Pod Insights You're Wrong About What to Carry, What to Burn with Blair Braverman About this episode Ada Blackjack wants one thing: To make enough money to bring her son home from an orphanage. But good work is hard to find in 1920s Nome, Alaska, so when four strangers come to town, looking to hire someone for a secret yearlong expedition, Ada embarks on the trip—not knowing that she’ll be the only one of them to survive. This is the first episode of YWA correspondent Blair Braverman's new podcast, What to Carry, What to Burn. To hear the second half of Ada's story (also featuring Sarah Marshall!), visit the links below:
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Transcript 11,167 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Sarah Marshall? Welcome to You're Wrong About the podcast where every so often we get to share something brand new and very exciting with you. And that means that today you will be listening to the world premiere of survival correspondent Blair Braverman's new podcast, What to Carry, What to Burn. I'm so excited about this. I got to be the guest on this inaugural episode. It is about the friendly Arctic and the survival of Ada Blackjack. If you've been listening to the show for a while, then there's a very good chance that Blair has guested in some of your favorite episodes, as well as mine, including Survival in the Andes, Chris McCandless, Aaron Walston, The Orlin, and my personal favorite, Balto. Blair is an amazing
0:45 Sarah Marshall? writer and journalist and my favorite storyteller in the world. And now we get to listen to a whole podcast where she will tell us stories and bring us to that campfire that we go to whenever we get to hear from her. And I'm so happy to be around this crackling fire, listening to the story with you. This episode was edited by Blair Braverman. And if you want to hear the second half of Ada's story, which I also recorded with Blair, and to subscribe to the rest of the series, you can visit the links in our show notes. I'm so happy you're here. I'm so happy to get to share this brand new, amazing show with you. And now here is
1:28 Sarah Marshall? the very first episode of What to Carry, What to Burn.
1:40 Speaker 01 I'm going to hire this untrained 20-year-old as the captain of my expedition, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
1:57 Speaker 01 Welcome to a brand new podcast, What to Carry, What to Burn. I'm your host, Blair Braverman, and I'm a writer, an adventurer, and a long-distance dog sledder. This is a podcast of stories about the ways we stay alive. Today, my guest is Sarah Marshall, host of the podcast You're Wrong About, and also my very good friend. And I will be telling her the true story of Ada Blackjack. This story does have some difficult topics, including abuse and attempted suicide. So please look out for yourself and only listen if you're up for it. There are also some really beautiful elements of this story because people find beauty and they make beauty in the most impossible situations. Let's jump right in.
2:47 Speaker 01 Here we are, Sarah. Are you ready?
2:49 Sarah Marshall? Okay, I'm ready.
2:50 Speaker 01 Settle in by the fire.
2:51 Sarah Marshall? It's crackling.
2:52 Speaker 01 It's 1898, and we're about halfway up Alaska on the west coast, in a village up against the Bering Sea called Nome. And until now, there have just been a few small native communities around there. This year, a couple of Swedish dudes find gold on a beach, and it sets off a massive international gold rush. The place explodes to 20,000 people.
3:16 Sarah Marshall? Man.
3:17 Speaker 01 And there are lines of tents that stretch along the beach for 30 miles straight. People are getting shot in the street. There are sled dogs everywhere. All of a sudden, there are 100 saloons where there used to not be saloons at all.
3:29 Sarah Marshall? The sled dog part sounds good.
3:31 Speaker 01 This same year, the same year all of this begins, a little girl is born about 40 miles away. She's a Nupiat, and her name is Ada de Luctuck. We don't know too much about her childhood, but she has a younger sister named Rita, and her family has sled dogs. When she's eight years old, her dad really suddenly gets sick. He's been poisoned by rotten meat.
3:56 Speaker 01 Ada and Rita managed to get him into a dog sled and they hook up a team of dogs and they start mushing him to Nome for help. This is actually a stretch of trail that I've mushed myself. And I can tell you, it is a tough trail. It's very windswept. So you have wind just coming off the Norton Sound and it's sweeping up into the hills. And you have to fight not to be blown away. The sled just wants to like flip over and roll and blow off the trail. There's no trees, there's no protection, there's no shelter. There's probably some huts belonging to prospectors, but it's very, very barren and very unprotected. Ada and her sister are fighting their way along this trail, helping the dogs. And partway through, they look in the sled and they see that their father has died.
4:38 Sarah Marshall? Oh my god.
4:41 Speaker 01 At this point, the girls don't know what to do. They turn their dogs around and they mush their father's body home.
