99% Invisible - 455- A Field Guide to Water

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

What does water mean to you? In this feature, author Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim), actress Joy Bryant, submarine pilot Erika Bergman, figure skater Elladj Baldé, 85-year-old synchronized swimmer Barbara Eison-White, professional mermaid Olivia Gonzales, and others share stories about the many ways water influences our lives.From Pop-Up Magazine, creators of this Field Guide series: "We recommend listening outside, near water if you can. Head to the ocean if you’re on the coast. Or walk to a nearby pond or creek. Sit by a fountain at a park. Or just pour yourself a glass of water."Plus, an excerpt of Roman Mars On The Anatomy Of A Good Story (w/ Michelle Fournet, Roman Mars, Pedro Pascal), part of the Periodic Talks podcast. It's a show about what gets people curious, from virtual experiences to celestial bodies, with Gillian Jacobs (Community, Netflix's LOVE) and Diona Reasonover (NCIS)A Field Guide to Water

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The health and growth of a city is an extra-bly linked to water. Clean water must be available and dirty water needs to be removed. The importance of this cannot be overstated, but it's easy for it to escape our notice. The influence of water in our lives is also personal and profound in ways not directly related to infrastructure, and our friends at Pop-Up Magazine have asked storytellers of all kinds, including a figure skater, a submarine captain, a synchronized swimmer, and many more, to talk about their relationship with water in a beautifully crafted story that just delights me in every way.

If you listen to our episode that they produced called Take a Walk, then you know the treat that you're in for. From Pop-Up Magazine, here's Haley Howe, On Water. In my most peaceful moments, I'm floating on my back, face pointed to the sun, ears underwater. All I hear is my breath, and the world around me fades into the background. In those moments, I feel weightless, like I could just float up out of the water and into the sky. Growing up in central Texas, a lot of my life revolved around water.

Summer afternoons at the city pool, long, lazy floats down the river, what does water mean to you? We set out to talk to all sorts of people about their relationship with water, and how it affects their lives. We heard from scientists, swimmers, humanitarians, riders, a mermaid, and more. My hope is that before we continue you can go find some water. Hit pause and drive to the ocean if you're on the coast or walk to a nearby pond or creek. Sit by a fountain at the park or just pour yourself a glass of water and listen. We also made a visual field guide to go along with this series. Check it out at popupmagazine.com. All right, let's dive in.

My name is Barbara Eisen White. I live in Bronx, New York. I'm 85 years old. I belong to the Harlem, Honey, and Bear synchronized swim team. I should make a correction. Senior synchronized swim team. First of all, I've always wanted to swim. I've always been afraid of the water. I'm one of these people that never let the water get in my face, even when I took a shower. And what happened was my son was forced to take a swimming class to get certain credits.

And I had to take him there. And naturally, I enrolled in the adult class. And the first thing the instructor did was take us down to the 12 feet, forced us to go down as far as we could, and see if we bob up again and we did. And from then on, I lost the fear. And most people on the team have the same story, fear of the water. I love to do the pyramid. It's so precise.

We go from one end of the pool to the other, synchronized. And then we take an encore. I feel light free. Just with no problems, no phone calls, nobody calling me. Just my time, my time. And I've heard people say, oh, those old people in the water, they don't know what they're doing.

But when they see us, they can't believe it. I'm Tobi Clark and I have been around water, in water, and loving water my entire life. The way that my body feels in water makes me kind of forget that I have a body. There's kind of like being a kid that like covers their eyes and says, you can't see me, like you can see them,

but to them, they've disappeared. There's this thing where even if people can see me, I don't care, I lose the sense of self-consciousness and the sense of self-consciousness and the sense of self-awareness almost and just kind of become part of the water. Because I'd always kind of felt different around my gender, water was kind of a refuge for me. When I'm in water, I feel incredibly graceful, I feel weightless, I feel competent in my body. Except it's not even like a feeling of competence while I'm doing it, it's just a feeling of being. Growing up in Hawaii, I was very clearly gender non-conforming. I just did not

fit in and I would cut high school and like there was a secret way to hop over the fence and get into this part of the river behind the school. My favorite thing to do would be scramble up the rocks, scramble up the river, and walk as far away from people as I could be where I couldn't see a single human being. And it was just me and the river and the birds. And I would catch crayfish and like just be there and play and lay naked in the sun and be a part of the landscape.

