Things

Oh wait, you're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From WNYC. C.

N.P.R. Hey, I'm Jadab and Rod. I'm Robert Krollich, radio lab, and today we're going to begin in a place. Robert, come in here.

Oh my god. A place full of wonderful things. This is the actual sled that Henson and Perry used to first go to the North Pole. These are Napoleon's books and his conquest to Egypt.

Look at the antlers over there. So wait, where are you? Well, before I tell you that, I'll just explain something. My wife and I have been having an argument for roughly, it's gone about 40 years, and it's always about things.

Like objects? Like objects, yeah. So as you know, you have a thing about things. You give me an autograph, like an Abraham Lincoln autograph.

I think, okay, my blinker stood in front of this very piece of paper in order to write his signature in this very way. He had to be standing exactly where I'm standing, and therefore he and I share this space. I literally believe that I am standing in Abraham Lincoln's shadow, so to touch it. Abraham Lincoln autograph is a form of time travel, a form of love.

It's all those things. And I can do that without even blinking. Right. Not at all.

But also, every time I said the magic of it extends to, we have a really, really ugly floor lamp from a long time ago. And every time I would say, enough already, let's get rid of it, you'd say. It's older than me. I've had it all in my life.

Which makes it beautiful. No. You don't have that at all? I don't have that at all.

So, in honor of our topic today, I decided that we're going to settle this argument once and for all. I took to the Explorers Club right here in Manhattan. Ah. Wait, what's the Explorers Club?

It's a little private club where explorers deposit things that they collected. Everything in this building has some historical significance in some sense. That's Will Rosamund, the executive director. He gave us a tour.

This is the actual bell. From the SS Roosevelt when Perry Hanson first went to the North Pole. How cool is that? Very cool.

But not magic. Cool doesn't cut. The chair over there, along to the Empress Dowager of China. The last emperor's wife.

Is that chair there? He points to it. It's like a little desk chair. The Empress Dowager of China sat in it?

Yeah. That was her chair. Is it making you want to sit in it? Yeah.

You sit in it first. She sits. Nothing. You feel nothing.

I just close your eyes. Nothing. And imagine that you are the last Empress in a hugely long line of Chinese Empress is going back probably a thousand years. Or do them to make more comfortable chairs.

Don't get up yet. Just give it a chance. There's nothing that's going to seep into me. Yes, there is.

Oh, there isn't. I don't know, man. Look, there's never going to be easy. Tamar is a New York Times reporter.

Very reasonable, very sensible. After all, it was just a chair. This was just the beginning. They have things in this place.

I was going to break her. Step by step. Will walk us to the next room. These are where they had pieces of fabric that were framed on display.

So, you know, early planes were made out of canvas. And these are actual pieces of those early planes. Here's a Wright Brothers plane. What do you mean?

The fabric from the actual first. Absolutely. Oh, man. There was a small brown piece of fabric, not much larger than your fist.

It was cut from the wing of their first airplane. So, the wind rushed over that little piece of fabric. Very cool. Very interesting.

Happy to see it. When you're standing next to the fabric that lifted into the sky for the first time, you don't feel just a touch closer to a bird or a light, not even a touch. I feel a wonderful collection. How interesting.

I'm feeling it. I'm feeling it. That's amazing. Do I feel that?

No. I'm trying to think of something that went incorrect. He's trying to pull out the big guns. I don't think anything is bigger than what you already offered.

Well, there's a question. Maybe this will convince you. This is an actual flag, an explorer's club flag, that accompanied Buzz Aldrin Neil Armstrong when they first landed on the moon in 1969. Oh, this is one of these people.

Oh my God. That piece of cloth right there? It was on the moon? Absolutely.

It was carried by Neil Armstrong when he first landed on the moon in 1969. Oh my God. It was in a little glass box. It was a royal blue explorer's club flag.

Very small, probably made of silk. Did that ever touch it? Yeah. I can, you know what?

I'll have the case. Let's have her touch the flag that was the first flag on the day that humans got onto the moon. It's going to happen. You think I will.

