When Doves Cry / Fever

An ecologist in Maine fears she will be criticized because she "communicates with animals." Then a tiny, collared Dove told her he could read her mind. And – a man in Alaska hears a rumor about the elusive blue bear. He never gave it much thought until a friend convinced him to search for one. We're wrapping up the FEVER series this week! Tune in. STORIES When Doves Cry An ecologist in Maine fears she must be crazy because she communicates with animals. Then a tiny, collared Dove told her he could read her mind. Thank you Sara and Lily B for sharing your story with us! Produced by Anna Sussman, edited by John Fecile, original score by Nicholas Marks. The Blue Bear Lynn Schooler grew up in Alaska hearing rumor after rumor about the elusive blue bear. He never gave it much thought until a friend convinced him they go out searching for one. What Lynn ended up finding was, of course, something much different. Thanks Lynn for sharing your story with Snap! For more on Lynn Schooler's work check out his Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/lynn.schooler?ref=tn_tnmn. Produced by Nancy Lopez, sound design by Renzo Gorrio and Davey Kim. Season 17 - Episode 9 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Glynn Washington?

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• 1:30Glynn Washington?

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• 2:12Glynn Washington?

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• 2:41Glynn Washington?

  Take if you will a picture of a story that starts with a twist. She hears a voice inside of her. Can you, my darling? Can you picture this? Dream if you can of a winter alone in the world that's so cold. Maybe we stop the demanding. Maybe we need understanding. Two-fold. For our love series Fever, Snap strikes such curious poses. This is what it sounds like when doves cry. Snap Judgment, storytelling with a beat. My name is Glynn Washington. Don't make me chase you, because even doves have pride.

• 3:26Glynn Washington?

  And you're listening to Snap Judgment.

• 3:37Glynn Washington?

  Now, we begin with a question because our story is from Sarah Wright, an ecologist who writes about animal behavior and patterns in the natural world. But there's one truth she knows about nature that she's never wanted to talk about.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Why didn't you want to talk about it?

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Because I'm crazy. I knew people were gonna think I was crazy, so I didn't talk about it, period.

• 4:02Glynn Washington?

  Snap's Anna Sussman asks pretty, pretty please, if she'd tell us her secret. Snap Judgment.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Sarah Wright told me that if I wanted to talk to her about her story, I'd have to come to her. So I drove to western Maine and ended up in the middle of nowhere, in the mountains, on a dirt road.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  And it got narrower and narrower until there was no road left, just forest. And then I got out of the car and walked through the trees.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  And then I saw a tiny, old woman with two long silver braids and high cheekbones, watering a patch of wildflowers in front of a log cabin. Hello!

• 5:06Speaker 02

  How are you, Anna?

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Good to meet you.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Good to meet you too.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  What a beautiful cabin. Are we going?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Okay, we're gonna go on the porch. But right now, we're gonna go inside.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Sarah brings me inside the cabin. A wood-walled living room with an aging couch, a screened-in porch. On her little white fridge, she's scrawled in a black sharpie, long slanting lists of animals and plants.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  I say, "Okay, sandhills arrive, turkey displays," I don't know, I do this every year. "Grouse drums, cardinal songs, tipmace arrives."

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Oh, it goes around to the front to go around the other side of the patch. There's bears, frogs. She lives profoundly isolated in the woods. In the winter, she has to snowshoe to her car. But she loves the woods. She grew up playing in the great forests of the Northeast, with only the animals and her little brother as company.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  We had nothing to distract us, and nobody was ever bothering us. We related to almost everything wild, everything we could get our hands on. I was three years old with my little brother, but we were soulmates.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  They'd wade through swamps and build forts and collect frogs. This one time, they even got a skunk in a live trap.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  My grandmother said, "No, don't get near that trap. He's gonna, you know, spray us." And we said, "No, he's not, he's not, he's not." He never did, of course. And so secretly, we went to the trap and let him out.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  And when they did, the skunk walked slowly out of the trap and then turned to the kids and looked them in the eyes. And that's when they asked it to be their friend.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Did you feel he understood you?

