The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 4: Surfing Lessons in a Warming World

Episode Date: November 13, 2015

What is it like to grow up with twenty siblings? When Sue and Hector Badeau considered the lives of children in foster homes, which are often traumatic, they felt that had to do something, and eventually adopted twenty in addition to their two biological kids. Larissa MacFarquhar reports on a family shaped by extreme compassion. When William Finnegan isn’t covering conflicts in places like Mexico, Sudan, and Somalia, he goes surfing. It’s been his hobby for half a century, and, on a recent morning, he gave David Remnick, the editor of the magazine, his first and only surfing lesson. Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer who has been writing about the environment for years, and has covered many international talks on climate change. She tells David Remnick why the upcoming U.N. conference in Paris could really matter. Finding money on the ground isn’t a bit of luck for Roger Pasquier—it’s the result of diligent effort and skill. Pasquier, who is an ornithologist, pulls in around a hundred dollars a year in spare change, but he doesn’t do it for the money. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Roger, how did you get started collecting coins? It happened simply because I saw so many on the street and thought I ought to keep track of this like a good scientist. Finding anything of value on the street is irresistible to me to pick up. Now, this to me, from the distance, looked like a penny. Did you immediately identify it as whatever it is? It looks to me like, I don't want to get that close to it, but it looks to me like a piece of bubble gum

that somebody has put down on the ground. It doesn't have the imprint of a coin. I'm going to identify what it is. It's a button with a nail in it. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. So one of the things about walking with Roger Paskier is that his eyes are not always looking at you or looking ahead. What are you actually doing, Roger? It's very rude, of course, not to look at the person you're speaking with,

but if you want to focus on coins as we are now, you have to be using your peripheral vision as well. And that means while I'm paying some attention to Nick or whoever my companion may be, I'm also looking in the gutter. And maybe we should trade places so I can be closer to the gutter and talk out of the left side of my mouth. While I have a better view, because the gutter, despite its unattractive name, is the best place to find coins. Because look at this sidewalk, how it rolls down.

It's not even. Coins naturally seem to land there. And you find more there than on any other part. of the street. How much money have you found this year on the streets of New York? Right now, my total is $36.52, and we'll see if this turns into a profitable wall. And that's Nick Thompson, editor of New Yorker.com on the street with Roger Pascier, and ornithologist and world expert in the art of picking up change on the street. We'll hear how they made out later on the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David

Remnick. Now, you've probably had this happen where somebody asks you to do something that sounds like fun, and you agree, maybe too quickly, then about five seconds later, you're saying, what on earth have I gotten myself into? Well, I did that not too long ago, and that's why I found myself leaving home around dawn on a Sunday headed to the Rockaways in Queens. Look at this. I mean, nobody can surf, but look at the waves. Wow. I'm sitting out on the beach with the great Bill Finnegan. Oh, oh.

Let's try that again. That was quite a wipeout. I'm sitting out at the Atlantic. Look at that stance. Wow. I'm David Remnick, and I'm here with my friend and colleague, Bill Finnegan, who's written an astonishing book called Barbarian Days. And we're sitting out here in the Rockaways at the Atlantic,

watching a lot of people fall in the war. as they try to serve. There are probably more than 100 people in the water. And the waves are kind of nice. They're small and quick. And one of the odd things about this crowd is that there are no clumps of people where the waves are concentrating

because nobody out can read the water at all. Nobody's reading the waves. And you actually read the waves first before you ride them. I read these as pretty good with a couple of good spots to take off. Water looks so nice. I want to go dive in.

So what we're going to do is we're going to get in the water, and we're going to attempt to stand on a board. You're going to catch some waves. You might be well advised to stay on your belly, the first couple. That's what I tend to do when I surf. It's low tide, so it's going to be a little crunchy, a little quick. Let's go west, yeah. Let's go where it's maximally dangerous.

And you began this adventure in life as a really young kid in Hawaii, as a way to do what, as a way to get out of the house? I grew up playing around in the ocean in Southern California. At a certain point, the age of 10, I really admired surfers and how beautiful what they did seemed and how cool this is in the early mid-60s. How long did it take you? How many times did it take you before you could get up on a board

and surf a wave? I think the first wave I caught, I stood up in road for a long time. The first time you went surfing? Yeah, but I was a small kid on a big board. I spent a lot of time on the water body surfing. You're just trying to make me feel better. I spent a lot of time with the water body surfing. I could read waves.

I've been reading them for years, and that's the crucial thing. And why did it become an obsession? It wasn't just, you know, everybody, when they're kids, they play playground basketball, or they collect model airplanes, or they do what they do. Surfing for you has never been that. How did that start and why? Well, serving is quite different from other sports, and it's not just me. and lots of people this happens.

It takes a tremendous amount of time to get even halfway decent. I mean, you need to put in basically years during which you have nothing else to do. In other words, you need to be a kid. And once you learn the pleasure of it is so intense, what is it? What's the pleasure of it? Well, riding a wave well

feels like such an achievement because you know how far you've had to come to do it. There's that. Some waves I caught in Fiji in the 70s. of an uninhabited island. A friend and I camped there. We'd kind of heard about a wave, and then we'd seen this wave with binoculars,

and it was an absolutely incredible wave. Long, long, long, the 300-yard-long left over a very shallow coral reef, just going on and on and on, and you're not getting obliterated, not falling off. And in real time, how long does the experience last? It's probably 10 or 15 seconds. But it feels like forever.

