Endless Thread - Dune Boy

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

Back in 2013, the sand dunes of Michigan City, Indiana swallowed a six-year-old boy. It took rescuers nearly 4 hours to dig him out of 12 feet of sand. It was a phenomenon that scientists hadn't studied in-depth. But Facebook recreational naturalists were on the case. In this episode of Endless Thread, producer Grace Tatter and host Ben Brock Johnson go down an internet rabbit hole and bring bring us an explanation of what happened, the coexistence of miracles and science and even the including the six-year-old boy who's now an adult. "We're pro-portal and we're pro- tree hole," Ben says. "Basically anywhere there's space, we want to explore it."

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Okay, Ben. Okay, Grace. Let's play some word association. Mmm, my favorite. Let's go. I'm going to describe a beach for you. Okay, so close your eyes maybe. Okay. So can you picture like turquoise water that turns into a deeper blue where it meets the horizon? Say it's a cloudless, sunny day. Hey Grace, can you pass me the Pinacolado? Gentle waves lapping onto a wide ribbon of pristine sand. And then dunes dotted with green

beach grass rolling down the coast for miles and miles. What are some words that come to mind? You've already given me a few. You know, like beach commercial, um, uh, Grace's nightmare vacation with her colleague. Yeah, that's what I got. Maybe also peaceful, idyllic? Yes, absolutely. Peaceful, idyllic, pinia collada. Yep.

Okay, and if you had to guess, where do you think this beach is? Oh, maybe southern Portugal, the Caribbean. You pick, Grace, wherever you want to go. I'll be there. The beach I have in mind, actually, believe it or not, is in Indiana. Did you even know that Indiana had beaches? I feel like a lot of people go. And so it's hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean.

Okay. In Michigan City. And that turquoise water is Lake Michigan. And the beach is at the foot of the tallest dune in our newest national park, the Indiana dunes. And it's called Mount Baldi. Okay. The only thing more confusing than having a beach in,

Indiana is that Indiana also has a place called Michigan City. So this is all very disorienting. There's a lot going on. I visited recently, though, and I can confirm, despite some of these confusing details, it is a very peaceful place, or at least it seems to be. So normally, it really is just a pile of sand. But once dunes get disturbed and start moving, then they can bury anything in their path. This is really taking a turn, Grace. Oh, yeah. Mount Baldy is on the move.

It's eating up parking lots and bathrooms, and it once even swallowed a little boy. I'm Grace Tatter. And I'm Ben Brock Johnson. And you're listening to Endless Thread, lurching to you from the shore of WBUR, Boston's NBR station. Today's episode, Dune Boy.

It was a hot day. Actually, it was the first day that we actually got a full round of complete data. And I remember we finished, you know, somewhere around like 3 o'clock, and we were so happy. So this is Erin Arjelon. She's a geoscientist. And I recently talked to her at the Douglas Nature Center, the gateway to the Indiana National Dunes in Gary. Back in 2013, she was a professor at Indiana University Northwest. She was seven and a half months pregnant.

Which is pretty pregnant. We would say. Yeah. So Aaron was packing up for the day when she and her students saw a big commotion. I'm thinking, no, we just finished. We got all of our data. Like, it's been a great day. No, no interference.

The people were extremely agitated. They were digging. You could tell from the body language that everybody was really flustered and it was really chaotic. They were screaming that their son had been buried in a hole and he was in the ground and it just looked like sand. So it was a really chaotic situation. And they said he had been buried alive. and get help and dig, dig, dig. Wow, this has gone from beach to absolute nightmare in a matter of minutes.

This is wild. Yeah, it's pretty scary stuff. This little boy's name was Nathan Weisner, and he was only six years old, and his family had driven to the dunes from their home in central Illinois. And they were climbing up to the top of Mount Baldi when the grownups look back, and Nathan was just gone, vanished. There was no visible sign of him at all. Like if you didn't know, if there was no commotion, you wouldn't.

