The Auralyn with Blair Braverman

Are you a survival pessimist or a survival optimist? Blair Braverman surprises Sarah with a harrowing, heartening, and sometimes hilarious tale of love and endurance in the face of certain death, but you’ll have to listen to find out the seemingly impossible circumstances our subjects had to overcome. Digressions include Sarah’s flight simulation skills, David Goggins' morning routine, and the best way to design your character in The Oregon Trail computer game. More Blair Braverman: Blair's new picture book, "The Day Leap Soared" Advice for Sarah from Blair Blair on Instagram More of Blair's work More You're Wrong About: Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchYWA on Instagram Sarah's other show, You Are Good Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Sarah Marshall?

  If you see a shark circling your boat, you should think purse.

• 0:14Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About the Podcast, where sometimes we get a little bit lost. And today, we are of course, joined by Blair Braverman, our survival correspondent. Blair has a suspenseful survival story for us today that was an absolute secret for me as I was preparing to record, and I am so excited for the journey she is about to take us on. You might remember Blair from previous fan favorite episodes covering such topics as Balto, Baby Jessica, The Miracle in the Andes, Idiot Love Pass Incident, Erin Ralston, and Chris McCandless. Blair also has an amazing new children's book coming out.

• 0:58Sarah Marshall?

  It's called The Day Leap Sword. It's out on October 21st. It's about joy, it's about dogs, it's about so many of the things that you know and love about the episodes that she's been on, and so much more. As always, we have a lot of great bonus episodes for you on Patreon and Apple Plus. Go check them out there. And if you have a survival related question for Blair, we have a post up on our Patreon where you can ask her some questions that might show up in an upcoming bonus episode where she answers your questions about survival, wilderness, and how to pee in really cold weather. A lot of people have asked that already, but you should ask that again if you want.

• 1:42Sarah Marshall?

  We also have recent bonus episodes on Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, with our Hollywood correspondent Eve Lindley. And this month, we brought on our legal correspondent, Mackenzie Joy Brennan, to join us for our True Crime Corner. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening. Here's your episode.

• 2:08Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we are all just trying to get through this thing called life, sometimes in the wilderness, sometimes not. And with me today is our survival correspondent, Blair Braverman.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Sarah Marshall.

• 2:26Sarah Marshall?

  Blair Braverman.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  You're wrong about.

• 2:29Sarah Marshall?

  That felt good. How are you? I'm so happy to have you back here. It's been many months.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  I am so good talking to you, Sarah. I can see your face. Your listeners can't. And you are like, like an oasis in the desert.

• 2:45Sarah Marshall?

  You are an oasis in the desert in every way. And I'm so happy to see your beautiful face, too.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  So Sarah, I feel like I should intro-- oh, I just knocked over my chocolate milk.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  It was empty.

• 2:59Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, thank God.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Sarah, I feel like I should introduce this because what happened here is that I heard a story.

• 3:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  And I thought, I want to tell this story to Sarah. And then I thought, I'm not going to tell her anything about it. I'm just going to ask her to schedule a podcast recording with me on trust. And she'll have no idea where this story goes.

• 3:20Sarah Marshall?

  Which is the first time I've done this on this show, I realize now, because usually I at least know the name of the thing that we're talking about. But yeah, it's, I mean, it's a complete mystery. I'm extremely excited. And also, you've more than earned that trust.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Do you have any predictions?

• 3:34Sarah Marshall?

  Um, well, okay, my only guess, and I don't think it's this, but the only thing I thought of was because I was like, thinking about telling you this story. And I was like, oh, it would be bad if this is the story she wanted to tell, is about that lesbian couple who pretended to be lost at sea, but that they weren't really lost at sea.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  No, it's not that.

• 3:53Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, all right.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  It's not that. But I will say, this is a survival story. I guess that's a spoiler, Sarah. But you probably would have guessed it.

• 4:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  It's one I wasn't familiar with.

• 4:04Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Which was exciting to me. I'd never heard about it at all. I feel like I'm going to start talking about it. And you're going to be like, oh, yeah, I know all about this. Let me just recite all the trivia. Like, it's fairly obscure.

• 4:17Sarah Marshall?

  I will be like, both chagrined and encouraged if I don't know it, because I spend a lot of time. Soothing my anxious brain by reading about scary things that happen. My other guess is that it's about the Lonergans, who were the inspiration for Open Water, but they famously did not survive. So it's probably not that.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Sarah, why, why are your guesses all about survival at sea?

• 4:43Sarah Marshall?

  I think about it a lot.

• 4:46Sarah Marshall?

  Is it that? Or is it, are we on land? Because I'm so excited.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know.

• 4:50Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, we don't know.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  We're just gonna have to see what happens to these people.

• 4:53Sarah Marshall?

  We don't know. We'll just find out, just like in real life. Oh, my God. Okay. Tell me, begin where you would like to begin.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I, I want to say that the, the way I learned about this story is I was assigned a book review for the New York Times, and the book is by Sophie Elmhurst. Wait, I don't want to say the title because it's going to give away a very slight spoiler, but I'll say the title at the end. It's so good. And I read it and I was, immediately became obsessed with the story. Like, I read like two pages in and I was running around my house like screaming for people to listen to me, reading it, reading it aloud. And then I, in a very paranoid way, it was like, Sarah, whatever you do, don't Google me. Don't look up anything I've written. Don't look on my social media for months because I just, this isn't like that big of a surprise, but I just was like, I want purity. I don't want her to see.

• 5:42Sarah Marshall?

  We need nice surprises in our lives, especially when there are so many weird, bad ones on the news. And I'm really, and I have managed to not accidentally spoil it for myself. So I'm really excited.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  All right, here we go. So Sarah, I want to introduce you to a suburban couple in England.

• 6:01Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, hello.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  The year is like 1960.

• 6:04Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  There's a gentleman named Maurice who works at a printing press. He's kind of a lonely guy. He was sick as a kid. He spent months alone in bed, so he really learned to enjoy his own company. He had a really strict religious family. He's not very close to them. They were very harsh. And he has terrible self-esteem. He has a stutter. He's shy. He just sort of has a, he's kind of a negative Nancy. That's what you need to know about Maurice.

• 6:30Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Or Morose Maurice, let's say.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  I can't say that, but I'm gonna try to say it every time. Morose Maurice. But he's also, he's like fairly adventurous. He's shy around people, but he learns to fly. He's a pilot. He likes to climb mountains. And he has a friend named Mike, who always goes to car rallies. And one time, Mike can't go. So he asked Maurice to take his spot. I'm not positive what a car rally is. I tried to figure it out.

• 6:58Sarah Marshall?

  I was just gonna say, is it like British for stock car racing, kind of? Or like a car show?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  So from reading the description of the scene, I feel like it's just people driving cars around to show them off.

• 7:09Sarah Marshall?

  All right. Yeah, people do do that.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  I look forward to hearing from listeners who who know what this would be in 1960 England.

• 7:18Sarah Marshall?

  Especially if they were there. And also, the word rally, as we learned from An American Tale, a rally is a large gathering of mice for a reason, if you're a mouse. And so it makes it sound like the cars are getting together to demand rights.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  The the reason is cars. And

• 7:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  They probably were, and we just couldn't understand them.

• 7:39Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's true. They tried, though.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  So Maurose Maurice, he goes to a car rally. He's supposed to be sharing a car with a girl he doesn't know, who's like a friend of Mike's. And he meets this girl. She's a she's gorgeous. She's 21. She's a tax accountant, and her name is Marilyn. And Maurice is like immediately head over heels for her. He's just like, oh, my God, she's so charming. She's sweet. She's energetic. He he's so head over heels. He just completely embarrasses himself all day. Like, he keeps driving in the wrong direction. He says the wrong things. He just is like, he already feels bad about himself, but by the end of this night, he's feeling worse about himself than ever. And he's just like,

• 8:23Sarah Marshall?