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. We both understood that the skunk knew exactly what we were saying. And of course, his behavior demonstrated his response.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  That we were friends and we wanted to get to know him better and we'd like to see him again, all of those sorts, all of those sorts of things.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  We were both so excited, we ran home. When we ran home, we were immediately told we were my parents. And of course, what came back was, we were imagining things. The whole incident was discounted as a figment of two children's imagination.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  But Sarah was convinced that it wasn't her imagination. And this would be the beginning of a hunt she had about communication between animals and humans.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Sarah and her brother set up the trap near their house again. And did he come back to the trap again?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Yes, again and again and again. And he became kind of like a pet. But he wasn't a pet, he was a wild animal.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  It went on like this. They had friendships with animals. And when Sarah and her brother grew up, still, whenever they would have encounters with wild animals that they couldn't explain to anyone else, they had each other.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Sarah would call him and tell him about the conversations she had with the pheasants outside her kitchen window.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  He would tell her about the new skunk under his house he had befriended.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  I could always check, you know, it was always him. So there were always two of us, and then there wasn't.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Sarah's brother died unexpectedly in his twenties.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  My brother and I were very isolated, which was no problem until he died. And after his death, it became a huge problem. It was much harder after it got to be just me, because I always had him to depend on.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Once she lost her brother, Sarah's life got pretty dark. She had gotten married, but it fell apart. So eventually, after many years of living as a shell of a person, Sarah did the only thing that felt right. She moved deep into the woods, and she began to write about animals and trees.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Eventually, she was alone.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Some days, I'm perfectly fine just being by myself. But there are other days when I am unbearably lonely.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  I pictured myself as a person who had a family and lots of animals. Well, the animal part, for sure, came through. The rest did not.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  She went to school, and she got advanced degrees in ecology. And she could dialogue with her professors and her peers about animal behavior and patterns in the natural world. But then there were other observations. Observations she didn't dare share with her colleagues about interspecies communication.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Why didn't you want to talk about it?

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Because I'm crazy. I knew people who were going to think I was crazy. So I didn't talk about it, period.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Tell me, why did you want a dove?

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Oh, gosh. That's such a great question. That takes me back when I was a very, very small child.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  When I first learned how to draw, and I was drawing as, you know, as a toddler, I used to draw little doves. I had a thing about doves. I had always wanted a bird, but I could never, I could not bear the idea of having a caged bird. Because birds need to fly and they need to be free.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  So I was never able to resolve that conflict.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  But then she discovered an opportunity to save a dove from potentially being killed.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  I don't know if I read it or saw it, but I found out that they imported African collared doves into the US to sit on exotic bird's eggs.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  And then they set them free. And of course, most of them died.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Sarah found an average-looking African collared dove at a pet store for $5 in a nearby town and drove him home in a little box on her front seat.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  She named him Lily B. Lily because she always liked that name. And B because he was a boy, Lily Boy. And Sarah and Lily B became instant BFFs.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  I loved him. I just loved him. And he liked the kitchen because he loved to watch me cook. And that's how I discovered he loved Havarti cheese. Anytime I was in the kitchen, he was in the kitchen. Anything I cooked, he wanted to taste.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Lilybee liked Mozart on the record player and sitting in the window and watching the wild birds outside.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Lilybee liked to go for rides in the car. I would take him with me. And he would perch either on the seat or his favorite place was the dashboard.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  And he'd sit up there and just, he'd just enjoy riding with me.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Why do you think he liked riding in the car?

• 13:25Speaker 02

  I think the scenery. I mean, always, always paying attention. We just had a life. I would wake up and, and he would start cooling. He would just cool and, cool and, cool and, cool. And I'd say, "Oh, good morning sweetheart."

