Radiolab - Things

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

From a piece of the Wright brother's plane to a child’s sugar egg, today: Things! Important things, little things, personal things, things you can hold and things that can take hold of you. This hour, we investigate the objects around us, their power to move us, and whether it's better to look back or move on, hold on tight or just let go.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C.

C. C? Yeah. And NPR. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab. And today, we're going to begin in a place.

Robert, come in here. Oh. Oh, my God. A place full of wonderful things. This is the actual sled that Henson and Perry used to first go to the North Pole. These are Napoleon's books and his conquest to Egypt. Look at the antlers over there. So wait, where are you exactly?

Before I tell you that, let me just explain something. My wife and I, Tamar, have been having an argument for roughly, it's going on now 40 years, and it's always about things. Like objects? Like objects, yeah. So as you know. You have a thing about things. You give me like an autograph, like an Abraham Lincoln autograph.

I think, okay, Abe Lincoln stood in front of this very piece of paper in order to write his signature in this very way. He had to be standing exactly where I'm standing, and therefore he and I share this space. I literally believe that I am standing in Abraham Lincoln's shadow, so to touch an Abraham Lincoln autograph is a form of time travel, a form of love. It's all those things, and I can do that without even blinking. Right.

Tamar. Not at all. But also, Robert's sense of the magic of it extends to, we have a really, really ugly floor lamp from a long time ago. And every time I would say, enough already, let's get rid of it, you'd say... It's older than me. I've had it all my life. Which makes it beautiful. You don't have that at all?

I don't have that at all. So, in honor of our topic today, I decided that we're going to settle this argument once and for all. I took Tamar to the Explorers Club right here in Manhattan. Ah. Wait, what's the Explorers Club? It's a little private club where explorers deposit things that they collected. Everything in this building has some historical significance in some sense. That's Will Roseman, their executive director. He gave us a tour. This is the actual bell from the SS Roosevelt when Perrin Hanson first went to the North Pole.

How cool is that? Very cool. But not magic. The chair over there belonged to the Empress Dowage of China. The last emperor. That chair there? He points to what looks like a little desk chair. The Empress Dowager of China sat in it?

Yeah, that was her chair. Did you just make you want to sit in it? Yes. Why don't you sit in it first? She sits. Nothing. You feel nothing. Just close your eyes.

Nothing. And imagine that you are the last empress in a hugely long line of Chinese emperces going back probably a thousand years. I would order them to make more comfortable chairs. Wait, don't get up yet. Just give it a chance. There's nothing that's going to seep into me. Yes, there is. No, there isn't.

I don't know, man. Look, look, this was never going to be easy. Tamar is a New York Times reporter. Very reasonable, very sensible. And after all, I was just a chair. This was just the beginning. They have things in this place. I was going to break her.

Step by step. Will walked us to the next room. These are... Where they had pieces of fabric that were framed on display. Scraps of, you know, early planes were made out of canvas. And these are actual pieces of those early planes. Here's a Wright Brothers plane.

What do you mean? You mean this is the fabric from the actual first? Absolutely. Oh, man. There was a small brown piece of fabric, not much larger than your fist, was cut from the wing of their first airplane. So the wind, the wind rushed over that little piece of fabric the first time. Yeah.

Wow. Very cool, very interesting, happy to see it. No, but like when you're standing next to the fabric that lifted into the sky for the first time in America, you don't feel just a touch closer to Uber and Orville, right, not even a touch? I feel what a wonderful collection. How interesting. It's amazing. I mean, I'm feeling it.

I'm feeling. That's amazing. And Tamar? Do I feel that? No. So. I'm trying to think it's something that was quite incorrect. Correct.

He's trying to pull out the big guns. I don't see how you can get bigger than what you already offered. Well, there's more. All right. Maybe this will convince you. This is an actual flag, an Explorers Club flag, that accompanied Buzz Aldrin Neil Armstrong when they first landed on the moon in 1969.

So this is one of these three things. That piece of cloth right there? It is, yeah. It was on the moon? Absolutely. It was carried by Neil Armstrong when he first. landed on the moon in 1969. Oh, my God.

It was in a little glass box. You could see it was a royal blue Explorers Club flag. Very small, probably made of silk. You let her touch it? Yeah, I can, you know what? I'll have to get the key. Let's have her touch the flag

that was the first flag on the day that humans got onto the moon. You think a little emanation will come and there'll be sparks and go into my body and suddenly, boom. Yes, yes. Okay, we've opened up the cabinet. You now got it in your hands.

Go ahead, Tamer. It feels very nice. It's a little flag. This was on the moon. This was on the moon brought there by the people from our planet, the first people ever to land on the moon. They brought this with them. Yes.

Touch it again. Okay, you touch it. Well, I'm going to touch it. Okay, here I go. Pretty neat, right? Oh, man. Coming down the ladder now? I'd say good.

That's one small step for man. One. Andy, you better touch it. I mean, I'm pretty pumped to touch it. I don't have it. I just, I don't have it. I don't have it. I gotta go to work, though. Okay. This has been a total treat. Well, it was our pleasure.

Thanks so much for coming. You? You lose. Oh, really? Look, maybe she's just open to the future. She doesn't want to have to carry all that baggage that you came up. I think that's exactly right. You know, you're going into a swoon about a lamp that's clearly an ugly ass lamp.