4:48 Speaker 01 After Ada's father has passed away, her mom sends her to live at a school in Nome that's run by Christian missionaries. They are going to teach her what they call city skills. So she's learning how to speak English, how to read and write, proper handwriting, how to pray in a Christian way. And she's a pretty good student. When she's 16, she leaves school and she gets married to a musher named Blackjack. Unfortunately, Blackjack is abusive. He cuts off her access to food, he beats her. Ada has three kids with him and two of them pass away very young. She has one surviving son, whose name is Bennett. And Bennett is just the light of her life. He is everything to her. They're so attached to each other.
5:34 Speaker 01 Bennett is five years old and he has a lot of health issues. So he has tuberculosis, he struggles to do the things that other kids do. Blackjack abandons them both. And once again, Ada is stuck needing to get a loved one to medical care without any help or support. So she picks up Bennett and she carries him to Nome this time, 40 miles away. She gets to Nome with Bennett, she's carried him all this way, and she realizes she can't afford his medical treatment. So she has to make an impossible decision and she surrenders Bennett to an orphanage. Because she knows that if he's at the orphanage, they're going to make sure he gets medical care. They're going to pay for his treatment.
6:15 Speaker 01 The most important thing to her is that Bennett's safe, but all she wants to do is be back together with him. And so she makes a promise to herself and to Bennett that no matter what, she is going to earn the money to be able to bring him home. Now Ada is 23 years old. She's living in Nome and the gold rush is over. People have just drained out of there, but it's still packed with shanties and saloons. It's really a lawless place.
6:41 Sarah Marshall? So now it's just like a drinking town.
6:43 Speaker 01 It's a drinking town. It's a lot of people who came to make their fortune and did not make it.
6:48 Sarah Marshall? I don't know, I just, I feel like she's surrounded by a lot of scary men, at least the way I imagine it.
6:53 Speaker 01 Well, probably, but she also, she kind of has a reputation as a flirt.
6:59 Sarah Marshall? Nice, okay.
7:00 Speaker 01 So Ada is usually pretty shy and quiet, but she can be a flirt. She likes going out and she's beautiful. She's stylish. She's really petite and small. She's under five feet tall and that means she can wear kids clothes, which are cheaper. So she likes to go to the kids section of stores and she buys these navy blue suits that are made for children. And that's like, that's her, her uniform that she wears. She looks super sharp.
7:26 Sarah Marshall? I'm really glad that she's having some fun.
7:29 Speaker 01 I know.
7:30 Sarah Marshall? And dressing on a budget.
7:31 Speaker 01 Because she was raised by missionaries for so much of her childhood. She doesn't have a lot of ancestral skills. She doesn't know how to hunt or trap or build shelter or things like that. But she's very good at sewing and she's pretty good at cooking and cleaning and some other tasks like that. So she starts to earn money by sewing clothes for minors and doing other odd jobs.
7:53 Speaker 01 One day Ada is leaving a house cleaning job. She's walking down the street and the chief of police is standing outside the jail and he calls her over. He tells her, okay, there's some strange men in town and they're planning an expedition and they won't say where they're going or why, but they're looking to hire a seamstress who can speak English and they're going to pay really well for one year.
8:18 Sarah Marshall? This is exactly how King Kong started.
8:21 Speaker 01 Is it?
8:21 Sarah Marshall? Yeah, they're like, we're doing an expedition to Skull Island. What's on Skull Island? Don't worry about it, but we need a hot lady to come with us. Eh? It's the depression. That's how King Kong starts.
8:36 Speaker 01 That's uncannily similar.
8:38 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
8:41 Speaker 01 The chief of police knows Ada. He knows the situation with her son Bennett and he knows she's struggling to save up money. It seems like she's working really hard, but whatever she brings in, she ends up just having to spend on her own food and lodging to get by. So he's like, look, I think you should do this. It's good work. You'll stay out of trouble. You won't be partying too much. You'll make $50 a month.
9:05 Sarah Marshall? Has he seen her Charleston-ing around?
9:08 Speaker 01 He probably has seen her Charleston. I want to see her Charleston-ing around.
9:12 Sarah Marshall? Oh, yeah.
9:12 Speaker 01 At $50 a month also is the equivalent of like 1,600 a month now.
9:17 Sarah Marshall? Okay.
9:18 Speaker 01 It seems like they should be paying more, but to Ada, this is good money.
9:21 Sarah Marshall? Yes, but that's true. It's true of so many jobs throughout history where something really terrible could happen, including the Skull Island job.
9:29 Speaker 01 Including Ada's too.
9:30 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
9:32 Speaker 01 The key point about this is that if she goes on the expedition for one year, when she's done, she'll have enough money to bring Bennett home.
9:39 Sarah Marshall? Oh, boy.
9:42 Speaker 01 Ada does not want to do it. For one thing, she doesn't live with Bennett, but she gets to see him and she doesn't want to be so far away. She hates that idea of being completely cut off from him.
