The Moth - The Moth Podcast: National Parks Week

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

In honor of National Parks Week, we've got three stories, all about our National Parks, and why they matter. This episode was hosted by Tim Lopez. Storytellers: Kathy Nicarry finds strength in Yellowstone National Park. Tim Lopez is feeling a bit lost, and then becomes a Park Ranger in California. 95 year old park ranger Betty Reid Soskin squares off with an intruder. Podcast # 914 To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Tim Lopez. I'm an educator, a moth storyteller, and an interpretive park ranger at Channel Islands National Park. On this episode, in honor of National Parks Week, we're celebrating our national parks. From iconic landscapes like Yosemite and Yellowstone, to sites that showcase American history, like Harper's Ferry and Manzanar, with three stories, all about our national parks and why they matter. So I've spent the last two summers working as a ranger at Channel Islands National Park, which is off the coast of Southern California, and one of the things I hear from a lot of visitors is, I've lived my whole life around here and I never knew this existed. Now I have to admit that that was also me.

Growing up in Los Angeles, I'd heard of the islands, but I never got around to visiting until I started working there. But once you've been out to the islands yourself, you can't help but feel a connection to this wild, undeveloped place. You can really feel the energy of the people who have called it home and been visiting for thousands of years, and you become a part of that. And it's guiding people into making that discovery for themselves that makes working at the Channel Islands so special.

There's something wonderful about places that belong to each and every one of us. Places that we have chosen to honor and protect and to share. Our first story is all about the lessons and strength you can take away from a place like that. Kathy and I, Carrie, told this at a Louvre Grand Slam where the theme of the night was fuel to the fire. Here's Kathy live at the mall. My husband and I had been invited to a Halloween party and I knew that Halloween 2009 was going to be very different as the perfect couple's Halloween costume popped into my head. John and Lorraine A. Bobbitt. Yeah, complete with props, you know, a bloody butcher knife in one hand and in the other.

Oh, it's terrible, I know. And what's really terrible is I grinned every time I thought about this. Now, I assure you, I didn't always think like this. I went into my marriage with a wide-eyed optimism. He was charming and charismatic in an OJ Simpson, Jimmy Swigert sort of way. And before we got married, he had never raised his voice, let alone a hand to me. He had me convinced that every bruise I hid was a direct result of my failure as a wife. My world revolved around his moods and when

lightning might strike again. Now I know I probably should have left after the first couple of red flags like when we didn't get our rental deposit back because he had splintered every door frame. My bad for locking the door after he's put his fist through the wall right next to my face. According to him, you know, I was just overreacting. The voice that the rest of the world heard was very different than the voice I heard behind closed doors. For God's sake, Cathy, you are so stupid.

If you think anybody is ever going to love you but me, you're wrong. If you ever try to leave me, I will take your kids, you will never see them again, and you know I can make that happen. Doubt wrapped around my psyche till I didn't know who I was anymore. But this year was going to be different because the one thing that I did know is that I was a good mother. And the kids were older now. We wouldn't make it to that Halloween party. You see, back in August, I took a trip to Montana with my sisters and a cousin. He did not want me to go.

In fact, he was adamant that I not go. And his main objection, though, were my sisters. He literally was afraid of them and their feminist ideas. He thought they were plotting against him, and maybe they were. I went anyway. Now, there is no better place to find yourself than in Big Sky Country and gain strength and clarity.

We spent three glorious days right in Yellowstone. I skinny dipped in the Yellowstone River. I heard that Robert Redford had done so in the exact same place the year before. My naked body was in the same place his naked body was. That was awesome. I witnessed old faithful erupt like clockwork. That reminded me of home, but with more predictability.

