Futility Closet - 312-The Last of the Yahi

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 11,000 quirky curiosities from the Roadrunner's Guidelines to the Origins of Surfing. This is episode 312. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1911, an exhausted man emerged from the wilderness north of Oroville, California. He was discovered to be the last of the Yahi, a people who had once flourished in the area but had been decimated by white settlers. In today's show, we'll describe Ishii's sad history and his new life in San Francisco.

Starting point is 00:00:45 We'll also consider the surprising dangers of baseball and puzzle over a forceful blackout. In the early morning of August 29, 1911, dogs began to bark near a slaughterhouse outside Oroville, California. In the dawn light, the butchers found a man crouching at bay against a corral fence. They called off the dogs, telephoned the sheriff, and told him they were holding a wild man. Sheriffs and deputies arrived at the scene and approached the man with their guns drawn, but he didn't resist and he allowed himself to be handcuffed. The sheriff, J.B. Weber, saw that the man was a Native American, terrified and exhausted. He was emaciated and his hair had been singed close to his head, a sign of mourning. He was naked except for a piece of canvas from a

Starting point is 00:01:36 covered wagon, which he wore around his shoulders like a poncho. He understood no English and they could learn nothing from him. They took him to the county jail and put him in a cell. That would at least protect him from the townspeople and outsiders who were already pouring in. At first, he wouldn't eat, drink, or sleep. He said later that he expected to be put to death. The only thing he knew about white men was that they had murdered his people. Local Native Americans, Mexicans, and Spaniards tried to talk to him. He listened, but when he spoke, no one understood the language he used. The story made headlines as far away as San Francisco, where the articles were read by two anthropologists at the University of California,

Starting point is 00:02:14 Alfred Kroeber and T.T. Waterman, who recognized its importance. They recalled an incident in 1835 in which a Native American woman, the last of her people, had been found living alone on San Nicholas Island off the California coast, a story we told in episode 175. They also remembered that in 1908, some surveyors who'd been working a few miles north of Oroville had surprised and routed a small band of Native Americans there. Afterward, Waterman had set out with two guides to search for them without success. This man might have been one of them. On August 31st, Kroeber sent a telegram to the sheriff of Butte County. It said, Newspapers report capture wild Indian speaking language other tribes totally unable understand.

Starting point is 00:02:56 Please confirm or deny by collect telegram and, if story correct, hold Indian till arrival, professor, state university who will take charge and be responsible for him. Matter important, account aboriginal history. The sheriff's office confirmed the report, and Waterman immediately took the train to Oroville, where he presented himself to the sheriff and was shown to the man in the cell. He was wearing a butcher's apron that he'd been given at the slaughterhouse and, as best he could, was patiently answering, in his own language, that he'd been given at the slaughterhouse and, as best he could, was patiently answering, in his own language, questions that various visitors were putting to him.

Starting point is 00:03:32 Based on their fieldwork, Kroeber and Waterman had guessed that the man might be one of the Yana people, whose former country was adjacent to Oroville. Waterman sat down and began reading from a phonetic list of Yana words that he'd brought. This didn't bring much success, and he was getting discouraged when he said suwini, which means yellow pine, and tapped the frame of the cot they were sitting on. The man's face lighted up. Waterman said it again, and the man repeated it, correcting his pronunciation. As they made further progress, it became clear that the man was a Yahi, one of the southernmost group of Yana. Waterman's list had come from the northern groups, but still it helped them to communicate. As they traded more words, the man asked him, Inemayahi? Are you a Yahi?

Starting point is 00:04:09 Waterman said yes, and the look of persecution left the man's eyes. Both of them knew that Waterman was not a Yahi, but this was a way of saying, within the constraints of their language, that he was a friend. Waterman wrote to Kroeber, This man is undoubtedly wild. We had a lot of conversation this morning about deer hunting and making acorn soup, but I got as far as my list of words would take me. wrote to Kroeber, Watching all this, the sheriff saw that the man and we could hardly get them away from him. He showed us how he flaked the points, singed the edges of the feathering, and put on the sinew wrappings. Watching all this, the sheriff saw that the man was neither insane nor dangerous.