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Sarah had become a full-time professional ecology writer, delivering articles to nature journals and online magazines about her observations and her research.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Every morning I journaled. And he was always in the room with me in the early morning.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  But then, something kind of beautiful started to happen.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  When Sarah would sit down to write her scientific observations.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  The reality is, if I was writing about, and I was always writing about nature. And if it was something really important, he had a special triple cool that he would use.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  The thing is, the cool was so, it was so insistent. It was louder than his regular cools. And at first, you know, I thought it was interesting.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  It took me, believe it or not, it took me six months to get it, that he was reading my mind.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  But after six months, I knew he was reading my mind. And I was also dealing with the fact that I might be crazy.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  And so that was really scary.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Tell me if I have the correct understanding.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  You would be journaling. Lilly B would be next to you.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  And when you would have a... Maybe, you know, when we're writing, you get to a point where things click?

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and insight. Any kind of... I don't like that word. Revelations.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  A breakthrough, a landing.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Anything, anything. And... Ah, damn, that bird.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  He would coo three times.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Only three times.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  So, for example, Sarah would begin to write a piece about her observations, let's say about mice or bears. And she would begin to work out a theory on pen and paper. And Lilly B would coo three times if she was on the right track.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  And, I mean, it put me over the edge because at that time, you know, I had done graduate work and everything is intellectualized. I had, at that point, been academically trained not to believe in this.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  So she kept it to herself? Well, herself and Lilly B.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  I mean, I knew it was happening. And I believed him. I believed Lilly B.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  I mean, you do... The whole scene is, you know, like crazy old lady in the main woods.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Exactly. Like a fairy tale. That's all. You know, honestly, I've become the old woman who lives in the woods with a bunch of animals. Was kind of like a Aubrey Yogg figure.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  He helped to cement something I had always known about myself, and which was that I was different.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Lilly B. was the one that did that. So when he cooed, I paid attention. I said, "Oh, okay, I get it."

• 17:48Speaker 02

  I said, "If he's like this, they're all like this." All these things that I have experienced during my life, I can communicate across species. In other words, I was starting to own it, to myself, not to anyone else.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Does accepting that also mean accepting a certain amount of isolation from the rest of the world?

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  So is that a trade-off in your life?

• 18:20Speaker 02

  I think it is, yeah, for me, yes. You lose the ability to share your experiences with other people. That, to me, has been the worst, especially since I had it as a child.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  But she had Lilly B. And for the first 10 years of Lilly B.'s life, he was a reliable editor, cooing three times when her writing was headed in the right direction. Sarah never kept Lilly B. in a cage. He just lived here in the cabin with her, following her from kitchen to dining room table to bedroom, where he'd sleep above her bed.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  And then, one day, something terrifying happened.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Lilly B., her editor and her best friend, decided to fly away.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  I remember the moment of, "My God." I opened the door, and it was open. But he had never attempted to fly out before.

• 19:42Glynn Washington?

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• 20:23Glynn Washington?

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• 20:42Glynn Washington?

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• 21:25Glynn Washington?

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• 21:45Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the When Doves Cry episode. Last we left little bird, Lily Bee, had just made a break for it and flew out of the house to the shock and horror of Sarah. Snap Judgment.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  When Lily Bee flew into the woods and Sarah didn't know if he'd ever come back, she panicked.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Because I was so afraid he was gonna be killed.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Lily Bee had never been a wild bird. He had no experience with predators. But eventually, he perched himself on a tree branch near their house.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  He'd sing to me every single morning at about 5 o'clock from the lilac tree that was right outside my window. So he never went anywhere.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Sarah knew what he was doing. He was trying to get the attention of a wild bird.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Oh, he's chasing the morning doves from tree to tree, right around the house, over and over and over. I watched him the whole time, fly after one morning dove after another.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  And what do you realize he's trying to do? Or what do you think?