It's one of the great mysteries of deep sea biology, you know. We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean, because the moon you can send up a telescope. You know, you can look through that telescope and you can see what the surface looks like. But the ocean, we have all this water that's in the way, and you've got to try and get through that water to see what the bottom of the ocean looks like. So my name is Dr. Rian Waller. I'm an associate professor of marine sciences at the University of Maine, and I'm a deep sea ecologist. So when I see a body of water that I the University of Maine, and I'm a deep sea ecologist.

So when I see a body of water that I've never seen before, one of the things that I like to do is I like to kind of drain the water. I'm really interested in what animals live in the very bottom of the ocean. I'm what's called a benthic biologist. I work on animals that live on the bottom. And so the water is kind of, it's in the way.

You want to move that water out of the way to be able to see what the bottom looks like. And so as a deep sea biologist, we often use things called multi-being maps. And these are maps made by sound on board really large research vessels. And these sound waves are sent to the bottom and they bounce off the bottom. They come back to the ship. And then some really fancy computers and math turns them into these beautiful maps. We'll look at these maps we'll see oh this area is really steep and rocky so there we might find animals that like to filter feed because water is

often sped up against these areas that are rocky and so we might find corals and we might find enemies and sponges and animals like that and then we'll see other areas that might be kind of sediment waves. So we might see shrimp or maybe some kinds of lobsters. So that's what I kind of think about when I go to a new area that's never been looked at before. I instantly want to know what the bottom looks like. I am so jealous of people that I see in other parts of the country where you can actually see the bottom of the water when you look through it Okay, I'm scared if I can't see my feet in the water just because I don't know what kind of titha is down there I mean that's a real thing. We have Ruka Roo's and titha is around here. You don't know what's living underneath there

So there's times when you don't want to get in the water because it's brown. It's dirty. It's muddy and Along with that you get crawfish. Of course you get snakes you get frogs Silver eyes are good. Those are frogs. Red eyes are bad. Those are alligators. So my name is Sean Boudreau. I'm the vice president of Cajunavier Relief in Lactia, Louisiana. We're part of a civilian-led search and rescue organization that uses our own personal assets to help out and conduct rescues during disaster. Initially, my involvement with the Cajun Navy began in 2016 with a tropical system that came across the area that didn't even have a named storm associated with it, so it didn't get the recognition, it didn't get the media coverage, but it ended up being a thousand year flood.

And the people who were being flooded out were not getting any help. Local authorities were doing the best that they could, but they had limitations and a lot of the folks down here in South Louisiana, well we have both in our backyards, you know, it's for instance Paradise. We do a lot of hunting fish and outdoorsy stuff and it just started on Facebook and we started caravansing to different areas that were flooded to start helping rescue folks. Once you start helping people and you see how effective you can be, just if you're there, just being there and being able to help immediately, it's very rewarding.

My name is Emma Robbins and I am the executive director of the Navajo Water Project and what we do is help families on the Navajo Nation get access to hot and cold running water in their homes so that they have safe drinking water. I think being from a desert water is something that you just really value even more. I remember as a kid, my parents were like, don't waste water and it's something that I think most of us Navajos

have always grown up with is that you can't separate yourself from the earth. And water is a part of the earth. Navajos who are living on the Navajo Nation are 67 times more likely to not have running water than your average American. And 30% of our population does not have running water than your average American. And 30% of our population does not have running water or sanitation. And when we lose water, we lose everything. We lose our food source,