Starting point is 00:04:51 There were no charges against him, there was no reason to keep him in the jail, but where could he go? Waterman offered to take him back to San Francisco, and on September 4th, they took the train to the Anthropology Museum there. The museum was already designed to accommodate guests. Because the building wasn't fire- or earthquake-proof, two men customarily slept in it every night. It had lighting, bath, kitchen, and bedroom facilities, and it was kept

Starting point is 00:05:14 warm. On the ground floor was a small room where visiting Native Americans could stay for a few days or weeks, people with whom Kroeber had stayed in the field and who were helping him in his study of linguistics. So when the new visitor arrived, Native American guests were already an accustomed part of the life of the museum. The morning after his arrival, the man met Kroeber, the museum director. Kroeber said his first impression was of gentleness and of timidity and fear held under severe control. The man would start at sudden sounds and seemed aware of his aloneness even among other people, but he was outgoing, ready to smile, and interested in everything. Reporters wanted to know his name. Kroeber told them the question was unmannerly, and the man said, politely, that he'd

Starting point is 00:05:55 been alone so long that there had been no one to name him. The truth was that a citizen of his people almost never spoke his own name except to those who already knew it, and would never give it in reply to a direct question. But even the museum staff needed to call him something, and Kroeber decided on Ishi, which means simply man in Janna. When the reporters left, the entrepreneurs came. Vaudeville impresarios offered to promote Ishi and Kroeber as an edifying two-man act. Others wanted to borrow Ishi for an exhibit. The American Phonograph Company proposed making records by and about him, and still others wanted to place him in a traveling carnival. Kroeber turned them all down, and gradually the exploiters and showmen left them alone. But Ishii was still, in some sense, an attraction, which was something his friends had not considered.

Starting point is 00:06:40 There was a steady interest from well-intentioned people who meant no harm and asked only to be allowed to meet and perhaps shake hands with him. Accordingly, they informed the city newspapers that Professor Kroeber and Ishii would be available at the museum on Sunday afternoons from 2 to 4.30 for the next several weeks, for those who wished to meet them. If only a few visitors appeared, they would greet them informally, and if there were more, Ishii was introduced to the group and Kroeber would speak, answering questions and translating Ishii's responses. Usually, Ishii demonstrated stringing a bow, making fire with a fire drill, or making a chipped arrowhead. At first, he gave the arrowheads away to people in the audience, but when the demand grew too great, he gave them to school and museum collections. Apart from these meetings, Ishii's time was his own. He might choose to work

Starting point is 00:07:25 at a bow or chip glass or obsidian or sit in the sun watching passersby if he wasn't doing linguistic or ethnographic work with Waterman or Kroeber. He was always friendly and would wave to anyone who spoke to him. As they got to know him, the anthropologists learned the sad history of his people. At one point, they had numbered 400, but the California Gold Rush of 1849 had brought whites to the area, and their encroachment had displaced the Yahi from their home. The white men's livestock depleted the native plant foods, and their mines poured silt into the streams and reduced the salmon supply. As their food dwindled, the Yahi could survive only by raiding white ranches, and the whites began to put bounties on their heads. In 1865,

Starting point is 00:08:05 when Ishii was six years old, his father and 40 other people had been killed in a massacre, and further attacks had eventually reduced their number to five, two men, two women, and Ishii. They had withdrawn into Deer Creek Canyon and survived there, somehow, for decades. But in 1908, a group of surveyors had stumbled into their camp and the band had scattered. Ishii was left with his ailing mother, who had died a few weeks later. After that, he had survived entirely alone for some time, possibly as much as three years, but at last, hopeless and overcome with grief and loneliness, he had wandered south into an unfamiliar country and lay down at the Oroville slaughterhouse, when he could go no farther. Like all other Native Americans within the borders of the United States, Ishi was considered a ward

Starting point is 00:08:49 of the government. Some months after his arrival at the museum, an agent from the Bureau of Indian Affairs came to tell him that he was free to go back to Deer Creek or to be taken to a reservation to be with other American Indians. He said no. Quote, I will live like the white man for the remainder of my days. I wish to stay here where I now am. I will grow old in this house, and it is here I will die. By November, Ishii was fairly well settled into a life at the museum. He had a name and an address. The first press of curious San Franciscans had abated, and his work was widely admired and respected. He was becoming accepted as a permanent part of the museum, and the university agreed to pay him $25 a month for doing janitorial work there.