Shh. I have a nation with all of these sparks. I'm going to get into my body in some way. Boom.

Yes, yes. Okay. We opened up the cabinet. We now got it in your hands.

Go ahead. It feels very nice. It feels like it doesn't. It feels like it doesn't.

It feels like it doesn't. It feels like it feels like it feels like it doesn't. I'm going to touch it. I'm going to touch it.

I'm going to touch it. I'm going to touch it. I'm going to touch it. Okay.

I'm going to touch it. Okay. Here I go. Oh, me.

I'm going to touch it. Andy, you better touch it. I'm not pretty pumped to touch it. Tim, are you going to get any of this?

No. I don't get a phone. How could you not get a phone from this? I don't get a phone.

This is the first trip to the moon. I know. This is a shiver. Is it my spy?

I don't have it. I just don't have it. I got to go to work. Okay.

Well, it's been a total treat. Thanks so much for coming. You lose. Oh, man.

Look, maybe she's just open to the future. She doesn't want to have to carry all that baggage. I think you came out exactly right. You know, you're going into a swoon about a lamp that's clearly an ugly-ass lamp.

You've got to throw out the lamp. Give me a new lamp. Let's be available to the new lamps of the world. I'm not going to admit or even consider anything you just said, except that you're probably right about the future or your vision.

Do you know what else I'm right about? What? Every story that we have in this hour is basically that argument you just had with your wife in story form. Yeah.

Object form. In each of these stories, there's a thing and the thing beckets. Or not. Today on Radio Lab.

Things. Everybody say something. Hello. Hello.

Hello. All right. So what are we doing? Well, we're talking about objects, I believe.

Yeah. And I understand you guys are kicking around some ideas, but it seems my ideas are in a bit of a different orbit than yours are. Maybe there's a connection. Yeah.

I don't know that we haven't orbit yet. I think we've launched. Okay. So our first story comes from a TV producer Vinlioda, longtime TV guy, who connected up with us because it turns out he's making a documentary about this very thing, people's connection to objects.

My interest in objects is things that sort of have accidentally gotten meaning. For Vin, even if you have a little scrap of something that's gone to the moon and back. It's nothing compared to Rick Rollins' sugar egg. Rick Rollins' sugar egg.

Rick Rollins' sugar egg. Yes. Actually, the story he wants to tell us has three parts. It's about a candy egg, a box, and a tree.

A candy egg, a box. And a tree. Yeah. So this is what I would suggest is I have some clips, some short clips, and I'd like to sort of weave the clips together, sort of get maybe throw it out that way rather than telling you about them.

Why don't we try? I see we're dealing with a storyteller. Yeah. Let's go wait until you hear the clips.

Okay, let me just play a clip. This is like a short clip. This is just an intro to Rick. I love this box.

Wow. It's beautiful. Not the size of a short box. It's made out of maple.

Very light and color, very delicate. And he keeps his most treasured objects in it. One of them is this sugar egg that we're talking about. It's not a real egg?

No. It's molded sugar. It's hollow in a center. Light yellow.

Something someone might eat. Someone might eat it. I've not eaten it. I've saved it since 1970 when I was given the sake.

Since 1970. What? He saved it. This is an edible egg.

Yes. It's edible if you kept it from 1970. It looks remarkably good for an... It isn't dissolved.

It's under the weight of time. No, apparently it's pristine. I've seen it. What is a sugar egg?

What is that? Apparently it's half of an egg. It's hollow. It's made out of sugar.

And you would put things like jelly beans. And you seal the edges with frosting. And then you decorate the outside of it. So there must have been some reason why he has memorialized this egg.

I'm glad you mentioned it. I just happened to have another clip. I never claimed it. I imagine my surprise.

The day that we were to leave. Oh, wait. Can we stop for a second? Yeah, sure.

I'm sorry. I didn't set it up because I don't think I have to say about Rick was when he was a kid. His family moved around a lot. Apparently Rick's dad did a lot of work for the government.