I mean, you're in that moment where you are braced for impact, you're about to dive off, and you don't dive off, and you don't dive off. And what are you seeing? What's in front of your eyes? Well, you're looking down the line, what's the wave going to do? What's the wave going to do? And at a certain point, when you realize that the wave is just going to hold you that deep in the barrel

and just fire you, like a cannon down this reef, you are free to actually look back deeper into the tube, you're free to look up at the wave that's breaking over your head. You're inside, and you're looking at daylight and sky ahead, and that's where you're headed. Roaring or quiet? It's noisy. I mean, at a certain point in the barrel, people say it gets quiet, and I think I've felt that, but I don't know why it should be true because the waves breaking full force all around you. All right.

First, let's put your leash on. Put it back down. I have to put a leash on? Yeah. This is the third most terrifying thing I've ever done in my life. So the two things I told you, it's actually important to remember now. Board straight? Straight.

Board straight. A second thing I didn't get the finish on you. Never get your board between you and the way. Oh, good, you told me that. Yes. To the side or behind you. To the side or behind you. Never between you and the way.

Excellent tip. Third thing. So, to the board should always be to your side. Side or behind you anywhere, but except they're in front of you. That it will hit you quickly. Okay, great. And the third thing, and this is for after you fall off. Yeah.

This could happen. Which couldn't possibly happen. Yeah. Get a good breath if you can before you fall off. Fill your lungs. And when you fall in, it's not real deep. It's not a lot of water, but nonetheless go as deep as you can. Go to the bottom, whatever.

And then hold your breath and stay down in a little while. Why? Because the board is bumping around and you don't want to get hit. And then when you come up, and this is the most important single thing, come up with your arms over your head. So it's not the edge of your face. So you don't get hit by your board. And you think that I'm going to remember all this.

Yes. No, I mean, people never do until they can hit a couple times, but... I don't want to get hit any times. So that's why I think you will remember. All right, let's go. Okay, let's walk this way a little bit. Because the current's going that way. We don't want to end up on those rocks.

Okay. Pretty little ways. You know, Bill, I read your book. I've read your book a couple of times, and I cannot help but thinking this guy has had more fun in about three weeks of life than I've had in a lifetime. There are different ways of living lives. You know, that Milan Cundra book, Lightness and Heavy. The heaviness of responsibility, and there's the lightness of living outside trying to live away from that.

And you've done both. You know, as a reporter, you've been in the middle of the worst circumstances all around the world. And then you do this. How does one treat the other? It's a good description. I mean, I have this sort of bipolar life, and the North Pole of irresponsibility is surfing. You know, dropping everything. It's nature worship.

and you have to be ready if you're going to serve to, like, ditch all engagements and flee your desk and make all kinds of bogus excuses to editors while you chase the waves when they're there. But you did it for years at a time. Yeah, I don't know. If you've got the time and money, you just go. And I just went. You know, like dog whistle orders from on high. and I went to the South Seas, Australia, Southeast Asia, Africa, looking for waves.

And nothing was tugging you back, parents, friends, money, whatever it is. Nothing was dragging you back to... Well, ambition was. I mean, I felt like, you know, everybody was getting on with life except me. I'm laying here with malaria and Sumatra. You know, why am I doing this? My parents got fed up with it after about two or maybe two and a half years. They just showed up in Cape Town where I was teaching high school.

school. Enough was enough. They'd had like a few phone calls for me in two and a half years. It's not that I didn't remember them, but I... A significant board of it. Bored with waves? Yeah. Not when the waves are good. And so there's always the lure of the possibility of the waves. Right. And the waves are usually not good. And you spend a huge amount of time chasing good, uncrowded waves. All right. Here we go. It's fairly cold. I would wear a parker if I could. I didn't exactly grow up in a beach family. Go ahead and lay down on it. I'll push it out. Good. Good. Go ahead and lay down. Get on it? Yep.

My usual experience of the ocean in New York City is when I would go with my grandmother after visiting my great-grandmother to Coney Island, and she would just yell at me and say, watch out for the syringes. You're okay. Don't paddle. Don't paddle. Don't paddle. Don't paddle. What is it in your personality that makes surfing? part of you? I have been serving so long that it's probably

it is your person. Formed my personality to some extent. And anyway, all kinds of personalities serve. I was going to say, you're not Mr. Laid Back. I mean, it's not like some cartoon of a surfer. And as a writer and as a reporter, you couldn't be more

ferocious and aggressive in your own way. I think I'm the same person surfing and reporting. I'm fairly intense in the water. I really want to serve. I take some chances. I've had lots and lots of arguments with the guys I serve with,

no, we shouldn't paddle out here. I'm paddling out, that kind of stuff. So it's sort of all of a piece. So you're the guy, when I go out reporting in some places, you're the guy who says, no, we're going to the next checkpoint. Yeah. I fear so. Okay.