She's not an ugly ass. Don't take her side. Give me a new lamp. Let's be available to the new lamps of the world. I'm not going to admit or even. and consider anything you just said, except that you're probably right about the future orientation.

Do you know what else I'm right about? What? That every story that we have in this hour is basically that argument you just had with your wife in story form. Yeah. Object form. In each of these stories,

there is a thing, and the thing beckons. Or not. Today on Radio Lab. Things. Everybody say something. Hello. Hello.

All right, so what are we doing? Well, we're talking about objects, I believe. Yes. And I understand you guys are kicking around some ideas, but it seems my ideas are in a bit of a different orbit than yours are. Maybe there's a connection. Yeah, I don't know that we have an orbit yet. I think we've launched. Okay, so our first story comes from TV producer Vin Leota, longtime TV guy, who connected up with us because it turns out he is making a documentary about this very thing, people's connection to objects.

I was like, my interest in objects is things that sort of have accidentally gotten meaning. For Vin, even if you have a little scrap of something that's gone to the moon and back. It's nothing compared to Rick Rawlins' sugar egg. Rick Rollins Sugar Ed? Rick Rawlins. Yes. Actually, the story he wanted to tell us has three parts. It's about a candy egg, a box, and a tree.

A candy egg, a box, and a tree. Yeah. So this is what I would suggest is I have some clips, some short clips, and I'd like to sort of weave the clips together, sort of get, maybe throw it out that way rather than telling you about them. Why don't we try? I see we're dealing with a storyteller. Yeah.

We'll wait until you hear the clips for us, right? So, okay, let me just play a clip. This is like a short clip. This is just an intro to Rick. I love this box. Wow. It's beautiful, about the size of a shirt box. It's made out of maple.

Very light and color it, very delicate. And he keeps his most treasured objects in it. One of them is this sugar egg that we were talking about. It's not a real egg? No, it's molded sugar. It's hollow in the center, light yellow. Something someone might eat. Someone might eat it.

I have not eaten it. I've saved it since 1970 when I was given this egg. Since 19. What? He saved it. This is an edible egg that's been saved. Does it stay edible if you kept it from 1970? It looks remarkably good for a 40-year-old.

It hasn't dissolved under the weight of time, and it's... No, apparently, it's, well, it's pristine. I've seen it. What is a sugar egg? What is that? Well, apparently it's half of an egg. It's hollow. It's made out of sugar, and you would put things like jelly beans in it.

You seal the edges with frosting, and then you decorate the outside. So there must have been some reason why he has memorialized this. Look, I'm glad you mention it. I just happened to have another clip to play for you. Imagine my surprise. The day that we were to leave. Oh, wait. Can we stop for a second?

Yeah, sure. I'm sorry. You know what? I didn't set it up because one of the things I have to say about Rick was when he was a kid, his family moved around a lot. Apparently, Rick's dad did a lot of work for the government, so almost every year he would find himself in a totally different town. And to make things worse, he was a very shy kid.

Kept to himself a lot. So for Rick, friendship just often seemed impossible. But Vin says there was this one moment. When he was eight, they lived in Washington State only for a year, and he found himself in a dilemma because he had finally made a friend, and his friend David invited him to a birthday party. But it happened to be that he, his birthday party was scheduled the very day that we were to move again.

So my father was once again transferred this time from Washington back to Idaho, and my parents had decided that I couldn't attend the birthday party because there wasn't time. So the moving van was sitting there, everybody was ready to go, and I don't think I even asked my parents, I don't think they know that I left. But I took off, and I ran up the street to David's house. I still can picture this moment. His house was a brick house, and he had a large porch that was completely empty, and I know that I paused there. Even though I was only eight, I must have known that our friendship really wasn't at the point where it demanded a goodbye, especially if that meant that I had to interrupt his birthday party.

But I rang the doorbell, and his mother answered the door. And I remember seeing basically from her knees down and beyond her into the back of the house which was bright and loud where the party was going on. And a few seconds later, David showed up. He was kind of behind her. And I don't remember saying a word.

You were just standing in... I was just frozen and standing there, completely embarrassed and not knowing why I had done this. And I was about to leave when David's mom apparently asked him to go get something and he left and a few seconds later returned and handed me this yellow sugar egg. The very same egg here in your box.

Yes. I walked back to my parents' house. We were loaded into the back of their station wagon and we drove from there to Idaho and I know that I held this in my hand the entire way. to let go of it. I put it in a drawer and it has lived in various places for all these years.

Why? Yes, it begs the question, doesn't it? You know, the truth is, I knew its importance immediately and it hasn't changed. I looked at this egg and it was proof, physical proof,

that I had been invited to a birthday party and that there was a hope of making a friendship. And I held on to it because I needed that proof. That's actually very wonderful. Yeah, yeah. But wait, there's the tree.

The tree. We did the box. We did the egg. But then there's the tree. Do we need the tree? The egg. I'm all of it. I'm swept into the egg. No, I'm bringing it together.

I'll bring the narrative threads together. I want more egg, Vin. Give me more egg. No, we need to play the tree. So yeah, my parents bought a home in Idaho. This is right after the egg incident? Yeah. This is in the Snake River Valley in Idaho.