So almost every year he would find himself in a totally different town. And to make things worse, he was a very shy kid. Kept himself a lot. So for Rick, friendship just often seemed impossible.

But Vin says there was this one moment. When he was eight, they lived in Washington State only for a year. And he found himself in the dilemma because he had finally made a friend. His friend David invited him to a birthday party.

But it happened to be that his birthday party was scheduled the very day that we were to move again. So my father was once again transferred this time from Washington back to Idaho. And my parents had decided that I couldn't attend the birthday party because there wasn't time. So the moving van was sitting there.

Everybody was ready to go. And I don't think I even asked my parents. I don't think they know that I left. But I took off and I ran up the street to David's house.

I still can picture this moment. His house was a brick house and he had a large porch that was completely empty. And I know that I paused there. Even though I was only eight, I must have known that our friendship really wasn't at the point where it demanded a goodbye, especially if that meant that I had to interrupt his birthday party.

But I rang the doorbell and his mother answered the door. And I remember seeing basically from her knees down and beyond her into the back of the house which was bright and loud where the party was going on. And a few seconds later David showed up. He was kind of behind her.

And I don't remember saying a word. You're just standing there. I was just frozen and standing there, completely embarrassed and not knowing why I had done this. And I was about to leave when David's mom apparently asked him to go get something.

And he left and a few seconds later returned and handed me this yellow sugar egg. The very same egg here in your box. Yes. I walked back to my parents' house.

We were loaded into the back of their station wagon and we drove from there to Idaho. And I know that I held this in my hand the entire way. Didn't let go of it. I put it in a drawer and it has lived in various places for all these years.

Why? Yes it begs the question. Doesn't it? You know the truth is I knew it's important immediately and it hasn't changed.

I looked at this egg and it was proof, physical proof that I had been invited to a birthday party and that there was a hope of making a friendship. And I held on to it because I needed that proof. That's actually very wonderful. Yeah, yeah.

But wait, there's the tree. The tree we did the box. We did the egg. But then there's the tree.

Do we need the tree? The egg. I'm all I'm swept into the egg. No, I'm bringing it together.

I'll bring the narrative threads together. I want more egg, man. Give me more egg. I'll use the tree.

So yeah, my parents bought a home in Idaho. This is right after the egg incident? Yeah. This is in the Snake River Valley in Idaho.

It's very flat. It's very wide. Their new backyard was a barren landscape. So my family, they started planting all kinds of things in the yard.

They planted apple trees and pine trees. Cherry. And amongst them was a maple tree. That was rich favorite.

It grew very quickly and it enveloped the house in a certain way. In the breeze. It sounded like suede rubbed together just amplified by hundreds of thousands of leaves. It was beautiful.

Rick lived there with his family for 10 years until college. I moved to Boston and I learned that my father had decided that the tree was planted too close to the house and that it would damage the foundation and he chopped it down. It was a massacre. It was brutal and I was very upset.

So my mother knowing that she mailed me a package and I opened it to find that she had placed in it some small sprouted seedlings from the original maple tree. Rick got a hole in the backyard and plopped it in the ground behind the garage. And it thrived. It really well.

And within a number of years it had grown to be a 30 foot tree. Reminding me obviously of the tree that I had loved and lost in Idaho. And it became so large unfortunately that it also caught the attention of my landlord. Who tragically one night I got back from work to discover that he had chopped down the maple tree.

The son of the tree. The same grisly end. Well, you would think so. I went out into the yard that night and I salvaged these sections of the tree.

Rick gave the wood to a friend. A furniture maker in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Who turned it into a box. This box.

One right here made from the maple that grew from. You know the story. Yeah. Wow.

There's this continuity. I find such comfort from that. So it in turn holds all these objects that have their own individual stories and their own meaning to me. One of them is this yellow sugar egg.

The egg, the tree in the box. Yeah, that's nice. That's really nice. Very nice.

Although pardon me. It doesn't part of you want to smack Rick a little bit and be like. Well, no, you're not. I'm just like, okay, is it okay?

You're living in the past. No, I actually don't. No, not me. But you could put the box in a house made from the teeth of his dog with the thing.