Starting point is 00:09:30 And he was settling into the community. On 7th Avenue, the grocer, baker, tobacconist, and cobbler greeted him by name, and he learned to shop thriftily. His friends learned to see their own world through his eyes. Running water and flush toilets were good and clever. their own world through his eyes. Running water and flush toilets were good and clever. Doorknobs, safety pins, and typewriters were hilarious. Telephones were amusing but less interesting than penny whistles and kaleidoscopes. Office buildings and airplanes were less impressive than mountains and hawks. And the white man's most important inventions were matches and glue, which he rated far above gas and electricity. One Sunday afternoon, he went on an automobile ride through Golden Gate Park to the Ocean Beach. Though he had never seen the sea,

Starting point is 00:10:10 he was most impressed by the throngs of people. He kept saying, Hansi Saltu, which means many white people. At a vaudeville show, he was more taken with the size of the crowd than with the performance he saw on stage. One day, a doctor at the local medical school, Saxton Pope, looked out the window, saw Ishii making a bow, and felt himself filled with a desire to learn the technique and folklore of archery from someone who had lived by them. He joined Ishii and got him to explain his shooting stance, his hold, and his method of release, and soon they were practicing together on the open grass at the edge of Sutro Forest. In the month that followed, the two of them would spend hours together, speaking a pidgin language of their own devising and comparing various bows

Starting point is 00:10:48 for the museum's collection. Throughout all this, Ishii kept attracting visitors. In his first six months at the museum, 24,000 people watched him demonstrate arrow making and fire building. On a single autumn afternoon, more than a thousand people gathered to watch him work. He added spears, bows, and arrows to the museum's collection, and to replenish his materials, he would make trips to Marin County and the Coast Range country, or approach museum workers who were going into the field. By 1914, he had an English vocabulary of five to six hundred words. Except for the linguist Edward Sapir, who had begun to study language with him, none of the museum's staff spoke Yahi, as well as Ishii spoke English.

Starting point is 00:11:26 He would greet people with hello or how to do and said not goodbye, but you stay, I go. He never learned to read, but could recognize newspaper titles and the letters and numbers that identified streetcars. He understood comic strips and got their point, and he developed a simplified understanding of the clocks he found in the museum and the hospital. He told his friends that the main reason men grew sick in civilization was that they were shut up in cars, offices, and houses. Men should not be too much indoors. His manner was gentle, kind, and warm-hearted, never proud or angry. He never touched anything that wasn't his. He once reproved Saxton Pope for putting a museum pencil in his pocket. But he loved to give things

Starting point is 00:12:05 to people. He would gladly give away a bow that had taken hours to make. He would never have volunteered criticism of the white man's ways, but in 1961, Alfred Kroeber's wife Theodora ventured to sum up his judgment. Quote, he considered the white man to be fortunate, inventive, and very, very clever, but childlike and lacking in a desirable reserve and in a true understanding of nature, her mystic face, her terrible and her benign power. His friends all testify to cheerfulness as a trait basic to Ishi's temperament, a cheerfulness which passed, given half a chance, into a gentle hilarity. His way was the way of contentment, the middle way, to be pursued quietly, working a little, playing a little, and surrounded by friends. In spring 1914, he took Kroeber, Waterman, and Pope back to his old

Starting point is 00:12:50 grounds in the Mill Creek country, the site of so much pain in his earlier life. They were glad to be with him and honored to hear his story, but by the end he wanted to return to the museum, to be home. They planned further trips, but the war broke out and they never came to pass. be home. They planned further trips, but the war broke out and they never came to pass. In December 1914, Ishii developed a cough. His lack of immunity made him vulnerable. He'd caught his first cold within a few weeks of coming to San Francisco, and his first pneumonia that winter. This illness was eventually diagnosed as tuberculosis. He spent some time in the hospital, but his friends remembered his wish to be home at the end, and they took him back to the museum and gave him a sunny room, where he stayed until his death on March 25, 1916. His main concern seemed to be to make himself as small a burden as possible to those

Starting point is 00:13:34 who cared for him. His real name was never known. It died with him. T.T. Waterman was overcome with grief and guilt. He wrote to Kroeber, the work last summer was too much for him. He was the best friend I had in the world, and I killed him by letting Sapir ride him too hard and by letting him sneak out of lunches. To be fair, the loss of appetite was probably due in part to the illness, and Ishii enjoyed his sessions with Edward Sapir so much that Sapir commonly had to end them out of exhaustion while Ishii was still happily teaching him Yahi. Kroeber wrote later, he was the most patient man I ever knew. I mean, he had mastered the philosophy of patience, without trace either of self-pity or of bitterness,

Starting point is 00:14:11 to dull the purity of his cheerful enduringness. Kroeber had been traveling near the end of Ishii's illness and had written to remind curator E.N. Gifford that the body should be handled as little as possible, only cremated and the ashes buried, following the Yahi practice. In particular, he saw no point in an autopsy. He wrote, If there is any talk about the interests of science, say for me that science can go to hell. We propose to stand by our friends. But his letter arrived too late. The medical staff did perform an autopsy and preserved Ishi's brain. Waterman called this a compromise between science