we lose something that keeps our body regulating and safe. You know, we lose our animals. And it breaks you down mentally. You know, you have to constantly think, and it breaks you down mentally. You know, you have to constantly think, where is my water coming from? Do I have enough money to buy bottled water? There are so many things that go along with not having water. It's not just, I can't drink anything. The rains that stick most in my mind are the sort of surreal ones where there's a storm

cloud on top and it's raining but it's an afternoon storm so the sun is at that four o'clock angle and they don't happen often, but when they do, the world takes this sort of surreal look. You know, there's bloom lighting off the streets, and it just, it looks very dreamlike. My name is Kyle Alvarado. I'm a lifelong El Paso Texas resident, and I create an aromatic liquid of the Creosow push that recreates the scent of desert rain. and aromatic liquid of the creosote bush that recreates the scent of desert rain.

When it's about to rain, it'll pass though the moisture will sort of wake up in the air and the resin in the leaves begins to activate and it starts to waft through the area and it's a great sort of preview of the coming rain. And then of course the rain comes and it washes everything clean and everything slows down a little bit and that creosote smell is still there. And

once the rain stops and the waters begin to recede and things begin to dry up that creosote smell just as gently as it came in begins to sort of fade out. My name is Bonnie Toei. I'm a journalist and the author of the book Why We Swim. So a few years ago I went to Iceland to participate in this annual swim that happens on this island called Hamei and it's an honor of a man named Goodliger Fridthorsen who in 1984 was working as a fisherman when his boat capsized and he swam six kilometers over six hours in 41 degree water to safety. In 41 degree water, you and I would die within 20 to 30 minutes from hypothermia,

but he survived and turned out that he, in addition to being a great swimmer, his fat was two to three times normal human thickness, and it was like he was more like a seal than a human. So, good looks on. Good lookers swim. This one that takes place every year. It takes place, of course, in a swimming pool, because in the dead of winter, in March, in Iceland, it's this incredibly cold and dark, and people sign up for shifts that they can swim six kilometers in the pool. And so Iceland is one of those countries where there is an extremely high pools per capita.

Even in the tiniest town in Iceland, there's a public community pool. I think it was one of the historians at the History Museum on the island of heyme, she said, you know, in Iceland, the pool is our pub. Like, this is where we hang out. This is where we share stories. This is where we come together. And it was just this beautiful thing of like, you know, this annual tradition. To not just honor, loye loye is his nickname.

Everyone calls him loye. But also to now it's taken on this role of trying to do something that you didn't know that you could do. My name is Nikki Halbin. I'm a writer and producer and I live in Brooklyn, New York. I've been canoeing on the Gohanis Canal many times and there's a wonderful group called the Gohanis Dredgers who take people out quite often. So, especially during lockdown, you know, I felt like I hadn't seen a tree or sat

and looked at the water or done anything in so long. And the guy who runs the club said he was gonna go out and asked if I wanted to go, and I said, of course, and I talked to my friend Carolyn into going, even though her wife kept saying, it's such a bad idea, you're gonna fall in, it's so gross, it's so scary. It's toxic waste and it gets written about in the New York press in quite word details

There's these myths that bodies have been found in it and that it was a mafia dumping ground It's really got a lot of Press about being filthy. It is a super fun site And I was like no one has ever fallen in, like what is totally safe and fine, like just kind of so she came along. And it was an extremely windy day and it was very cold and we were you know just kind of getting pushed up against the walls of the canal a bit. Oh we were you know paddling along, we were going away from the harbor. the walls of the canal a bit. But we were, you know, paddling along. We were going away from the harbor.