It's very flat. It's very wide. Their new backyard was a barren landscape. So my family, they started planting all kinds of things in the yard. They planted apple trees and pine trees, cherry. And amongst them was a maple tree. That was Rick's favorite. It grew very quickly and it enveloped the house in a certain way.

In the breeze? Oh, it sounded like suede, rubbed together, just amplified by hundreds of thousands of leaves. It was beautiful. Rick lived there with his family for 10 years until college. I moved to Boston, and I learned that my father had decided that the tree was planted too close to the house, and that it would damage the foundation, and he chopped it down. It was a massacre.

It was brutal. And I was very upset. And so my mother, knowing that, she mailed me a package. And I opened it to find that she had placed in it some small sprouted seedlings from the original maple tree. We dug a hole in the backyard and plopped it in the ground behind the garage. And it thrived. It grew really well. And within a number of years, it had grown to be a 30-foot.

tree reminded me obviously of the tree that I had loved and lost in Idaho. And it became so large, unfortunately, that it also caught the attention of my landlord, who tragically, one night I got back from work to discover that he had chopped down the maple tree. The son of the tree. The same grisly end. Well, you would think so. I went out into the yard that night, and I salvaged these sections of the tree. Rick gave the wood to a friend. A furniture maker in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Who turned it into a box?

This box, the one right here, made from the maple that grew from... You know the story. Yeah, wow. There's this continuity. I find such comfort from that. So it, in turn, holds all these objects that have their own individual stories and their own meaning to me. One of them is this yellow sugar egg.

The egg the tree in the box. That's nice. That's really nice, man. That's very nice. Although, part of me, doesn't part of you want to smack Rick a little bit and be like... Well, no, you know, I certainly... Okay, it's a... Tree!

You're living in the past, man. Move on! No, I actually don't. Not me. Yeah. If you could put the box in a house made from the teeth of his dog with the thing, I would say, okay. Yeah. Just keep multiplying this.

Oh, how I wish we'd left it there. You know, sort of the thing about objects is that, like, you can't really experience them unless you touch them and interact with them. Like, that's how you get the essence of what's in there. But at a certain point, our producer, Louie, who really produced this show, had this great idea for an experiment that we could do. Where we would make 3D printed versions of the objects and the stories. And then have, like, an exhibit where people can come and see them while they listen to the audio. Or even if they have access to a 3D printer, they could just print a version. wherever they are.

So we asked Rick if we could scan his egg. I'm not sure what will happen, but I thought it was an intriguing idea. He was game, so Lynn found a place that does that near him. We asked him to bring his egg in. The technician put it into the scanner. It's a machine that takes like 360 degree images. Which you can then use to print a replica. Just a little bit of melted plastic and voila, there it is.

And here's what happened. Rick dropped the egg off for a scan. This egg that he had been cherishing for over 40 years. for over 40 years. I had to leave it for a couple hours. Shortly after he does, he gets a call from the scanning technician who tells him something happened. You know, she said, the bottom line is

the egg is broken. She said, I hope it wasn't a family heirloom. Finn met up with Rick as he was just getting back from the print shop with his bag of egg pieces. I closed this up at the store. I didn't really even look too much. Oh my God. It looks like it's in about seven pieces

in this plastic bag. There it is. Yes. Hi, is this Rick? It is Rick. How are you? This is Jad from Radio Lab. Jad, hi.

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

to walk into this store that is devoted to the future and all these machines sitting around that are turning out almost magically these new things. And I, on the other hand, am standing there to collect the shards of a sugar egg that I've held on to for 40 plus years.

And it just felt a dullness kind of heavy, like everything was just a little bit muddied for a while. It took a little while for that to wear off. And it did with an amazing clarity. Hey, Max. Hi, hey, we're going to see you. One morning, I think it was two days after the egg had been broken. He says he woke up. And an idea came to me.

He thought, I should call Max. Max. Max is the son of a friend of his who lives down the street. So we do one and a half tablespoons any. Yeah. He's eight, exactly the same age that I was when I got the first egg. Nice scoop of yellow. And so I asked him if he would.

help me recreate the sugar egg. Kind of smiled and said, sure. Maybe two now that you've got some in there already. This big scoop. Going right here. Already finish an egg. All but one.

I was exactly your age. So exactly eight years old. And I was invited to a friend's birthday party. And I couldn't go because of their family's family. Special thanks to Vin Leota who provided us with much of the tape you just heard of Rick and well pretty much the whole thing he is doing a documentary

which is why he's got all that stuff about people who attach to everyday things Oh and and in terms of the the egg breaking we actually we have we found somebody who does like restoration for movie stuff and we've offered Rick to

to have that person fix the egg with epoxy or whatever An offer he agreed to accept. Happy to say. And also, interestingly enough, mid-scan, you know, the scan that broke the egg, actually we have that scan. Because the scanning machine was actually running at the very moment when the egg broke. So we actually have a scan of the millisecond when it fell apart. It's at radiolab.org.

Hi, this is Vinlyota. All right, this is for Crohn's. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan is the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. End of message. Okay, I'm Jedd. I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab, and today, things. I just, I wanted to check in. This is the usual radio lab style, which it means that I can basically natter on forever.