• 22:56Speaker 02

  He's trying to find a mate.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  And I could feel that, I knew it. And after six weeks of flying after, and it was springtime, it was mating time, and nobody loved him. And then one day, he just flew home again, flew back in the house, and he stayed there. And I said, ah, gotta get him a mate.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  So Sarah found Lily Bee, a series of female doves, who he loved with varying degrees of enthusiasm. And then she found Lucia. Do you remember how you found her? How you found Lucia?

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Internet.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Where was she?

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Someplace in, right here in Maine. And I took one picture of her, and I ran it off the computer, and I put it up on the wall, and I said to Lily Bee, "Is that the bird?"

• 24:01Speaker 02

  I went back to the internet. I said, "I'll take her."

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Lucia had brown feathers and was very smart.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  That bird was the love of his life. They were never separate. They ate together. They sat on the same branch. If they moved to the house, one followed the other. He taught her everything she knew. She was a real spirit bird. They slept together. They were together all day. They were just always like this. If one flew, the other one followed. They never were separated. And sometimes he had treats for her. He would bring back little pieces. I never really got it, you know? But he would bring her things.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Like what?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Well, he brought her blueberries once. And once he brought her some kind of little stone. You know, he brought her presents.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  When he had that kind of love, could you feel something?

• 25:07Speaker 02

  Oh, it was impossible not to.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  What did that... Tell us what that felt like as someone who's so connected to Lily B.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  There was some distance that opened up. It's not that we didn't communicate, but there was another in the space, and I could feel that.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  But there definitely was a distance.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Was that okay with you? Was that hard?

• 25:33Speaker 02

  No. I didn't think it would. I missed him. But I wanted him to be happy. And he was happy.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Lily B and Lucia stayed together wing by wing for years and years. Until the morning Sarah woke up and put the kettle on and looked out the window for the turkeys and the deer, and then looked up to the perch Lily B and Lucia sat on and noticed something wasn't right with Lucia.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  She seemed like she was sort of rocking back and forth. She was not acting right. And I went, "Oh, no." And the next morning, she was on the bottom of the cake.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  When I went in, he was on his perch, but he flew down. He was so clearly in mourning. He wouldn't leave her. So I left her there.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  And I said, "I'll leave you there as long as he needs her." And I left her there.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  It was all that day. And the next morning,

• 26:51Speaker 02

  I dug a grave. And I put her in it. And he watched me bury her.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  He was inconsolable. And so we all sat with him. He had a basket over the window. And I sat with him. He loved the Mozart requiem.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  And so I put on the requiem.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Sarah was 65 years old when she buried Lucia in a wildflower patch. She couldn't deny that her future wasn't the limitless expanse imagined in younger minds.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Lily Boy's feathers were starting to age, too. His voice was getting croaky.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  It was time to ask her bird a question.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  I said to him, I said, "Look, if you feel like you need another mate, you've got to let me know. Because I don't know what to do at this point."

• 28:33Speaker 01

  You're looking at him in the eyes?

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  And I was talking out loud to him. I said, "You have to let me know because I can't make that decision for you." Those words, I thought it was gonna kill him. Because I hadn't heard a sound since she died. We go on another day or so. I'm still writing in the morning. And all of a sudden, I know. I just know. And I wrote, "He doesn't want another mate."