I watched as sunrise illuminated the mountains every morning, but there was still a shadow of doubt about what I needed to do. As we drove through Yellowstone, we saw the evidence of this massive forest fire from 1988, the charred remnants of hundreds of thousands of lodgepole pines. And then I watched a film at one of their visitor centers about the wildfires of Yellowstone, and I learned that fire is absolutely essential for the growth of the forest. Now they had the policy of putting out every blaze before this, but it left the forest

vulnerable to invasive plant species. It caused the build-up of underbrush and plants and animals that needed sunlight got choked out. So in 1988 they decided to let this one run its course. Then I learned that the seed of the lodgepole pine, the most prevalent tree in all of Yellowstone, can only open and germinate after a fire. That seed and cone are covered in this thick resin that must be melted by fire and only then can it grow." And then the film showed how the forest is transformed and then within just days of the smoke clearing, there were millions of tiny lodgepole pine seedlings fighting their way

up through the ash. Plants previously deprived of sunlight began to flourish. Wildlife moved back into the area, and life went on. There was a quote at the end of this film by Earl Nightingale. I committed it to memory that day. Within every adversity lies the seed of its equal and equivalent opportunity. Within every adversity lies the seed of its equal or equivalent opportunity. I stood there with tears streaming down my face because I knew exactly what I had to do. I had to let it burn.

So when I got back home, we made preparation for our evacuation. He thought we were boxing up for a yard sale. I stopped walking on eggshells. I stopped apologizing. I stopped biting my tongue. It's a wonder I hadn't bitten the damn thing off. I realized I'd been trying to do controlled burns for so many years, dousing every flare up by whatever means necessary, thinking that I was protecting the fragile creatures that lived in that environment, until I realized they're strong and they're capable of change and they needed sunlight to grow. So on Halloween 2009 we moved out. I got my kids to safety. I

stuck around for that fire. The resin melted away and I stand before you a lodgepole pine. That was Kathy Nightcarry. Recently retired, she is thrilled to now have time to volunteer. She writes a cooking column for a local newspaper where she combines her love of cooking with storytelling. She enjoys life in Louisville with her husband Sam and their new orange cat, Rhubarb. Our next story is from, well, me.

I told this in a New York City main stage outdoors in Greenwood Cemetery. So if you're wondering why you're hearing crickets and other sounds of the natural world, that's why. Here I am, live at the mall. Alright, so it was 2011. I was fun- fun employed and living in a converted garage in Santa Monica, California. The travel agency I had been working for, I went out of business about a year earlier and since then I had been dividing my time fairly evenly between taking long walks on the beach, clipping coupons and playing frisbee. I was 33 years old and living the life of a retired person. Now, I say this laid-back California lifestyle comes very easily to me.

You might even say that it is in my genes. I am an eighth generation Californian on my mother's side and the southern California, the west side of Los Angeles in particular is where we have our deepest roots. In 1794, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, a man named Felipe Talamantes, came up from New Spain as part of one of the original settler families of the Pueblo of Los Angeles. And in 1819, he was given a land grant by the then Mexican government over a huge plot of land that came to be known as the Rancho La Bayona.

Regrettably, none of that property or wealth was passed along to me. But what was passed along to me was some mild inherited trauma and a long legacy of unfulfilled potential. For example, I am the first person in my family to go to college. I'm also the first person in my family to drop out of college. Now I eventually went back and I finished school, but so much time passed over that time period. My dad actually went back to school and graduated and he actually became the first person in our family to graduate from college. My life was full of these kind of stops and starts and these unspoken expectations that

I was having trouble meeting. So one day I was doing my customary nothing and a friend of mine came over and told me that he had recently uncovered a secret. And that secret is the exact location of the oldest living thing in the world. Now it is an ancient bristlecone pine tree and its name is Methuselah. Now the Methuselah tree is over 4,853 years old and it's in California.

It's only a couple hours away from where I grew up. And even though it's on public land, on a trail, its exact location is unknown to the public. Now there used to be a sign in front of it but people could not be trusted with this information. And they would come and take away branches and cones and otherwise harm the tree. So for its own protection, the sign was taken away. And ever since then, its location has been a very closely guarded secret.

So secret, in fact, that it is not posted anywhere on the internet. There is no dropped pin at the Methuselah tree. And there are no images of it online either. If and when you Google the Methuselah tree, you will find a picture of a massive, gorgeous, ancient bristlecone pine tree and that is not the tree. In fact, the only verified photograph of the Methuselah tree can be found in an old issue of a geographical magazine of national renown that will remain nameless. My friend was able to track down that magazine, using the photograph, was able to locate the tree.