Whatever you like. All right, so this is Allison Gopnik. She's a professor of psychology and philosophy. At the University of California at Berkeley. And the author of The Philosophical Baby. And the reason we called her up is that, you know, truthfully, after the egg situation. We broke an egg to make this program if you're just joining us now. We weren't planning to.

It just happened. We feel really crappy about it, frankly. But it got us thinking about the fragility of objects. And for me, that called to mind an idea that I've always been thinking about, you know, being the father of two young kids, about object permanence, which is this whole idea in child psychology, that when babies are really young, when an object disappears from their view,

they think it's gone forever. That's the peek-a-boo game. Exactly, that's what makes it fun, because, like, from their perspective, thought is, you're gone forever, and then you're back. Then you're gone forever, and then you're back. So I thought this would be a cool idea

for us to explore about how, like, from the very beginning, we're born with no concept that objects would stick around. But when we talked with Alison Gopnik, the first thing she told us was that... Well, it's a little more complicated than that. Of course. Of course, right? It's science.

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

You know the woe because babies look much longer at things that they don't expect that are surprising. Oh, I see. It's as if they're sitting there saying, you know, what the? They very rarely finish that expression, though. All right, so I was wrong. Fine. But here's the really surprising thing. Now suppose what happens is a yellow duck goes behind the screen. Moving left to right and then out the other side.

Instead of the yellow duck, there's a little blue bunny. Now, most adults, if they saw this, would be like, What the? But the babies are totally blasey about that. What? If a yellow duck goes in one side of the screen and then magically, the blue duck appears on the other side of the screen, until they're about a year old, babies don't seem to be phased by that. And she suspects that the reason for that is that the most important thing about the duck to the babies

is not that it is yellow or round or duck-like in any way. it was its trajectory, its story. What it did in the past, what its history is. Like, this is an object that was moving left to right. And when it emerged from the screen, it was still an object moving left to right. And there are experiments with adults that are kind of amazing. Where you sort of see the same thing. You take a room full of students, divide them in half.

You say, okay, everybody on the left half of the room is now going to get a, you know, University of California at Berkeley mug. And then you say to them, all right, all of you guys who have a mug, how much would you sell your mug for? And then you ask the people on the other side of the class, how much would you pay to buy that mug? And you get people to write it down on a piece of paper. Well, it turns out the people who actually already have the mug on their desk think that it's much more valuable than the people on the other side.

So they would demand much more for their mug. Keep in mind, they've only spent one minute with this mug. But somehow over that minute, she says, the mug gets imbued with something, some kind of essence. There's something, and again, you can see this even with children. There's something about mindness. There's something about possession, about the relationship that I have to the objects that I care about, that goes beyond just what their superficial features are.

Oh, I think that makes such deeply obvious sense to me. I'm surprised that it was even a discovery. If I have a relationship with a thing, like I'm going to see my girlfriend and the railroad man gives me the ticket. And it turns out to be a fabulous date. Then I put the ticket in my pocket and then I saved the ticket for 40 years. Anytime I want to go back

to the day that I had the great date, I just touched the ticket. Yeah, I don't have that at all. You don't have that at all? Well, no, I have it a little bit, but I just, no, I throw it, yeah. You throw them away. I throw them away.

You got to purge, man. You know, some of us are more sentimental about the past and about objects than others are. And she says, interestingly, for those weirdos like you, Robert, who get super romantic about their things, there might be a deep evolutionary reason for it.

Now, you always have to take these evolutionary reasons with a grain of salt. But she says, if you look at patterns of cashing, for example, is what it's called in biology. You know, like the squirrel who hides his nuts. The squirrels keep really good track of which nuts they have

and what their histories are. And one possibility is that some of our relationship about at least physical objects stems from this history of the history of being mammals who keep track of what we've got and what we don't have. It's my inner squirrel. Right. You know, we do talk about people, squirreling things away. Is there something that's got this kind of deeper evolutionary background?

And I think there is some evidence that... But isn't there also like a counter-squarel instinct? I mean, like, there's that famous thing with observation that young male baboons when they get to a certain age, will get gripped by wanderlust and then just wander away from the troop, which is good because it prevents inbreeding. Yeah, I think there is actually reason to think that we all live on this kind of emotional bungee cord.

You know, boeing between the squirrel and baboon. And she says it's interesting to think about, like, what's going to happen to our bungeeness now that we're entering a world where objects are becoming just information? What will happen when we have 3D printers that are going to be like the replicators on Star Trek that can just keep producing replicas of objects. Might actually mess with some of our most basic instincts.

Philosophers, philosophers are always great about having wonderful, crazy thought experiments to try to demonstrate this. So one of them is the swamp man. It's a famous thought experiment. Not exactly clear why it's a swamp man and not some other kind of man, but here's how it goes.

Here's the story of the swamp man. Imagine you're standing next to a swamp, You're you. And in the swamp, there's a bunch of bubbling gases. Chemical reactions. Bubbling and interacting in some weird organic way. But whatever, you're just standing there.