I would say, okay, just keep moving like this. Oh, how I wish we left it there. You know, some of the sort of the thing about objects is that like you can't really experience them unless you touch them and interact with them. Like, that's how you get the essence of what's in there.

But at a certain point, I were a producer of the movie who really produced the show. I had this great idea for an experiment that we could do where we would make 3D printed versions of the objects and the stories and then probably exhibit where people can come and see them while they listen to the audio or even if they have access to a 3D printer, they could just print a version wherever they are. So we asked Rick if we could scan his egg. I'm not sure what will happen, but I thought it was an intriguing idea.

He was game, so Lynn found a place that does that near him. We asked him to bring his egg in. Technician put it into the scanner. It's a machine that takes like 360 degree images.

But she can then use 2-print a replica. Just a little bit of melted plastic and voila, there it is. And here's what happened. Rick dropped the egg off for his scans.

Egg that he had been cherishing for over 40 years. I had to leave it for a couple hours. Shortly after he does, he gets a call from the scanning technician who tells him something happened. You know, she said the bottom line is the egg is broken.

She said, I hope it wasn't a family heirloom. He then met up with Rick as he was just getting back from the print shop with his bag of egg pieces. I closed this up at the store. I didn't really even look too much.

Oh my God. Looks like it's in about seven pieces in this plastic bag. There it is. Hi, is this Rick?

It is Rick. How are you? This is Jad from Radio Lab. Jad, hi.

How are you doing? I just need to say that we are so, so, so, so sorry about what happened. I never had my heart sink in that way from any email I've ever opened. Well, thank you.

Thank you. It was such a, it was such a strange clash to walk into this store that is devoted to the future and all these machines sitting around that are turning out almost magically these new things. And I, on the other hand, am standing there to collect the shards of a sugar egg that I've held on to for 40 plus years. And it just felt a dullness kind of heavy, like everything was just a little bit muddied for a while.

It took a little while for that to wear off. And it did with an amazing clarity. Hey, Max. Hi, hey Rick.

Good to see you. One morning, I think it was two days after the egg had been broken. He says he woke up. And an idea came to me.

He thought, I should call Max. He's already finished an egg. Max is the son of a friend of his who lives down the street. So we do one and a half tablespoons of me.

Yeah. He's eight, exactly the same age that I was when I got the first egg. Nice. A yellow save.

So I asked him if he would help me recreate the sugar egg. Going right here. Kind of smiled and said, sure. Maybe two now you've got something there already.

A yellow save. Nice big scoop. Going right here. Already finished an egg.

Oh, the one. I was exactly your age. So exactly? Exactly your years old.

And I was invited to my friends with a party. And I couldn't go to the same family. Special thanks to Vinlioda who provided us with much of the tape you just heard of Rick and Wilp, he was doing a documentary, which is why he's got all that stuff, about people who attach to everyday things. And in terms of the egg breaking, we actually found somebody who does restoration for movie stuff and we've offered Rick to have that person fix the egg with the poxie or whatever.

And he agreed to accept. So happy to say. And also interestingly enough, mid-scan, the scan that broke the egg, actually we have that scan. Scanning was actually running at the very moment when the egg broke.

So we actually have a scan of the millisecond when it fell apart. It's RadioLab.org. Hi, this is Vinlioda. All right, this is Rick Rolens.

RadioLab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Flown Foundation, the Alfred P. Flown Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Flown at www.Lown.org.

And this message. Hi, Lulu here. And this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. May is Mental Health Awareness Month.

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On the broadside, we take you into the heart of the south, with stories that'll surprise you. Bigfoot apparently loves glow sticks. Next to party again. Exactly.

He's a raver. And topics that dig into the muddy margins of history. Right? The bad, the ugly.

It's not clean at all. It's so messy. Wait a second. This is actually real.

Listen to the broadside. One story. Every week. Exploring the rich traditions of the south.

Okay, I'm Jan Abumra. I'm Robert Colbridge. This is Radio Lab and today. Things.

