Futility Closet - 179-Two Vanished Young Writers

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities from a devilish corkscrew to a disappearing beaker. This is episode 179. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Everett Roos and Barbara Newhall Follett were born in March 1914 at opposite ends of the U.S. Both followed distinctly unusual lives as they pursued a love of writing,

Starting point is 00:00:34 and both disappeared in their twenties, leaving no trace of their whereabouts. In today's show, we'll describe the brief lives of two promising young authors and the mystery that lingers behind them. We'll also patrol 10 Downing Street and puzzle over when a pigeon isn't a pigeon. Everett Ruiz was born in Oakland, California in 1914. His father was a Unitarian minister and the family moved around a lot whenever it was young. He started showing artistic ability at an early age, wood carving, sketching, and modeling in clay, and he was writing essays in verse by age 12. And he started a literary diary that eventually filled several volumes.

Starting point is 00:01:15 He went to Los Angeles High School and then on to UCLA, but he dropped out after just one semester. He wrote to a friend, I'm glad I went, but I'm glad it's over. That's because he already knew what he wanted to do. He'd gone on his first camping trip at 13, and in high school he'd started hitchhiking up the California coast. He'd fallen in love with the beauty of the American West, a beauty that he found so intense that he almost couldn't bear it. He wrote, much of the time I feel so exuberant I can hardly contain myself. The colors are so glorious, the forest so magnificent, the mountains so splendid,

Starting point is 00:01:49 and the streams so utterly, wildly, tumultuously, effervescently joyful that to me at least the world is a riot of sensual delight. He called this such utter and overpowering beauty as nearly kills a sensitive person by its piercing glory. His biographer W. L. Rusho calls Everett's gift the act of vision. He says he could sense beauty so acutely that it bordered on pain, and he could describe these feelings exceptionally well. He's been compared to Walt Whitman and particularly to John Muir, whose adventure on an Alaskan glacier we described in episode 162. Both of them found the wilderness so captivating that they wanted to spend as much time as possible there. Wallace Stegner wrote, if we laugh at Everett Ruiz, we shall have to laugh at John Muir because there was little different between them except age. Starting in 1931, Everett began traveling through Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado

Starting point is 00:02:31 by horse and burro, trading prints and watercolors to pay his way. He sang opera to the burros, he read philosophy, and he tried to describe in words the beauty he found in nature. The people he met found him to be strangely fearless. He wrote to his parents about encounters with wild bulls, scorpions, rattlesnakes, and centipedes. An archaeologist he befriended wrote, one time in camp, he stood on the edge of a 400-foot cliff during a rainstorm and did a watercolor sketch of a waterfall. I remember this very clearly because I was scared to death just watching him perched on the edge of the cliff. His parents sent books to mail stops,

Starting point is 00:03:04 and he'd pick them up as he passed. Candide, the Satyricon, Balzac, and Dunsany. He read the Brothers Karamazov and asked for Walpole and Dos Passos, The Magic Mountain, the Anthology of Western Poetry, and Havelock Ellis's The Dance of Life. He named his first pair of burros Pegasus and Pericles and he decorated their saddlebags with Indian designs. As he gained experience, it became common for him to travel 35 miles a day. He learned to speak Navajo, and the Hopi allowed him to participate in their antelope dance. Eventually, he met the painter Maynard Dixon and the photographers Ansel Adams, Edward Western, and Dorothy Lang. He traveled virtually without money, and he spent his days without much food, comfort, or companionship because he found that most people couldn't understand his sensitivity

Starting point is 00:03:43 or why he was choosing to live this way. He wrote, I've always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. To live is to be happy, to be carefree, to be overwhelmed by the glory of it all. In 1934, after wandering all over the southwest for four years, he arrived in Escalante in the steep, rugged canyon country of southern Utah. He rode in from the west, saddled on one burrow and leading another packed with camping gear. Over the next few days, he explored the area around the town with the local boys. They rode horseback with him along the nearby ridges, hunted for arrowheads, and ate venison and potatoes with him at the campfire.