Fair enough. Tell me about danger. What's the catalog of your injuries? Wow. I'm talking about danger. I'm watching people crash into each other out here who just, Yeah, starting to get more crowded, wasn't it? What they're doing, yes, and people not hanging onto their boards.

So the main danger is... Starting to look like the belt parkway on the ocean. Yes, it is. So the main danger is other people's surfboards, I'd say. With me, I mean, you have lots of little injuries of concussions, broken nose, you know, broken this and that, but... What do you mean? Broken this and that?

I don't know, my ankles are a mess. It seems like everything that's wrong with me is from surfing, but most of it's long term. My eyes are messed up from the glare. I've got these terrigia in both eyes. My ears are really messed up from cold water. I've had three operations. My skin is a mess.

I'm always having the basal cell carcinoma dug out, and I hope it remains only like that. Are you oblivious to the danger, or it just comes with a territory, and if you don't want to get hurt, don't serve? If you know what you're doing in the water, it's usually not at all dangerous. You know, the first time you go out

and you don't really know what to do, you get hit by your board. Usually first time, that's sort of how you learn where not to put your surfboard. But if you've been doing it for a million years, all those dangers go away. In a crowd, there's other people's boards

flying around, and in serious ways, there's the bottom and the power of the waves themselves. And when it's dangerous, though, you know that, if you have a lot of experience. Have you ever been terrified? Yes. Where?

In Hawaii, in Madeira, what's the terrifying bit? For me, the worst moments have been in really big waves. Last year in Hawaii, I did something stupid. I was on too small a board in big waves at a place called Makaha in Hawaii. And I got frustrated because I was on a small board, it was hard to catch waves. So I moved in. I moved in. I sat too far in. I sat in a really dangerous spot.

And I paid the price. I got held down for a very long time by a couple of big waves. And I've actually taken a solemn vow not to do anything that stupid again. Do you want your daughter to surf? No. She's how old now? 13. And you've never kind of done with her what you just did with me?

I've pushed her into little waves. Is she suitably terrified? Not bad. That's too bad. I mean, took her out to her mother's distress before she could swim. I took her out in Costa Rica and rode some waves. Oh, whoa, whoa. You took her out surfing before she could swim.

It was totally safe. She had one of those little things around her, those little floaty things. And she was, I had a death grip on her leg. She was not going to fall off. The waves were small. We're on a big board. But it was taken ill by my wife and others. Can't imagine why.

Yeah. But then she and I, in Hawaii one time, we're out on a giant tandem board riding together. We've done that a few times, you know, ridden together just on our bellies, me and back. And I made a mistake. And we had a really big board, like an 11-foot board. She got smacked. and had her dad land on her from a height, and then hold her under for a little while his legs were tied up by a leash,

and it was generally pretty rough and traumatic, and she hasn't served since, I don't think. You're ready to slide back a little bit. You did a great job of staying under after you ate it. I'm really good to failure. You were in no danger because you were that side of you. You're going to let me know when there's a wave coming, right? Yeah.

I'm trying to be more careful. Always make sure I get back to shore. That's the main thing. What Christ. Now you have to stand up on the thing. I think I'm hooked. I'm ready to go to Haiti or wherever. This book is a memoir,

and it uses surfing as a vehicle, as a way of living. And when you look back on all the time you've spent in the water and thinking about surfing, it seems to me like It's like physical chess in a way. It's meaningful and meaningless at the same time.

Yes. Yeah, I mean, it's the most useless thing you could possibly do. It's just a monomaniacal pastime. And really doesn't resemble sport. There's nobody keeping score. You'd rather do it alone usually. Although there's a performance aspect. You want to be seen?

Yes, you want to be seen. You want to do it well. You want to do it stylishly. That's important. And it has to do with masculinity? Not necessarily. Some women surfed beautifully, but it's... I meant your own masculine.

Well, it's certainly, especially in bigger ways, more challenging ways. It's a continual proving ground, yes. The New Yorker's known for its fact-checking department. How do you fact-check a memoir when you're depending on a combination of memoir and spotty documents from your own life? I don't know. We got a hold of what we... New York will publish an excerpt from the first part of the book,

which was set in the mid-60s, so there was that work to be done. And the checker got a hold of, like, my best friend from those days. A kid named Roddy Kalakakakui, who's now a lifeguard at a resort on another island in his 60s with grandkids, and there he was just the same. He was saying, you know, you've got to get over here. I've got just the right board for you.

I've got this place, Honolet Bay, on Kauai, just wired. And I'm going next winter. I mean, it was really... I have no doubt. What can you do less well now that you're not only a man of parts, but a man of 60? 62, yeah. Who's counting? This is a really tough thing to do, get up on a board and ride a wave and stay out there for a long period of time.

What becomes trickier, harder, more painful? Well, one just, the general process of what surfers call becoming a kook again, a kook as a beginner, is psychologically quite painful. And that's what goes on when you get old. You feel that you're a beginner again in somewhere? Not that bad, but it's... You're headed in that direction. You peaked a while ago as a surfer.

You can read waves just as well. Ah, I see where I need to be. I see what I need to do? And what do you know? You're not as quick or as strong as you used to be. Where you really notice it, where I really notice is in the pop-up, which you and I haven't got to yet.