I just wanted to check in. This is the usual radio lab style, which it means I could basically natter on forever. Whatever you are. All right.

So this is Allison Gopnik. She's a professor of psychology and philosophy. At the University of California at Berkeley and the author of The Philosophical Baby. And the reason we called her up is that truthfully after the egg situation.

We broke an egg to make this program. If you're just joining us. We weren't planning to. It just happened.

We feel really crappy about it, frankly. But you got us thinking about the fragility of objects. And for me, that cult of mind, an idea that I've always been thinking about being the father of two young kids about object permanence. Which is this whole idea in child psychology that when babies are really young, when an object disappears from their view, they think it's gone forever.

That's the peek-o-boo game. Exactly. It's what makes it fun because from their perspective, you're gone forever. And then you're back.

And then you're gone forever. And then you're back. So I thought this would be a cool idea for us to explore about how, like from the very beginning, we're born with no concept that objects stick around. But when we talked with Allison Gopnik's first thing she told us was that...

Well, it's a little more complicated than that. Of course. Of course, right? It's science.

And then we talked about the conversation that went in some strange directions. But she began by telling us about some new research which shows that actually babies do have an idea that objects stick around. You know, if you do these experiments where you show them an object behind a screen and then they disappear, they think, whoa, where did it go? It should be there.

Exactly. But you know the whoa. You know the whoa. Because babies look much longer at things that they don't expect that are surprising.

Oh, see. That's if they're sitting there saying, you know, what the... They very rarely finish that expression though. Alright, so I was wrong.

Fine. But here's the really surprising thing. Now suppose what happens is a yellow duck goes behind the screen. Moving left, right?

And then out the other side. The duck, there's a little blue bunny. Now most adults if they saw this would be like, what the... But the babies are totally blazae about that.

What? If a yellow duck goes in one side of the screen and then magically the blue duck appears on the other side of the screen until they're about a year old, babies don't seem to be phased by that. And she suspects that the reason for that is that the most important thing about the duck to the babies is not that it is yellow or round or duck like it anyway. It was...

It's trajectory. It's story. What it did in the past. What its history is.

Like this is an object that was moving left to right. And when it emerged from the screen, it was still an object moving left to right. And there are experiments with adults that are kind of amazing. Where you sort of see the same thing.

You take a room full of students, divide them in half. You say, okay, everybody on the left half of the room is now going to get a university California at Berkeley mug. And then you say to them, all right, all of you guys will have a mug. How much would you sell your mug for?

And then you ask the people on the other side of the class, how much would you pay to buy that mug? And you get people to write it down on a piece of paper. Well, it turns out the people who actually already have a mug on their desk think that it's much more valuable than the people on the other side. So they would demand much more for their mug.

Keep in mind they've only spent one minute with this mug. Somehow over that minute she says the mug gets imbued with something. Some kind of essence. There's something, and again, you can see this even with children.

There's something about myness. There's something about possession, about the relationship that I have to the objects that I care about that goes beyond just what their superficial features are. Oh, I think that makes such deeply obvious sense to me. I'm surprised that it was even a discovery.

If I have a relationship with a thing, like I'm going to see my girlfriend and the real real real man gives me the ticket. And it turns out to be a fabulous date. And I put the ticket in my pocket and I saved it to get for 40 years. Any time I want to go back to the day that I had the great date, I just touched the ticket.

Yeah, I don't have that at all. You don't have that at all? Well, no, I have it a little bit. But I just, no, I throw it away.

You throw it away. You throw it away. You got to purge, man. You know, some of us are more sentimental about the past and about objects than others are.

And she says, interestingly, for those weirdos like you, Robert, who get super romantic about their things, there might be a deep evolutionary reason for it. Now you always protect these evolutionary reasons with a grain of salt. But she says, if you look at patterns of tashing, for example, is what it's called in biology, you know, like the squirrel who hides his nuts. The squirrels keep really good track of which nuts they have and what their histories are.

And one possibility is that some of our relationship about at least physical objects stems from this history of, history of being mammals who keep track of what we've got and what we don't have. It's my inner squirrel. Right. You know, we do talk about people swirling things away.