Starting point is 00:04:18 On his last night there, he treated a couple of them to a movie. The local theater was showing Death Takes a Holiday. Then, on November 20, 1934, he set out into the Utah desert with the Burroughs. He rode out of town alone, headed southeast toward the bare plateau that the locals called the desert. In his last letter to his brother, he'd written, it may be a month or two before I have a post office, for I am exploring southward to the Colorado, where no one lives. Two young men met him on his way out of town. They thought he didn't have enough supplies to spend six weeks in the high desert in winter.

Starting point is 00:04:46 They could see no stove or tent, and they thought he had too little food, but he said, I don't need very much. After a week, he'd travel 50 miles, and he met a couple of sheepherders and spent two nights with them. Then he left, prodding his bros southward. He was never seen again. Nearly four months passed before anyone organized a search. His parents received a packet of letters that they'd sent to him, now returned as unclaimed, and they raised the alarm.

Starting point is 00:05:08 The Los Angeles Evening Herald broke the news that he was missing, and it became a national drama. The Los Angeles Police Department issued a bulletin with a photo of Everett taken by Dorothea Lange. Searchers from Escalante started at the location of the sheepherders' campfire, and after several false starts, they entered Davis Gulch, a canyon of the Escalante River following an old livestock trail. They found a corral made of brushwood that held Everett's two burrows, which were still fat and healthy. Further down the gulch, they found what seems to have been his last camp, with some empty cans of condensed milk, candy wrappers, and marks in the dirt where he'd laid his bedroll. But everything of value that he'd owned was missing, including the bedroll, his clothing, food, camping gear, saddle, gun, books, sketching and painting materials, and his 1934 journal.

Starting point is 00:05:50 And it wasn't clear how he could have carried all of that out of the canyon without the help of the Burroughs. On some Anasazi ruins, they found the inscription Nemo 1934 carved in Everett's handwriting, which was odd because he generally disapproved of marking the wilderness. Nemo in Latin means no one. Everett's parents explained that in the desert he had read the Odyssey, and at one point Odysseus identifies himself as no one. His father also thought he might have been thinking of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, in which Captain Nemo is an explorer who hates civilization. So there are all kinds of guesses as to what happened to them, but no one really knows. Perhaps he wandered away from his camp and died of hunger and thirst, or drowned in a flash flood, or sank in quicksand. Maybe he was

Starting point is 00:06:28 murdered by a renegade Indian in the desert. Possibly he fell to his death in this treacherous country. In his last year, he'd written, this time in my wanderings, I have had more reckless self-confidence than ever before. Hundreds of times I have trusted my life to crumbling sandstone or nearly vertical angles in search for water or cliff dwellings. But in that case, what became of all his camp equipment? It's possible that after his death, someone had come along and found his camp and taken his things. Or maybe he was deliberately robbed and killed by cattle rustlers who were known to be in that area. Possibly he committed suicide, but there was no indication that he was despondent. In his last letter to his parents on November 11th, he said he was entering some rather wild country and that they might not hear from him again for several months.

Starting point is 00:07:07 And he told them he was bringing ample food and even sent them some money because he said he had more than he needed. One of the more romantic ideas is that he'd contrived his own disappearance. In his last letter to Reach the World, he'd written, I have known too much of the depths of life already and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax. So perhaps he'd crossed the Colorado River and joined the Navajo, maybe even married a woman there and taken up their life. But the sheepherders he'd met said that he didn't seem curious about how to cross the river or about the Navajo country that lay beyond it,

Starting point is 00:07:33 and it seems unlikely that he would have left his burros behind to starve. That June, his parents made a 2,400-mile trip to all the locations he'd visited, but they found nothing. The best Navajo trackers found plenty of Ruiz's footprints and none of other people. And in that region, footprints can last for up to two years under the overhangs. His parents returned to California, and as time passed, they began to accept that he died somehow pursuing the life he'd chosen. His father wrote, even if he were found alive, we would have no desire to interfere with his fulfillment of his life and destiny. They used the proceeds of a life insurance policy to start a poetry contest in his name for young people in the Southwest. In 2009, a body was found stuffed