But then, a bolt of lightning comes out of the sky and kills you. And then, another one comes out of the sky, hits the swamp, catalyzing all that chemistry into overdrive and somehow miraculously, for just a moment the reactions come together

in just the right way to form. Hi, I'm Robert. A man. completely identical to you, Robert. I'm Robert. A brand new you. If you took every single molecule in the Swampman's body, it would be exactly like yours at this very moment. So here's the question.

Does Swamp Robert remember that date? Or does Swamp Robert care about the ticket? You're saying that Swamp Gas Robert is molecule for molecule, atom for atom, identical to this Robert right here. Exactly. So you're saying, are the memories and experiences of his life suddenly? contained in that facsimile. That's the question. And most people's intuition is...

No. Nah. Absolutely not. I'm not even hesitating. Why not? Because I believe that my date and the ticket that took me to that date, they belong to me and not to Adams. And I don't know.

What's the difference between me and my Adams? I don't know. But I know it's there. Right. Well, because the atoms of you sitting right there actually, went on that date, whereas the atoms of swamp gas robber weren't there. Right. You think you got it exactly right, Jed. It's something about the history. It's the fact that, you know, Robert's atoms really were in that place. They really were there with that person.

Although I could tell a version of the swamp gas robber that would, I think, solve this problem. If Robert, this robber, instead of the lightning, he just got into the swamp, submerged himself, co-mingled his atoms with the swamp gas atoms, and then he got out and went on his way. If then later, even like years later, the swamp I'm Robert, spat out a copy. The fact that the real Robert was there to begin with and that the copy somehow touched and almost like a baton passing,

I could see that the date would be in the copy. I think you might be... Do you agree with me there? I think I might. I've always explained it to myself through a sense of touch. That is, my wife has a very different view of this than me, but I one day, while sitting around in the office,

get a letter unbidden from the first man on the moon from Neil Armstrong. Just write something about I had written. He said, and it says, Commander Neil Armstrong, that's very flattering. And if it had come in any other form but by email, I would have framed it. I would have given it a special place of honor. But since it arrived from a machine to my machine and then out of a machine to another machine to a flat piece of paper,

You can't give it that thing? I can't give it the ticket to the date thing. I can't. That's weird. Why? Because Neil Armstrong never touched it. Yeah, but you and I are old, Robert, so maybe that's... Well, yeah, so, Jed, you don't have that feeling?

Well, no, the moment you said it, I thought I was constructing an image in my mind of Neil Armstrong at a computer touching the keyboard. and there is an unbridgeable gulf between his fingers and that paper you're holding. They never actually touched each other. I mean, if you think about it as touch, then you're right, I guess. Because he's now dead. And I think if just touching the paper, he would just be a little, I don't know, closer somehow. Well, it's a funny tension, I think, because, you know what, both science and And at least some philosophical and even religious traditions tell us is that the world is impermanent.

Nothing in it stays the same. We don't stay the same. Our bodies don't stay the same. The people that we love and the things we love don't stay the same. That's just the truth of the matter is that there's this constant impermanence and this constant flux. And some philosophers have argued over the years we should just embrace that. We would be freer if we didn't try to hold that flux for a moment. I have to say my feeling about it is part of what makes everything so precious to us is exactly the fact that we know it's going to disappear.

We know it's impermanent. We know it won't last. But what we love is this thing now. We love our, for me, the most dramatic example of this is our relationship to our children. So we know they're going to go. We know that in 20 years from now, if they treat us with affectionate contempt, we'll be doing really well. But that doesn't change the fact that right now it's this child and not any other child in the universe, just this one. And I think there's something really deep and profound about our human lives that the fact that we can do both of those things, we recognize the impermanence, but that we feel the attachments.

That seems to me to give our life its very special texture. Wow, that's exactly, I could just put that whole thing you just said in the frame and I just bowed. down. Well, don't bow too soon, my friend, because the next segment is going to hurt. It's going to hurt. Tamar wind is blowing. That's all I'll say. My name's Annalise, and I'm calling right before going to bed in Des Moines, Iowa. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloon.org. Life seems very small as it is day to day.

And then you just have these moments. What's there? They just open it up. Scorpion, sighting. Into something much more complex and rich. Where is it? Oh. Hey, I'm Chad.

I'm Boomeran. I'm Robert Pellewitch. This is Radio Lab. Today. Things. And our next story involves one thing, three people. Craig. I'm Craig Childs.

Who you just heard? I'm a writer and traveler from Western Colorado. Reagan. I'm Reagan Choi. I'm an artist and a mother and an educator. You know each other? Oh, yeah, we're married. And finally, Dirk.

Dirk Vaughn. I was a street cop in mostly Denver. Craig's a unlikely best buddy. I mean, if we'd have been to school together, I would have just beat this out of him in the playground. You know, we drive each other mad, but in the end, we can still scramble around just fine. Part of what joined us is we were in love with wilderness. For years, they would take these trips together out into the wilderness of Colorado or Utah.

No maps, no GPS, no trails. No campfires even. Dirk and I would go off for weeks in the desert together. I think the longest trip we took was a month out, just wandering, looking for routes. And it was on one of these trips that they made a discovery that I think it's fair to say still haunts them today. And recently, almost killed one of our producers. So we'd been out for a couple of days. On this particular occasion, the three of them are together, and there are a couple days into a hike.