  Got a case of the flibberdy gibbets.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  He does. And he feels so embarrassed. He's like, at least I'm gonna buy her a tank of gas. Like, as an apology for my completely embarrassing behavior. He fills her gas tank and then discovers he doesn't have any money. So she has to pay it anyway. He's just like, this couldn't have gone worse.

• 8:44Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  I completely blew it with this girl. He sends her an apology letter and some flowers afterwards. She writes back. He somehow gets the guts to be like, Marilyn, like, would you try again? Would you go on a date with me again? And she agrees and they fall completely in love with each other.

• 9:02Sarah Marshall?

  Yay.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  It's an unlikely romance. She's this like sheltered only child. She's stubborn. She's adventurous. She's drawn to him because like she loves that he takes her in planes and teaches her how to climb mountains and do things like that.

• 9:19Sarah Marshall?

  This is crazy because I am a sheltered only child who loves to be in planes.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Okay, for for our listeners, recently, Sarah and I tried a, what was it? It was like a

• 9:34Sarah Marshall?

  It's a very immersive VR flight simulator, I would say. I don't know what it was called.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, a very realistic VR flight simulator. I could not land the plane. I crashed it so many times. And then Sarah tried and she just like beautifully piloted an entire flight.

• 9:51Sarah Marshall?

  It did take many attempts. But well, it was just, I just knew that I needed to get you in all of those unlabeled boxes to, well, the Scappus Airfield, because that was where I decided to land, because I wanted to show you my, where I grew up.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  So I legitimately, like, I saw that you were so smooth touching down on the runway, like, in an emergency.

• 10:13Sarah Marshall?

  That makes me so happy. Because, yeah, it is like, you ever watch an Indiana Jones movie and they have to land a plane all of a sudden and they're like, I guess we'll figure it out. And you're like, huh, I would not know where to begin. But if I have someone very nicely explaining it to me the entire time, I think I could do it. It's just, it's, it's hard to find the nice explainer in the emergencies, though. But maybe this will come up as a theme, too.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Hmm, interesting. Well, I just felt like sharing that little braggy thing about you, because I was highly impressed.

• 10:43Sarah Marshall?

  I love that. That's like, the love that should find everyone listening to this is like, The people who are just like, I need everyone to know about this thing my friend did that I loved.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Sarah and I also tried sensory deprivation a few weeks ago.

• 10:57Sarah Marshall?

  And you wrote about it.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was great. Highly recommended. Anyway, back to Maurice and Marilyn, our lovely, our lovely couple. They fall in love. They get married in 1963. Marilyn is 22 and Maurice is 30. And they're in a culture with a lot of expectation on them. Like, they both have professional jobs. They're presumably going to have kids. She'll be a mom probably and quit her job. Like, there's, there's just societal expectations. They're in the suburbs. Maurice doesn't want kids because he wants his genetic line to end with him.

• 11:34Sarah Marshall?

  Why is this like something I find so attractive in a man? You know, but it is. Just gonna set that out there and look at it.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Do you find it attractive in a woman or just a man?

• 11:44Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I think that you kind of expect it more in women, you know? Because it's like such an issue these days that like, you know, women are people with fallopian tubes, like have such a hard time getting tubal ligation. And like, so few doctors appear to want to perform it. And there is some kind of awareness of like, you know what? This is, this is it. Let's seal up the cave. That's a weird metaphor, but they do do that with real caves sometimes. It wasn't, I wasn't talking about cervixes.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Maurice, in a, in a move that, that would appeal to Sarah very much, has determined that his genetic line should end with him. Marilyn's fine with that. She doesn't want to be a mom. It doesn't interest her. But she's also bored with the suburbs in general. And she's like, Maurice, let's sell our house and live on a boat.

• 12:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. I mean, no, but yes. Oh, gosh.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Maurice is like, sorry, what? And she's like, yeah, let's just sell every single thing we own and sail to New Zealand and just see what happens.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  And Maurice is like, this is a bad idea, Marilyn. Like, this doesn't make any sense. We'd be leaving everything we know. What? But she, Marilyn is stubborn AF. Like, this is one of her most defining characteristics, and she won't let go of the idea. And eventually Maurice sort of gives in. He's like, okay, I mean, sure, I guess, let's sell every single thing we own, move on to a boat and sail to New Zealand. Do they know how to sail very well? No, they have to learn. Do they have a boat? No. So they spend four years getting ready. They get a boat built, they sell all of the furniture in their house. Like, all their peers are, you know, buying nice furniture and starting to have kids.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  And Maurice and Marilyn are like, having a yard sale to buy boat paint or whatever. They're working on the interior of the boat. They're learning sailing. It's a 31-foot yacht, and they name it the Orlin, which is a combination of their names.

• 13:56Sarah Marshall?

  That's really cute.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  It's really cute.

• 13:58Sarah Marshall?

  Is this the time to mention that, well, I guess, three years ago? So if I had started working on this, I would be buying boat paint as well, but obviously I wasn't going to. But three years ago, when my dad died, I was like, I'm gonna sail to New Zealand, I think. That was like the form that my grief took. And I wrote a tough love letter about it.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  You did?

• 14:21Sarah Marshall?

  And you wrote the most beautiful tough love column about, well, I have to return to it, and we can put a link to it, but something to the extent of like, you want to do this huge thing. And also, I don't sail, I'm not a sailor, I'm not a nautical person, surprise. But it was something like, you know, your grief is telling you to do this huge thing, but you can also honor this love that you've lost by getting a little boat and going out a little bit, which is very good advice for a grieving person. But I feel like, I'm like, oh, my God, if I had started three years ago, I would still be having the yard sale part.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Does that help?

• 14:57Sarah Marshall?

  Well, it's just, I mean, I can tell that it was never like a serious desire for me. It was more sort of like a mind vacation because I think that my brain attaches to certain themes, especially in times of uncertainty.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Who doesn't?

• 15:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I don't know. I think it's like, and especially if you have sort of the gift of feeling comfortable like in research and in books and in other people's stories and there's something, yeah, it is such a meaningful way to process stuff. But I think it's just like, it's the kind of thing that you say and it's such a simple sentence. You're like, I'm going to sail to New Zealand and people either like, okay, cool, or they're like, I don't know, maybe you should think more about that. But then, once you get into actually doing it, it becomes, you know, like something you shape your entire life toward, especially if you're starting from scratch. And then it becomes, I don't know, that like quests are tricky things, but I feel like if you're gonna have a quest and be married, then you should probably have the same quest.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Hmm. I mean, and I understand why you wanted that too. I feel like if you're grieving someone or something big in your life and it leaves this big hole, like you have to look for something really big to fill that hole. Like you can't go for a walk.

• 16:11Sarah Marshall?

  Right. I wasn't gonna fill it with a bunch of pebbles. I would let it erode to that gradually.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  You had a vacuum. I mean, and you still do. It doesn't go away, but.

• 16:20Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, but you, but at a certain point, you've like, well, to quote Betsy von Muffling and I'm just like that quoting her Kabbalah class, there's a hole in you that doesn't get filled in, but new life grows around it.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Hmm. Oh, I like that.

• 16:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Uh, I wanna think of a segue, but I don't have one.

• 16:37Sarah Marshall?

  No, you know, sometimes holes get filled with water and you can put a little boat in them, but you know what's even bigger than that? The ocean with a people-sized boat. Well, it's the best we can do. We gotta keep going.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  I'm not even gonna try to think of segues. I'm just gonna be like, Sarah, give me a segue.

• 16:51Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Uh, okay, June 1972.