• 29:21Speaker 02

  And when I wrote those words, he spoke for the first time. He called three times. And so I knew. And then, all of a sudden, he's... He just came back to life. And that was when he became my bird again, just the way he had been in the beginning. I was in the kitchen, he was in the kitchen. He was everywhere I was.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  How long have you told Lily B. would live? It must have been about 10 or 12 years.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Some African collared doves live all the way into their mid-teens. Lily B. is now 35 years old.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  You know, it's been him and me, you know? And it's okay. He's an old bird now. He's starting to lose his vision. And we're just getting old together.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  It's 79-year-old Sarah and 35-year-old Lily B. In their little log cabin. Lily B. moved into the bathroom.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  And you see, the bathroom is the perfect place to have their ruse. Because I have to go to the bathroom. So I'm in there like, what, 50 times a day? It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. I mean, I couldn't have planned it better. All right, let's go say hi to him. You want to go inside? Okay.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  Hi, sweetie. Oh, he's nap on. It's his nap. Yeah, hi, honey. Hi. Hi, sweetheart. How are you? I love you. I love you.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  The bathroom is lined in cedar wood. Lilly Bee has a perch in the corner. He looks out a big glass window onto a meadow.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  You can see he's focused on everything I'm saying. Everything. And at the same time, he's got his eye on you. And he's like, really?

• 31:42Speaker 01

  He's kind of trembling.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Is he always on that?

• 31:45Speaker 03

  No, he does that. He does that as part of... It's part of the communication thing.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  He's kind of like shuffling back and forth on his branch. Lilly Bee is a remarkably unremarkable-looking bird.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  His feathers are scruffy, and he's got some bald spots. And years ago, he lost his voice.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  And...

• 32:06Speaker 01

  He just raised his wings when he said "fly"?

• 32:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. He says, "I just can't fly the way I used to." Yeah, I know, honey. Oh, honey, I know.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  He was trying to fly when she was talking about flying.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, he's just talking about flying. Yeah. See, he understands everything I say.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  This is why it's such a good thing to be in a bathroom, because you can always have the conversation with me.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  What do people misunderstand about your telepathy with Lilly Bee?

• 32:39Speaker 03

  I don't talk about it to people because nobody understands it.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Are you worried about this when you're going out?

• 32:46Speaker 03

  I was initially. I said, "What? How? I never talk about this." I have reached the point now where I'm just not shutting up about it. Yeah, he reads... Lilly Bee reads my mind. I used to feel like I had to explain all this stuff. It's like the nice thing about being a very strange old woman is that I am free to say any damn thing I want. All I have to offer is my own experience. That, take it or leave it.

• 33:25Speaker 03

  If you don't want to believe that interspecies communication...

• 33:31Glynn Washington?

  Is a reality, that's your problem.

• 33:57Glynn Washington?

  Thank you so much Sarah and Lily B for sharing your story and thank you so much for sharing your connection. Original score by Nicholas Marks, produced by Anna Sussman.

• 34:30Glynn Washington?

  With Snap Judgment Returns, a journey to find a very elusive creature. Stay tuned.

• 34:46Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the When Doves Cry episode.

• 34:51Glynn Washington?

  Today, when you least expect it, expect it. Because for our next story, we head out to the shores of Alaska. For Lynn Sculler, there is nothing better than being alone in the wilderness.

• 35:08Glynn Washington?

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• 35:52Glynn Washington?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Americans United has spent the last 80 years defending your right to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Through film screenings, speaking engagements, and valuable resources like the Know Your Rights and Public School Guides, AU empowers people nationwide to recommit to the separation of church and state, protecting individual freedoms and strengthening our democracy for all. Freedom without favor and equality without exception. Learn more at au.org/TENC.

• 36:40Speaker 04

  When I was growing up in Anchorage, back in the late 60s and early 70s, I had heard of blue bears. And you'd hear the stories about them, like they were these bears that lived up on the glaciers and never came down. And that's why they were this pale gray-blue color. And other people would say how they knew of somebody who knew somebody who shot one. But I certainly never saw one and didn't know anybody who had seen one. It always seemed so elusive and special. It just was below the radar all the time. I got into the guiding business because shortly after I moved down to southeast Alaska here,