Then someone called my name and I turned fairly quickly and it was like all of a sudden I was cold and in the canal and I was like oh oh, so embarrassed. I could immediately, so embarrassed. I had this whole vision in my head, because I had on like a leopard coat, and I have like white and gray hair. And all I could think was that someone was going to walk over the footbridge and like take a picture. And I mean, what a crazy thing

I think that there I would be on the front page of the New York Post or something like who's the you know Who's the great-haired leopard lady of the goon as canal and It was just like oh this is so bad like this is so bad and terrible I have not gone back. I will eventually It would be a shame to blame the water for my having fallen into it. My name is Alage Balte, and I am a professional figure skater, competed for Team Canada for over a decade, and spent most of my life in Montreal.

When you're skating in the rain, it's like, it's so full of chemicals and paint and all these things that I don't necessarily associate it with water. But when you're outdoors on a lake, it's clear. It's like underneath me, there is, I don't know how many meters or feet of water that's not frozen. You know I had the opportunity to go on Lake Minowanka in Calgary, Banff, that

truly in a way changed my relationship with skating. Really. 80% of the lake was still open water. There was just a little area that had started freezing and actually the part that I skated on was only a couple inches thick and that's a bit scary but when it's thin like that it's it's it's magical because the sounds it makes is not something you ever hear when you skate. It sings. My name is Joy Bryant. I am an actor, a writer, and producer. So in 2018, we went to New Zealand for about two weeks. I kind of understood what I was getting myself into,

and then I kind of did not understand what I was getting myself into. Like, I knew that we were gonna be rafting, but then in my mind, I just like, I didn't have a real frame of reference to really understand what that meant. And I'm such an uncomfortable swimmer, I don't really swim.

And I just remember like kind of like, trying to keep my anxieties, like just very quiet, because I'm just like, oh my god, this fucking boat. I can't I turn back now. I mean, I don't have to, I don't really have to do this, right? I don't have to do this. This is crazy.

It's gonna flip over, I'm gonna diamond a trap. It was like all these things going through my mind. I just sort of just kind of just fought through my anxieties and got my ass on the raft. And then, he wasn't bad. I'm just so grateful that I just shut up because once we got on the raft, I was like, oh, this is it. I'm good.

My name is Olivia Gonzalez. I live in Thornton, Colorado, and I am a professional mermaid. So at the Denver Aquarium, the way that we do shows is all with freediving, so we don't breathe off of any compressed air or anything like that. It's all breath holds. And we do a scripted show. And so it's a full-blown kind of little production. There's lines that we say under water. It's very choreographed. Kids love it. A little girl once came up and her eyes started at the bottom of my tail and trailed all the way up to my head. And she just was like, you're humongous. And I was like, awesome. You're humongous! That was like awesome!

So when we're swimming it's really important while we're underwater and performing that we're not blowing bubbles out of our nose or out of our mouth because it just doesn't look great. And so the water will definitely kind of flood in your sinuses. And so when you get out you have to literally like kind of bend over and Just let it flood back out of your nose When I first started so when I did my audition. I had no idea that this was a thing I was in college at the time so afterwards I had to drive up To campus and I had a test in my environmental chem class and I'm sitting there taking this exam and all of this water is coming out of my nose. And I had no idea what was going on. I was freaking out, I'm trying to take this exam. So not the most glamorous thing.

And yeah, definitely I would say one of the downfalls of the job. My name is Erica Bergman. I live in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, and I'm a submarine pilot. Research submarines are actually called submersibles, and so our kind of submersible is entirely windows. It's like going to an aquarium and being wrapped by the glass in your own little bubble. It's really fun to take people down underwater, especially people who have perhaps made theories about what they think they're gonna find down there. At first they lose their minds, they get so excited. Everybody is so chipper and chatty and philosophizing down there,

if I can use that word. And after a few minutes, nobody is saying anything. Everyone is just staring out the window with their jaws wide open. And one of my favorite things to do is to help people realize the kind of distortion that the bubble creates.