9:54 Speaker 01 Also, she's terrified of polar bears. She feels like wherever these guys are going, there's gonna be polar bears. And she doesn't want to be the only native person on the trip.
10:03 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
10:04 Speaker 01 But the chief reassures her. He says, actually, no, it'll be great. There's a whole native family going. You won't be alone. And Ada thinks about it, and it's a lot of money. She would have $600 at the end of the year. Not only could she afford to bring Bennett home if she does this, but she could afford to bring him all the way to Seattle, and he could get even better medical care, and maybe they could cure him of his tuberculosis for good. He could just be a normal kid, which is, that's what she wants most of all. She goes to a shaman and asks what she should do. And the shaman tells her that she should go, but she has to be prepared for death and danger, and she needs to watch out for fire and knives.
10:47 Speaker 01 She thinks all this over, and she agrees to take the job.
10:52 Speaker 01 Now it's September 9th. It's early fall, and Ada goes to the port of Nome to meet the ship.
10:59 Speaker 01 Rumors have been flying all around town, and people have figured out now that the expedition is going to a place called Wrangle Island, which is a pretty large uninhabited island that is full of polar bears.
11:12 Sarah Marshall? Oh, my God.
11:12 Speaker 01 It's north of Siberia in the Arctic Ocean.
11:16 Speaker 01 It's about 90 miles long, end to end.
11:18 Sarah Marshall? And I bet there's no bars there at all.
11:20 Speaker 01 No bars there at all. No partying.
11:24 Speaker 01 Polar bears and birds. The goal of the expedition is that they're gonna go overwinter there, which means that a ship is gonna drop off the crew, and they'll just live off the land until next summer, and then someone's gonna come pick them up again.
11:39 Sarah Marshall? And what is the, not that there's anything wrong with that, but what's the point?
11:47 Speaker 01 There's a couple of points. Sometimes these expeditions are for biological research. A lot of times they're for claiming land. We're gonna get into that a little bit later in the story, whether this expedition actually has a point or not.
12:01 Speaker 01 Ada gets onto the ship and she realizes there's no other native people there.
12:05 Sarah Marshall? Oh, good. They lied to her, or at least we're wrong.
12:08 Speaker 01 They didn't lie to her because a native family had signed on, but they decided not to come. They didn't show up.
12:18 Speaker 01 And at this point, Ada doesn't know what to do.
12:22 Speaker 01 There are only four other members of the expedition. They're all men. They're all white. She doesn't want to be the only native person. She doesn't want to be the only woman. But she's counting on the money and she also doesn't want to break her promise. She said she would go. So she's waffling. She's not sure. She wants to get off the ship. They're about to leave. And the guys are like, "Look, look, look. Don't worry. We're gonna stop in Siberia along the way and we're just gonna like pick up some more people and get more supplies there. So don't even worry about a thing." They talk Ada into it. She stays on the ship. They leave Nome and they start sailing north.
12:59 Speaker 01 I'm gonna back up a little bit because there's a villain in this story, Sarah.
13:05 Speaker 01 And his name is Viljalmur Stephenson.
13:08 Sarah Marshall? I'm never gonna be able to say that.
13:11 Speaker 01 No, neither can I. I don't know if he could. His birth name is William Stevenson. He's from Manitoba. But he changed his name to sound like more of an Arctic explorer.
13:21 Sarah Marshall? That's really embarrassing.
13:23 Speaker 01 That's really embarrassing. We're on to him. We're on to Stevenson. Stevenson is a professional explorer and he's a big proponent of this theory he's come up with and branded called "The Friendly Arctic", which basically argues that it's super, super easy to live in the Arctic.
13:44 Speaker 01 Famously.
13:47 Speaker 01 There, there are a couple of things I agree with in his theory. I'm gonna give him credit where it's due.
13:51 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
13:52 Speaker 01 Stevenson takes issue with a lot of language that is often used to describe the Arctic, like lifeless, or barren, or wasteland. He's saying, no, no, those aren't the case. It's very beautiful up there. There's a lot of plants and animals. Fine, great. He has a point there. And he does recognize that indigenous people in the far north have a lot of skills and knowledge about how to survive. So we'll give him that. But beyond that, his argument is bizarre. He basically has made a living going around telling everyone that anyone can live in the Arctic. It's not hard at all. It has no additional challenges over living anywhere else. And his argument for this is that he spent a lot of time up north. Look how awesome it is.
14:37 Speaker 01 He doesn't mention that when he's done that, he's had entire indigenous families basically hunting for him, cooking, making his clothes, doing all the hard parts.
14:45 Sarah Marshall? Yeah, it is easier if you make everyone else do all the work. That, that is.
14:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, anyone can live there if you have, employ 20 people with skills.
14:57 Sarah Marshall? Okay.