• 16:55Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  They sail out of Southampton. They're gonna see.

• 16:58Sarah Marshall?

  Just like the Titanic.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  In the Orland. Oh, uh-oh. By the way, Sarah, they decide not to bring a radio transmitter.

• 17:07Sarah Marshall?

  Guys, why did they decide that? Wanted to save 15 bucks?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  They're gonna do things old school. They're gonna navigate by the stars, man.

• 17:14Sarah Marshall?

  No, don't. There's, look, there's a reason we invented all these things, and it's because people died doing that. They can't hear me. They're in the past.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Maurice is the captain. And for the first couple of months, the trip is pretty smooth. They stop in Spain, they stop in Portugal, they stop in the Canary Islands, they stop in the Caribbean. They're on their own schedule, so they can stop and meet people and party and explore and work on the boat and see other people's boats. They pass through the Panama Canal in February.

• 17:44Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, Jesus. Okay.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  And they're headed for the Galapagos. So this isn't just like, oh, we're going, you know, beelining for New Zealand. This is like, we are touring the world. They're on their way to the Galapagos on March 4th, 1973. It's super early in the morning, sun's barely risen, there's a bang. Everything goes flying off the shelves, books, equipment. They don't know what hit them. They run outside, they discover they've been hit by a whale.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Great sound, Sarah. They've been hit by a sperm whale. It's pouring blood.

• 18:20Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Not from the Orland, but from something else. Like, clearly, it's a dying whale, and that's probably why it hit the boat.

• 18:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  And by the way, I want to tell you that as I've been researching this story, I've gotten to the point where all of my ads are for boat insurance.

• 18:37Sarah Marshall?

  They're like, so, I hear you've been reading about boats looking pretty good, am I right?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, might your boat get a hole in it?

• 18:48Sarah Marshall?

  You seem to have a boat hole problem. We're here to help.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  The Orland sure did.

• 18:53Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  There's a hole, a hole in the hole. That's hard to say. The whale has punched a hole in the boat. It immediately starts filling with water. They try to cover the hole with a sail from the outside to sort of block water from getting in. That doesn't work. They start stuffing clothes into the hole. It's not huge, but it's

• 19:12Sarah Marshall?

  But it's a hole.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  You know, there's the force of water pushing into it. They start pumping. They're not going to be able to fight this hole. The boat is going to sink. It's really clear. The water's coming in too fast. Maurice gets the life raft ready. Marilyn, who can't swim, by the way.

• 19:29Sarah Marshall?

  Marilyn.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Marilyn.

• 19:30Sarah Marshall?

  Should have learned to swim. I'm sorry, but come on.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  She's wading around in the water, trying to grab supplies, trying to move it to the life raft. It is about an hour from the time of the whale hitting the boat until it finally disappears under the water.

• 19:43Sarah Marshall?

  Jesus.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  And I want to read you just a line from this book, which is how I first learned about this story. It's called, I'll tell you now, "A Marriage at Sea" by Sophie Almhurst. It's so good. It's so good. Okay, but listen to this line. Marilyn took a picture as the last triangle of sail and the tip of the mast disappeared beneath the surface. Frozen in the photograph, the mast looked as if it might be coming the other way, emerging from the water like a thin arm hoping for rescue. Ah!

• 20:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, geez.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  They have a life raft and a dinghy tied together. They're both made of rubber. Neither of them are very big. One of them has a covering so they can get out of the sun and one of them is open air. And they have about 20 days' worth of supplies. They have food, water, a few flares, a biography of Richard III.

• 20:35Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  But they have no motor, no radio transmitter, no communication device at all.

• 20:43Sarah Marshall?

  Man.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  And immediately, they have different perspectives on the situation. Marilyn is cheerful. She's like, "What are we, like 300 miles from the Galapagos? Okay, we'll row there." Maurice, on the other hand, literally at the same time, is trying to determine if there's enough gas in the canister, the stove, for them to kill themselves. He's paralyzed. Like, he's... Even as Marilyn is planning how to get to the Galapagos, he's just planning how to... Like kill them as gently as possible. It's clear that Marilyn is the new captain. Right? He was the captain of the Orlean. Marilyn is the captain of a lifeboat. And she says, okay, we're gonna row to the Galapagos.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  It's too hot during the day, but all night long, they're rowing in two hour shifts. Just it's exhausting, it's blistering, they're steering by the stars. You know, they're on food and water rations. They have food and water, but not a ton. But they are working incredibly hard. And after two nights of rowing all night long, using every bit of strength they have, they've gone four miles south, which is the direction they need to go. And they've drifted 30 miles west.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  After four nights, they've made it 10 miles south, but the current's carrying them west even faster. And it becomes clear they're like working against a treadmill. There is no amount of rowing that's gonna get them to the Galapagos. Maurice suspected this from the start.

• 22:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  He's like, yeah, obviously, we're just gonna die here. Everything's terrible. Marilyn's like, all right, whatever. We've been staying up all night. We have blisters, everything's awful. We'll just aim for a shipping lane so that a ship will see us. And she like ties a sail bag to the oars to try to make a sail and figures that's the next plan. Now, they are near a shipping lane. Even if you're in a shipping lane, it's hard to be seen if you're in a lifeboat. The ocean is huge. The horizon at sea is about two miles away. So the odds of a ship passing close enough to you are pretty slim, even if you're in a place where a lot of ships are passing through.

• 22:51Sarah Marshall?

  I feel like it's hard for my brain to like conceive of the scale of the ocean because it's like when you try and visualize it, there's no, I mean, if you imagine being on the open ocean, you don't, or I don't really visualize like distinguishing features. So it feels like just space with no sense of proportion. But the figure of like the horizon being two miles away and you trying to be found, I don't know, I never thought of it that way before because that even if you're in a big freighter, you can only see like an infinitesimally small piece of the ocean that you're going through.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:26Sarah Marshall?

  The ocean is simply too big.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  It's too big. Have you ever been at sea, Sarah?

• 23:31Sarah Marshall?

  Uh, well. I was on a cruise ship to Puerto Rico once and like even that was extremely humbling, you know, because there comes a point when you can't see land. And that just like feels strange. It feels so interesting to be like on this, you know, floating principality with a little casino in it when, I mean, that's why one of my favorite pieces is this Atlantic article on the sinking of the Estonia, which was a passenger ferry that sank in the Baltic Sea in 1994. And I guess this description of like, it takes very little time for this sort of like piece of civilization to become claimed by the ocean. And also it turned out, and we didn't know this for a very long

• 24:15Sarah Marshall?

  time, but that it collided with a submarine and that was the reason that it sank.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Really?

• 24:21Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And that was like, I think, like a post-Cold War secret for a while. And yeah, also the idea that you can be like, just run into something giant with your boat, I like, had not even occurred to me to worry about. So.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  This is how I feel. I, I was talking to a pilot recently who was trying to explain to me how planes collide with each other in midair. Cause to me, I'm like, the air is so big.

• 24:48Sarah Marshall?

  There's so much of it. Just look.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's so big. Go around. I know that's an incredibly ignorant way to see things.

• 24:56Sarah Marshall?

  But yeah, but if you don't understand something, you are like, surely we're safer than we are.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you can only see about two miles. And sure enough, they're incredibly lucky. Marilyn was right, and they see a ship.

• 25:13Sarah Marshall?

  Marilyn.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  And they start lighting flares, and they light a flare. It doesn't go off.

• 25:18Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  And it turns out their flares aren't working, and the ship passes them.

• 25:22Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, God.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  At the same time, they discover that four gallons of water that they have are contaminated with salt, so they have to discard them.