Starting point is 00:08:09 into a rock crevice near the town of Bluff, Utah, 60 miles from Escalante. An elderly Navajo had said he'd heard that Everett had been murdered by Ute Indians who wanted his burros. The first test seemed to suggest a match, but two months later, Utah's state archaeologist said the body was probably not his since the dental records didn't match, and further DNA tests showed that the remains don't belong to Everett. Everett Ruiz wrote no books during his lifetime, but his journals and poetry have been published posthumously in books illustrated with his woodcuts, and over time he's come to symbolize the wild mystery of the American West, as if he'd learned to merge somehow with the

Starting point is 00:08:40 beauty that he loved so much. His disappearance has never been explained. In November 1934, in his final letter to his brother from Escalante, he'd written, As to when I shall revisit civilization, it will not be soon. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and the star-sprinkled sky to the roof, the obscure and difficult trail leading into the unknown to any paved highway, the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. One of his poems reads,

Starting point is 00:09:04 Say that I starved, that I was lost and weary, that I was burned and blinded by the desert sun, foot sore, thirsty, sick with strange diseases, lonely and wet and cold, but that I kept my dream. In the same year that Everett Ruiz was born in California, 1914, Barbara Newhall Follett was born in New Hampshire to the critic and editor Wilson Follett and the children's writer Helen Thomas Follett. Wilson Follett became well-known later, but during his early life, he was probably most famous for being Barbara's father because she quickly revealed herself as a prodigy. She was consumed by the language by the age of three. Wilson wrote, she was always seeing A's in the gables of houses and H's in football goalposts. Her parents educated her at home, and she was writing poetry

Starting point is 00:09:45 by age four. When she was still too young to use a pencil, they discovered that she could write using her father's typewriter, and from there there was no stopping her. She wrote her first novel as a gift to her mother on the occasion of her own ninth birthday. As she typed it in the winter of 1923, she posted this notice on her door in their New Hampshire apartment. If the door is shut tight and a person is in the room, the shut door means that the person in the room wishes to be left alone. She was eight years old and was turning out 4,000 words a day. When a friend complained about her absence, she wrote, You don't understand why I have my work to do,

Starting point is 00:10:15 because at this particular time you have none at all. By 1926, her book was more than 40,000 words long, and it had a title, The House Without Windows. It opens in a little brown shingled cottage on one of the foothills of Mount Varkrobus. There lived with her father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. Igleen, a little girl named Epersip. She said it was about a child who ran away from loneliness to find companions in the woods, animal friends. In the end, Epersip disappears altogether, transformed into a wood nymph. When the story was finished, her father suggested she might clean up the manuscript and get some copies printed for her friends. They had planned to send

Starting point is 00:10:48 it to a vanity press, but he'd been working with the publisher Knopf, and on an impulse, he sent it to them, and they accepted it. She was 12 years old. She wrote, I simply threw myself on the floor and screamed. It is Epersip, The House Without Windows, my story, my story in New York, with the Knopf's, to be published, published. The second published has eight exclamation points after it. It came out in February 1927 to enormous praise. The New York Times called it the most authentic and unalloyed document of a transient and hitherto unrecorded phase in plastic intelligence, a truly remarkable little book. The Saturday Review of Literature called it almost unbearably beautiful.

Starting point is 00:11:21 Soon she was being asked to review A.A. Milne, and H.L. Mencken wrote to her parents, you are bringing up the greatest critic we've heard of in America. At age 13, to follow this, she fulfilled a dream by going to sea by spending several months on a lumber schooner off Nova Scotia. She departed in July, sailed and wrote feverishly, and in November she gave Knopf a second book called The Voyage of the Norman Dee. She turned 14, 12 days after it was published. This, too, received critical acclaim. The Times Literary Supplement wrote, its ingeniousness is preserved yet embellished by a literary craftsmanship which would do credit to an experienced writer. The Saturday Review featured her book alongside Dorothy Parker's latest and called it a fine,

Starting point is 00:11:58 sustained, and vivid piece of writing. But in that same year came the most devastating event in her life. Her father abandoned her mother for another woman, leaving them both alone and without a source of income. At first, her mother tried to make this into a romance. She said that she and Barbara would sail to Tahiti and write books together. But by the time they returned to Los Angeles, they were in pretty bad financial straits. Her mother called in some friends from the East and turned Barbara over to them while she returned to her work in Honolulu. They enrolled her in Pasadena Junior College. Barbara hated the idea of school and hated these strange guardians. In a way, she was a victim of her own precocity. She wanted to live her own life, to carry out her own plans for