Where are we again? We're in Utah? Yeah, Utah. Think desert, but rocky. Slick rock, sandstone, cliffs. Canyon land. So they're hiking through all these canyons. And we actually, we split up.

Reagan said she wanted to set her own camp. And so she stayed in one canyon, and Dirk and I, popped over into the next canyon over. Really? You just, is that a normal thing? Or were you guys fighting? No, that's normal. We weren't fighting at all.

It's one of the great things about being out together is that there's an ease with that. So separating is part of the deal. Yeah. And I think Reagan was looking at Dirk and me and saying, you guys are going to go scrambling and get weird. I'm going to stay over here. I don't know if that was the case. Well, part of it was just that I was.

at least five months pregnant, and I was just starting to have a really hard time tightening my backpack so that the weight wasn't all on my shoulders. And she says, while she was hiking, the pregnancy hormones were giving her bouts of vertigo. It was just starting to hit her. Like, wow, in a couple of months, things are going to be really different. So she needed some alone time. She set her own camp. Durk and Craig, meanwhile, scale up this cliff face to get to the next canyon over. And when we get to the very close to the top, and there's a little flat area. This balcony. of rock overlooking the canyon below. This little ledge.

So we said, well, okay. Let's just sit here, have some lunch. Break out the pipe. Smoke some pot. Exactly. So we sit down and we literally both have like the first lung full. When Craig decides to take his backpack off. And he leans over.

And I notice as I'm bending over a round object underneath the edge of a boulder back under the shack. And he says, hey, there's a pot under there. So is it straight vertically below you? I'm eye to eye with it. And then I dropped to my knees and looked into this shadow, and there was this beautiful red jar. Low and flat, covered in maybe 700, 800, maybe 1,000 years of dust. It's a kind that's called a seed jar with just this narrow mouth on the top.

and had black paint design around the mouth. We're talking about early Pueblo people, cliff dwellers, people who lived out in that desert a thousand years ago. And as he looked closer, he could see that this particular jar... It had a crack down the front of it, and it had two holes drilled around the crack, and then a piece of yucca twine had been used to tie the holes together. Oh, so it was precious to somebody?

Yeah. So they might have left it there. Maybe it was during a migration. Thinking they would return at some time. Maybe they were on the run. I mean, someone was hiding it from other people? Yes. You don't know who it was, if it was male or female, or what clan or any of those stories,

but you know it was a human being in the same position that you're in right there, doing the same thing, the same gesture. You can see the hand reaching out and placing the object. You can imagine the hands and the feet and the people and the sounds that they would. make. They stared at it for about an hour, not really saying much. And then suddenly it just hits Dirk. Oh. Wait a second. We got to move this thing. Somebody else is going to find this. It just felt like if we can just kind of luck into it. What's to stop some four-wheel driving? Bipedal pillager. From doing the same. Because it's an access route. I don't know. I felt

sort of protective of it. Because, you know, pot hunters were all over the southwest, looting dig sites, and that jar would be worth a lot of money. tens of thousands of dollars, at least. You wanted to make sure they somehow didn't get their hands on this. And so I thought, well, let's hide it. Craig was like, no. I said absolutely not. The moment we touch that jar?

It no longer is part of that story. It's now part of our story. He's a purist. We do not move this thing. Not move it. Protect it. Let's cover it. I wanted to build a corral of stone around it to, like, camouflage it.

That's exactly what I'd be looking for. In fact, I wouldn't notice the seed jar. I'd notice the rock, and I would go, ooh, somebody's hiding something. Yeah, right. Dirk's looking at me going, you and your Yoda crap. God damn. And he says, we could give this another 700 years of life. Hell, it had been there probably a thousand years.

So how do you resolve this? He said, you know, we'll come back tomorrow. We'll just leave it for now. Oh, so you left in a draw. We left in a draw, and we actually hopped back over the canyon to find Reagan. Reagan's kind of like this badass samurai. a chick, I thought, well, oh yeah, I can, I'll be able to draft Reagan over to my side. So they hiked back up to that ledge, yelled out for her, and the next day she hiked on over

to where they were. I remember her hitching up her pants, pregnancy style and kind of squatting down to get in there. What was your first thought when you saw it? Focus. And just being right there completely consumed in that moment. And I think it went on for a long time because eventually they're like, so! What do you think? I want to hear the truth, what we should do.

Oh, you guys argued back and forth for at least an hour and a half, and I just ignored you for most of it because I was just looking at the seed jar. I wasn't really thinking to be in the position of Arbiter. But I just got fed up, and I was like, that's enough, you guys. Leave it alone. It's part of an ongoing story. Like, just give it up. Leave it alone.

And so... So she takes some pictures and we... And we walk away. And within a year of that moment Everything just like went whirlwind Reagan and Craig had a baby Craig decides to become a writer He writes a book, it becomes a bestseller

I quit the business and got divorced Everything changed But even on that day They knew This will be the center of things we talk about For the rest of our lives The seed jar Yeah the day we found the seed jar

Do you think it's still there? I think it's still there I think it is The route's pretty complicated. With that particular location, I'd say 50-50. Topps. Again, if only that were the end of the story. I don't think you're going to be in the same view.