15:00 Speaker 01 Stevenson has also had a very recent public humiliation. It's a, it's a tragedy, but to him, it's a humiliation. Which is that he brought 25 people on a ship to look for a secret continent up north. He was like, there's gonna be a secret continent up there. I'm gonna find it. The ship got stuck in the ice. Stevenson bailed with a team of sled dogs. He just got on a dog sled and was like, bye, crew, and mushed away. He said he was going for help, but he just left and didn't come back and went to safety himself. And the remaining members of the expedition, everyone else, which included a child, by the way.
15:42 Speaker 01 Had to like make their way on sea ice to the nearest land they could find, which was Wrangell Island, the same place Ada's going. And a lot of them ended up dying from cold and starvation.
15:53 Sarah Marshall? Yeah. So he's like, don't worry. It's like easy to survive on the island where those people I jettisoned died. It's because they were dumb that they did that, actually, is what I imagine in his head.
16:07 Speaker 01 That's exactly what he did.
16:08 Sarah Marshall? I can't swear to it, but.
16:10 Speaker 01 He blamed them. He said that they had made mistakes.
16:14 Sarah Marshall? Uh huh.
16:17 Speaker 01 His, his career took a hit, but not as much of a hit as it should have taken, considering all of the people he basically killed on this expedition. He's still writing bestselling books. He's traveling around giving talks. He decides to launch another expedition now that's going to be his redemption. And by launch, I mean, he's putting his name on it, but he's not going to be there. He's getting other people to do it for him.
16:44 Sarah Marshall? He's like, it's easy to survive in this harsh environment. I'm going to force even more people to do it. I would not risk myself because it is too easy for me.
16:54 Speaker 01 It's too easy for me. Yes, that's, you're totally in his mind. And he's been going around giving these talks about how easy it is. And there are these young men who have been helping like with his projector and taking tickets and just sort of like being ushers for his talks. And they listen to his talk every night and they're like, oh my God, this guy's the coolest. I want to be just like him. They idolize him. And Stevenson's like, hey, hey, kids, you want to be like me? Guess what? It's your lucky day. I have picked you to go on this redemption trip. You're going to be famous. You're going to have the time of your lives.
17:29 Sarah Marshall? Oh no. You know, I, look, I had heard of this story before you told me you were going to tell it to me.
17:36 Sarah Marshall? But I didn't know that this was so regrettable and silly from the beginning, you know? Because there are so many polar expeditions where you're like, yeah, that was like a reasonable premise to start with. And then things went horribly wrong. But with this, you're like, why, why would you do any of that?
17:55 Speaker 01 It's it's reputation laundering.
17:57 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
17:58 Speaker 01 I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
18:00 Sarah Marshall? And putting others' lives on the line, which is always ideal.
18:03 Speaker 01 Stevenson does not care about other people's lives. That that's clear.
18:07 Sarah Marshall? Apparently, yeah.
18:08 Speaker 01 Apparently.
18:09 Sarah Marshall? You've you've you've made a very strong case.
18:13 Speaker 01 But we care. So I'm going to introduce you to the three guys.
18:17 Sarah Marshall? Oh, my gosh.
18:17 Speaker 01 He he picks. They they beg to be picked. He picks them. They think they're very lucky. These guys are young. They're idealistic. Their names are Frederick Moore, Lorne Knight, and Milton Gall. And Moore is the oldest. He's 29. He has the most experience because he was on Stevenson's last expedition. He basically almost starved to death. He got so hungry that he was scraping the oil off of his boots to try to get a single calorie. And now he's been home for a couple of years and he's sort of looking back on it all with rose colored glasses. He's been Stevenson's assistant and Stevenson's been flattering him, telling him how great he is.
18:57 Speaker 01 He has so much potential. And Moore starts to think, oh, it was all just an accident, a misunderstanding. He sees these crowds every day cheering for Stevenson and he wants some of that glory.
19:07 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
19:08 Speaker 01 He also really loved the Arctic. Like, it's it's beautiful. It's genuinely a spectacular place to be.
19:14 Sarah Marshall? It's like, apparently a classic thing for, like, men in New Zealand to love Shackleton, which is, you know, my dad has always had a thing for Shackleton. So I grew up thinking that, I don't know, just that everyone's house had Shackleton books. And I realize we're talking about the Antarctic with that one, but I think there is like, I don't know, the the whole Arctic explorer thing, like, it does feel to me like there's so much of the best of humanity and that curiosity and then the worst of it. And, you know, this way that we turn nature into a canvas for our own hubris. And and then, you know, throw that around in ways that destroys the lives of other people.
19:56 Sarah Marshall? But yeah, I don't, I will always, I think, empathize with the urge to see those places.
20:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. These, these kids, I mean, they're not kids. They're, I'm older than 29 now, so I can call them all kids.