And he told me he would take me up there to see it, as long as I didn't give away its location. So, a couple weeks later, we were hiking the trail, the ancient Bristol Cone Pine Forest. It is a austere and otherworldly kind of place. It's very remote. You kind of hike up this mountain, and before long, you're surrounded, but all that's around you are these petrified trees. They're all thousands of years old and their bark has been stripped away by eons of wind and cold and they're gnarled and they're twisted and they're mostly dead. But if

you look close enough at the tips of their branches where they're kind of reaching out to the to the sky and the sun and the warmth, there's a little bit of green and they're unmistakably alive. And we're walking through this forest and eventually we come up on the tree from the photograph. And you know, it's not the largest tree in the forest or the most aesthetically pleasing. In fact, it's kind of small and almost frail looking. But as I stood there with it, nobody else around, I couldn't help but feel this profound connection to it and a really deep admiration for the fact that this living

thing had planted its roots here in this place before the pyramids were built and over that entire period of time it had managed to survive in this very unforgiving environment and to continue to move itself and its family forward. At the same time, you know, it occurred to me that it was trapped, that it was stuck here and that these very roots that kind of kept it in place were preventing it from going anywhere else. And it wasn't growing anymore, it was just kind of surviving. And I understood that if I wanted to grow, I was going to have to uproot myself and move as far away from Los Angeles as possible. And so I moved to New York City. Now, when

I got to New York, I did my best to reinvent myself. I got a 9 to 5 job in the financial district where, you know, I took the subway to Fulton Street every day and I wore button-up shirts and basically cosplayed as the protagonist of a rom-com for a couple of years before I spectacularly quit. At that point I went out to an old standby bartending waiting tables and I even dabbled in the nonprofit sector before you know discovering that it is particularly non-profitable for me. You know it almost ten years had gone by and I was still clutching at straws. I felt like I was not moving forward.

I was still kind of stuck. And then the pandemic happened. Everything I was doing stopped. All of us were trapped in our apartments for months. And coming out of that experience, all I knew was that I wanted to work outside. And one day I was on the train and I saw a recruitment poster for New York City's greenest, the Department of Parks and Recreation. And that, my friends, is how I found myself a little over a year later, knee deep in a muddy

pond in eastern Queens on the thin green line as a full-fledged member of the New York City Urban Park Rangers. Now my partner and I had been called out that day on a high profile case. We had a swan on the loose. Now bird cases can get a little dicey. I don't know what you know about the New York City birding community, but they can be a little intense. And swans in particular tend to captivate the public's imagination in ways that most birds do not. People find them beautiful, people find them graceful, they mate for life which is something

people really respect in a wild animal. And whenever a swan shows up in a New York City park it instantly becomes something of a celebrity. Now rangers hate swans. They are what is known as an invasive species, which means that they are not from the area, which in and of itself is not a problem. The thing is, when they arrive to a New York City pond, what they do is they out-compete the local waterfowl for resources. They push them out, they build these huge, ostentatious nests, and they generally make a spectacle of themselves.

They are bullies and they are gentrifiers. This particular swan had been a thorn in our side for months. It had been seen frolicking in various high traffic areas of the park where it was having numerous close encounters with unleashed dogs, which is another cultural flashpoint in the parks. And so the decision was made that for its own good and for everyone's good we should go and bring him in. Riding shotgun with me that day was my partner Sal. Sal and I went back

away as we were in the academy together. He's kind of a strange man, hot temper, but also a militant vegan who seemed to subsist entirely on dandelion sandwiches. In any event it was just us two after conducting a couple of interviews. We were able to get an approximate location on the perpetrator and we moved in, put on our protective equipment and headed down to apprehend the swan. Now I must stress at this point that we are highly trained professionals. We have gone over the scenario many times in the academy using stuffed animals. However, any ranger will tell you when, you know, a real world scenario when you're eye

to eye with a wild animal on its home turf, it's a totally different ballgame. I don't know if you've been very close to a swan, but they are bigger than you think, they are meaner than you think, and this particular animal started hissing and clicking and beating its wings like a little pterodactyl, which basically it is. And so I look over at Sal, Sal looks over at me and I think we're both wondering, is he gonna come quietly or are we gonna have a problem? As it turns out, it was all for show, it was a bluff.