You know, we could have done the thing where you're just like, oh, the narrative power of objects, meta, blah, blah. No, we were like, is the damn thing there? Or did someone take it? We got so curious about this that we convinced Craig, Reagan, and Dirk to go back. Now they're here. And check. And we sent our producer, Molly Webster, along for the ride.

Past the camp, it's just a ride. I didn't realize when they were, like, giving each other a hug the first night at camp, and I was there with my recorder shoved in their faces. It was actually, like, a big moment. I guess this is a reunion trip. We haven't seen Dirk in ages. Reagan had said that one of the last times, now that people have kids and families, one of the last times they were together was this seed jar.

Oh, you're talking? Yay, we're so happy here. And so they were really, really, really excited to, like, be together. Wait, how long ago was this when they found the thing? It was 11 years ago. This was 11 years ago? Yeah, so the kids were, Reagan was five months pregnant, and the kid she was pregnant with is Jasper.

Turn off the light and come on out. Come on out. He's now, he just had his 11th birthday. Did I bring my backpack out? Close the door and come say hi. Hi. Hey, man, I'm Molly. I'm Dirk.

Dirk had never met their kids. Well, he had, but the last time he saw Jasper, Jasper was a baby. And the other thing is, I'm just going to say, Craig and Dirk are like brothers from another mother. Oh, yeah. Like, they are like the bestest bromance. I have every season. They love each other so much.

So anyway, so we get there and we like drop our bags. We go to sleep. And get out of the sleeping bag. You woke up, four-wheel drove or drive. I don't actually know how that goes. Out into the mesas. Parked the cars. And then we hiked a mile and a half to the edge of the mesa.

Wow. Basically, the entire landscape felt like they had just put me on a bonanza set. It was like gnarly. warpy trees, red, red sandy sandstone. You're on this mesa, and then it falls off into this canyon, and then there's, like, another mesa. And then that falls off into a canyon, there's another mesa, and then that, and it's just this, like, unending landscape.

But look, we're floating up here now. Yeah. And there's, is it just, like... There's no sound. There's no cars in distance? No sounds, no nothing. It's infinite. I mean, I know we came out the top and across when we went back to get Reagan.

And basically our objective was to go somewhere into this like canyon land. Drop down to where Reagan was camp before. Yeah, yeah, and come along that. And somehow find like a tiny little seat jar. It's weird to go back because I like to think of it. Like this is going to change things. If it's not there... But do not find a seed door, I'm going to be so mad.

I like to be out in the world and just think about it. Just go, okay, there's a seed jar sitting there under a... or boulder right now and it will be there for the longest time and it's just quiet. And I can imagine the wind going around it and more sand building up. And it's just this really nice thought of isolation and perpetuity. I kind of want to hear it echo. So we set up camp on the edge of a mesa and then we all went to sleep. What's the flute town?

The flute, that's, I don't know, Craig apparently has a flute in his bag. Dirk calls him flute boy. It was weirdly appropriate. So anyway, so we, so we wake up like first light. Is today the day, guys? Today's the day we go find out if the egg is still there in the nest. Today's the day. We start hiking, we go down this 800-foot descent.

Watch out for those rocks. No femurs are broken. Then we strap this down. The Anasazi were some tough people. We'd wind around this canyon, moving on these cliffs sides, through a saddle, around the back of another canyon. How long did this hike take? To get out there, it probably took six, maybe seven hours. Wow.

We're going pretty slow. The kids were amazing, but also slow. It was starting to, like, it was starting to bug Dirk, I think, is the way to say it. Oh, it's really hot. Sun's straight overhead. I think they'll end up having to park the kids somewhere. Sure enough, at the end of the six-hour hike. If you could leave your pets so that they've got extra water and snacks.

The kids need to break, and so we sort of leave them in an alcove on the side of the canyon. I don't want to come. Well, we'll figure out where it is and then you'll get you see you guys. Hopefully I brought my book. Okay. Bye guys. And Reagan's like, all right, boys, you have your murals. Emergency whistles, remember three times, but no joking.

Okay, final assent. You know, we went up that angle? Yeah, we went up that diagonal there. I remember it really, really clearly. I'm all behind you. So there's this, we were slammed up against this canyon wall. We needed to get over it. And the only way to do that was that there was a boulder sort of out in front of the canyon wall,

and it created this skinny little chute. And we had to wedge ourselves into the chute and, like, go up. I think getting up on it. 60 feet. Take a breath there, mother. Hold on. Take a breath. I would like to get off this plan.

I had to, like, put my back against one wall and my feet against the other. Push between the two walls. And I had this moment where before I left, Dylan told me not to die for radio lab. So I paused, and I was like, okay, don't do this for radio lab. Do yourself. Never doing that again? Never doing that again? There.

Okay. Never doing that again? By the time we get done with the gnarly assent, everyone's like, this f*** c-jar is going to be there because no one else would do this. That was really hard. Just got the spot, hey.

Just head down. So, Dirk and Craig are like, okay. This is it. We did that around. I'm absolutely sure we did that around. The sea jar should be around here somewhere. We're like walking around, giant tumbled boulders looking under. We've got like a quarter of a mile of canyon phase to figure it out.

Just giant tumbled boulders. Craig thinks it's to the left. Dirk thinks it's to the right. Anything, Dirk? No. It's so weird because... Does it look familiar? This is... this is it. This is the spot.