So when you're in this spherical acrylic pressure hall, we call it, everything outside looks about 30% smaller than it really is. And so no matter where I am in the world, at some point during the dive, I know that I'll find a beer bottle. And you find a beer bottle and you show it to your passengers and they look at it and their eyes go big. They're like, what is that? A beer bottle for

Barbies? Is that a doll toy? You say, no, that's an actual beer bottle. And then all of a said in their sense of scale completely changes. And that reef that we were looking at or that sponge that we were looking at, that sponge that we were looking at, that's when the moment clicks for them. And then they realize that it's actually massive and it's taller than the submarine and it's wider than the submarine. And we're just this little pin prick of light

looking at one little piece of this massive motif of an ecosystem. I'm sorry. This story was brought to you by Pop-Up Magazine Productions, written and produced by me, Haley Howell, along with Joy-Shan, Alyssa Eads, Ariel Mejia, and Elise Craig. Our editors are Derek Faggerstrom and Doug Magray. Our music and sound design is by Alex Overrington. Our creative director is Leo Jung. Rebecca Chu is our art director and Jackie Bates is our photography director. Lauren Smith is our director of operations. And we had production help from Al Shatz and Andy Spillman. Thanks so much for listening and don't forget to check out our visual field guide at popupmagazine.com. Popup Magazine has other field guides available, one on trees, and one on the night sky on their podcast and website.

Go get them and get to know Popup Magazine. They make amazing things at popupmagazine.com. When we come back and excerpt of a fun conversation I had with Gillian Jacobs and Deanna Reesonover from Periodic Talks about how to tell fun stories about boring things after this. And now an excerpt of Periodic Talks with Gillian Jacobs and Deanna Reeson over. Retrain me.

There are rules in storytelling that you can intentionally play with or break altogether. And in 2020 at the start of the pandemic, you completely changed the format of your show in an episode called Roman Mars describes things as they are. So let's take a listen to how you started that episode.

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Hello beautiful homebound nerds. If I sound a little different, it's because I'm recording this at home. You might even hear some cars passing by. I'm not sick. Hopefully neither are you, but many of us are staying home so that we don't inadvertently become vectors to a virus whose impact we don't fully understand.

This is the right thing to do. We are all part of one big ecosystem, and if any part of us gets sick, we all suffer. We are in this together. So my job in this world is to tell stories about all the thought that goes into the things most people don't think about. And since many of us are stuck at home, maybe alone, maybe lonely, I thought we'd spend some time exploring this place we call home together, just you and me.

So I'm good. If your answer back out loud, I won't think you're weird. We talked earlier about the familiarity of the introduction and the intimacy and it works, it's like one of these things where it's such a payoff. Obviously, I don't want that to be a global pandemic to have this pay off, but I mean, it really is. It feels both so intimate and still so new. It's really, it's incredible.

Well done, sir. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So the things that are different there are, there's no music, like almost always after the night, I'm Roman Mars. There's a music hit. And I, so that, that show is completely dry.

There's no music. I was really looking for something different because it was, because we're a bunch of humans that make this show. And so we feel the world when we make it. And I don't know what the episode that was supposed to go on that week, but everything felt irrelevant. And so I was like, well,

if the sort of idea, the central crux of the show is that we sit and describe things and talk about the interesting stories behind boring things, well then I'll just do it around here and then kind of encourage people to be inside because at that point, there was no mandate to be inside. It was the very, very beginning, but it was like people were like,

work was closing out. Like I think for the most part, I think my kids came home from school the Friday before, and you know, with no real, you know, like then they were like, they'll be back in two weeks or something like that. But I just wanted to reflect it, you know? And so, yeah, so that was the episode that was in my head. And so, that's what we made.

And I really focused on trying to do that comfort and soothing. And also, a bit of the seduction of just like, okay, stay inside guys. I know you don't want to, but I really, really wanted to make a case for it because I believed in it. And that piece culminates with, I end up at my record player and I play a song, the only song you hear is a song like, I don't know what you call that, diagetic or something, but in the scene,

versus soundtrack versus diagetic sound, is like if you character turns on a radio in the play sound. Anyway, so it's diagetic. And I make this case for this musician I love, who has a heart condition, who can't go, we're gonna do this for him. And I asked his permission, I was like, okay, so when we get to the center of this thing,

it's gonna be's cool with you. And he was pretty nice about it. But like the whole thing is a subtle case for us collectively carrying about each other by doing nothing. And so that's part of it too. So there's a few agendas that are going on there. But hopefully you just feel that intimacy and you just want to go on and ease into it.