Starting point is 00:12:32 developing her literary skill, but no one would take her seriously. She fled to San Francisco and hid in a hotel under an assumed name when police broke into the room she tried to escape out a window. She told a reporter, I came away because I felt I had to have my freedom. I felt utterly suppressed, almost frantic under the plans that had been made for me. I did not want to enter college nor live the standardized existence. Why are older people crushing us this way? It seems to me I cannot wait six whole years until I'm 21 in order just to be free. She and her mother were reunited in New York, but they had so little money that when she turned 16 in March 1930, Barbara had to seek work. The Depression had started, but she managed to find a secretarial job. That June, she wrote to a friend, my dreams are going through their death flurries. I thought

Starting point is 00:13:13 they were all safely buried, but sometimes they stir in their grave, making my heartstrings twinge. I mean no particular dream, you understand, but the whole radiant flock of them together, with their rainbow wings, iridescent, bright, soaring, glorious, sublime. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of time and money. She kept writing and produced two further books, but then stopped, now having spent six years without her father. She fell in love with an outdoorsman named Nickerson Rogers, and in 1933 they eloped. They traveled throughout Europe and the United States, and eventually settled in Brookline, Massachusetts. They were happy at first, but she came to believe that he was being unfaithful to her and she became depressed. To a friend, she wrote, on the

Starting point is 00:13:53 surface, things are terribly, terribly calm and wrong, just as wrong as they can be. I am trying. We are both trying. I still think there's a chance that the outcome will be a happy one, but I would have to think that anyway in order to live, so you can draw any conclusions you like from that. That was her last letter. In the early evening of Thursday, December 7th, 1939, she walked out of her Brookline apartment after a quarrel with Nick. She didn't even take her purse. She was never seen again. Her husband didn't report her disappearance for two weeks. He said he was waiting for her to return. He waited another four months before asking that a missing persons bulletin be issued. That was nondescript and issued under her married name, so the media largely didn't realize that Barbara Newhall Follett was missing until 1966,

Starting point is 00:14:33 when her mother co-authored an academic study about the disappearance. For a while, it was thought she'd run away, perhaps to her friend in California. When she didn't return, it was thought she'd assumed a false identity. She seemed too vibrant to have killed herself. In May 1941, her father published an open letter to her in the Atlantic Monthly called To a Daughter, One Year Lost, but she didn't respond. In 1952, 13 years after her disappearance, her mother began to insist on a more thorough investigation, and she began to suspect the husband after she found he'd made so little effort to find her. But nobody was ever found, nor was there any evidence of foul play. The date and circumstances of Barbara's death

Starting point is 00:15:07 were never established, and to date no one has ever explained what became of her. Barbara Follett had probably never heard of Everett Ruiz, but they were the same age, and both wrote continually about shunning a conventional life and about leaving the mundane world behind and finding happiness on their own in some transcendent new existence.

Starting point is 00:15:23 It's just possible that both of them achieved this somehow, but it appears we'll never know. If you're thinking about your holiday gift buying this year, and there's someone on your list that a razor just won't work for, check out the Futility Closet books. The books are a little different than the podcast in that everything in them is very short. So both books are filled with hundreds of quirky oddities and curiosities, offbeat inventions, odd words, and brain-teasing puzzles. Perfect for anyone who would enjoy learning about an invisible student at Georgia Tech

Starting point is 00:15:58 or a baby carriage modeled after a tank. Look for them on Amazon and discover why other readers have called them a fascinating compendium of interesting bits of information and fun books that can really be enjoyed by all. I have some updates on the subjects of bears in cars and bears and doorknobs, as we've discussed in episodes 164, 168, and 172. For those who want to catch up on this apparently very rich topic, Kevin Smith sent us a link to a story about a woman finding three bears in her car. And of course, it happened in Colorado. I've mentioned before that Colorado really seems to be over represented in bear incidents. This one happened on October 2nd in Lake City, Colorado, when Liddy