Yeah, well, that'll be tomorrow. Yeah. Springing to your feet. on a small board, a short board, which is what I still read, the timing's got to be perfect and you've got to be strong. Although, but for the record, I think it's easy to say that you're by far the best surfer out here, no matter what the age. I'm going to just make that call.

Okay. I'll accept that accolade as low as the bar is out here. It's a pretty low bar. When do you stop? I have no plans to stop. I do know guys who surf into their 80s. obviously on bigger boards and gentler waves and they try to find some way to grow old,

some way to grow old gracefully. To watch Bill do it, even on a small wave out in Far Rockway, and nobody else is getting up on their boards for more than a half a second, and Bill at age 60-something just rides the thing in with ease all the way in. That's pretty amazing. There he goes. Oh, my God. William Finnegan's book is called,

called Barbarian Days. He told me he's headed to Hawaii in the next few months. In a minute, I'm going to talk with Elizabeth Colbert about the Paris climate talks, and we'll see if there's any hope for the world at all. So stick around. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. My name is Nick Thompson, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm walking here with Roger Paskier, who has an obsession with finding coins in the street. He's very good at it, and he takes it quite seriously. Roger, I did not see those. So what is Roger just found?

Roger first, his eye was attracted to the quarter and then saw that there was a dime next to it. And this happens pretty often that there's more than one coin where you find them. So I'm going to pick them up. Roger is walking into, it looks like, the parking lane next to the bicycle lane, and picking up 35 cents, which I did not see and I was looking. Number one, you just picked up some valuable coins.

35 cents, that's very good for a day. Number two, you didn't get killed because they were in the parking lane. And there was a bicycle lane, there's no risk. And number three, the cars were at a red light anyway. Right. So all that was very good. And the interesting thing to me was that this quarter has lost most of its shine,

but still there was enough to make it distinguishable from a bottle cap. And the delight, once you got closer, was to find this very shiny dime next to it. And so when you find them, you do have to be looked, remember to look carefully around because there could well be others that your eye isn't spotting immediately. Roger Paskier and Nick Thompson on the streets of Manhattan. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick. Now I'm with Elizabeth Colbert, who's been covering climate change for the New Yorker for years. And she's the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Sixth Extinction,

about the effects of climate change on Earth. No one knows more about this subject in my estimation. But I have to tell you, and I've known Betsy for a long time, she's never exactly been a cock-eyed optimist about this or any other subject. So now we're coming to the climate negotiations in Paris. They begin November 30th. Everybody's talking about it in the most dramatic terms, as if there's going to be a fantastic breakthrough. Betsy, what are your expectations?

Well, I think that there probably will be an agreement that comes out of Paris that seems to be the direction we're heading in. As you say, there's a lot of optimism. and I think that there's been so many years. This meeting is being called COP21. Okay, so this is the 21st of these meetings, and there have been one sort of failure after another. So I think if we don't get an agreement, you know, the stakes are so high

that people are really, really trying to ensure that we get in. But why is this night different from all other nights? We've seen agreements in Kyoto, in Copenhagen, all Ballyhooed on the front pages of newspapers and everybody goes home feeling a little uplifted. President Obama is extremely proud of himself that he broke into a meeting with the Chinese

and managed to get some concessions from the Chinese. Meanwhile, the problem gets worse and worse and worse. The weather ramifications are what they are. The political ramifications and the disbelief in climate change persists. Why do you have any? any belief, or do you have any belief, that Paris is, as we endlessly say now, a game changer of any kind? Well, that is really, that is the $64 trillion question. And I think that there are, you know, two things going on here, one of which is, as you say, the physical evidence is just becoming

overwhelming. And the world is reaching, you know, a critical point of either committing to doing something or throwing up its hands and really letting, you know, the worst happen. And I think there is a sense among world leaders, including, you know, Barack Obama, that something must be done. So in that sense, there is momentum. Now, now that being said, I don't think anyone expects that this is going to be, for example, the peak of emissions, right? Are we going in 2015 see the highest emissions in history and then emissions are going to start to decline, which is really what has to happen? That's the only thing that the atmosphere cares about, right, is how much CO2 are putting up there. But the hope is that we sort of commit to commit to peaking emissions.

So, for example, China, as part of its commitment going into Paris, has said it will peak its emissions by 2030. Now, that's still 15 years from now, but that at least is a step in the right direction. So China seems to be a dilemma here. On the one hand, China seems to have more political momentum than it's ever had to help solve this problem in concert with the rest of the industrialized nations of the world. On the other hand, we pick up the paper the other day and we see that they have been lying like crazy about how much coal smoke has been going up into the atmosphere above China. How would you describe the Chinese political situation when it comes to global warming? their impulse to do something, their capacity to do something, and what they will do. You know, China is the world's leading emitter by far now. It surpassed the U.S. far earlier than

expected and has gone on to, you know, just grow, increase its emissions radically over the last decade or so. With no real end in sight, although they have, you know, said they will peak in 2030, and there are some signs actually that they are leveling out. But that being said, the Chinese system would ratchet it up really quickly. There's also a sense, well, they could ratchet it down really quickly. That's the way they do things. You know, they don't have a Congress sitting there blocking every move when they decide to do something and the order goes out to do it. So that's the hope.