Nothing would have looked amiss about the dune. No, it just looked like sand again. And some people liked to say right after it happened that maybe there was a little divot in the sand. But honestly, you can have so many ripples and bumps in sand. I would not have thought that anything was out of the ordinary. Okay, Ben, vanishing six-year-old, large sand dune. What are your theories? Well, as the parent of two six-year-olds, I would start by guessing that they immediately got themselves into some sort of pickle.

Vanishing six-year-old, large sand dune. I mean, like, maybe like part of the dune, some of the dune sort of like collapsed and covered them up or something. That would be my guess. Okay. You know what I mean? Like when a pile of sand can like slip down and you know what I mean from the top. Like a mudslide but a sand slide? Either that or as, again, as the parent of six-year-olds, I would guess that they like saw a sign for popsicles and were immediately drawn to that sign or something.

You know what I mean? They like sensed snacks in the area and then just ran directly towards the snacks. So despite being a dude expert, Aaron was about as much at a loss as you seem to be when it comes to possible theories for the vanishing six-year-old. You mentioned a sand slide. I don't know if that's actually a thing. Think about digging a hole in dry sand. What happens?

You're usually not very successful because like there's nothing. It just sort of like keeps filling up, I guess. you know, it's just not really, like, if you're at a beach and you're digging a hole, like a beach where there's water, so be it. But if you're just digging in sand, it's not going to, it's not going to go well. Exactly, because sand doesn't just like crater, right? Like, you need to pack it down with some water to get it to maintain its shape. But the wazners were high up on this state in Mount Baldy. It's really tall. It's like 12 stories tall. So they were far away from the lake. The sand where, they were was totally dry. 12 stories tall? Yeah, it's really big. Wow, okay.

They don't come out for nothing. I guess not. Have you ever seen the movie Lawrence of Arabia? Only parts of it when my father-in-law is the one controlling the television and I'm, and I can't stop him. Maybe I don't know of the parts that you have seen is the scene and the scene and which a little boy gets sucked into a dune in the desert, it's very dramatic and sad. Except for dune scientists like Aaron always laugh when they talk about it. They've always made

fun of it because something like this is supposed to be impossible. People just don't fall into dunes or get sucked into dry sand. So Aaron couldn't understand how this was happening. Nothing was making sense in my mind. I often say, yes, I have a PhD in environmental and earth science. but all of a sudden I feel like everything I knew just failed me because I couldn't make sense of thinking that there was a child that was buried and so far down that it would have collapsed on top of him and looked like nothing. Was there a part of you when they were like, he's in there? Was there a part of you thinking like, man, maybe not?

Maybe he's hiding someplace else because this just seems so unlikely. If I were a six-year-old kid, I would think it was really funny to hide behind something and make people look for me. So it did definitely cross my mind that maybe he was hiding. somewhere and that was of course what we were hoping for. But he wasn't hiding. He was down there. They dug for Nathan for nearly four hours.

I will say that this is the kind of thing that immediately turns my stomach, Grace, right? If someone gets buried alive, digging for four hours, that is not usually a story with a happy ending. When I left that night, they said it was going to be a recovery, not a rescue. and anyone that I talked to that experienced people being buried in sand from digging holes or anything like that, so the people just do not survive. Absolute miracle. That is what a deputy coroner is saying about a six-year-old boy who survived the collapse of a sand dune in northern Indiana. The National Park Service thinks... When they finally found Nathan, his body was cold.

According to news reports at the time, first responders couldn't find a pulse. He had to spend several days in the hospital. But a few weeks later, he was totally fine. His parents told reporters that he didn't even really remember what had happened. Aaron saw the news on TV and was, of course, immensely relieved, but no less confused. I called many other scientists, and everyone said there's no way that can happen. Some people suggested, oh, you must have dug a hole and then fell into it. I mean, six-year-olds do be digging holes.

For sure. Yeah, but the whole Nathan fell into was more than 11 feet deep. Yeah, the six-year-olds don't have the attention span for 11 feet, I don't think. Yeah, I would say it's beyond the scope of even the most prodigious six-year-old. If you want to dig in dry sand and get deep enough to fully bury a person, you really have to go like at least three times as wide. So to get that deep, though it would have had to be like a 30-foot wide hole. And we had been there all day.