Starting point is 00:16:44 Breeden went to her car that she'd packed the night before for a drive back to Texas and was quite shocked to discover a mother bear and two cubs sitting on top of all of her stuff, eating all of the food that she had packed. The bears eventually departed after finishing the food, leaving all of Breeden's things and the vehicle in a certain amount of disarray and smelling strongly of bear. things and the vehicle in a certain amount of disarray and smelling strongly of bear. The news site that ran this story apparently has a running feature that this story was a part of,

Starting point is 00:17:15 giving this story the tagline, and that is the most Colorado thing we saw today, which really does not inspire me to want to go to Colorado anytime soon. I'm surprised you could fit three bears in a car. Yeah, it was like a sports utility vehicle, or a van. I'm not really good with my vehicles, but it was larger than a regular car. But yes, it was pretty full of bear. And apparently, it's not just bears getting in where they shouldn't be. Matt Turf rewrote, Hello, Sasha. We don't even get any billing anymore. Just Hello, Sasha. I have listened to all your podcasts. I have devoured many unsolved mystery books in the past and happy to hear you cover stories I have never come across. Below is a link from the Australian ABC about 6,000 camels plaguing outback towns in 2009.

Starting point is 00:17:57 The article has a photo of a camel opening a door with its mouth. There was a drought that year and thirsty camels were desperate for water. I listened to your podcast in Fremantle, Western Australia as I designed luxury super yachts while looking at a dry docked submarine. And indeed, Matt sent a link to a story that shows a camel attempting to open a door with its mouth with a round doorknob, I should note. So while round doorknobs may help deter bears, apparently they are no help at all against camels. Just something to keep in mind when you're planning your future doorknob purchases. We had talked in episode seven about how camels were introduced into

Starting point is 00:18:35 Australia in the 19th century to be used for transportation, but they were mostly released into the wild once the railway systems were completed. Due to a lack of natural predators and a long lifespan, the feral camel population took off and it has really become an ongoing issue for Australia, though that's not a country that I think many people usually associate with camels. The article that Matt sent a link to has some great quotes, like a Northern Territory local government minister Rob Knight saying, the community of Docker River is under siege by 6,000 marauding wild camels. He went on to say, they are intruding on the private property of residents. They are damaging infrastructure.

Starting point is 00:19:15 They have knocked down fencing at the airstrip, which doesn't sound quite as violent as the words siege and marauding would usually imply. But I guess these are camels after all. And 6,000, that's an enormous number. That's a lot of camels, yeah. Graham Taylor, the chief executive of the local shire, agreed with Knight's assessment, even though I had a little trouble with it, saying, I think the words under siege are good words because it talks about people being stuck in their homes

Starting point is 00:19:41 and looking out and seeing just numbers of camels at your front door. And if they get anxious and want more water and stick their head through the window, I suppose you've then got another problem. The ABC article actually says it's estimated that there are more than one million camels roaming through a vast area in the Australian outback. And then quotes the chief executive of the Northern Territory Cattlemen's Association, Luke Bowen, who says, this is a plague of biblical proportion laying waste to a sensitive and arid environment. So there you go, Colorado, maybe your bears aren't so bad after all. regulated door handles and the question why not just lock the doors i'm only speculating here since we don't have such regulations or bears in germany but in an area where bears are apparently so numerous that there are regulations about them wouldn't you want buildings to be unlocked to be able to hide inside when you encounter a bear love the podcast i hadn't even thought about that

Starting point is 00:20:40 so that was i had speculated why don't you just lock the doors and then the bears can't get in, right? But you could be locked outside with a bear. And James Pattison wrote, all the talk about doors and handles reminded me that the front door of the British Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street doesn't have a handle on the outside. From Wikipedia, the door cannot be opened from the outside. There is always someone inside to unlock the door. I don't think it's anything to do with bears or arthritic prime ministers, though, or fears about former prime ministers, arthritic or otherwise, breaking in. And James sent a link to an article in The Telegraph called QI, Quite Interesting Facts About 10 Downing Street, and closed with, In case you're wondering, I live in a lever-handled

Starting point is 00:21:25 house in a bear-free part of England. The article James sent did have a number of interesting facts about 10 Downing Street, such as that the last private resident was called Mr. Chicken, although apparently nothing more is known about him than that and that he moved out in 1732. Also, number 10 Downing Street is apparently one of the most heavily guarded buildings in Britain. As James said, the front door doesn't have a handle, so it can't be opened from the outside by people, bears, or camels. And you can't enter the building without passing through a scanner and a set of security gates manned by armed guards. However, according to the article in The Telegraph, even with all this security, in the first five years after Tony Blair became prime minister, 37 computers, four mobile phones, two cameras, a mini disc player, a video recorder, four printers, two projectors, and a bicycle all managed to be stolen from the site.