How's that? And in terms of, you know, have they been underestimating their emissions? I do want to say that, that, you know, they have been. They have been. But that correction came from them, you know. So they are trying and to be more. transparent. And transparency is a very big part of going into Paris. You know, can we trust each other? So the United States and China both have domestic targets now, too, right? So what changed?

Well, I think what changed was, you know, the Chinese are feeling effects. The U.S. is feeling effects. And we are the two biggest emitter. So you can, you know, deal with this problem if China and the U.S. want to deal with it. And you can't deal with it if they don't want to deal with it. And the U.S. has really dragged its feet, you know, for many, many years. And the agreement that you alluded to at the start, you know, the what's called the Copenhagen Accord, which was brokered by Barack Obama, that was considered in many ways of failure. And so now the U.S. is trying to step up to the plate. President Obama just rejected, you know, the Keystone pipeline. That was very much a move, I think, designed to send a signal to the world that we are serious. It took him years, though. In other words, Barack Obama. Obama is a left-of-center Democrat who came to office committed to doing something about climate change. We are now in year seven of his presidency. And for the first time, when you talk to people in the State Department, when you talk to people in the White House, they feel that climate change is a legacy issue, but only now.

I think he was a person who was late to come to this as one of the central issues of our time. And it's only now, as you say, in his second term that he's really started to do the things that he needed to do. In other words, the U.S. is going to come into Paris with something to show finally because Barack Obama finally decided to bypass Congress. And I do give him a lot of credit for that because otherwise we would be going to Paris with nothing. And there would be no prospect of an agreement really if the U.S. is not taking any concrete action. So what Barack – What concrete action is the United States taking? The concrete action that the U.S. is taking is what are called the clean power plant rules,

and they are a set of regulations designed to limit emissions from power plants, and they will have the practical effect of closing down a lot of the country's least efficient coal electricity generating plants. But there is sort of a sense that we are making progress, which didn't seem to be the case for many years. In short order, when we get to Paris, we're going to see a lot of beautiful words from a lot of nations in the setting of the city of light. But when they get down to it and they're across a table, what is going to be the stickiest one or two issues in front of them that haven't been prepared by diplomatic and scientific teams ahead of time? Right. Well, I think that a big sticking point is finance. A lot of developing countries say we need money. both to adapt to the inevitable climate change that's happening and also to take a different energy path, right, a cleaner, perhaps more expensive energy path. So the developing developed world did commit, in theory, $100 billion in climate finance, $100 billion a year. But we have seen

pledges that do not total up to $100 billion yet, not nearly. The U.S., for example, has only committed $3 billion. So let's say there's a, an agreement. as we probably expect coming out of Paris, and this agreement is brought home to the United States. What's the political battle that then ensues between the president and Congress? Well, this is a key point. That agreement will not be brought home. It's what's called, once again, in Wonderful UN-Speak bindingness. What kind of a treaty are we going to get? We can't have a treaty that Barack Obama has to come home and get Senate ratification for because he will not get it. It's sort of a treaty, but it's not a treaty that needs to be brought before Congress. And that is –

But as you talk, Betsy – imagine the listener hearing this, a treaty that's not a treaty, and they're all saying, you know what, I have a headache and I have to leave the room, but maybe I'll turn the lights off to be a good citizen. No, but I mean this. And isn't this part of the problem? Oh, absolutely. In addition to the fact that we all have to change the way we live, the way we move around the globe, et cetera, et cetera. The political way this is discussed and the intricacies of having to do it on an international level with countries having radically different interests make it so hard to get from point A to B when we have to get to Z.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And that is the situation that we're in. And it's definitely a reasonable person could look at both the geophysics and the economics and the politics and the politics. politics and despair. That is, I think, a very reasonable response. But that being said... But we don't have to be religious to know that despair is the one unforgivable sin. Exactly. Exactly. So when the politicians come home from Paris and you are assessing the meeting in Paris, what would you consider success and what would you consider a failure? If we come out of Paris with a sort of agreement that emissions must peak soon and start coming down, that will be considered success. Now, does it mean emissions will peak soon and start to come down? I can't promise you that.

But I think a sense that we have momentum and that therefore that we're heading in a certain direction, I know this sounds horribly vague and not enough to hang the future of the planet on, but I'm going to continue on anyway, that money will follow. The idea is that this will become a virtuous cycle. Money and investment will follow the direction and the signals given in Paris. That is the best you can hope for. Betsy, thank you.

Okay, thanks. That's New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Colbert. The Paris climate talk start on November 30th. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Lots of people who believe that finding a coin gives them good luck. Do you believe that? Perhaps it does for them. For me, the coin is the luck.

