry James,
but they do. They do tend to wind and sort
of wind on at the point where you know, you
realize half a pages passed, and so you did a
lot of work. Um, you and your team where you're saying, hey,
we want to stay true to this story, but we
(46:46):
also need to make sure that it is a viable
understandable story for people to experience. Did you have did
you have moments where you found yourself really in the
trenches of like, Okay, Truman, I know what, I know
what you're trying to say, buddy. How difficult was it
to sort of walk the line on the adaptation of
(47:07):
the text here? I uh, I went through the whole
story probably a dozen times or more editing it. I
really didn't change any of his phrasing or his words,
but I did just kind of cut it for a
little bit for a content and a little bit just
mostly for time to try and clarify and make it
(47:28):
something that would fit like an hour. So it's not
the complete unabridged text, it's very it's it's pretty close, um,
and we've got the unabridged text everywhere, but it's a
little bit more kind of clarified than that. Honestly, I
sort of sweated every every line of that, you know,
because I just want, you know, the larger project for
me here is right. It's in a really incredible story.
(47:51):
It's incredible that it's a firsthand account. It's incredible that
the guy survived, and I worried that things like this.
I'm glad it's did it eyes. I'm glad it's out
there that it's got you know, some articles and stuff
about it online. But I worry that things like that,
you know, will become irrelevant and maybe get completely lost.
And it's it's a very real possibility. It's something that
(48:13):
you and your team have already seen in the course
of UH, in the course of different episodes of Ephemeral,
you know, the two part series on video stores I
think was very well done. And one one thing that
really I think that Ephemeral really speaks to and one
(48:35):
reason that no not to speak for you, but one
reason I think we're both big fans is because each
of these episodes of this show have so much time
and care putting into them. UH. And sometimes I get
the feeling like, is is Alex out here finding a
story that doesn't want to be found or is he
(48:56):
racing some sort of ticking clock, you know, a to
which point the people who could have told you this
story are gone, right and the p and that's something
you probably run into. Or are you reaching a point
where the only record of this story was a physical
record that's never been digitized and will it go away?
You know how what disaster will strike next. So you know,
(49:20):
with that in mind, I do actually have a question here.
So with that in mind, you could just tell many
nice things about this is a great podcast. Well this
is stuff Nolan I talked about too. But with that
in mind, one of the questions I know we had
before was what motivates you and Trevor and Max to
pick a specific story, Like do you have a list
(49:43):
of sort of draft picks and then you narrow it down,
or do you do you get struck with the Eureka
moment and say like, uh, holy smokes, Stephen Foster he
had he had a Mariachi phase or something like that.
You know, I don't think just for the record, I mean,
that's the next episode, but I'm not gonna spoil that. Uh.
(50:05):
You know, they come from different from different ways, you know,
like sometimes it is sort of a larger I mean,
I mean to answer you, to really answer your question, Max,
Trevor and I have a million ideas. We have a
very long list of ideas that we meet on all
the time and are always kind of and we sort
of all have our own approaches to, uh to tackling that.
(50:26):
Sometimes it is kind of a larger cultural thing like um,
video stores like you mentioned, which is all the work
of Trevor Young. Trevor took August and made two fabulous
episodes on video stores UM and the sort of rise fall,
decline and how they really really changed our relationship with
media in this world. UM. So it's like, all right,
(50:47):
well that's a cool idea. Go find the people who
can talk about it. Found a guy named Dan Herbert
who was just on the CUSP was like around I
think he took himself on a road trip. Um. He's
a Universe a student, Michigan professor, and he took himself
on a road trip and drove all around the country
and tape recorded him going to video stores and just
talking to people, talking to someone in Cheyenne or whatever.
(51:09):
And it's like, oh, yeah, it's what's a tanning salon
and a video store and you know he's just getting
all these and some people trying to sell him their
video stores and stuff on the spot and um. And
then sometimes it's like this like the thirty seven Days
one where you find this one record, whether that's a recording, uh,
you know, audio recording or video or an image or
(51:33):
an essay like this is or a manuscript that's just
a one of a kind that doesn't you know, it's
just nothing else quite like it. It's like, okay, that's
a thing that can we breathe some new life into this,
like can we put this in whatever, you know, whatever
little influence that we have, like back on the radar
of the public consciousness. And it's not an easy process.
(51:55):
It sounds like right. I mean, first of all, you
even identifying those gems squires a real curatorial eye and
a fascination with this kind of stuff. That's sort of
the mission of the whole show. The idea of you know,
returning things that maybe were lost to history or lost
to technology even you know, like the idea of ephemera
often has to do with outmoded technology or things that
(52:16):
are no longer as easy to play anymore, like things
like you know, seventy eight's or you know, old eight
tracks or things like that, or things that were written
and maybe never you know archive and things like that.