So there was just no way that somebody could have actually. dug this hole. So the scientific community was not super helpful. I was asking everyone and they said it just didn't happen. But I was there and it did happen. But then Aaron saw a post from a non-scientist on the internet that cracked the whole case open. More on that, after the break.

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leader. Recruit new talent, reach new audiences, whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Okay, before the break, we had just gotten to Erin finding a lead after scientists and scientific journals yielded nothing in her quest to figure out how a six-year-old boy got swallowed by a dune. And Ben, this is where the internet comes in, lest you think that I forgot that this is a podcast about the internet. Hmm, you would never, you would never. I'm ready. Let's go. Let's go online. Okay, so Aaron sees a post from a woman in Oregon. I'm Dina Pavlis, and I'm I don't know how you want me to, like what kind of title you want me to give you.

I do so many different things. The reason that Dina is struggling to figure out what title to give me is because Dina wears many hats. She's an author. She also has a radio show called Beyond Your Front Door. And she's a volunteer interpretive park ranger at the Oregon National Dunes. But one thing she is not, technically, is a scientist. So I'm definitely a recreational naturalist, which is a new. term I learned from somebody I interviewed who calls himself a recreational naturalist.

But when I moved here, I knew that I wanted to volunteer on the Oregon Dunes, and I literally drove into town, threw my suitcases into my bedroom at his house, and drove down to Reed's Port and signed up to volunteer as an interpretive ranger. And I said, great. And they said, great, we're so excited to have you. And I said, I'm so excited. Give me all the info so I can learn. And they said, well, we don't really have anything.

So Dina wrote her own book called Secrets of the Oregon Dunes, and she started sharing facts that she learned about the Dunes from Park Rangers and scientists on a website called a lot of sand.com. Oh, man, a lot of sand.com, which, by the way, I think is now available for $15 if you want it. Just saying. And who wouldn't want that domain name, especially if you're really into dunes like Dina? But the reason that it's available is because Dina did migrate her content from a lot of sand.com to Facebook. Huge mistake.

Huge mistake. Neither Aaron or Dina can remember exactly which post Aaron saw that inspired her to reach out to Dina. But they know it was about a phenomenon that people in Oregon call tree holes. I don't know if the post that she saw was one where I had stepped in a tree hole or where my dog had dropped. a ball down the tree hole, but they're very, very deep. I can never see or even with my dog's ball thrower, find the bottom of them. So, you know, I would probably was some post I was putting up that was informational for people. So wait, there's a thing in dunes called tree holes.

This is, I've never heard of this. Yeah, and Aaron hadn't heard of this either. Like this post from Dina about these tree holes, the very idea of. their existence was a big deal to her. But for Dina, although she finds tree holes and absolutely everything about the Oregon Dunes to be really, really cool, they were not. I guess I never thought about it as a Marvel because we always all just knew like, oh, this is a tree. You know, we called them tree holes. The Oregon Dunes have buried forests. So anywhere that the coastline here is flat, that sand blows in from the ocean. And it pretty much buries anything in its path, which originally

was forest. And so when you're walking on those deems that I was saying are, you know, 20 feet, 200 feet tall, whatever, you know, anywhere within there, you may, you are probably walking on the tops of trees. You are walking on a buried forest. Something about this is magical to me. It's rare that you think about the history of geology while you're, you're like walking around in it. But when you think about it, so much of the landscape we experience every day is totally different from what it used to be. Like, what is now a dune used to be a forest. How do these tree ghosts exist inside the dune? What happens is that the trees decompose underneath the sand. But the inner bark decomposes more quickly than the outer bark. So it creates a kind of a straw. Whoa.