And what is your advice for young coin hunters? Always hold your mother's hand when you're crossing the street. What is your advice for someone who's 25 years old, who's just moved to the city, loves the idea of hunting for coins, what should they do? I know millennials are said to have all kinds of special problems these days. I hope the satisfaction of finding coins can counter some of the frustrations that are said to be intrinsic to your age group. That's not very helpful, Roger.

to them or to you? Roger, is global warming good or bad for coin hunting? I think it's bad. First, it's going to put some of Manhattan underwater, but more importantly or more regularly, it's going to reduce the amount of time during the year that people are wearing gloves and are having more trouble holding onto their coins. Good for you, Nick. I've just found a penny underneath a little flower box here with some boxwoods. lovely outside a cafe i have a two thousand penny so i now have one cent and you have 35 34 to go so roger why did you miss that is it because i'm a better coin hunter now um i think because i was

trying to answer your difficult question i'm david remnick welcome back to the new yorker radio hour i've got three kids mostly grown now and i think any of you with three kids or two or maybe even just one, we'll tell you that sometimes raising children just feels nuts. So when Larissa McFarcker told me about the Badoe family of Philadelphia, well, it kind of blew my mind. Here's Larissa. When Sue Hogue was 12, she read a book, The Family Nobody Wanted, about a couple in the 1940s who adopted a multiracial posse of 12 children,

despite having very little room or money. It seemed wonderful to Sue to be part of such a family. and she begged her parents to adopt. What a thrill it would be, she thought, to take children who have been abandoned to friendless institutions and bring them home and play with them and love them and make them happy. Her parents said no, but Sue kept thinking about that book, and by the time she was 15, she had met her future husband, Hector Bodeau,

and by the time she was 18, she and Hector had planned their family. They would have two kids and adopt two. By the time they were four years out of college and four years married, they had had the two kids and adopted the two kids and thought their family was complete. But there were more than two children in the world who needed parents. There were so many children who, because they were too old or too violent or too traumatized or unable to walk or too close to death or the wrong color, or had too many brothers and sisters, were unlikely ever to be adopted.

And when Hector and Sue thought about what those children's lives would be like without parents, lives that were already unimaginably difficult, they could not bear it. Oh, boy. Well, we have 22 children, I know for sure. I believe we have 36 grandchildren. Yes. And I believe it's 10 great-grandchildren. I haven't checked a computer printout this morning. I think that's correct. Okay, I know what you're thinking. 22 children. It's an enormous number. But Hector came from a family of 16 biological kids.

So even as the family grew and grew to 22, it still felt like a normal family. family to him. In 1985, when Sue was 24, they had five children under five, plus three teenage foster kids living with them. But then one day, Sue was leaving through an adoption newsletter from New Mexico and saw a picture of four young kids, two brothers and two sisters. So Sue Ann is on the bottom left, Flory's on the bottom right. And something about those four kids pulled at her. Yeah, it was just a sense of a connection that you feel in your, you know, your gut and in your heart our faith is important so we do pray but

just you feel this sense of kid like this is my child and this is my child not living with me yet I have to go get this child this child is supposed to be here when the kids were growing up they all lived in a big old stone house in the outskirts of Philadelphia that used to be a convent in the wintertime it gets very

drafty in there because the furnace broke shortly after they moved and they didn't have enough money to fix it even though they knew that having more and more kids would take away some of their time and attention and resources and they did not have a lot of money. If it was going to dramatically improve the lives of the kids who were not yet in their family, then it was worth it. Sue and Hector flew out to New Mexico to meet the four new kids. I remember walking into the foster family home being so nervous. Even though we had adopted before and everything, these were the oldest kids at that point we had adopted. So they had more

of an actual, legally, they had more of a say and whether they were going to come with us or not, but also, So they had more ability to verbalize and say whether they wanted us to be their parents or not. These new kids, the ones in New Mexico, had had a pretty rough childhood. They'd been bouncing from foster home to group home for a while. Sometimes they were together and sometimes they were separated. Before they met the Beddoes, the kids had made lists of what they wanted from a permanent family. Sue Ann was the oldest girl. Her number one wish was that she'd never again be separated from her sister and her brothers.

Abel, the oldest, wrote that he wanted someone he could call dad. He wanted to call someone dad, but more importantly, he wanted someone who would call him. His son. Introduce him as this is my son. Yeah. Did you ask them to call you mom and dad? No, one thing we never did with any of our kids is tell them what to call us. We asked them what they wanted to be called, and if they, once they were adopted, what name they would want.

Yeah, Abel, I know. He wanted to be Rocky, Abel Rocky Bedo. Because after Rocky, the movie character. Most of them, nearly all of them, did end up calling us mom and dad. Something quicker than others. It's actually better when they don't call you mom and dad too quickly. You have some other respectful way that you talk to each other. But do you long for that moment when they spontaneously call your mom or dad?

Of course she did. Sue was just a normal mom in many ways. There was always the risk that things would go badly, but this risk excited her. Would the new child get along with the others? How soon would this new child feel that this was her home, not just another foster home that she'd get kicked out of in a few months? Sue Ann and Flory had been in so many foster homes

that at first they didn't know the difference. I thought it was just another foster home. I just thought it was further away than New Mexico. I was just like, okay, as long as we're together. How did you come to feel that this was your family, that this was something different from, a group home or a foster home. I guess it took a while, you know, just being in a routine and, you know, just knowing that

you're not going to go anywhere else, you know. I didn't really understand what adoption was until when you go to court and you're allowed to change your name and be who you want to be and start a new life and decide who you really are and this is what your life is going to be and this is your family. And you don't actually move anywhere else and you stay in the same school. And you start to have like a real life, that's when it really sinks it. Because your life isn't like that beforehand. Your life is chaos all the time.