We were able to coax the swan into the animal carrier with very little fanfare and load him up into the vehicle. And as we get him into the truck, he's in the carrier and I'm standing there and we're basically even-hike eye to eye. I'm looking at him in the face for the very first time. And you know, I don't see a bully, you know, or I just, I see another creature just trying to make it in New York City. Maybe just made a couple of wrong turns and found themselves getting a little stuck.

Just a little nudge moving on to the next thing. And as we're driving out of the park, we're going to take it to the Wild Bird Fund. It's going to be relocated to another area of the park. We pass by a huge tulip tree. It's over 100 feet tall, 150 feet tall. And this is the Alley Pond Giant. And the Alley Pond Giant is the oldest living thing in New York City. It was already a notable tree when George Washington

visited it on his way out to Long Island shortly following the Revolutionary War, which was right around the same time that my ancestor, Felipe Telemontes, was coming up from New Spain to put down his roots and mine in Southern California. And as I looked up into the canopy of this tree on this

hot and humid summer day in New York and seeing these really bright green leaves, I couldn't help but think of the fact that it had planted its roots here in New York and those roots had allowed it to grow and to grow strong. And I couldn't help but think of my own roots back in California and my family and everybody that I had left back at home. And I know that it was this thought that kind of paved the way for me to eventually return to California where I currently live and work as a national park ranger with the National Park Service. And thank you. Thank you. And you know I still not only land in

California or other anywhere else but what I have now is something that's perhaps even more valuable to me, which is a sense of ownership over a place that means a tremendous amount to me. It is something that, a responsibility that I have to look after this place, to protect it, but also to share its stories. And it is a responsibility that I take very seriously, and it fills me with a tremendous sense of pride and of purpose. Now one of the first things I did when I went back to California was I went back to the

Methuselah tree. I'm happy to report that it is still there. But this time was a little bit different. There were people around. There was a family there that obviously knew which tree it was and there was another individual there that can best be described as a potential YouTuber. And so it appears as if the secret is out. And I'm of two minds about this. On one hand I'm concerned about the tree and its

welfare but on the other hand I'm hopeful that if people can find out where the tree is they can go to visit it and being in its presence, they'll be able to have that same connection that I was able to have with it. And through that connection, they'll realize what I realized, which is that it's not one person's responsibility to take care of these things in the world or to keep them a secret. It's everybody's. So, thank you. After this story, I ended up moving back to California and I was extremely lucky to get

hired as a seasonal ranger at Channel Islands National Park. On one of my very first trips to the islands, I had an experience that is pretty rare, but it does happen out there. I got mugged by a whale. That's the term we use when a humpback whale gets right up close to the boat and breaches the surface. So close, you can smell its breath and feel the mist from its spout. It was a truly magical experience, and ever since then, I've been captivated by the islands and have found a wonderful community of people who love them just as much as I do. We'll be back in a second with a story from a national treasure.

The national parks are places where we can take in breathtaking views, explore our history, and perhaps even listen to some stories. When we were talking about doing this national park themed episode, the Moth's executive producer, Sarah Austin-Giness, told us about a time she ran into some Mott fans at a national park.

Here they are. So in July, I was in Glacier National Park with a friend of mine. She has a Sprinter van and we were camping at Two Medicine. And I decided to take a hike. And you were the ranger leading that hike. And I remember it being really beautiful, and there was a particular part where you were telling us about moths,

and I wonder if you could tell us a little more about what you shared. So yeah, we were going on a hike in Glacier, and moths are typically not what people expect to hear about in Glacier and moths are typically not what people expect to hear about in Glacier. In fact, I would say most people expect to talk about grizzly bears and I think a lot of people join me on Ranger Led Hikes because they're afraid of grizzly bears. And so at this point in the hike, we stopped by a tree that had some bear hair in it. And the cool part about bears and moths is the really neat connection that I like to talk about.

There's a moth called an army cutworm moth or a miller moth. And it's a moth that spends most of the year out on the plains. and it's a moth that spends most of the year out on the plains, but then early in the summer it flies to the highest peaks of the Northern Rockies, and this moth is actually one of the most fat-rich animals in the entire animal kingdom. They have like 70% of their body is fat, which is an incredible food source for bears. Bears are mostly vegetarians in our part of the world. There just isn't great other high-fat food sources. Like we don't have a ton of salmon. That's too much energy to hunt other large game. So most of what they eat is plant material, but they do need that fat as they are getting ready for hibernation.