• 25:30Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Days go by. They don't see another ship. They run out of gas for cooking, so they can't heat up their canned food. And they're out in the sun. Their skin is getting weathered. They're getting sores from the salt. They don't know what to do. They're gonna run out of food. They're just waiting for another ship to find them. Now, there are turtles everywhere. And here's the thing about turtles, to Maurice and Marilyn.

• 25:56Sarah Marshall?

  They're full of blood.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  They're annoying. The sea turtles are annoying them. They're always in their way. They're bumping on the bottom of the boats. Like, they're constantly being bumped by sea turtles. And they're like, okay, if we're gonna kill something, we might as well start with something annoying, I guess.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  So they've been on the raft for 24 days.

• 26:18Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  It's March 28. And it's hard to do, but they kill a small turtle, and they start fishing. They don't have any fish hooks, but Marilyn makes fish hooks out of safety pins. And so they're able to start fishing. They're running low on water, but they start drinking the liquid from fish eyeballs. And they eat the turtle blood, which congeals into a kind of a solid jelloey thing.

• 26:40Sarah Marshall?

  Huh, okay.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  And they start doing this regularly. They're getting into a new routine. Marilyn is wrestling a turtle one day, and she has another idea. Because this turtle is really, really strong. And Marilyn's like, look, I understand that we can't row to the Galapagos. But I bet, I bet if we harness this sea turtle, it can pull us to the Galapagos.

• 27:06Sarah Marshall?

  Like some kind of sled dog.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Like some kind of sled dog. So she catches a turtle, like a strong turtle. She makes a harness out of ropes.

• 27:17Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  She puts it back in the water and sure enough, it immediately starts pulling them just in a straight line through the sea. There is water streaming across its shell. It's amazing. It's completely working. She's like, I solved it. I solved it. So she catches another turtle and she makes a harness for the other turtle, too. I would love to know what Maurice is thinking while this is happening.

• 27:38Sarah Marshall?

  Right? He's like, thank God I asked her out that second time. Also, how do you harness a turtle? Because like, do they have shoulders, really?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  She wraps ropes around their flippers.

• 27:49Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. I mean, I get that maybe this is not the ideal turtle harness, but it's a tough situation.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  It's if you have to make do, you have to make do.

• 27:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  So she needs more power than just one turtle. She catches another turtle. She harnesses the second turtle. She puts the second turtle in the ocean. It immediately starts swimming in the opposite direction.

• 28:09Sarah Marshall?

  No.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  They are a turtle tug of war.

• 28:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  And the whole thing falls apart because she cannot convince these two turtles to pull together.

• 28:17Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  They will only pull against each other. So that plan fails. Marilyn's on plan number eight at this point. She's like, okay, the turtles aren't going to pull us. We don't have turtle sled dogs, but I'm going to keep one as a pet. She finds a cute turtle. She makes a leash for it so it like swims around while she's fishing. She totally has a turtle pet. Now, this whole time, weeks and weeks are going by. Marilyn never questions that she and Maurice are going to survive. There's this moment where they see a whale. It surfaces right next to them. And she says, oh, it's it's too bad that we don't have a camera. We could take a picture because without a picture, no one will believe how close this whale came to us. And Maurice is like, she's just assuming that we'll be telling people about this whale. Like, she never doubts.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  And she, for what it's worth, she's religious. He's atheist. So she's really leaning into like, this is how things are meant to be when a ship passes. She tells them, okay, well, it's not the ship that's meant to save us.

• 29:15Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  It couldn't have been the ship because this isn't the ship that's meant to rescue us. Now, the thing about survival, in a lot of cases, and this is a great example of it, is that a lot of survival stories aren't super dramatic. They're just about things getting worse and worse and worse. They're about lowered expectations, they're about lowered standards. Something I think is interesting about survival stories is that there often isn't a lot that happens. The tension is just time passing. And survival itself is really tedious. The amount of time it makes to procure water, to handle food, it's just the same thing again and again and again and again. But it's gradually getting worse over time. And that's what they're experiencing too.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  So when it rains, first they need water, they don't have enough water, they're worried that they're going to be so dehydrated they'll die of dehydration. Then it rains and they're absolutely bombarded, they aren't able to get dry at all, their skin starts sort of falling off in little strips. They get sores all over, they're losing a lot of weight, their skin is just wrapped over their bones. Marilyn's hair is so tangled, it takes her a tremendous amount of time to untangle it every day, but she refuses to cut it. She's like, I love my hair, I'm going to have long hair, it doesn't matter how much time I spend untangling it every day. They see a fourth ship, finally, they've been drifting for however long, they have no more flares, Marilyn invents a smoke flare by burning paper in a turtle shell. And the ship turns around.

• 30:45Sarah Marshall?

  Oh my god.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  But then it turns back again.

• 30:47Sarah Marshall?

  God.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  It thought it saw something and then it turned and it sailed on its way.

• 30:52Sarah Marshall?

  And then they're like, that can't be a turtle shell flare, I'm just hallucinating.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  That couldn't possibly be a woman with long, beautiful hair burning a turtle shell.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  At this point, they start being upset when they see a ship. It's actually more upsetting to see a ship than not to see one because they just presume it's going to pass by.

• 31:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  But Marilyn is determined to keep them moving forward. She makes playing cards out of paper from her journal. It's so thin that they can see each other's hands. Like, it's absolutely on our system because they can just see through the backs of each other's cards. But she makes cards, she makes them play games. She starts designing their next boat on paper. She's like, we're going to get a better boat. And so they start arguing about the yacht they're going to have and the meals they're going to serve on it and which entrees should be served with which wine and the kinds of cakes they're going to eat. And on April 24th, they've been at sea for seven weeks. It's Marilyn's birthday and she has this kind of fish that she really likes. It's become her favorite fish while they're out there.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  And Maurice is like, I'm going to catch her favorite fish for her birthday. And he tries to catch the fish. He punctures the raft with a hook.

• 32:04Sarah Marshall?

  Oh Maurice, oh no, oh my god.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Oh no. So now their raft is leaking. Meanwhile, within like a few days, a spiky fish punctures the other raft. So now both

• 32:16Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  the life raft and the dinghy have holes and they're just constantly having to deal with the hole. Like, the rubber is sagging, air is escaping, water is getting in. So then, because the boats are sort of saggy, they're like pinching their skin and causing even deeper sores. They can't sleep because they end up sort of like stuck in these crevices of deflating boat.

• 32:38Sarah Marshall?

  Like when you're on an air mattress.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Like, picture the most uncomfortable air mattress you've ever slept on, but you're stuck on it.

• 32:47Sarah Marshall?

  And then you're covered in sores.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  You're covered in sores.

• 32:50Sarah Marshall?

  And the ocean is around you.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  There's birds just constantly landing next to them. Because birds at sea don't really have predators on land. Like, if they do land on an island, there's just rodents there.

• 33:00Sarah Marshall?

  Huh.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Not big mammals.

• 33:02Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  So, they just land on the raft. Like, they think it's a cool place to land. And so then, you know, Marilyn and Maurice just sort of wring their necks and eat them.

• 33:11Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm, like Blake Lively should have done in The Shallows.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  There you go. Exactly. That's what I was gonna say. One time a seabird lands there and just like starts regurgitating fish.

• 33:22Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, that's convenient.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Six or seven fish. So they eat the fish. They don't need to eat the bird.

• 33:26Sarah Marshall?

  Now, here's a question that I feel like is occurring to listeners. It's certainly occurring to me, and I wonder if you have any insight about it, which is that like, you know, I mean, I'm like, I'll eat a lot of stuff, but we all have limits generally. Nearly everyone does. And I feel like if you were to give me a plate, a fish that had just been regurgitated by a seagull like today, I feel like I would have a hard time eating it. But in a survival situation, I certainly like to think that I would get over myself. But like, is that, do you think that's a matter of hunger that enables you to do that? What do you think that's like?