20:11 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
20:12 Speaker 01 But they're coming into it, I think, with a, with very sort of true hearts. They just want to see the north and they believe they're part of something important.
20:21 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
20:23 Speaker 01 Moore has a bestie named Lauren Knight, and Lauren is a big guy. He's over six feet tall. He's from Oregon, Sarah.
20:33 Sarah Marshall? Blair, this is crazy because I'm over six feet tall and I'm from Oregon.
20:39 Sarah Marshall? And I'm a big guy.
20:42 Speaker 01 Lauren has also worked with Stephenson before, a little bit.
20:46 Sarah Marshall? Wow.
20:46 Speaker 01 Stevenson, Stephenson. And he's kind of a dreamer. And Moore and Knight just have really wanted to go on a trip together. They're buds. They're like, we're gonna do this together, where it's side by side. There's also this kid on the lecture circuit, like truly a kid. He's 19 years old. His name is Milton Gall. And his whole family lives in a small town in Texas. None of them have ever left. And when, when Stephenson and these other guys come through that town in Texas, Gall just has stars in his eyes. He's young and he's helpful and he's charming, and he charms these other guys, Moore and Knight. And he gets them to promise that if they ever go north again, they'll invite him along because he just wants to leave his small town.
21:32 Speaker 01 Originally, Stephenson just invites the older guys. But they're like, hey, can we bring this kid? Can we bring Gall?
21:42 Speaker 01 Stephenson makes a big deal about how, oh, there's so many applicants for this expedition. 10,000 men have applied. They all have amazing resumes. They're so accomplished.
21:52 Sarah Marshall? A big, beautiful expedition.
21:54 Speaker 01 But you know what, Gall? I see something in you. I pick you. You can come along as long as I don't have to pay you and you do it for free.
22:02 Sarah Marshall? No, I'm gonna sell you my course on how to be an influencer for $1,500.
22:10 Speaker 01 To be clear, also- Literally, no one has applied for the job. It's not been announced. It's all completely a lie. It's just flattery to get Gaul to go along for free and do labor for him.
22:23 Sarah Marshall? Of course.
22:23 Speaker 01 But Gaul's like, oh, my God, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Of course, I'll do it for free. Like, I'm so lucky. I'll do anything for you.
22:29 Sarah Marshall? The worst part is that all of this could happen like right now, I feel like. Don't you think?
22:34 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I mean, it happens. It happens in a million ways these days.
22:38 Sarah Marshall? Yeah. But I feel like literally.
22:40 Speaker 01 Less often to the Arctic. Stephenson's idea for this redemption expedition is that he's going to send the guys back to Wrangle Island, which is that big uninhabited island where a bunch of people on the last expedition died. And they're going to live there for two years. But halfway through, a ship is going to come drop off more supplies and more people so they can leave early. Like, there's going to be people on the island for two years, but a ship's going to come after a year and take anyone home who wants to go home.
23:11 Sarah Marshall? Oh, boy. I certainly hope that ship comes.
23:15 Speaker 01 The goal is to colonize Wrangle Island for Canada so that Canada can use it as an airbase or to farm reindeer or trap fur. It's really unclear how Canada's going to use it. They don't want it. But what is clear is that Stephenson expects this project to be very profitable for him personally as an individual.
23:36 Sarah Marshall? They could at least go to Monaco. I mean, I feel like Canada famously has more than enough land. Even reindeer type land, they're doing fine. But whatever. Why am I criticizing this aspect of the plan?
23:50 Speaker 01 Sure enough, he brings his idea to Canada and Canada's like, no. We don't, we don't want that island.
23:59 Sarah Marshall? Pitch the Americans. This is much more their type of thing.
24:02 Speaker 01 We don't, we don't want it. In fact, please don't do it because.
24:10 Sarah Marshall? We don't want to have to make a heritage minute about this.
24:15 Speaker 01 Because we think that island belongs to Russia and we don't want to piss them off.
24:19 Sarah Marshall? That too.
24:21 Speaker 01 Stephenson's like, they actually want me to do it. Canada, you're so coy. You said no, but you're going to be really happy once I pull it off.
24:30 Sarah Marshall? Oh, Canada just likes me so much that they have to pretend that they hate me, but they love me.
24:37 Speaker 01 I'm gonna do it anyway. I'm gonna colonize it for Canada. The only problem is that the three guys I'm bringing are American. And in order to colonize Wrangle Island for Canada, the captain of the trip needs to be a Canadian citizen.
24:51 Sarah Marshall? Oh, no.
24:53 Speaker 01 So he writes a letter to the University of Toronto, asking them to recommend a student to him who's a Canadian citizen. The younger, the better, because younger is more malleable.
25:05 Sarah Marshall? No, I was literally gonna make a joke about his letter saying, send me a student, not too experienced, of course. And then he literally did that.
25:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, he literally did that. You can read the letter. It's basically exactly that.
25:18 Sarah Marshall? This is like the famous Pony Express ad that says orphans preferred, or at least according to legend it does.
25:26 Speaker 01 Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. It's the same idea completely. But the university bites. They're like, oh, cool opportunity.
25:34 Sarah Marshall? No.
25:34 Speaker 01 We'll nominate a kid. Here's, here's a kid. We found him. His name is Alan Crawford, and he's just a science geek. He's super into science. He's a boy scout.
25:43 Sarah Marshall? Geek. We weren't really doing much with him.
25:45 Speaker 01 Have a boy scout geek. He's 20 years old. He's never done anything like this at all. And Stephenson's like, fantastic, exactly what I was looking for. I'm gonna hire this untrained 20-year-old as the captain of my expedition. What could possibly go wrong?
26:00 Sarah Marshall? They couldn't have gotten somebody from the ski team or something?
26:04 Speaker 01 No ski team.
26:05 Sarah Marshall? Gosh darn.
26:06 Speaker 01 Now we have our four guys. They're so excited. They can't wait. They just think they've been offered the trip of a lifetime.
26:13 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
26:14 Speaker 01 Stephenson sends them all to Nome with a shopping list. He doesn't even come along to help them pick supplies. He's like, just pick up, you know, a skin boat and some potatoes.
26:25 Sarah Marshall? Just your normal Arctic expedition stuff. Everybody knows what you're supposed to get for that. Like, should I really even have to tell you? I don't think so.
26:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, this will totally, this will be everything you need in the high Arctic. Just go to Nome, I'll send you the money once you get there. They get there, he doesn't send the money.
26:42 Sarah Marshall? No.
26:44 Speaker 01 So they're sitting, they're waiting, they're trying to keep the expedition a secret. Because they're like, oh, my God, if anyone knows we're going to Wrangell Island, they'll all try to colonize it first.
26:54 Sarah Marshall? Everybody wants the slice of paradise.
26:57 Speaker 01 Everybody wants it, it's so valuable. Summer is passing and they need to leave now because the ocean's gonna freeze over. Like, you can't travel once fall hits. Finally, he sends the money and at this point, it's late in the summer. And they need to just buy everything really fast. So they find a ship that'll drop them off, they buy guns, they buy food, they buy cooking gear, they pick up some sled dogs. They, they hire Ada Blackjack. Meanwhile, their families back home are, are getting pretty worried and Stephenson has an elaborate correspondence with them. He's sending their families reassuring letters.
27:35 Speaker 01 Here is a quote from a letter he sends to Maury's brand new wife, who, by the way, they got married because he was going on this trip.
27:43 Sarah Marshall? Oh, boy.
27:44 Speaker 01 Stephenson says, "The polar regions are just as commonplace as Ohio. Lightning may strike you next summer, but from that, Fred is safe. Then there are all the multiplied dangers of civilization. Railroad accidents, panics, fires and falling down stairs. If you can once divest yourself of these beliefs about the North that are untrue, you will see that the few dangers of the North are paralleled by the same sort of dangers down here."
28:16 Speaker 01 Sarah,
28:18 Speaker 01 I am, I am just, I'm gonna share something with you that I, I am distraught about.
28:23 Sarah Marshall? Yeah, please.
28:24 Speaker 01 When I first moved to the Norwegian Arctic when I was 18, I was 200 miles above the Arctic Circle. I was sleeping outside, I was dog sledding. My mom was worried and I sent her a letter.
28:38 Speaker 01 I sent her a letter and I tracked it down just for this. And I'm going to read you a paragraph from the letter I wrote when I was 18. Dear Mom,
28:51 Speaker 01 I don't think of this place as being dangerous at all. Imagine if I'd grown up here and moved to an American city. Then I would probably call home and talk about how there are car crashes that people die in. And you can't walk around alone at night without the risk of being mugged or kidnapped or killed. I think that idea is a lot scarier than here when all you have to do is watch the weather and keep an eye out for musk ox.
29:14 Speaker 01 Girl, I sound like Stephenson.
29:16 Sarah Marshall? Yeah, but you know what? You're writing that letter on your own behalf, which makes all the difference, in my opinion.
29:22 Speaker 01 That's true. That's true. Like, and I also, I see my point and I, I, I still kind of agree with it.
29:28 Sarah Marshall? Yeah, I see. I completely see you. It's just like every place has rules, right? And it's like, maybe one of the questions is like, are they learnable rules? And they're not if you're being lied to by the person who's sending you up there.
29:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:41 Sarah Marshall? And also like,
29:44 Speaker 01 if you go on a camping trip in Ohio, you presumably have a way out of the woods. If these guys get into trouble, they have
29:49 Sarah Marshall? Right.