Is there something that's got this kind of deeper evolutionary background? And I think there is some evidence that... But isn't there also like a counter squirrel instinct? I mean, like, there's that famous thing with observation that young male baboons when they get to a certain age will get gripped by wanderlust and then just wander away from the troop.

And which is good because it prevents inbreeding? Yeah. Is actually reason to think that we all live on this kind of emotional bungee cord. You know, boiling between the squirrel and baboon.

And she says it's interesting to think about like what's going to happen to our bunge-ness now that we're entering a world where objects are becoming just information. What will happen when we have 3D printers that are going to be like the replicators on Star Trek that can just keep producing replicas of objects? It might actually mess with some of our most basic instincts. Philosophers, philosophers are always great about having wonderful, crazy thought experiments to try to demonstrate this.

So one of them is the Swamp Man. It's a famous thought experiment. I don't exactly care why it's a Swamp Man and not some other kind of man, but here's how it goes. Here's the story of the Swamp Man.

Imagine you're standing next to a Swamp, you're you. And in the Swamp. It's a bunch of bubbling gases. Chemical reactions.

Bubbling and interacting in some weird, organic way. But whatever, you're just standing there. But then a bolt of lightning comes out of the sky and kills you. And then another one comes out of the sky, hits the swamp, catalyzing all that chemistry and overdrive and somehow miraculously for just a moment the reactions come together in just the right way to form.

Hi, I'm Robert. A man. Completely identical to you, Robert. I'm Robert.

If you took every single molecule in the Swamp Man's body, it would be exactly like yours at this very moment. So here's the question. Does Swamp Robert remember that date or does Swamp Robert care about the ticket? You're saying that Swamp Gas Robert is molecule for molecule, Adam for Adam.

And molecule for molecule to this Robert right here. Exactly. So you're saying are the memories and experiences of his life suddenly contained in that facsimile? That's the question.

And most people's intuition is? No. Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

Absolutely not. Why not? Why not? Because I believe that my date and the ticket that took me to that date, they belong to me and not to Adams.

And I don't know if you asked me what's the difference between me and my Adams? I don't know. But I know it's there. Right.

Well, because the Adams of you sitting right there actually went on that date, whereas the Adams of Swamp Gas Robert weren't there. Right. You think you got it exactly right, Jad. It's something about the history.

It's the fact that Robert Adams really were in that place. They really were there with that person. And although I could tell a version of the Swamp Gas Robert that would solve this problem. If Robert, this Robert, said it later, he just got into the swamp, submerged himself, commingled his Adams with these Swamp Gas Adams, and then he got out went on his way.

If then later, even like years later, the swamp spat out a copy. The fact that the real Robert was there to begin with and that the copy somehow touched and almost like a baton passing, I could see that the date would be in the copy. I think you might be. Do you believe me?

I think I might. I've always explained it to myself if he was a sense of touch. That is, my wife has a very different view of this to me. I one day, while sitting around the office get a letter unbidden from the first man on the moon from Neil Armstrong.

Just write something about I'd written you know, and it says, command and he's very flattering. If it had come in any other form, but by email, I would have framed it. I would have given it a special place of honor. But since it arrived from a machine to my machine and then out of the machine to another machine to a flat piece of paper, I can't give it the ticket to the date thing.

That's weird. Why? Because Neil Armstrong never touched it. Yeah, but you and I are old, Robert.

So maybe that's. No, well, yeah. So, so, you don't have that feeling? Well, no, the moment you said it, I thought I was I was constructing an image in my mind of Neil Armstrong at a computer touching the keyboard.

And there's an unbridgeable gulf between his fingers and that paper you're holding. They never actually touch each other. I mean, if you think about it as touch, then you're right. He's now dead.

And I think if just touching the paper, he would just be a little, I don't know, closer somehow. Well, it's a funny tension, I think, because you know what, both science and at least some philosophical and even religious traditions tell us is that the world is impermanent. Nothing in it stays the same or we don't stay the same. Our bodies don't stay the same.