And so they spend hours of the day in August near the tallest peaks in the park, just digging up and eating thousands and thousands of moths. They estimate it's 40,000 moths a day that these grizzly bears can eat as they're prepping for winter. So we could see the scene where that could happen on our hike, but fortunately we didn't see any bears in close quarters. I thought this was hysterical and I actually leaned in and asked you again for the name of the moth and then I said I actually work for a place called the moth and then I you know revealed that I that I work with with this sweet place and and then you, you know, revealed that I work with this sweet place. And then you said you were a listener, which I thought was just the coolest.

Yeah, I am a huge fan of The Moth and some of my other park service assignments I've had long commutes and I have spent hours and hours listening to The Moth podcast. It's powered me on tons of drives in remote parts of the world. So I was pretty excited to have that connection. I remember as my friend was coming to pick me up in her Sprinter van, there was another ranger that came up and was like,

I just want to say, I listened to the Moth. So it's nice to think about all the people who are in these beautiful national parks and leading folks around our treasures, you know, who are listening to stories. Yeah. Yeah. So my job title, I'm an Interpretive Ranger.

It doesn't mean I speak another language. Essentially, we're the storytellers of these places. And so I think there's a lot of us here that love the moth, because we're storytellers. We love sharing the stories of these places. And so it's cool to hear stories from other people in other places through the Moth. I love that so much and I hope to return to Glacier. What a beautiful place and I hope to see you soon.

It was so nice to reconnect with you. Yeah, thanks for reaching out. This is a lot of fun. Thanks to park ranger Sarah Dix for chatting with us and for leading these hikes in Glacier National Park in Montana. You can see the photos we mentioned on our extras page at themoth.org. Up next, we've got a favorite story from the archive from a very special park ranger. Betty Reed-Soskin told this at a Montana main stage where the theme was occasional magic. Here's Betty live at the Moth.

Thank you very much. The year was 2017 and my friends were settling for Friday Night Bingo at the Senior Center. And I was a full-term permanent park ranger at Rosie the River Homefront National Historical Park in Richmond, California. But I had reached that age with problems that meant that I was, I outlived my sense of future and was involved in a grand improvisation. I was making up life one hour at a time. I was meeting with my attorney, going over end-of-life issues in the morning, going to work, and then coming back to an exploding life. It was intense. I spent my days as a ranger doing things that rangers do, guiding tours. I was being involved in trainings, of course that takes most of our lives as rangers, trainings in CPR in which I was most often the victim. Trainings and with that defibrillator that's on the wall just in case one of my visitors got in trouble.

But also answering phones. And that was tricky for me because I would answer the phone, Rosie the Riveter Home but National Historical Park, to a visitor or a potential visitor wanting to make reservations to hear one of my programs because I was in the theater three to five times a week doing programs involving the history of that great place. They would say my mother or my grandmother or my grandfather heard this woman and was

excited and I want and she they would go on and on and I would feel more and more embarrassed and Betty would go more into the third person and by the time the telephone was over I would have gotten to the reservation books which is an incidentally usually two or three months in advance and I they would say to whom am I speaking and I would say Helen and this became a joke among my colleagues. So much so that on one of my birthdays, someone, my supervisor, had a new brass ID tag that I wore above my other tags which said Helen. And Helen became the persona that did all the things that Betty didn't have the nerve enough to do. And Helen was to become a strong feature in my life. Because my family was involved in concern, and I was involved with those end of life issues and

wondering whether living in an apartment alone was something I needed to go on doing. I had become a park ranger at the age of 85. I mean, who does that? that. But my sons were going deeply concerned about my fact that I was living alone. I'd given up driving because my sight was failing. But I didn't want my kids to have to wrestle my car keys out of my hand. So I was becoming, my life was becoming more and more constricted. But on June 30th, I woke in the night to a presence. I realized that there was someone in my bedroom.