Starting point is 00:22:16 So it seems to me like maybe they need to focus some of that security on the people exiting the building. exiting the building. And as interesting as all the various facts are about this particular address, the very best fact is that Number 10 Downing Street has an official chief mouser, with the office currently being held by Larry. According to the gov.uk website,

Starting point is 00:22:38 Larry spends his days greeting guests to the house, inspecting security defenses, and testing antique furniture for napping quality. His day-to-day responsibilities also include contemplating a solution to the mouse occupancy of the house. Larry says this is still in tactical planning stage. And there is a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. We're trying to keep that information from Sasha, as she does not have a Wikipedia page, though I would say that she very ably fills the role of Chief Mouser for our household. And as far as we know, does it brilliantly. As for this very important British feline position, there have actually been a number

Starting point is 00:23:18 of political intrigues surrounding it in recent years. For example, in November 1997, six months after the Labor Party's Tony Blair became prime minister, rumors started swirling that Humphrey, the chief mouser who had been serving in his post since 1989, had been put to sleep. Officials announced that the kitty had been retired due to health problems and that he was peacefully recuperating in a quieter environment, but a conservative MP wanted proof that Humphrey was still alive, and political journalists began pressing the issue and making insinuations about Ms. Blair's supposed dislike of cats. According to a BBC News story, she was suspected of having blood on her hands. A Tory MP demanded that the contested kitty be produced, and per the BBC, facing one of its toughest challenges since

Starting point is 00:24:05 Labour's election on May 1st, the Downing Street office smuggled the media to a secret location in South London, where the bemused feline was photographed hostage-style amidst copies of current newspapers to prove that he was indeed still alive. A later BBC News story notes that he actually died several years later in March 2006. Whether or not Ms. Blair's feelings towards felines had anything to do with Humphrey's retirement, the post of chief mousetrapper did indeed stay vacant for the next 10 years until Sybil was brought on in 2007, a few months after Gordon Brown took over as prime minister. Sybil actually belonged to the family of the chancellor of the Exchequer, but she was sent back to Scotland after just a few months in her new position, and that again necessitated denials from the Prime Minister's

Starting point is 00:24:49 staff that the Browns' dislike of animals had anything to do with it. The official story was that the Scottish kitty could not adapt to London living. The post of Chief Mouser was then vacant again when in January 2011, rats were seen outside 10 Downing Street on news broadcasts showing the importance of the chief Mauser office and prompting speculation about whether or not then-Prime Minister David Cameron would try to fill it. While his spokesperson first said that he wasn't planning to, the next day it was acknowledged that there was actually a pro-cat faction. This faction apparently won out, and Larry was officially appointed to the position the next month, after being selected for it by the Cameron family from

Starting point is 00:25:30 an animal shelter. While Larry still serves in this capacity, his tenure has had its own controversies. In September 2012, there were reports that Chancellor George Osborne's cat, Freya, would be replacing Larry, who was not adequately fulfilling his rodent catching duties. Some media sources described the situation as more of a job share in an attempt to avoid any hurt feline feelings, but others reported quite baldly that Larry had been sacked. In any event, Larry regained the post in November 2014 when Freya was sent to live in Kent. The officially given reason was that she kept wandering away and getting into scrapes, but this being the chief mouser, of course there was considerable skepticism, and there was speculation that the real reason was that Freya was bullying

Starting point is 00:26:14 the chancellor's beloved little dog that had come to live with the family a few months previously. Quite a lot of political intrigue surrounding these pussycats. Yeah, you're right. So thanks so much to everyone who writes into us and continued appreciation for the pronunciation help. If you have any questions or comments for us or for our chief mouser, you can send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me a strange-sounding situation, and I have to try to figure out what is going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Doug Shaw. Police in Kuwait caught what they thought was a pigeon,

Starting point is 00:26:56 but they were surprised to find out it was a mule. Okay. How is such a thing possible? Oh, my. How is such a thing possible oh my how is such a thing possible okay let's start police in kuwait caught what they thought was a pigeon oh oh oh is this pigeon like stool pigeon like a pigeon has different meanings like a mark or a stool pigeon is somebody who i know it forms on someone else or that's not it oh man because i'm a stool pigeon is somebody who performs on someone else. No, that's not it.