Bringing in new children was obviously more work for Sue and Hector. But everything was work. They never wanted an easy life. They were always exhausted. They were always broke. And they almost never had any time alone. But they knew that they were needed. They could give love and food and shelter to children who hadn't had those things.

And they were doing God's work. It was a lot of work. Sue even wrote a Bodeau family handbook in which she wrote down the family's values, rules, and rituals, including number six. We will celebrate special times in each person's life, like birthdays and anniversaries, and try our best to make each person feel special and loved.

Number nine. Each week, mom will take one kid on a Friday night date and dad will take one kid on a Saturday morning breakfast so we can have one-on-one time and develop our relationships with each other. But no matter how, organized they were. There was always a lot to do. What times do you get up? Forever I got up around 4.35.

4.30? Why? Yeah. I needed my time before the kids got up, but to get that many kids, bathe them, get their clothes on and all that kind of stuff. Change diapers and make lunges, yeah. And usually hit the sack about a lot of that. That wasn't in her contract. What did you do? Slipped in until seven. From almost the beginning of their marriage, Sue and Hector had a deal. She would do the paperwork. He would change the diapers.

He didn't like having a boss, so she decided she would work outside the home and make the money. He would stay at home with the kids. At first, Sue was working as an adoption caseworker in Philadelphia, and she would be home at night and make the dinners. And then she took a fellowship in Washington, D.C., which meant she was away five days a week, living in a hotel room, and Hector was at home, making the lunches, changing the diapers, doing whatever needed to be done. Even when they had 16, 17, 18 kids, he would take them on road trips on summer vacations. My dad would make the van like a big huge bed where we all just had our spots. So we kids sometimes we traveled through the night and we'd have to sleep, you know. Sleep and read, sing songs.

Imagine being in a van full of like not only like some teenagers but babies peeing and stuff like that. It was worse. And he took all the kids that were living at home at the time. Some of them were babies. Some of them were in wheelchairs. That was fun. By the time they were grown, they'd been through every state in America except for Hawaii and Alaska, which was a big point of pride for all the kids.

I mean, my dad was good for the most part, but he did forget a couple people at like six flags and stuff like that. No, he didn't forget them. They got left at the bathroom when we were walking to the van and would get to the van and do a headcount and we'd be like, oh, shoot, they went to the bathroom and I need to have to go back and get them. They'd be like standing there next to security. Everywhere they went across the country or at home, people would stare at them and ask

about their family. I used to be embarrassed growing up telling people I was like adopted and from a big family because I didn't want people knowing. We got a lot of attention. Not everybody was like, you have black people and Chinese people and white kids. You have all these different races too. And they're like, that's not your brother. And then you get a lot of questions. Sometimes you don't want to share your whole life with every person you meet. What kind of questions? They'd be like, well, what do you mean you're adopted? Why are you adopted? Where's your parents? Yeah. Well, what's wrong with you? Why don't your parents? love you. And that's what my brother would say. He'd be like, our mom just threw us in the trash.

Sue wanted her children to know that she was different. When one older girl joined the family, she asked Sue, how do I know I can trust you? Sue said, we have made a commitment to you. That commitment is just as serious to us as our marriage vows. We are making a promise not only to you, but also to God. And it doesn't matter what you do. You are our children. We are your parents. We are a family. Of course, she didn't know then how much that would be tested. They made a point of adopting children that no one else was going to adopt. They adopted six brothers and sisters from Texas, teenagers.

No one was going to adopt six teenagers other than Sue and Hector. They adopted three boys with terrible physical disabilities that meant they needed constant care. A lot of people thought they were saints to do what they'd done. But others thought they were publicity. or had some kind of psychological disorder. People thought they were presumptuous to imagine that they could be good parents to so many kids.

Hector heard it all, but he developed a pretty thick skin. This is what we're good at, and that's what we're doing. They can't imagine, I couldn't do this, so how can you? And so then they start to speculate, well, then what would be someone's motives for doing that? And they either go to an extreme, well, you must be in it for some bad motive. You're in it for the money. There's a lot. We could have been a lot richer.

There's a lot of other ways. Easier a way to make a buck. Their goal was to break the cycle. Their kids' parents had had children as teenagers, and they weren't able to take care of them, and the children ended up in foster care. Hector and Sue wanted things to be different. They wanted their kids to finish high school and go to college,

and then have children once they had settled down and could raise them in a stable home. But it didn't happen that way. Did your parents talk to you about birth control? I think they thought they did, but maybe I wasn't listening. I don't, that was, I actually had a baby at 16, so there was a lot of, that threw a monkey wrench into the family dynamics. Sue Ann knew she had to tell her parents about her pregnancy, but it was very difficult. My mom was pretty upset. She didn't say too much.