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. If you're very hungry, your standards change.

• 34:06Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  When I did Naked and Afraid, and I hadn't eaten for like, two weeks, I started salivating when I saw large mammals walk by.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Which is definitely not a thing that occurs to me in my normal life.

• 34:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I know you pretty well. You don't do that, you know, at home.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really, really don't. I really don't. But I was like, oh, I see. I see how this happened.

• 34:33Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. Yeah. Which is good, because you don't want your body to reject nutrition when it needs it. But it's interesting that we develop such different standards so quickly.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  I think it changes really, really fast. I mean, relatively speaking, I think it changes very fast.

• 34:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Now, the dinghy and the raft are getting barnacles all over them.

• 34:54Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, God.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Right? So then fish are constantly trying to eat the barnacles. So there's fish bumping on the bottom of the raft all the time. But then sharks and dolphins are trying to eat the fish. So then there's sharks and dolphins bumping on the raft all the time. And they're just like constantly pumping at this point, pumping water out every 20 minutes all day and night. So they're going through

• 35:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  the torture of sleep deprivation. I mean,

• 35:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  neither of them can sleep more than 20 minutes at a time. The sores are getting really deep, going down to the bone. There's constantly waves pouring over the side. They get diarrhea. They had a little bit of fresh water stored in their containers, but it sort of spoils, like somehow the plastic of the containers has some sort of reaction and it turns the water green and chemically and they can't drink it. And Maurice starts to get some sort of lung condition. He's coughing constantly. At one point, he coughs up a big chunk of something of like flesh that he believes to be part of his lung.

• 35:54Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, God.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Oh, if you hear grunting next to me, it's just a sled dog.

• 35:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yep. We love to hear it. I feel like they have, in a way, become like, because they can't, it seems like they have, you know, very, very little effect over what direction they're traveling in and have kind of maybe at this point given up on expending the energy to try and row it all. They've kind, they've just become like the inhabitants of a piece of ocean trash that's like getting covered in barnacles and just sort of like drifting through the ocean, but it has people on it this time. Like, they've become like a passive part of the ecosystem and animals are like not afraid of them, but also just like gonna just bother them. I don't know, it's just kind of incredible to think about and also very scary.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  So Sarah, I want to show you an image that I found while researching this.

• 36:44Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  And I want you to describe it for listeners.

• 36:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Now, we can bring up the different ways that survival stories are portrayed. But here's an example of one of the ways this story's been portrayed. I'm sending you a link.

• 36:56Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  So open this, scroll down to the bottom and describe what you see.

• 37:05Sarah Marshall?

  It is like a beautifully, it looks like watercolor, like a raft with a canopy over it. And this bedraggled but smiley couple with torn clothes are like leaning their heads together and smiling. And there's turtles in the ocean smiling at them. There's like what literally looks like a parent and a baby hammerhead shark smiling, just like, hmm, this is nice. Like, all the creatures in the ocean are like, yeah, we like. These guys.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  There's a caption that refers to them becoming sea creatures themselves. So this is a highly idealized version of what's going on with them.

• 37:41Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, hammerhead sharks nearly never smile, I would think. Just don't have the muscles for it.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  There's stingrays smiling, there's octopuses smiling at them. It just, this is, it's like a Garden of Eden style illustration.

• 37:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, totally.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  This is on a website for a company that you can pay for them to strand you on a deserted island.

• 38:03Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 38:07Sarah Marshall?

  They're like, see, it'll feel it like that.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Which I totally want to do. But anyway, um, okay, we can remove that. Oh, hello, sir. I have a dog near me. Anyway, Maurice is coughing up part of his lung. They have sores down to their bones. They're constantly.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  What?

• 38:34Sarah Marshall?

  He's like, I'm gonna get sores down to my bones if you don't pay attention to me right now.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Wait, what's that?

• 38:42Speaker 01

  I, excuse me, I'm being paged by a dog. I'll be right back. Let me let that dog out.

• 38:48Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Okay, the dog has been freed. So Maurice, at this point, he starts like passing out of consciousness for long periods of time. Marilyn's doing all the fishing. She feeds him little bits of fish, just sort of trying to keep him alive, taking care of him, dressing his wounds, helping him go to the bathroom, everything he needs. When she's not doing everything to keep them both alive, she is doodling cats and designing dresses in her journal.

• 39:23Sarah Marshall?

  I'm very glad she's got her journal.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  And I, it was a little bit hard. I found, you know, I was trying to read her journal. I couldn't read all of her handwriting, but she's like describing outfits. So for instance, here's some of her notes. Panelled tailored camel color long skirt. Wear all brown or green blouse. Two pockets, navy skirt. Skirt and jeans are similar, but in brown denim. Brown and pink paisley, approximately five yards.

• 39:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  I love that she's designing brown and pink paisley outfits while she's out there.

• 39:53Sarah Marshall?

  I know, that's so good. Yeah, because you want to feel pretty when you come back from trying to harness yourself to the turtles.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  So I want to read you, there was one thing that struck me most about this story, and in particular Sophie Elmhurst's book about it. And I want to read you a paragraph that I wrote in the review.

• 40:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Survival stories are rarely about women, and even less often do they recognize traditionally female tasks as the actual work of survival. Not decorations of life, but the fight for life at its most essential. Between stints at fishing, bailing out the raft, smothering seabirds with a towel, and cleaning Maurice's seeping wounds, Marilyn plans dinner party menus, doodles cats, designs dresses she wants to sew, brown and pink paisley with straight long sleeves, and crafts playing cards out of thin paper. She kills and skins a shark with pearly skin, planning to make a purse. She serves as indisputable captain of the lifeboat. "To his credit, sort of," Maurice recognizes her skill, though in his writings, he still paints himself

• 40:58Speaker 01

  as the active decision maker, conferring the favor of responsibility. "I saw that she was stronger and more capable than I was," he wrote, "and I sat back and was prepared to let her take over." And she did. I think it's so interesting to see Marilyn Maurice in this situation. And part of her buoyancy, part of what is keeping her alive, is her dedication to things that are, would be smeared or dismissed as female. She's designing dinner parties. She's working on her hair, making sure that her hair is untangled. She's planning dresses. She's doodling cats. She's making games. She's decorating things. These are things that are dismissed as not survival skills.

• 41:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  And this is a case that so clearly positions her. It is indisputable that she's the one surviving for both of them. And I think that these things she does that are traditionally female, they're not contradictions to that. They're part of why she's able to keep them both alive. And so part of what I love about Sophie Elmhurst's book, she isn't super explicit about this, but it really rose to the surface for me, is how much she gives attention to these traditionally female tasks that Marilyn's engaging in.

• 42:12Sarah Marshall?

  And I feel like there's this, and I'm sure we talked about this before, because we're always talking about gender and the wilderness story, but this, I think, bias and sort of like, at least, you know, British and North American literature and sort of survival stories and narratives of masculinity that like, the ocean, or the forest, or just like, nature generally, the mountain, like, that these are places where you go to like, have the feminine stripped out of you, you know, it's like the whole call of the wild thing, and that the wild that is calling is like, very manly, and you can't be a city dog anymore. And so it feels like there's, I don't know, I guess from kind of like,

• 42:54Sarah Marshall?

  young adult books I remember reading, that like, there comes a time in a lot of these stories, at least fictionally, where like, you cut your hair off short as a boy's, and you realize that you feel better now, and you don't care. And it's like, some of us care so much about our hair. And that's not like, that doesn't have to be an impediment to survival. And in fact, I don't know, that what this shows in so many ways, that like, it doesn't depict it, that, you know, isn't it nuts that she was such an accomplished survivalist, and also was, wanted to make a pink and brown paisley dress? And it's like, no, she was good at surviving because she wanted to make that dress, and was thinking

• 43:35Sarah Marshall?

  about it, and was thinking about the future that she wanted to live for, and doing housekeeping on a life raft, basically.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Right. Survival isn't masculine.