Now, the trees here are not massive, so your body isn't going to fall in and get swallowed. In fact, I've never heard of anyone. being swallowed in the organ dunes here. But your foot might go in like up to your knee and then usually you'll just like fall forward into soft sand. So it doesn't really hurt. But you can't see them. The sand is covering like the top of the hole. And so it's your foot breaks through that is what happens. Dina was not the first person to document this either. Finding Dina led Aaron to a story by the writer who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kese. He lived where Dina lives now in Oregon, and he wrote a novel about the dunes there called Sometimes a Great

Notion. And in that story, a little boy falls into a hole in a dune, and I believe it's his uncle who says, well, you fell into something called the devil's stove pipe. And that's what happens when a dune buries a tree, and then the tree decomposes and leaves a hole. Oh, so they had figured this out. They had figured it out, but it wasn't in any scientific literature. So that's what's so funny about just communication and information. It's in a novel, in a different locations, similar scenario. It makes sense, but it doesn't become an acceptable model until you do the science and prove it here. Deena's posts and what was just kind of common knowledge among the recreational naturalist of Oregon was enough for Aaron to develop a pretty good

hypothesis and do the science. So kind of went back to the basics, went up on Mount Baldi found a couple of these kind of circles that looked like limbs coming to the surface. And then just with a paintbrush and a trowel started excavating them. And as I started excavating the limbs, there were a couple places where I could see complete holes and I could stick my hand into the holes. You could feel kind of the mushyness on the inside of the limbs. And so that seemed like the path that we needed to head down. So this is, this is kind of wild to me. Like all these people in Oregon like knew about this thing, right? And then an actual scientist learns about it.

And then they go and start sticking their hands down holes in the dunes. This is wild. Yeah, nothing is real until a scientist sticks their hand down. Into some mush. Nothing is real until a scientist sticks their hand in some mush. We went up on Mount Baldi after a really bad, October storm and we were able to see these limbs that were exposed on the surface and I walked backwards saying well if this is a limb I would expect the trunk would be around here somewhere

and my foot went into an eight foot deep hole you could see how a small child could easily fit into something that size so there must have been a thin veneer of sand over the top of it I never saw it and then when my foot stepped on it boom I went in it was moistly enough, I think, in that hole that it stayed open for a little bit, so we were able to measure it, but less than an hour. Once they start to dry out, then they fill in pretty much like an hourglass, which is exactly what happened to Nathan. When he went down into the hole, he disturbed it and everything just collapsed on top of him. So this helped Aaron and other scientists learn an important part of Mount Baldy's story. What we discovered is you have to think about Mount Baldy

as it was like an open forest. So imagine that you have to be a lot of. So imagine that you have to be a had a forest on top of a dune and everything was stable. Because of disturbance at the shoreline, the shoreline has had more erosional power than depositional power. So there's not enough sand to keep nourishing it. So over time, it's just been eroding and it kicks the sand up on top of that forest. What everybody thought was just a ginormous sand dune actually has an entire forest inside of it. This is so cool to me. It's such a fascinating. idea. Erin and her colleagues were even able to find pictures of the forest that used to be at the beach that Mount Baldy ate. We learned that it takes about, you know, about 70 years for an oak tree

to decompose. So that was about right. We went back to the 1939 aerial photos. We're able to see where the trees were in the 1939 photo. And then those trees have been buried, obviously, close to 1939 shortly after. So plenty of time to fully start that decay process. And so Nathan's fall and miraculous recovery and then Aaron's digging and discovery of Dina's Facebook posts led to this whole big study of Mount Baldi and how it formed, which is really important because the more we know about Mount Baldi, the more we know about how to protect it. So now we get LIDAR every three years and we can map out how the entire Dune is moving and changing. LIDAR is saying. LIDAR is stands for light detection and ranging, and it basically uses lasers to help scientists measure distances.

And that's been really, really important because it's now continuing to bury infrastructure. It's buried the circle part of the parking lot, so they've had to restrict people from going over there. It's encroaching on the bathrooms that they have over there. So they had to decide, are we going to move the bathrooms, abandon the bathrooms? Are we going to put money in and make new bathrooms? So we've been using the maps of Mount Baldy to, they made the decision to abandon the bathrooms and take the structures down before they get buried again

so we don't have this issue in the future. After I talked with Aaron, I drove to Mount Baldy and saw with my own eyes that bathroom is a goner. Oh, no. So now the park is super proactive about let's map all of our infrastructure, let's take it out of the way of the path of the moving dune. Because of their mission, they don't do active moving of the sand. They're not going to just go ahead and use a bulldozer and move it.