Starting point is 00:14:44 and sentiment, with myself on the side of sentiment. Ishi was crem Waterman called this a compromise between science and sentiment, with myself on the side of sentiment. Ishi was cremated with one of his bows, five arrows, and some acorn meal, beads, tobacco, and obsidian flakes, and his remains were placed in the Mount Olivet Cemetery in a jar of black pottery, inscribed Ishi, the last Yana Indian, 1916. That inscription wasn't quite accurate. Ishii may have been the last Yahi, but the parent group, the Yana, still have descendants living in Northern California, and in 2000, they repatriated and buried Ishii's brain and original cremated remains near Mount Lassen in the Cascades. In 1984, Congress established the Ishii Wilderness, 40,000 acres of the Lassen National Forest in northeastern California,

Starting point is 00:15:30 to honor his memory. Kroeber and Waterman established distinguished careers in anthropology. Today, the headquarters building of the anthropology department at the University of California is called Kroeber Hall. Their four-year association with Ishi remained one of the most important chapters in their professional lives. But the man who was most personally affected by these experiences was probably Saxton Pope, the surgeon who discovered through Ishii a love of archery. He is remembered today as the father of modern bow hunting. Using the techniques that Ishii had taught him, he hunted grizzly bears in Yellowstone and lions in Africa using a bow and arrows, and his book Hunting with the Bow and Arrow is still in print today. In it, he describes his friendship with Ishii and the lessons he learned from him. He ends by writing,

Starting point is 00:16:09 And so departed the last wild Indian of America. With him, the Neolithic epic terminates. He closes a chapter in history. He looked upon us as sophisticated children, smart but not wise. We knew many things and much that is false. He knew nature, which is always true. His were the qualities of character that last forever. He was essentially kind. He had courage and self-restraint, and though all had been taken from him, there was no bitterness in his heart.

Starting point is 00:16:38 His soul was that of a child, his mind that of a philosopher. With him there was no word for goodbye. He said, you stay, I go. Eric Waldo wrote to us about the puzzle in episode 307, spoiler alert, and said, Greetings, podcasters. I just heard your cast with the lateral thinking puzzle about one man winning eight Oscars for the same movie, Walt Disney for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. If you want to try a follow-up, in 1947, one man received two Oscars for the same film. Why? In 1947, one man received two Oscars for the same film. Why? The man was Harold Russell.

Starting point is 00:17:30 During World War II, Russell lost both of his hands in a training accident. In 1946, William Wyler was making The Best Years of Our Lives about veterans returning and adjusting to civilian life. He had seen Russell in a short film produced by the Army and cast him in the new film, as a sailor who had lost his hands but is adept with his prosthetic hooks. Russell was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role. The Academy Board of Governors wanted to honor Russell, but since he was not a professional actor, they thought it very unlikely that he would win. They decided to give him an honorary award for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans through his appearance. Later in the ceremony, he won for Best Supporting Actor as well.

Starting point is 00:18:07 He remains the only actor to win two Oscars for the same performance. Russell continued to be an advocate for veterans. He served for two decades as chairman of the President's Committee on Employment of the Handicapped. He also took a few small acting roles in the 80s and 90s. So that seemed like it might be a little difficult to try to guess as a lateral thinking puzzle, but it's a very interesting follow-up to the Disney Oscars story. Harold Russell was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, and moved to the U.S. with his family as a child after his father's death. He was working in a food market in Massachusetts when

Starting point is 00:18:41 Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, and he immediately enlisted in the Army because, he later said, he thought of himself as a failure. His military training to become a paratrooper and an explosives expert provided him with a new sense of purpose. In 1944, when Russell was 30, he was teaching demolition work as an Army instructor when a defective fuse detonated explosives he was holding, necessitating the amputation of both of his hands and part of his forearms. After Russell spent the next several months struggling his way through a deep depression, he then chose to be fitted with mechanical hooks to replace his hands. Although he knew that the hooks looked, as he said, scary, he chose them

Starting point is 00:19:20 over more visually appealing plastic hands because the hooks would be more practical and functional. He threw himself into a demanding daily routine to learn to master the prostheses, and his resulting expertise so impressed the Army higher-ups that they cast him in a training film for soldiers who had lost their hands, entitled Diary of a Sergeant, that showed Russell performing daily activities and that brought him to the attention of film director William Wyler. Russell, who was attending business school at Boston University at the time, had to be really coaxed into agreeing to take the role in Wyler's film. He had no interest in being an actor and was sure that his lack of experience would be apparent. But The Best Years of Our Lives,