• 37:22Speaker 04

  through a strange sequence of events, I actually wound up working for a law firm. And I've always played a game with myself where I asked myself what I would do if a doctor told me I only had two years to live. I decided, sitting there at my desk, with a screen in front of me and a suit and tie on, that I would want to spend all of that time outdoors, in wild places, on my own, answering to nothing social or cultural, or none of those expectations of how you should look or be or act.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  I went out and got a Master Mariner's License from the United States Coast Guard and built a boat to do this with and started a, more or less, a water charter freight service here in southeast Alaska. I would work 115, 125 days straight, exhaust myself. Winter would come, I'd just kind of hunker down and get through it however best I could and then prepare for the next season. It suited me. I didn't have the latitude, I didn't have the mental playroom to let some very disturbing things from my past that had been eating at me for a long time keep running around and around in my head.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  When I was 21 years old, a woman that I was very attached to disappeared. You know, of course, after we had searched all the woods around her cabin and done everything we could do to figure out where she went and why she left her dogs alone and why there was food rotting in the refrigerator and what could have happened, it turned out that she had been abducted and was murdered. Never knowing exactly who was involved, that cast a very long shadow over everything else. I didn't trust anybody. I didn't want to be close. I was not sure that the general cut of humanity was desirable company.

• 39:21Speaker 04

  I was 36 when I started working on getting the boat together and preferred to be alone. One day, the phone rang and it was Michio Hoshino, a Japanese fellow, I could tell from his accent, and it turned out he was one of the best wildlife photographers in the world, if maybe even the best, and had a huge rock star following in Japan. He wanted to hire me to take a film crew out for six weeks. And my initial reaction was, no way. The thought of having four people in an 8 by 10 area for weeks on end sounded more like the best analogy was a prison cell.

• 40:03Speaker 04

  But there was something in his approach that made me consider it. He just wanted to go out in the woods or on the water and see the most beautiful things he could see and try to take good photos of it. So I took the job. Within a couple of hours of having him on the boat, getting ready and everything, I realized that I liked him, which was kind of unusual, you know, to right away just like somebody.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  He was such a calm presence that you didn't feel like you had to be on your guard at all. I wasn't used to asking anybody for anything. And so I very reluctantly asked him if he would teach me something about photography. And he immediately agreed. I had taken Michio way up on a hillside where there's a stand of interstadial stumps and he was setting up, taking some photos. And he suddenly, he just stepped aside and motioned at his camera that he had on tripod there and pointed down at a, just a stump and some rocks. And I put my eye up to the viewfinder. There was this beautiful composition.

• 41:15Speaker 04

  A lot of smooth stones of different colors nestled into the curve of a root. It was like the root and these stones that were millions of years old had this intimacy between them. As if I was looking at a Madonna or a photo of a mother holding a baby. How did he see that in that pile of rubble that I was standing on? And that was fascinating to me. It was kind of an eye-opener about what photography could be like. He told me once that every photo should tell a story. And after he explained that to me, I started recognizing that in his work.

• 41:57Speaker 04

  He asked me one day if I thought we could find a blue bear. And I said, "Not a chance." Going looking for a blue bear is gonna be like looking for a yeti or, you know, a snow leopard. But he kept bringing it up. He kept asking me how we could find a blue bear. I started digging into it and gathering up all the information and we started making trips to some of these areas where there seemed like there might be a chance. He understood that bears can be very dangerous, but he also appreciated living with bears. He was adopted into the bear clan of the Clinquet Indians. One of our trips together, we had been up into a fjord region where I'd heard a rumor

• 42:42Speaker 04

  of a blue bear and spent several days without any success, no sign of it. One of those days where it's just so calm, you could, you know, see seagulls landing on the water half a mile away and no wind at all. And we decided to make a run and see if we could find some humpback whales. This was very late in the autumn. This weather front hit us, went from blowing maybe five knots to 20, to 40, to 50. And then, I don't know how hard it was blowing, it was just blowing like hell. And the seas built up almost faster than I can describe it. Like, big gray animals coming at us, out of the dark. And my boat, the Wilder and Swift, is only 31 feet long. It was out of control.