This is the idea. We have another, we have this one last clip to set up and I'm really excited because I have a, I think, a question that I've been waiting to ask this whole time. So this is from that same episode and this is when you're kind of walking around your place and you're describing what you're seeing and the back stories that you see when you look around your space. Let's walk down the stairs. And we are entering the hall in his book at home. Bill Bryson wrote that no room has fallen further in history than the hall.

I always remember that line. I've been to Sterling Castle and Scotland a few times, and I love it there, especially the Great Hall, which has been painted a shocking and delightful butterry yellow since its restoration in the 1990s. We did a story about it a few years ago, you should check it out. It seems impossible that a hall like the one in Sterling Castle and the hall in your house have a shared origin, but they do. The hall used to be everything. From the Middle Ages, to about the 15th century, the hall was effectively the house, with a central hearth that people used to warm themselves and cook over. All activity took place there, awake and asleep. As soon as a second room was added to homes, the hall has been on a downhill slide.

Now, it is this dumb thing, a non-room room whose primary function is to connect other rooms. So, you know, pour one out for the hall. I love that so much. My question is, is it possible to train your brain to see stories everywhere? It totally is. And because I did it, I'm going to use, I don't want this to be obnoxious, but I'm going to use Roman Mars as a third person.

But basically, Roman Mars is an aspirational figure who notices all things and cares about all things and reads every plaque. I am not Roman Mars all the time. Do you have a family nickname? Who are you really? No, I'm Roman to everybody, but still it's sort of, but that character of being, you know, like a student alert on it, you know, like, you know, I don't have that all the time.

I have to really do have to, I do have to keep it going. And so, and sort of keep that curiosity alive. And I do that through the work. You know, like I don't know if I would always be like this. I mean, it's spilled out in different parts, but like it's the knowledge or the thought of like, of crafting something into a story that sort of trains you to think,

okay, so what's the story of this place? I'm like, what is this? And why have I heard, you know, like, hall or, you know, like, you know, like a Tammy Hall or whatever, I've heard this word before. And I know what a haul is in my house, and I wouldn't name it anything. You know, so just sort of like you notice those differences, and you go like, okay, so if there's a difference in incongruity or something I can't understand,

well then there's a story there. There's a difference between that. That Delta is what the story is. And so just sort of be alert to those things and then have fun with them. And then sometimes they come to nothing. Like it's not all stories are great. But occasionally they are.

And sometimes it's just in the way that you tell them. And sometimes it's about the passion of telling it. You know, like I think that the whole story is like, you know, like you could tell it kind of boringly. You know, but I, you know, but I turn the hall into a person, you could tell it kind of boringly, but I turn the hall into a person that you pour one out for. That's part of the process of it is to make it interesting.

But yeah, you definitely can just read plaques and look down a lot and you can do it. It's like, usually engaging with the belt world usually involves some disengagement with actual humans. But you can do it. I was just a little bit of the conversation that I had with Killian and Diana. There's a ton more from me and you will also learn about eels from Pedro Pascal on the latest episode of Periodic Talks.

Go get it! 99% of visible is Delaney Hall, Kurt Colessted, Vivian Le, Sean Rihau, Chris Baroubaix, Joe Rosenberg, Lashemba Dawn, Christopher Johnson, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquarters at 6 blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown oakland california. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on facebook you can tweet at me at Roman Mars and show at 99pi org or on instagram and read it too you can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, including periodic talks,

as well as every past episode of 99PI and 99PI.org. This is a Stitcher, a Stitcher podcast, a stature podcast from Sirius XM.