Starting point is 00:20:00 about World War II veterans coping with the return to civilian life was a huge critical success, earning seven Oscars, including Best Picture, and Weiler said later that Russell gave the finest performance I have ever seen on the screen. As Eric noted, Russell won a special honorary Oscar created for him by the Board of Governors, but then also won a regular Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, making him the only person to win two Oscars for the same role, and also one of only two non-professional actors to win an Oscar for acting. After the film, Russell completed his business degree, graduating in 1949. As Eric also noted, Russell was active most of his life in veterans organizations,

Starting point is 00:20:41 including serving three terms as National Commander of AMVETS, becoming a founder of the World Veterans Foundation, and serving as vice chairman and then chairman of the President's Committee for the Employment of the Handicapped. The New York Times reported that in his 1949 autobiography titled Victory in My Hands, Russell wrote that after his struggles to recover physically and psychologically from the accident, he became so proficient with his prostheses that he would joke that he could now do anything except pick up a dinner check. Russell also wrote, it is not what you have lost, but what you have left that counts. You and I saw that film years ago, Best Years of Our Lives.

Starting point is 00:21:18 Yeah, I vaguely remember it. But that's what I remember from it is his performance. Right. I remember it, yeah. But that's what I remember from it is his performance. Right. Yeah, apparently he was actually pretty darn good in it, even though he had grave doubts himself about how he would do with it.

Starting point is 00:21:32 Yeah. The puzzle in episode 296, also spoiler alert, was about a man with a stick accidentally killing a man with a log and was based on a 1902 newspaper article about how a fan logging scores at a baseball game had just borrowed a knife to sharpen his pencil when a foul ball drove the knife into his chest, and we wondered if the story might be apocryphal. Ed Kitson wrote to let us know that this incident is noted in a book called Death at the Ballpark, a comprehensive study of game-related fatalities of players, other personnel, and spectators in amateur and professional baseball, 1862 to 2007. So we weren't able to

Starting point is 00:22:12 get a copy of the book for ourselves, but I did read some good reviews of it, including a review in Slate that Ed had sent, and in Nine, a journal of baseball history and culture. The book seems to be well regarded, with respect given to its authors, Robert M. Gorman and David Weeks, who are university librarians and baseball historians. Gorman and Weeks spent eight years scouring local newspaper archives for deaths due to baseball games in one way or another, and ended up chronicling 850 of them, covering professional, amateur, little league, and even informal backyard games. of them, covering professional, amateur, little league, and even informal backyard games. Some of the causes of the deaths cataloged in the book are only incidentally related to the game of baseball, such as suffering from heat stroke or falls from the stands, or, for example, a major league umpire

Starting point is 00:22:56 who collapsed during a game in 1996 because he had postponed treatment for a heart condition so that he could call the opening day game. Being hit by lightning is a surprisingly frequent cause of death at baseball games, although the Slate article points out that maybe it's a little less surprising when you think about how baseball is played mainly during the summer and usually on flat fields surrounded by things such as metal bleachers and fences. A particularly striking example is that during a 1949 amateur game in Florida, the second and third baseman and shortstop were all killed by a single lightning bolt, which struck the backstop and then traveled around the infield. Some of the deaths recounted in Death at the Ballpark are more directly related to the gameplay. Casual games played on improvised fields have led to

Starting point is 00:23:42 players chasing balls and running into the paths of cars or buses or even in one case a hearse. In another example, a third baseman in an Indiana league in 1909 tagged out a runner who plowed headfirst into his gut and then died three days later from the resulting internal injuries. And baseball involves hard projectiles traveling at high speeds. According to the article in Slate, a typical baseball game sees 35 to 40 balls rocketing into the stands, some of them traveling at up to 100 miles an hour. The author of the article himself witnessed a woman getting smacked in her breast with a foul ball during a game, and after the ball ended up by his foot, he gave it to her after she straightened up and stopped moaning. And Gorman, one of the authors of the

Starting point is 00:24:25 book, was actually struck in the forehead himself by a foul ball at a minor league game while he was working on the book. Examples of deaths from errant balls listed in the book include a semi-pro pitcher who died after being struck in the head simultaneously by both a thrown and a batted ball while he was warming up, and an amateur shortstop in 1902 who got hit in the throat with a ball but who managed to throw out the runner at first in his very last moments. And there's a whole section of death at the ballpark devoted to death by commotio cordis, or concussion of the heart, a frequently fatal disruption of heart rhythm caused by being struck in the chest directly over the heart at a very specific