• 43:26Speaker 04

  I did not think we were gonna make it. Michio asked me how it looked. I lied, I said, "We'll be okay, the Swift is a good boat, we'll make it." And so, he said, "Okay," he laid down. I kept steering the boat and praying and was dry mouth with fear. And I looked back and Michio was sleeping. He was asleep. And the boat was just being thrown helter-skelter all over the place. Somehow or other, we managed to make it and tuck into a little hole I know about up there and get into shelter. Michio got up and looked around and said, "Oh, okay." He immediately started making dinner, you know?

• 44:06Speaker 04

  I was just clammy with sweat and stank from fear and was just so amazed to still be alive. And when I asked him if he wasn't afraid, he said, "Well, you said we'd be all right." And it just struck me how he believed me. He trusted me to be right. I'm glad I didn't make a liar out of myself. I found myself putting in extra effort to try to hunt down an elusive blue bear, talking to biologists, calling up other naturalists and guides, digging through the records in the library, going through old magazines, and just trying to parse up any little reference to the blue bear. It was intense.

• 44:49Speaker 04

  My intention was to do the very best I could for Michio. It got to where everything else was just filling in the time between our trips. We would have the kind of conversations I'd never had with anybody before.

• 45:06Speaker 04

  We were at anchor, you know, in a little cove, and we were in the cabin of the boat. We had coffee after dinner, you know, so, fresh smell of coffee. Sitting there in the light of a 12-volt white bulb, and the windows are open, and outside, there's the darkness, you know, and it's quiet. There's a sense of a really big world out there waiting. And that was the first time in our conversations, you know, when we were talking about all his successes. You know, he had a show at the Carnegie Museum. He had a show in Tokyo that 10,000 people attended the opening day.

• 45:48Speaker 04

  They were doing documentaries of him. His books were selling very well. And then, just out of the blue, he said, "I would trade all of this to have a family." And I realized that he was lonely. And that really hit me.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  Having those kind of conversations at night became one of the things that I looked forward to the most. Gradually realizing that what I really enjoyed here was this open intimate connection about what we really thought and felt. Sometimes he would ask my advice on how to get what he wanted, which was, I was the last person you ought to be asking how you'd go about getting married. It kind of snuck up on me that all of a sudden I had this close good friend.

• 46:37Speaker 04

  And then one day, he called me up and I could tell immediately that he was just vibrating with excitement. Michio had made a trip back to Japan and I asked him what was going on. And he said, "I met her." "Who? What? Tell me about it." And he said, "Her name is Naoko. We're gonna get married pretty soon." I'm embarrassed to admit that my reaction was, "Oh, no." Instead of being happy for him, I was afraid it was gonna mean the end of our trips, that he was gonna disappear. He was gonna fade out of my life. And then that passed pretty quickly. His excitement was contagious.

• 47:21Speaker 04

  And a year or so later, he got married and had a son. But then, he came to Juneau with his family and he still had hopes for finding the blueberry. I was kind of elated that it wasn't gonna change that much and it looked like we were definitely gonna be making another trip.

• 47:43Speaker 04

  It was some months later that... I called Michio up. I was all very excited and said, "I know where there's a blueberry. We can go to this place." Only Michio couldn't go when I thought we needed to go. We put it on hold. And I had another charter. After being out for a week or 10 days with those, that crew, I pulled into a little village named Cake and went to a payphone to call in and get all my messages at home.

• 48:12Speaker 04

  There were probably half a dozen or more messages from people calling to tell me that Micho was dead. Micho was working, doing his photography with this film crew in the Kamchatka Brown Bear Reserve. In the middle of the night, this bear who had been hanging around too close to camp and breaking into things, took Micho out of his tent and killed him. I remember standing in that little restaurant, that café, on the payphone, and this incredible void opened up.