They have to let nature do what nature does. Did you very, very gingerly and carefully hike Mount Baldy? I did not because it is closed. Oh, no. I know. Well, but for one thing, people tromping on the dunes, even gingerly, might disturb the grass that keeps the dune from moving and eating bathrooms and highways. For another, there's the whole thing.

There is still a trail that goes by the base of the dune to the beach, and it goes by a big sign where the old trail used to be, warning people not to climb. I feel like they could have even scarier signage, to be honest. Like the whole the guy's person is falling in. to doesn't look that deep, it just looks like they're tripping. I feel like you could really deter people a little bit more by showing someone like buried in sand, but maybe that would be too unsettling.

Even if I didn't get to climb to the top of Mount Baldy, I did get to walk alongside the base of it onto this pristine beach where the forest and the dunes meet Lake Michigan. And the lake looks perfect today. It's like that turquoisey green. like from an ad for the Caribbean or like a sandals resort, it looks unreal. But then you look to the right and there's a huge nuclear reactor, which kind of sullies the vibe, the peaceful vibe. I wonder if they're worried about that getting buried by sand.

Because of the research of Aaron and her colleagues, the park service has more information about how to protect this land, for generations to come. But as evident by Dina's post, something doesn't have to be published in a scientific journal to be a scientific phenomenon. There's real value in recreational naturalists, spending time in nature and noticing what's around them

and then sharing what they've noticed. Yeah, this sort of reminds me of this idea of like community science, right? Like this idea that, you know, everyone can be a scientist or at least contribute to science by noticing things and talking about them and, you know, quote unquote, surfacing them for real scientists to do their work. Because scientists know a lot, but they don't know everything. That's part of science, right? Exactly. Yeah.

And not to tutor own horns, but I feel like that's something that we do, y'all do on this show, like helping people learn about things like slime mold. And then they might, you know, notice something that no one ever has before that could be like a portal to more scientific discovery. We're pro portal and we're pro, we're pro treehole. Basically, you know, anywhere there's space, we want to explore it. Right. But back to Nathan. He still doesn't remember much of what happened. He talked to the local news around the 10th anniversary of his fall earlier this summer.

He's going into his junior year at a Christian high school. For him, his fall is less about science and more about spirituality. I'll just be casually thinking and then or like about something. And it'll come to mind, and it just reminds me and it gives me hope that there's a plan and that I'm meant for something. And look, science and miracles can coexist. Aaron, as you remember, was pregnant

when Nathan fell into a hole and this all began. And now she has a 10-year-old daughter. She doesn't want to go to Mount Baldi because she says this is the Dune that eats children. And for a while, she thought it was like a bedtime story. And I was like, no, we have to, this is a real scientific thing. It was a really scary experience.

And we are just so lucky that Nathan was rescued and that the first responders just didn't give up. And they found him and that, again, the doctors responded appropriately and he is fine. There were so many miracles that came together that day and it would just be a disservice not to learn from it and use it as a lesson about human interactions with the landscape.

Well, look, Grace, I think this is a happy story because a six-year-old, survives a fall and a scientist discovers a new phenomenon. And a whole bunch of people realize that where this dune is, there used to be a forest. And understanding that history is good. So the story of Dune Boy, to me, I don't know if it's spiritual, but it's certainly interesting.

Yeah, and it's Mount Baldi is lurching toward the highway, but not. Very slowly. Slowly and it comes in peace. We can figure out how to coexist with it. Endless thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. It was produced by This Dune Girl, Grace Tatter. And co-hosted by Dune Boy Johnson.

Sound design by Sandman Paul Vicus. Our managing producer is Sumitajoshi. The rest of our team is Quincy Walters, Dean Russell, Matt Reed, Emily Jankowski, a ghost tree, and Amory Siebertson. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and tree holes. If you have an unsolved mystery and untold history or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, go straight to a lot of sand.com. Or you can hit us up by emailing us at Endless Thread at WBUR.org.org.

See you on the beach.