• 43:44Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, yeah. But I think people think that it is. I think I even, deep down, still think that it is, you know? It's just like, in there, is what I feel like the, I don't know, the narratives that we learn really want it to be.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  I think Marilyn's actions really make clear the absurdity of the idea that toughness and femininity are contradictions.

• 44:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  But that's an idea that... Serves the patriarchy, right?

• 44:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  It's insidious. It digs deep. I mean, I think about the times when, let's see, when I was, I guess I was 19 and I first started working as a dogside guide in Alaska. And I was living on a glacier and one of the first things that I did on my day off was go to Salvation Army and buy all men's clothing. Cause I knew I wasn't going to be taken seriously. I could just feel that I couldn't be wearing the women's clothing I was wearing. And I had to buy men's car hearts, I had to buy men's coats. And then I was able to sort of be treated a little bit more human.

• 44:42Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  And that was shocking to me, but I felt it very deeply.

• 44:47Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  I needed Marilyn.

• 44:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, we, we all do. I.

• 44:51Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. I think that's why I'm so attached to My Side of the Mountain, which is a book that so many people read growing up and bring up to you and that I feel like has so many people have asked you about that you feel like you've read at this point. And where it's about like an adolescent boy, but where, and this is by Jean Craig Haidge George, who also wrote Julie of the Wolves, which is about a girl, but is obviously, you know, like a very sad book for many reasons.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:21Sarah Marshall?

  And My Side of the Mountain is about like hollowing out a tree to live in and then like making a little stove out of a can so that you can make blueberry pancakes with the blueberries that you picked and training a falcon to hunt for you. And this idea of like, I guess in a kind of Thoreauian way, like going to the woods so that you can live well. And like looking for the life that you want out there. And cause I feel like they, like it seems like a big, a core part of at least toxic masculinity is that toughness involves suffering on purpose. And it's like, actually, if you suffer on purpose, you have less energy for helping other people, which arguably is weak. Like you've used, you've expended.

• 46:07Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know. It's like how there's kind of, it's sort of a meme, I think lately for people to talk about like, you know, David Goggins is like this ultra marathoner that in-sols are obsessed with because it's about like, run 300 miles at a time and do the Navy SEAL exercise plan and run like a half marathon and eat a single banana every morning before work. And it's like, but this guy like, isn't parenting his kids. It's like, you know, it's hard to do. Being a parent, like just do that. You don't have to run 300 miles or you could like do some parenting and then have a shorter run.

• 46:45Sarah Marshall?

  Just do a 5K for God's sake.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Get a jogging stroller.

• 46:49Sarah Marshall?

  Get a jogging stroller. Now that's toughness.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  I, I read so many survival books growing up and they were pretty much all about boys. We talked about this a lot in the Baby Island episode.

• 47:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, which I love.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  But one of the, a book that I'm working on now that I'm really excited about is a chapter book for kids. That's a survival book featuring a girl or starring a girl.

• 47:11Sarah Marshall?

  It's like the very book that I wanted when I was growing up.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  It's the book I wanted to.

• 47:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  A girl and a dog.

• 47:18Sarah Marshall?

  I mean.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Anyway, okay. Now, Maurice said in an interview after this was all over, if there had been two men there in that life raft, we wouldn't have been able to survive. It's just that Marilyn was able to sustain the will to live. That's what females of the species usually do.

• 47:35Sarah Marshall?

  Very British way of saying that.

• 47:40Sarah Marshall?

  Telly ho, off to put on shorts and boots. Have we ever talked about the Alfred Hitchcock movie Lifeboat?

• 47:48Speaker 01

  No.

• 47:49Sarah Marshall?

  It's very good. It's, I mean, Alfred Hitchcock made like 60 movies, I think. So it's like very easy to end up on the long list. But it was like, I think it didn't do super well because it was just like quite a downer. But it's about a group of people who are on a lifeboat during World War II that's been torpedoed by Nazis. And then they actually like fish a Nazi out of the water and have to figure out what to do about that. But one of the, you know, it has this cast of like 12 characters and you kind of are thinking at the beginning, kind of based on your assumptions as a person and a viewer who you think is going to make it the longest and. The person who like keeps it together the most and is the most emotionally strong throughout the movie and who has this tension with the sort of like man's man who's trying

• 48:32Sarah Marshall?

  to take the captain role is this journalist played by Tallulah Bankhead, who's wearing a fur coat when we first meet her and who's just, you know, she's Tallulah Bankhead. She's very glamorous, but I feel like that's, I don't know, for what it's worth, another entry in the feminism and the art of survival story that we're telling. Feminism and femininity, more to the point.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  There's some overlap.

• 48:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. What do you think of that statement by Maurice that if there had been two men, they wouldn't have made it?

• 49:01Speaker 01

  I want to be careful how I phrase this. I think he's blaming a little bit of his incompetence on his gender.

• 49:09Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Like, some men would have made it, obviously.

• 49:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  There's some women who wouldn't have.

• 49:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Or like maybe not giving enough credit to her character.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  It's a little bit like, oh, it's not my fault that I gave up. It's because I'm a man.

• 49:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Like, I appreciate that he's giving credit to women and I appreciate that he's giving credit to Marilyn, but it is a little bit like, oh, she did it because she's a woman and not because she's an extraordinary human being.

• 49:38Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Because I mean, that, the degree of mental toughness that it takes to continue to plan for the future, day after day and week after week, I think is, I don't know how rare that is, because most of us never find out if we have it.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  I think she's exceptional. I think she's at the far extreme. There's people who would have made it, but without the incredible will to live that she had.

• 50:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  They may, would have made it at least part of the time.

• 50:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  At some point, she would have outlived them.

• 50:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. But it also feels like, almost like a parable, not to, because, I don't know, because you don't want to make real events into metaphors, because primarily, they just are the thing that happened. But it does make me think about just like, living with long-term depression or something like that, where it's just like, it just continues and you can't lay back and let it happen to you because it's what's happening. And that kind of every little thing you do and every cat that you draw is actually you very bravely fighting against this entropy that you're living in.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, getting through depression and survival too. If someone's drawing, manages to draw a cat in a day, then they're

• 50:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  They're doing what Marilyn did. Like if that's very hard and you do it, that's a huge triumph.

• 50:51Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And then anything that connects you to life and hope is pretty much by definition, not a waste of time, you know, unless it's like a great caloric expenditure, you know, if you're in a lifeboat. But if you're at home, you can just go to McDonald's after, so.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  There you go. So summer rolls around, day after day, things are, I mean, it's just, the sores get deeper, they get hungrier, they're thinner, their legs can't support them.

• 51:18Sarah Marshall?

  Summer on the open ocean, what a time. Love it.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  What a time. Their legs can't support them anymore.

• 51:23Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Their muscles are too atrophied. They get stuck in storms where the waves are so tall that they block out the sun.

• 51:30Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. It feels like they could have and maybe should have died like many, many times, right? That if you're covered in sores, then like, it seems like the odds of neither of them just like developing a horrible infection that way. Like, it seems like there are many things that could easily have killed them at this point.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  I mean, the difference between the people who have been in wilderness survival situations, who we celebrate, who made it out alive, and the people who survived a long time and ended up dying is often pure luck.

• 52:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  But we ascribe so much glamour and resilience to some of them.

• 52:07Sarah Marshall?