You know, what did I do wrong? I'm a failure. I'm a bad mom. I never should have adopted these kids if I couldn't make their life better for them. I think my parents thought that I had been a part of the family long enough that they had made an impact that it wouldn't happen. Yeah, the situation is still vivid in my mind of... 21 years later. Yeah, it was pretty... It was shocking, and it was the last thing we wanted or expected. It was kind of crushing. Hector and Sue told Sue Ann that she could either drop out of school to take care of her baby or put it up for adoption.

It wasn't that they didn't love babies around the house. Of course they did. But they wanted their children to take good care of their kids to be real parents to them. I guess I had a motto that I wasn't going to raise my kids' kids. And I kind of stuck to it. You know, my thinking has evolved over time, but especially when we first started having to deal with pregnancies,

I was like, oh, if you're going to have kids, you're going to have to take responsibility. I didn't have a job. I didn't have any money. I didn't have an education. I didn't have anything to give her. Sue Ann named her daughter Milagro. She decided to give her up for adoption,

but to family friends so she could continue to see her. Well, I knew I wanted her to have a good life, and I knew that I couldn't give that to her. So I had to, you know, give her everything. Give her me and give her a family. After what happened with Sue Ann, Sue and Hector were not taking any more. more chances. I was on the Norplant when I was like 13. My parents just wanted to play it safe.

Sue Ann's younger sister, Flory, was only 13, but they put her on Norpland and she stayed on it for five years. But then when she was 18, she decided to go off it, and she got pregnant and had a baby. Yeah, I thought about giving her up for adoption as well, because I was like young and it was a lot of decisions. But then I, you know, also thought about Sue Ann's situation when Malagra, and I just couldn't do it. Sue Ann got pregnant again and quit college. Flory got pregnant again. And then there were more pregnancies and more after that. And then some really terrible things happened.

Sue and Hector had adopted three boys, knowing that they had terminal illnesses and would die young. But it was still a shock when they did die. Two other sons ended up in prison, Fisher for beating up his girlfriend, and Abel for sexually molesting one of his younger sisters. When that happened, Hector told me, he thought about leaving. He wasn't really going to leave, but that's how he felt.

Sue became profoundly depressed. She wrote to a friend. I try to pray, but I feel like I am praying into a black hole. Reading the Bible does nothing more for me than reading the newspaper. I still believe, but I feel nothing. No connection to God. No reality of the Holy Spirit in my life. This must be what hell is like.

When you think about reading the family nobody wanted, when you were a kid, how does the family you created differ from that? How is it like or not like the family you pictured when you were 12? So for me, our family turned out better than anything that I imagined from those, either movies or books. The downs, the valleys, the trenches have been worse than anything I imagine from any of those. One of the worst things I remember from that family Nobody Wanted book

was when they reached a point where they'd, didn't have any money to buy groceries and they didn't know when the next time they would. And that was like the worst thing I remember from that book. And certainly we've been through way worse things than that. The hard times were harder and yet the overall feeling of who we are as a family and the depth and the security I have that the relationships are really no matter what and they are forever. The joy that we do experience when things do go well or when we're just enjoying each other when we're just having a good time, is way better than anything, I imagine.

I can't imagine any other life than the one we've had together. So when I had the, we were going to change the world when we, I think we did it to a certain extent, but I think the big changes I'm hoping are going to come even a couple more, couple generations down the road where we were trying to break the cycle of poverty or break the cycle of early pregnancies. Or I thought we were going to adopt them. Everything's going to be wonderful. They're going to go to college.

But the commitment, it's going to be a few generations. I think that was a big adjustment for me. Sue Ann and Flory are now both happily married. Most of the kids still live within a few blocks of Sue and Hector's house, the one they grew up in. They're in and out of the house all the time, babysitting each other's kids. There are always people at the bedouette.

Even like ex-boyfriends, they still come around to, like, talk to my parents and hang out with the family. Sue still travels a great deal. She speaks about adoption and foster care all over the country. Hector now works overnight shift in a homeless shelter. This summer, they discovered they even had enough time to take over a month off and travel to Kenya to help teenage moms and their babies. In a lot of ways, Sue and Hector are like any other parents. They love being parents. They love their kids. they've gotten a lot out of it. They did not choose an easy life, but they loved it. Being parents was what they were great at,

and that's what they wanted to do all the time to the exclusion of everything else. Some people look at the bad things that happen in their family and think, this experiment didn't work. They should have adopted fewer kids. Not everyone can do what Sue and Hector did. And maybe not everyone should. You know, if I see someone that's put their whole life goal

is to do something really risky and crazy, like climbing Mount Everest, and you could die while you're doing it, and other people might have to risk their lives to save you if something happens. Like, I don't get that. But if that's that person's passion, then who am I to question them, too? Just because I couldn't do it, doesn't mean they can't do it. Sue Bado, matriarch of the Bado family. Larissa McFarca wrote about them in her book, Strangers Drowning.

I'm David Remnick, and that's it for the New Yorker Radio Hour today. let me know what you thought of the show. Reach us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio or leave us a comment at New YorkerRadio.org. We'll be back next week with more stories. Let's try it again. I will go for a nickel on this.

Actually, a quarter. Let's try another one. That has a completely unmetallic sound, certainly not as high as a dime, and without the richness of that quarter. So for that, I would say a penny. Yes, correct.