29:50 Speaker 01 no communication, no way out.
29:52 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
29:52 Speaker 01 Absolutely nothing.
29:53 Sarah Marshall? Although the lack of tornadoes, you know, that, I mean, at least they have that going for them.
29:59 Speaker 01 They, they really do.
30:01 Sarah Marshall? And DuPont isn't operating on Wrangle Island. So that's, you know, yeah. But anyway, yes. It, this is like more cult-like than I had ever imagined.
30:11 Speaker 01 You see cults everywhere once you, once you know what to look for.
30:14 Sarah Marshall? Yeah, exactly. It's like, uh, I don't know, color theory. It's cult or theory.
30:22 Speaker 01 The four guys are in Nome. They finally have the money. They're packing. Gahl buys 26 boxes of candy because that's what he's most worried about being without. He has a sweet tooth.
30:35 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
30:36 Speaker 01 They get seven sled dogs. As a dog slitter, I can tell you exactly how this went down. These guys rolled into town, they're asking around for dogs.
30:48 Speaker 01 They're, they're gonna get, they're gonna get the dogs that nobody wants. Like, I'm sure every single person was like, this is an amazing lead dog and they totally don't fight or hump all the time or chase birds. I am sure they got scammed into those dogs.
31:02 Sarah Marshall? They definitely won't stop running because they are suddenly not feeling it or anything like that.
31:08 Speaker 01 I mean, I, to be clear, all dogs are good. I'm not, of course, they got good dogs, but like...
31:15 Sarah Marshall? Of course their dogs had beautiful souls, but how much, how, how reliable were they though?
31:22 Speaker 01 This motley team they've pulled together, I can tell you that, that is just gonna be chaotic AF. Like, it's gonna be a disaster.
31:30 Sarah Marshall? And it's also like presumably like sled dog ends in pieces, so they, they don't have a coherent team. They have a bunch of dogs that like haven't worked together before.
31:40 Speaker 01 That's usually not that much of a challenge if you have a good leader.
31:44 Sarah Marshall? Okay, cool.
31:45 Speaker 01 But that's a big if for them.
31:48 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
31:50 Speaker 01 Another thing Stephenson told them they needed to get was a skin boat, which is a boat that's made of walrus or seal skin around a wooden frame. So it's very lightweight. You can carry it over ice and you can use it for hunting. But the skin boats they find are really expensive. And the guys are like, we'll just pick that up in Siberia too.
32:08 Sarah Marshall? Oh, I'm stressed.
32:13 Speaker 01 They do have a cat they're gonna bring. Her name is Vic. She's a good cat. And at the last moment, Stephenson reaches out to them again and he's like, by the way, I don't have the money to pay you for this trip. So hopefully it's cool if I just give you shares in my own company after the expedition's over.
32:33 Sarah Marshall? Your company that does what?
32:36 Speaker 01 The company of Stephenson.
32:37 Sarah Marshall? The company of colonizing islands for Canada against Canada's own will.
32:43 Speaker 01 That's, that's the one. But he's like, what are you gonna need money for? You don't need it. So they agree. What are they gonna do?
32:50 Sarah Marshall? Why, you're going to Wrangle Island where the pineapples just grow up out of the ground, they do.
32:59 Speaker 01 They they get on the ship and they head north.
33:04 Sarah Marshall? Hmm. What kind of a ship is this?
33:07 Speaker 01 This is just a ship they walked around Nome trying to pay someone to drop them off. They just found a guy. They found a guy.
33:14 Sarah Marshall? Okay, great.
33:15 Speaker 01 Yeah. At this point, we have the four men, Ada, the cat named Vic, seven definitely well-trained sled dogs. And they're all going to be on Wrangell Island for a year until another ship comes to relieve them. So they they stop in Siberia along the way and they try to hire a few more native people who are like, absolutely not. No way. That's way too dangerous. They try to buy a skin boat. They can't. No one will sell them one of those either. So they're just like, you know what? We'll we'll just go without those things. And on September 16th, they reach Wrangell Island. The island is just looming above them in the fog. It's bare. There are no trees.
34:00 Speaker 01 There are these wide, wide gravel beaches, rocky bluffs, mountains all over. The color comes from mosses and lichens and tiny flowers on the ground. There's birds. There's scree fields. There's polar bears just wandering along the beach, kind of at all times.
34:16 Sarah Marshall? Oh, good.
34:16 Speaker 01 It's just stark and big. And they get off the ship. They stand on the beach. And the first thing they do is raise the British flag, which really pisses off the ship captain who dropped them off because he's American and he's like, oh, these dudes tricked me. I would not. I would not have helped them colonize the island for Canada.