  Right. It's like, even after you cut your own arm off, you better hope there's tourists hanging out like pretty close by.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  You better. I always think that's so interesting. Like, someone could survive 200 days in a life raft and it wouldn't be seen as a success story if they didn't make it out alive. They wouldn't be seen necessarily as an inspiration. I mean, it would ultimately be a failure. And as I say this, I'm like, okay, yeah, they died, their goal was not to die, but it doesn't mean anything less about their character.

• 52:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Yeah. And also I guess that people who last any length of time in a survival situation and are able to, I don't know, to just share something with each other in the way of just having a relationship where you still remember what day your wife's birthday is and you still are kind of sharing some kind of warmth of human hope and compassion with each other to the end, even if you don't make it, that that deserves to be celebrated too, I think.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  On June 30th, they've been at sea for 118 days. Maurice is unconscious.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  And Marilyn sees a ship. They haven't seen a ship in 43 days and she can't wake up Maurice. She's unable to get him to stir. But the ship is getting closer and closer. And she starts to think it actually sees them. And suddenly she sees people on deck calling to them. And it turns out it's a South Korean tuna fishing ship. It just spent two years in the Atlantic. It's now heading back to Korea. They drop down a rope ladder. It's real. They're being rescued. Before she climbs the rope ladder, Marilyn sets their pets free. Cause she has a collection of pets. They set them free. The crew brings them up on deck. They have to crawl because they can't walk. Their legs are just too weak now.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  And so they sit on a blanket and they drink milk. And Maurice says to Marilyn, we made it. And Marilyn says, now for Orland too.

• 54:08Sarah Marshall?

  Marilyn, you have a lot of dresses to make. You should just do that for a while.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  And sure enough, that is what they do. Back in England, they sell the rights to their story to buy a new boat.

• 54:19Sarah Marshall?

  Perfect.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  They call it Orland too. The press is all over them, of course. Now, at first it is reported incorrectly that they were at sea for 117 days. So their book is called 117 Days Adrift, even though it was 118. It's just like PR recognition. You know, 117 was the number they committed to in their stories.

• 54:39Sarah Marshall?

  It kind of sounds better, possibly. It's got a nice meter.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Now predictably, the media really focuses on Maurice as the hero of the story. He continually tries to give all the credit to Marilyn. He's just repeatedly like Marilyn got us through. It was all Marilyn. She did everything. He's just singing her praises constantly, like trying to express to people how much she did, how much she as their captain saved them both and kept them alive. But you know, he can't fight against all the sexism of the world there. Here's a line from the book, A Marriage at Sea. Another journalist asked if Marilyn would follow her husband to sea again. Follow her husband. Quote, "The small brunette said, 'Of course,' reported the Korea Times."

• 55:24Sarah Marshall?

  They were like, "What, what size is this woman? Is she little? We gotta hear about it."

• 55:29Speaker 01

  She's sure small now.

• 55:32Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, God.

• 55:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it is because they reveal so much in just kind of like news articles throughout history where they're like, "Here's the only way we know how to communicate something, even if it's in fact inaccurate." It's interesting, too, because of course, based on Brandy, you're a fine girl. A sailor's life, loving lady is the sea. And you never hear the sea referred to as like, I don't know, a sexy man that your wife is gonna run off into.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  I'm here, I'm here for that framing.

• 56:05Sarah Marshall?

  I think the sea can have however many genders we want to give it. It's big enough.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Sarah, I, I think the sea is gender fluid.

• 56:15Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 56:22Sarah Marshall?

  Player off.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  They continue, they continue sailing the world on the Orlan II. Marilyn dies in 2002 at the age of 61. Maurice lived another 20 years, basically. They were lifelong vegetarians after this.

• 56:41Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  And he just spent the rest of his life in love with her and telling everyone how wonderful she was. He was pretty lonely at the end, but he was writing letters about her and just sharing, sharing the story and trying to celebrate everything they'd done. So they were just lifelong soulmates, and that was a tiny part of their lives in the scheme of things.

• 57:01Sarah Marshall?

  That's fantastic. God. What, so, okay, here's a question that occurs to me, and I feel like the answer seems like it should be obvious, but I can't think of it. So of course you have to tell us, which is, because one of the things that kind of sticks in my mind and a lot of people's minds about Ocean Gate, the Titanic submersible, is that Stockton Rush, the founder of this company, who, you know, was just like, not trying. Very hard to make a submersible that wouldn't implode at some point, it would seem, was famously like, well, I don't want to die and I'm not going to. I'm paraphrasing, but not by much. It was just that sort of like, I don't know, like, I think something we're all very familiar with at this point, because we have to be the sort of like,

• 57:45Sarah Marshall?

  American CEO billionaire stupidity of like, reality is what I say it has to be, and I'm not going to die if I don't consent to it. And it's like, okay, well, guess what? And then the sort of like, different kind of stubbornness of like, well, who knows what she felt in her deepest thoughts, but at least outwardly like, never suggesting that you don't think that you're going to make it in a situation like this. Like, how do you determine? Or what do you see as the difference between those demeanors?

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Oh, that's interesting. I mean, I think the biggest difference is that once the Orlan sank, of course, everything Marilyn did was designed to keep them more safe, not less safe.

• 58:30Sarah Marshall?

  As opposed to intentionally seeing how dangerous she could make things, just like, for fun.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  I mean, they did go to sea, so I'm not, I'm not saying, okay, they weren't, they weren't locked in a padded box. I think there's a, I think if you have the need to brag about it,

• 58:47Sarah Marshall?

  it's probably a sign.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Then it becomes more of a performance. It's about like, you want people to think that you won't die. That's a good question. I don't think that Marilyn intended to stay alive because of her ego in any way. Or if she did, it certainly, certainly didn't come through in her journal or anything like that.

• 59:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, and I feel like there's, like, in what you're describing to me, it feels like, sort of a daily practice and like, a work that you do in this case, where you wake up every morning and believe in the future and try and create a better quality of life for yourself and the person you're trying to survive with, and you can't share that hope with them. Whereas, and also, I don't know, something I think about a lot with survival and with the shows that we've done, is, it seems, you know, I mean, it seems like the main thing is just luck. And then maybe the next thing is preparedness. But somewhere, as far as I can tell in the rankings of level of importance, I mean, we were, we were talking

• 59:51Sarah Marshall?

  recently about Oregon Trail, like, the 90s computer game and how What you remembered, which was like, it doesn't really matter what choices you make as long as you just start off as a banker.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember the version I played, at least you could start out as a farmer or a doctor. Like, if you're a doctor, you were able to heal your wagon party if they got sick. If you were, you know, a carpenter, you were able to fix your wagon. There were all these little benefits you could get. But none of them allowed you to do as well in the game, as if you just started as a banker with no skills but a fat lot of money.

• 1:00:30Sarah Marshall?

  And you're never gonna run out of money when it's time to take the ferry and you're gonna be able to make, you know, good wagon choices. Yeah. And that's, it was a very instructive game for that and many other reasons. And also, don't shoot too many buffalo, even though they make a cool sound when they fall over. Don't do it. But I feel like the, one of the things that seems most important to survival, as far as I can tell, is the ability to assimilate new information and like, deal with it and deal with the situation that you're in. Cause I think that, at least the kind of, like, if you were to call Stockton Rush, the Ocean Gate guy, optimistic, it would be in the sense of like, complete denial of reality, you know, which is kind of the political moment

• 1:01:12Sarah Marshall?

  we're into, where it's like, wow, we're in a dire situation, but what if we ignored it? And what if we based an entire ideology on ignoring it? And what if we refuse reality and pretend it can't hurt us that way? And how that might make you feel better momentarily, but really, it's not increasing your chances of survival and in fact, is decreasing your chances because you are not allowing yourself to make any kind of realistic judgment of what your chances are. Whereas if you're able to accurately assess where you are and what the situation is, and for example, to say like, well, like, I choose to survive and I believe that I will survive and I have faith that I'll survive, but I have this many ounces of water and

• 1:01:56Sarah Marshall?

  that'll get me through this many days. And when I don't have it, I'm gonna have to drink turtle blood. That feels like, I don't know, like a humility too, in the face of just facts, which I mean, we really shouldn't see empirical thinking as like, rare and impressive, but maybe it always has been and always will be and just... The ability, I don't know, the sense of self that allows you to believe in your own capacity to survive, but also not do so only because you're lying to yourself about what the situation is.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  I mean, you have to live in the situation you're in and not the situation you want to be in.