Starting point is 00:25:05 point in the heart rhythm cycle. It sounds really specific, but has managed to claim several pages worth of victims over the years. And then there is the rather unusual way that the man in our lateral thinking puzzle managed to die. Apparently, Gorman and Weeks had both heard this story for themselves, but they had also assumed that it was probably apocryphal until they found the local newspaper article confirming it, and they do believe it to be true, that a foul ball managed to cause a man to stab himself to death. Wow, I never thought you'd say that. I know. And while looking into this topic, I came across a 2016 article in Current Sports Medicine Report that was a compilation of publicly available media reports of injuries sustained specifically by spectators at Major League Baseball games from 2009 to 2014. The authors found a total of 33 such injuries between those years, including six fatalities.

Starting point is 00:26:06 fatalities. The most common cause of injury in MLB spectators were foul balls, affecting 39% of those injured, falls, such as down a staircase or over walls or off of railings, sometimes while trying to catch a ball, affecting 27% of the group, broken or flying bats, 15%, and violent assault, 6%. The 2009 Slate article on death at the ballpark had noted that surprisingly only one fan in the last 150 years had actually been killed by a foul ball at a Major League Baseball game. And similarly, in the 2016 article, there were no reported fatalities from foul balls, although some fans were rather seriously injured by them, including suffering skull fractures and brain injuries. Of the six reported fatalities, four were due to a jump or a fall, and two were from assaults.

Starting point is 00:26:48 I'm trying to think what I would have guessed if you hadn't told me anything, like what numbers I would have come up with. I don't know what I would have said, but it wouldn't have been this many. I don't think I would have thought of the assaults. I mean, I guess that makes sense wherever you're going to have large crowds of people gathering, but I don't think I would have guessed that people were dying from being assaulted at baseball games or that they were falling off of walls or things, you know. And of all the injuries cataloged in the article,

Starting point is 00:27:13 the oddest one to me was that a 53-year-old male suffered a detached retina after he was hit by a hot dog thrown by a mascot. That must give you a story to tell people. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We always appreciate hearing your comments and follow-ups. So please send any that you have to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an odd-sounding situation, and I have to try to guess what is going on, asking yes or no questions. This is from listener Emmett B., who is eight years old.

Starting point is 00:27:53 Oh. I'm swinging in the backyard, and when the power goes out, I swing higher. Why? Wow. When the power goes out. When the power goes out, meaning the electricity shuts off. Yes. Okay. Huh. When you say swinging, do you mean like on a swing set?

Starting point is 00:28:14 Yes. On a swing? Yes. Is there anything about the swing that I need to understand? No. But somehow the electricity going off, would you say the electricity going off enables him, physically enables him to swing higher? No. But somehow the electricity going off, would you say the electricity going off enables him, physically enables him to swing higher? No.

Starting point is 00:28:30 Would you say that because the electricity is going off, he swings higher because, for example, his parents won't be able to see him and he's going higher than they usually let him go? No, that's a great guess, but no, that's not it. Like the lights shut off in the backyard. Okay, so it's not that he is now physically enabled to do something that he couldn't do before, you said. That's right, right. Hmm.

Starting point is 00:28:56 Does this have something to do with parents in any way? Yes. And what they normally... Huh. Were his parents, were either one of his parents parents at least one of his parents in the backyard with him before the electricity went off no did they come into the backyard at least one of them when the electricity did shut off yes does it matter how many parents or which parent no okay so he's swinging in the backyard.

Starting point is 00:29:26 Yes. By himself? Yes. Okay. The power goes out and at least one adult appears in the backyard. Yes. Do they do something that enables him to swing higher, like push him? Yes.

Starting point is 00:29:40 Because the power's gone out? Basically, yes. The answer is because someone who would otherwise be doing something requiring electricity inside comes out and pushes me. Aww, that's a very cute puzzle. Thank you so much, Emmett. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet would not still be here if it weren't for the generous support of our listeners.

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Starting point is 00:30:30 extra lateral thinking puzzles, outtakes, and peeks behind the scenes of the show. At our website, you can also graze through over 11,000 exceptional esoterica, browse the Futility Closet store, learn about the Futility Closet books, and see 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. All of our music was written and performed by Greg's phenomenal brother, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 312-The Last of the Yahi

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