• 48:56Speaker 04

  I literally don't remember the rest of the day. You know, just get back out on the water, find wildlife for these photographers, you know, set up, wait for the light, pay attention to the weather. But I wasn't present somehow. You know, it's like I was just watching myself do this stuff, not having any idea what the future might be, or if there was a future, if it was worth thinking about. Just loss. The following spring, I'd lined up trips for the spring and was with a couple of photographers that I wasn't getting along with. You know, looking back, I probably was not in the best frame of mind. We were anchored off in a fairly remote area.

• 49:40Speaker 04

  There was no wind, but there was the sound of water, you know, the sea moving, all the thousands of tiny little bubbles and pops and clicks and all you hear from different bivalves being exposed. Kind of thing where at first it seemed silent and quiet and still, but when you really start listening, there's just kind of constant murmuration of movement and life. A bear walked out onto the beach, got to look at it, and there was something different about it. I put this gift in the water and got a little closer, and it was this husky, well-furried, heavily muscled animal with this kind of smoky gray coat that blended into the, all

• 50:24Speaker 04

  of the glacial erratic stones and the cobbles and things. It looked like a dark gray stone.

• 50:32Speaker 04

  Sure enough, it was a blue bear.

• 50:35Speaker 04

  I broke every rule I had about approaching wildlife. I've always made it a point to try to not bother the animals, not intervene. But I just kept drifting closer and closer and closer. And the skiff was in a couple of inches of water. I might have even stepped out of the skiff and started walking towards it. If it hadn't just suddenly spun around and was looking at me and just picked up my camera that Michio had talked me into getting and took one shot.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  And then it just turned and ran off into the woods. And it was gone. And then it was just me sitting there on the beach.

• 51:23Speaker 04

  Part of it was very bittersweet. You know, it kind of felt a little bit like something was being put in my face. And I remember thinking, "Where are you, Michio? Where are you now that I've finally found a blue bear?"

• 51:42Speaker 04

  Took one sixtieth of a second to take that picture. It's blurry, it's kind of out of focus. You can tell it's a blue bear from the color, but the entire story of my friendship with Michio, all of those remarkable times I had spent with Michio, was wrapped up in that one sixtieth of a second. And the fact that it's not much of a composition and that it's blurry and, you know, poorly shot, doesn't change that.

• 52:33Glynn Washington?

  Thank you Lynn Sculler for sharing your story. To find out more about Lynn and Michio's adventures, grab a copy of Lynn's book, The Blue Bear. I have a link at snapjudgment.org. My story was produced by Nancy Lopez with sound design, original sound scoring, and original sound playing on instruments by Renzo Gorrio and Davy Kim.

• 53:06Glynn Washington?

  Snappers, this Wind Doves Cry journey was just one episode of the Snap Judgment Fever series, exploring the deep and varied ways to connect with someone else and divine. And there is nothing more intimate, more dangerous than a story. And if you want to set the mood for love and adventure, get the Snap Judgment Fever series on any podcast platform and send it to your boo. Share your fever story with us in comments on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen. We can't wait to read them. KQED in San Francisco is where we hide the evidence. Robots, please note that no Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior

• 53:48Glynn Washington?

  written permission on Team Snap. The union representatives, producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Works of America, AFL-CIL Local 51. Snap is brought to you by the team that talks to animals. Except of course, for the producer, Mr. Mark Ristich, he refuses to speak to anything that he eats. And there's Nancy Lopez, Pat Messina Miller, Anna Sussman, Renzo Goryo, John Facil, Shayna Shealy, Taylor Decot, Flo Wiley, Bo Walsh, Marissa Dodge, and this is not the news. No Oasis news. In fact, you can along great with all the creatures in the forest.

• 54:33Glynn Washington?

  Till that fateful day they just leave you standing. Knowing the world's so cold. And maybe it's because you're just too demanding. Maybe you're just like a father. Tubo. And you would still, even then, not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is PRX.

• 56:16Speaker 05

  This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O D O O dot com. That's O D O O dot com.