• 1:02:31Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  And I think that acceptance is one of the hardest things that people can do.

• 1:02:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  I'm curious, Sarah, as I was reading this, I kept thinking, it's very clear what Maurice is getting from Marilyn.

• 1:02:43Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  What is Marilyn getting from Maurice?

• 1:02:47Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. I mean, I think that there has to be something nice about being in a relationship with somebody who you get to bring into a life that takes a shape they never imagined for themselves.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:03:00Sarah Marshall?

  And also, maybe he's funny.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  He might be funny. He might be really charming. I did watch some video interviews with him and he was very sweet. He seemed very sweet.

• 1:03:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. It's also, I feel like, the nice thing about happy couples is that they just don't talk too much about it. So like, you often don't know what their deal is, because they just are like busy doing it, you know, whereas like, you know, if you have like, like, the most obvious counter example I can think of is Rachel Hollis, who like had a marriage advice podcast with her husband up until the day they were like, we're getting divorced, KK. You should stop taking advice from us right now.

• 1:03:47Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know, but I think that like, there, I think that there are many different kinds of relationships in your life, and there are a lot of like more casual relationships or just acquaintanceships or somebody who like, you get together when you're in town and you have dinner and you have a great time, where like, not every relationship in your life needs to be with somebody who you could be in a lifeboat with. But I do feel like the people who you're closest to, like, to me, it's a helpful question, like, do I want to be in a lifeboat with this person, you know? Because if I had to answer that question about you, like, absolutely, yes. And not just because... You're a survivalist and not just because of your skill set, but because you're fun. And because we would have fun, we would reminisce about the stuff we did on the lifeboat, even if it got really horrible, I think.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Well, Maurice later said toward the end of his life, he said that if he knew that he was going to be rescued again, four months in, if he knew that he was going to survive at the end of it, he would do it again. He learned enough from the experience and there were so many beautiful moments that he would go through all of it again, just for the experience.

• 1:04:52Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  And just to share it with Marilyn.

• 1:04:55Sarah Marshall?

  This also reminds me of the Andes survival story, the miracle in the Andes episode that we did, because it seems like, again, you know, that luck was a big part of it and just sort of happenstance, but also that everyone could have died so many times, but that there was this camaraderie that kept them going.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's about people. It's about who you're with.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  I think, I mean, a good companion is the best survival tool you could have.

• 1:05:25Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, gosh, yeah.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  There's nothing you should trade for that.

• 1:05:29Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And if you can catch a shark, you should try and make a purse out of it. If you see a shark circling your boat, you should think purse.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  So that didn't work out because she caught the pearly shark. She skinned it and then when the skin dried, it stopped being pearly.

• 1:05:45Sarah Marshall?

  No.

• 1:05:48Sarah Marshall?

  And that's why we don't have shark purses.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  I really hope she got a pearly purse somehow after that. I actually really want to try to recreate the dresses.

• 1:05:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Not recreate, I want to create the dresses that she designed.

• 1:06:01Sarah Marshall?

  I want you to, too.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Like use her notes and have a Marilyn Bailey dress made of five yards of pink and brown paisley.

• 1:06:10Sarah Marshall?

  I think she would look great in a pink and brown paisley dress with straight sleeves and maybe like kind of a boat neck. I didn't even mean that as a pun. I just thought it would look nice.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  I'm gonna wear it next time I see you.

• 1:06:24Sarah Marshall?

  Good.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  If you want to know more about this story, the book A Marriage at Sea, Sophie Elmhurst, it is so beautiful. It tells the story in way, way more detail than anything I've said here. It's gorgeously reported. It's also just spectacularly written. The book is not spoiled for you, just because you've heard this podcast. In fact, you might appreciate it more.

• 1:06:46Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah. The last of the summer reading. It's not too late. And then there's fall reading, and then winter reading, really good for any season. Curl Up by the Fire with A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst. And then you have a survival book, by the way, Small Game by Blair Braverman.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  I do have a survival book, Small Game. It's a novel. And I also have my very first kid's book is coming out this fall in October. So if you're listening to this before it comes out in late October, you can preorder it and it'll show up at your door. But you may be listening to this once it's out. It's called The Day Leap Sword, and it's about sled dogs. It's about a sled dog sort of learning about running with the team and what she has to give the team. It's about self-esteem. It's about teamwork. It's about real dogs who I've worked with. And it is so beautifully illustrated by Olivia Wen. She made paintings for every single page. I'm obsessed with it. So yeah, it's my first kid's book. I'm

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  really excited. And if you have any kids in your life, or if you just love, you know, beautifully illustrated books, I'd love it if you'd pick up a copy or have your library order it.

• 1:07:58Sarah Marshall?

  I'm so excited for this book. And I also feel like, I feel like you're entering the era of writing the books that you needed when you were growing up and that a lot of kids need now. And I'm so happy you're doing it.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  I'm excited about that era for me. I think that's what we all do. I think that's what a lot of writers do, at least.

• 1:08:17Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  And I'm a dog slitter, I'm an adventurer, and I'm a keynote speaker. So you can bring me to your events and I will talk about resilience and teamwork and use exciting stories to sort of give examples of things we can all be learning from the wilderness. So I hope to encounter some of you.

• 1:08:37Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And there's, I don't know, I feel like the more we talk about survival stories, the more it feels... So much more relevant to everyday life than most people give themselves credit for. And I'm just so happy to get to keep bringing you back for the survival beat.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you, Sarah. That's something I will never stop. That's my sort of annoying thing that I preach is that survival is not relegated to the wilderness. It's something that everyone's doing at all times. And, and these wilderness stories are just a way of sort of distilling it into a pure form that allows us to look at it a little bit more clearly.

• 1:09:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, yeah. And these stories are for all of us.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  They are.

• 1:09:13Sarah Marshall?

  And we're gonna have a bonus episode with you soon where we had Patreon supporters ask you their survival questions. I'm really excited to record that. And as I predicted, 10% of the questions are about, should I drink my own urine? Should I or shouldn't I? And I still don't know, and I can't wait to find out. So everybody, listen to that if you want to know too.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  Tune in.

• 1:09:41Sarah Marshall?

  I made a Google Doc of those questions for you, and I was so pleased with two of the different titles I chose for the urine question section that I couldn't pick one. And so I put in both. And so you'll notice that the section is called potent potables slash you're in trouble. So look out for that on Patreon and Apple Plus subscriptions.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Is that gonna be the name of the episode?

• 1:10:06Sarah Marshall?

  It can be. Yeah.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  Please.

• 1:10:08Sarah Marshall?

  You're in trouble. No, I'm in trouble. Anyway, I'll see myself out.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  I love you, Sarah.

• 1:10:15Sarah Marshall?

  I love you, Clay. This was so good.

• 1:10:22Sarah Marshall?

  And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. I hope at least one of you is in a corn maze right now. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for producing and editing this show. If you want to learn more about Marilyn and Maurice, please check out Sophie Elmhurst's A Marriage at Sea. Thank you so much to Blair Braverman for joining us on this episode, for sharing her stories and her wisdom. And thank you also, Blair, for writing your debut children's book.