Starting point is 00:27:25 Oh, man, because then the mule is somebody carrying drugs, right? So the whole thing fits. Darn it. I want credit for that. You get full credit. No, it's an actual pigeon. They thought they caught a pigeon as in a bird, and they found that they had a mule as in something vaguely resembling a horse.

Starting point is 00:27:45 No. Nah, the mule is vaguely resembling a horse. No. Nah, the mule is not something resembling a horse. A mule isn't a kind of a shoe? There's a shoe called a mule. We got a bird and found out it was a shoe. Well, that's vaguely possible. It's more possible than the mammal thing because it's much bigger than a pigeon. I'm trying to think, did the thing they find, was it roughly the same size as a pigeon?

Starting point is 00:28:04 I'm trying to think what's the same size as a pigeon yes see a mule isn't actually the same i mean whatever it's very different size unimpeachable okay so they they what they had was a mule which is not an equine type animal right but i have to guess what a mule is right oh my goodness and i've already come up with two different definitions of mule, neither of which works. I have to come up with a third somehow. But it's roughly pigeon-sized, whatever it is. So is this something that you would more tend to find in Kuwait than in other places? No. Is this something that would be normally connected to law enforcement? These are my only clues. I've got police in Kuwait, so I'm trying to make

Starting point is 00:28:45 whatever I can of them. The thing they found? The thing they found. No, I wouldn't say so. Okay. So, what do you call a mule? Well, retest what you think you know.

Starting point is 00:28:58 I think maybe we've crossed our wires here. Maybe we've crossed our wires here. They thought they caught a pigeon yep meaning a bird yes and then they ended up getting something that wasn't a bird when it when you right no oh it was a bird it's a bird called there's a bird called mule no okay they caught a bird yes it was not a pigeon that's false They caught a bird that was a pigeon. Yes. But it somehow was also, oh, a mule like a drug mule? Like I was thinking in the first place. Yes.

Starting point is 00:29:30 Ah, it just wasn't a human drug mule. Somebody stuffed drugs in a pigeon. Yes. Doug writes, I'm indulging, well, not in the pigeon. I'm indulging a little ambiguous wording here. The pigeon was caught with a tiny backpack on it full of drugs. Seriously? A little backpack? People were taking homing pigeons from Kuwait to Iraq, then strapping on drug-filled backpacks to the pigeons, making them into drug mules, and then flying the drugs back into Kuwait. The tiny backpacks are adorable in the picture.

Starting point is 00:29:53 I'll put a link in the show notes. Basically, in May 2017, Kuwaiti customs caught a pigeon flying across the border from Iraq into Kuwait. It was wearing a tiny backpack that contained 178 pills. Oh, my. Wow. Okay. Thank you, Doug, for sending that in. The things you would never think of.

Starting point is 00:30:09 Well, it's really creative. I mean, even if they catch the person who's doing that, they deserve some credit for coming up with that in the first place. Thanks to Doug for that puzzle. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is a full-time commitment for us. If you would like to help support the celebration of the quirky and the curious that is Futility Closet, you can find a donate button in the support us section of the website at

Starting point is 00:30:36 futilitycloset.com or you can join our Patreon campaign where you'll get outtakes, extra discussion on some of the stories, more lateral thinking puzzles and updates on Sasha, the very diligent Futility Closet chief mouser. Find that at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the website for the link. At the website, you'll also find over 9,000 bite-sized distractions, the Futility Closet store, more information about our books, and the show notes for the podcast with the links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by Greg's

Starting point is 00:31:15 incredible brother, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week. Thank you.

Futility Closet - 179-Two Vanished Young Writers

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