The people that we love and the things we love don't stay the same. The truth of the matter is that there's this constant impermanence and this constant flux. And some philosophers have argued over the years, we should just embrace that. We would be freer if we didn't, if we didn't try to hold that flux for a moment.

I have to say my feeling about it is part of what makes everything so precious to us is exactly the fact that we know it's going to disappear. We know it's impermanent. We know it won't last. But what we love is this thing now.

We love our, for me, the most dramatic example of this is our relationship to our children. So we know they're going to go. We know that in 20 years from now, if we, they treat us with affectionate contempt, we'll be doing really well. That doesn't change the fact that right now it's this child and not any other child in the universe just this one.

And I think that's, there's something really deep and profound about our human lives that the fact that we can do both of those things, we recognize the impermanence but that we feel the attachments that that seems to me to give our life. It's very special texture. Wow. That's exactly, I could just put that whole thing you just said in a frame like this bow down.

Well, don't bow too soon my friend because the next segment is going to hurt. It's going to hurt. And a Tamar wind is blowing. That's all I'll say.

My name's Annalise and I'm going right before going to bed in Dumwyn, Iowa. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about saloon at www.slown.org.

On the broad side, we take you into the heart of the south with stories that'll surprise you. Bigfoot apparently loves glow sticks. Exactly. Exactly.

He's a raver. And topics that dig into the muddy margins of history. Right? The good, the bad, the ugly.

It's not clean at all. It's so messy. Wait a second. This is actually real.

Listen to the broad side. Every week, exploring the rich traditions of the south. Life seems very small as it is day to day. And then you just have these moments.

Like this? Like this? Just open it up. Oh, scorpion's siding.

Into something much more complex and rich. Where is it? It's over here my friend. Nope.

Hey, I'm Jad Ibo I'm Robert Brolich. It's the Radio Lab today. Things. And our next story involves one thing, three people.

Craig. I'm Craig Childs. You just heard. I'm a writer and traveler from Western Colorado.

Reagan. I'm an artist and a mother and an educator. Know each other? Oh yeah, we're married.

And finally, Dirk. Dirk Vaughn. I was a street cop in mostly Denver. Craig's a unlikely best buddy.

I mean, if we'd have been at school together, I would have just beat this shit out of him in the playground. You know, we drive each other mad, but in the end we can still scramble around just fine. Part of what joined us is we were in love with wilderness. For years they would take these trips together out into the wilderness of Colorado or Utah.

No maps, no GPS, no trails, no campfires. You know, Dirk and I would go off for weeks in the desert together. I think the longest trip we took was a month out, just wandering looking for routes. And it was on one of these trips that they made a discovery, and I think it's fair to say still haunts them today.

And recently, almost killed one of our producers. So we've been out for a couple of days. On this particular occasion, the three of them were together and there were a couple days into a hike. Where are we again?

We're in Utah. Yeah, Utah. I think desert, but rocky. Slick rock, sandstone, cliffs, canyon land.

So they're hiking through all these canyons. And we actually split up. Reagan said she wanted to set her own camp. And so she stayed in one canyon, and Dirk and I popped over into the next canyon.

Really? You just said a normal thing? Were you guys fighting? We weren't fighting at all.

It's one of the great things about being out together. There's an ease with that. So separating is part of the deal. Yeah.

And I think Reagan was looking at Dirk and me and saying, you guys are going to go scrambling and get weird. I'm going to stay over here. I don't know if that was the case. Well part of it was just that I was at least five months pregnant, and I was just starting to have a really hard time tightening my backpack so that the weight wasn't all on my shoulders.

And she says while she was hiking, the pregnancy hormones were giving her bouts of vertigo. It was just starting to hit her like, wow, in a couple of months, things are going to be really different. So she needed some alone time. She set her own camp.

Meanwhile, scale up this cliff face to get to the next canyon over. And when we get to the very close to the top and there's a little flat area, this balcony of rock overlooking the canyon below. This little ledge. So we said, well, okay.