Years. Yeah, but I just, I know this is... ...spot. I know it. We don't see the spot. It's just getting trickier and trickier. They're like just going like really confused. We weren't that far down. We've been looking...

I don't know for an hour. And it all like looks the same... Like just everything looks the same to an untrained guy. Yeah. Right? It's like, where's Waldo land? And we're trying to find Waldo. Go over, find Craig. Get his thoughts.

I finally see Craig kind of far off down the canyon, standing by himself, just staring at the ground. And I was like, hey, like, any luck? I went down and looked at what would have been our likely route up. Yeah. Which is right up through here. And he points to the ground, like, right where we're standing. And he says,

it's like right here. I think like this was the place. I don't want to think about this particular possibility. See all that stuff I just walked across? Yeah, that's all fresh. Oh, seriously? Yeah. Wait, what does that mean fresh? Well, we were standing on this pile of really sharp rock. It was just all of these sharp little jaggedy knives. I mean, it sort of didn't look like any of the other areas we had been in. It's possible that the cliff has fallen here and covered everything.

The top of that cliff. If you looked above us to the top of the cliff, it was like someone had just taken a meat cleaver to it. It was just like sliced off. This whole thing broke off. The entire cliff face had fallen off and annihilated

everything. things, hundreds of feet in either direction. It's been totally destroyed. Oh, no. Yeah. I mean, it wouldn't have survived. Even the giant boulder protecting it. Like, it's just, it's been wiped clean.

It reminded me of, like, an iceberg, um, calving. You see all those videos of, like, the front of the iceberg just all of a sudden cleaves off. That's exactly what happened on this clip. So you're talking, like, like a 10,000 tons of rock falling air. just Yeah I mean That's not what I was thinking

What's the possibility I'm not swallowing it just yet So he calls in Reagan Reagan come toward us And then Dirk comes wandering over It does kind of make sense I guess No If the pot's been here for 700 years

It doesn't make sense at all It would happen in the last 11 years I'm not making sense. Why it's not looking right. It was here. It was right in here. I know it was here. No.

No, no, no. Oh, my God. Craig's like leaning against the wall. Dirk was like, wow, man, I guess this must be it. And it was this real, like, they were grappling with something. And I was, like, trying to figure out, like, what they were grappling with. And Craig just kept talking to me, like, not actually about the seed jar, but about the place. This is where I remember Reagan hoisting up her pants, pregnant, squatting, and Dirk and me on our knees, looking in on this thing for the longest time.

You know, it was very clear in my mind to have the place itself gone. It's, I'm fine. It's beautiful. It's wonderful. But Jesus. This is a different kind of sadness that I wasn't quite... Are you sad? Yeah. Yeah, this kind of sucks. If it was missing, if somebody had taken it, that would be a sad of like, oh, screw you people.

Why do you do this? This is gravity. Dirk's gone. We should start moving. Yeah. All right. That's just too much of an irony. Why?

I think it's perfect. It doesn't seem like it. irony at all. Just let it go. You're going to break into soft? Let it go. Cheap, cheap, cheap. It is like a mountain goat.

Producer Molly Webster. Thanks all suit to Craig Childs, whose latest book is Apocalyptic Planet. And a special shout out to Henry Wright from Minute Physics and Minute Earth. He has been spending time with us, got totally fascinated by Craig's story, and made a little

wonderful animation of a story that you didn't hear on our podcast or our radio show is just on the web. So that is Henry's animation, and you should look for it at RadioLab.org. Yep, it'll be up soon at RadioLab.org. Message. Hi, this is Kirk Child. This is Jayden Child. Hi, this is Reagan. Toy.

Radio Lab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abamrad. Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Soren Wheeler, Kim Howard, Renna Farrell, Molly Canyon Grubb, Webster, Melissa O'Donnell, Dylan Teef, Jamie York, Lynn Levy, Andrew Mills, and Kelsey Padgett, with help from Ariane Wack, Matt Kielty, Simon Adler, and Lily Sullivan.

Special thanks to Mac Primo. Everyone at MakerBot. The edge of the... Peters Park Museum and H. Phelps. Hope that works. Thanks. And goodbye. End of mailbox. Hi, this is Frankie. I have two things to destroy today.

The first one is a beerstein that I painted at one of those paint-your-own pottery places with my stupid ex-boyfriend. It's a stupid mug, and it was a stupid relationship. So here goes. This is Jeremy Miller calling from Chicago, Illinois. That was me punching a wall. This is Caroline Flehart from Brooklyn, New York. I made this globe of the world puzzle.

I did it when I was in high school because I was spent a lot of time in my room. And I don't know, things are getting better now. Maybe it's time to let go with that part. So let's destroy it. My name is Mary and I'm going to destroy a picture of me and my ex-boyfriend. I am cleaning up all the paperwork from my classes. And this is the sound of me ripping them up. This is one of my father's computers.

And this week, it's three years since the stroke that killed your father. So we're going to beat the shit out of it with a hammer. Yes. That was satisfying. My name is Justin. Last year, my life was like a country song. First, I lost my girl, then I lost my job, then I lost my house, then my dog got killed. And this is the sound of me destroying my old life. Thank you.