So I think it's awesome what you're doing. It really
is almost like a an Internet archive kind of project.
And big fan of the show and I think anyone
that likes the show absolutely like it. As well. Yes,
(52:37):
but you still have to listen to our show. Please
please just my girlfriend. My girlfriend, by the way, doesn't
listen to our show. Um. She just told me the
other day that she started listening to Ephemeral and I'm like,
she did text me some nice words about it. She
(52:58):
really likes it. Well, maybe to listen to the one.
Yeah maybe so, maybe so uh wump wump. But man, Alex,
thanks so much for joining us, Thanks for having me
and and and really it's it's worth listening for the
vocal performance as if nothing else. And no, you're you're
also in there as a hunter. He spent his life
(53:19):
among the wilderness. And I will not spoil that, but
you have a really great moment right at the end
of the episode. Nailed it. Yes, we've come for you,
you know after after that about okay, I won't won't
spoil it, but involves some kind of gross, doesn't it.
It's a it's a little gross. It's maybe one of
the grosser parts. Yeah, it's well intentioned, though we can't
(53:40):
we can't keep spoiling. Dude. It's a miracle basically, Yes, Okay,
let's what else is a miracle? Is? Is you ridiculous historians,
each and every one of you God's miracles to podcast them. Yes,
thank you so much, folks. Thank you Alex Williams for
hanging out before we head off into the wilds of
(54:04):
our own. Could you tell everybody where to find Ephemeral
where to learn more about your work, because you don't
just do ephemeral, which is really weird and amazing to
me that you do other stuff as well. I'm totally
lost right now, get it? Yes? Um, do you want
to know where to find ephemeral dot show or on
all the social things at ephemeral show? And uh, what
(54:27):
you want to talk about other things that I work on? Yeah? Yeah,
what are we doing right now? Well, we've got a
new season of Thirteen Days of Halloween coming out on
the nineteenth of October and that'll run day day or
a day for thirteen days. I will not spoil anything
about that, but because I don't want to not a spoiler.
But it is another kind of immersive storytelling podcast with
(54:50):
three D audio touches, I believe. Yeah, the first season
featured Gig and Michael Key. It's all one binural three
D audio. It's like a you know, listener to question
advised comes from Blumhouse and Aaron Manky and and us
here at I Heeart and then uh, you and the
one and only Mr Max Williams have some future episodes
(55:11):
of Ephemeral coming out, which we said we wouldn't spoil, right,
it's up to you, Max. No, no, I've been working
on this episode for a good minute now, and I
don't know it's it's a really intriguing story we were
talking about before off off Mike and Ben's like, oh
my god, that's my favorite movie. So you know, it
should become an oppeginning October. It's gonna be a lot
(55:32):
of fun to listen to some mystery and that, and
it is also a bit HALLOWEENI yes, uh, and yeah,
I wonder what Ben's favorite movie is. You let to
tun into a phemeral to find out. You guys are
boxing me in all right, Well, do check it out.
Do check out all of the shows that are available
on the Ephemeral website. You can follow them to get
a peek behind the scenes on the various social needs
(55:54):
of choice. You can also follow Ridiculous History and check
this out in old People can follow us not just
as a show, but as individuals. That's true. You can
find me at how now Noel Brown on Instagram exclusively
mess that Twitter nonsense. I'm a Twitter lurker at best.
And I will not reveal your name because you had
(56:16):
we had talked about it. Okay, you know I don't
remember what it is, so how do I know and
you don't? Okay, So you can find me at ben
Bulling bow l a N on Instagram. Uh, and you
can find me at Ben bull In h s W
on Twitter. Thanks as always to our long suffering nemesses.
Jonathan Strickland a k. The quiztions he suffering, he makes
(56:37):
us suffering. Yes he's not. He's not the sufferer. He's
the deliverer of suffering. Yes. In the next studio. Yeah,
he has to be with himself all the time. He's
like he's like pinhead for He's the kind of guy
you summoned with like a weird demon cube. You know,
I love him. I'm missing let missing. Yeah, he's going
(56:58):
to kill us for that out you're but we've got
some other folks to think, right, Well, let me sure do.
Max Williams, super producer Extordan You probably already thinks that.
But he gets a Second, thanks for me. This is
sort of a thing we do. We're like big on
thinking people. Uh, let's see Christoph Roscio is here in spirit.
He's Jeff Cote wherever she may roam. Um Alex Williams
to compose our theme. Second things for a different thing. Yeah,
(57:22):
it's you're hearing it right now. Don't just to spend
your just happening happening right now. We'll see you next time, folks.
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