And I turned to see a man standing not six feet away with a small flashlight looking through my things. I reached over to the nightstand where my cell phone was. Anyone would do that, right, to call the police. But my turning signaled him that I was awake. And within seconds, he had leaped across my bed, had wrestled me out of the bed, and flung my cell phone across the room. And I remember feeling grateful cell phone across the room and I remember feeling grateful that neither of us was armed because had it been a gun, it wouldn't have lasted more than six seconds. We wrestled in that room, the stranger and me. I screamed as loud as I could scream.

He pinned my arms, my back was against his chest. And I remember for some strange reason realizing that my chin, my head ended at his chin and that he was probably 5'8", 5'10". It's amazing what comes to you in times like that. We wrestled across the floor and when we got to the door of the hallway, I suddenly realized, even though he's still screaming, but my screens were being muffled by the fact that his arm was over my mouth. And I was to learn later that no one was hearing me anyway

because the Downster department was empty. But as we got to the doorway of the hallway, I reached out and kicked his leg out from under him, and we both fell. I fell with my back on the floor, and he was straddled with his knees on each side of my body, my torso. And his hands were freed up, and he was trying hard to keep me from screaming. So he was pummeling my face with his bare fists. And I suddenly realized my hands were free

and that he was wearing what was probably pajama pants, because there was a drawstring that I could feel, which meant that the family jewels were exposed. In the back of my mind, I remembered this magical thing and I reached in. I grabbed his balls and I squeezed as hard as I could. And magically he toppled over in a heap. And I was suddenly free, but I was right next to the bathroom door. I plunged my way through the door and sat with my back against the laboratory and my feet propped against the door so he couldn't get into me. And suddenly, suddenly I felt safe. I listened. I couldn't hear him. I couldn't hear anything. I don't know how long that session ended, but I suddenly realized that under the laboratory was my electric iron.

So I reached in, I pulled it out, stood up long enough to plug it into the wall and turn it up to linen. I was going to brand him for the police. It was still silent. And as soon as I felt it was safe enough, decided that he was gone, that my intruder was no longer there, I went in calmly, got myself into some clean pajamas, went out the front door, still was the iron in my hand now cooling, pounded my neighbor's door, neighbors I had not met, pounded on and suddenly Arthur Hadley, my neighbor who I'd never met, arrived and he opened the police, Helen. That night, I think I received a gift that was unintended because when the police arrived and the city officials with them and the police department was there because I'm

a pretty noted figure in my city, they offered not only counseling but to relocate me if I needed that to happen. And I suddenly realized, despite my kids' fears or even my own, that that intruder had given me a gift. That for the first time in my life, I knew that I'd been tested, not only survived, but prevailed. And I'm now 97, still living along. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That was Betty Reed Soskin. Betty lives in Richmond, California and her remarkable life has included being an author, composer, and singer, political activist, historian, public speaker, mother, grandmother, and singer, political activist, historian, public speaker, mother, grandmother,

great-grandmother, and yes, park ranger. She retired at 100 years old from the Rosie the Riveter World War II Homefront National Historical Park and recently celebrated her 103rd birthday at the Library of the Betty Reed Soskin Middle School in Richmond, which was named in her honor. That's it for this episode. We hope that these stories remind you of how incredible, special, and ultimately fragile our national parks are. From all of us here at the Moff, let's visit a national park soon. As storyteller, educator, and seasonal park ranger based in Southern California, Tim Lopez believes in the transformative power of story to build community and affect positive change. He hopes to foster connection, generate empathy, and inspire a shared sense of responsibility

through engaging personal narratives. A special thanks to Sarah Dix and all the park rangers that listened to The Moth. Kathy Nicarry's story was coached by Jennifer Hickson, Tim Lopez's story was directed by Jodie Powell, and Betty Reed Soskin's story was directed by Sarah Austin-Ginness. This episode of the Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin-Ginness, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Salinger. The rest of the Moth leadership team

includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Jennifer Hickson, Kate Tellers, Marina Cluchay, Suzanne Rust, Leigh Ann Gulley, and Patricia Urena. The Moth Podcast is presented by Odyssey, special thanks to their executive producer, Leah Reese Dennis. All Moth stories are true as remembered by their storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.