34:35 Sarah Marshall? Okay, so Canada's still using the British flag. Okay. Good for them. Hadn't come up with the maple leaf yet. In which you can see the outline of two guys shouting.
34:47 Sarah Marshall? But anyway.
34:47 Speaker 01 The ship, now pissed off, leaves, goes off into the distance, and now it's just them on the beach.
34:56 Speaker 01 The first thing they do is take stock of all their supplies. They need to build a shelter, they need to figure out a plan for food. The supply situation, once they're looking at all these boxes, once they're left on the island, they're discovering it's not as good as they thought it was when they left Noh. A bunch of the food is rotten, the potatoes are moldy, their prunes have maggots in them. The dogs are skinny, the dogs are not in good shape. But they try not to let this get them down. Their spirits are high, they're here, they made it, and they're immediately getting to work.
35:28 Sarah Marshall? Man.
35:29 Speaker 01 First things first, they build shelter. There's no trees, of course, but there's a ton of driftwood. And they gather it from all over the beach and they use it to build frames for these tents and like the skeleton of a house. The house has open sides, but their plan is that once it snows, they can use snow blocks to build up the walls. This actually works really well. If you haven't slept in an igloo, it's really surprisingly cozy. Snow is a good insulator because it has air in it. So their snow house, it's not going to get warm even with a fire inside. But if it's 40 below outside and they have a little stove going, it might get up to like 30 degrees, 30 above inside the house.
36:09 Sarah Marshall? I mean, you know.
36:11 Speaker 01 That's 70 degrees warmer than the outside air. So it's pretty good. They obviously are going to need a ton of fuel. So they gather a bunch more firewood, they chop it, they stack it. More really like beefs up their dog sled. It turns out the dog sled they got was rickety, who could have guessed? Ada immediately starts sewing. So she's sewing hoods onto all their parkas, making them, she's knitting them socks, gloves, just everything they're going to need. And it's also just cool, like they're excited to be there. There's animals around who aren't used to people, so they'll come right up to them. Do you remember Alan Crawford, the 20-year-old Canadian?
36:48 Sarah Marshall? Yep.
36:48 Speaker 01 Captain?
36:50 Speaker 01 He's, he's the leader, but he's just really into science. So he's like running around documenting all the plants and animals he can find, like drawing sketches of little flowers. There's walrus, foxes, owls, seagulls, a ton of polar bears, which Ada doesn't like.
37:10 Speaker 01 The polar bears are so numerous that they often will have polar bears on multiple sides of them at any given time.
37:17 Sarah Marshall? Ada's also like trapped on an island with a bunch of guys who, and I say this lovingly, are there because they all have the survival instincts of a fruit fly.
37:30 Speaker 01 Probably more than that.
37:31 Sarah Marshall? Okay. But you know, perhaps not the level that it would be nice for them to be at, and certainly it seems like nowhere near where hers have had to be.
37:41 Speaker 01 I think, I think the guys actually have surprisingly good skills.
37:44 Sarah Marshall? Yeah, nice.
37:45 Speaker 01 But that doesn't protect them from being taken advantage of.
37:49 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
37:50 Speaker 01 The thing to know about polar bears, their constant neighbors, is that they are one of the only animals that will actively hunt and eat people. We are their prey. A lot of wild animals can hurt people, like black bears, even grizzly bears, they can hurt people, but they're not hunting them specifically for food. Ada's polar bear phobia is extremely rational. She grew up with a lot of stories about them, legends, warnings, and this just builds her fear even more.
38:23 Sarah Marshall? And I know everyone knows this, but like, I feel like it's worth pointing out that they're just like, they're just really, really, really big.
38:31 Speaker 01 They're really big. They're very, very large, very large.
38:36 Sarah Marshall? They're probably even bigger than, than you think, if you haven't seen one or a taxidermy lately.
38:43 Speaker 01 When I first lived in Norway when I was 10 years old, the grocery store had a taxidermied polar bear standing up in one of the aisles, holding a bottle of Coca-Cola as an ad for Coca-Cola.
39:00 Sarah Marshall? How did she, did she like it at that age?
39:03 Speaker 01 I think I didn't think too critically about that. I mean, I was like a bear. Cool. Like, I didn't. I should drink Coca-Cola.
39:09 Sarah Marshall? But like, did it, it didn't like scare you or anything?
39:12 Speaker 01 No, it didn't scare me. I thought it was beautiful.
39:16 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
39:17 Speaker 01 Ada has always heard in stories that polar bears won't bother poor people.
39:23 Speaker 01 If you're poor, they leave you alone.
39:24 Sarah Marshall? That would be really nice.
39:26 Speaker 01 And this has reassured her in the past because she's always been poor, but now she's making $50 a month.
39:32 Sarah Marshall? Oh, God.
39:33 Speaker 01 And she feels like now the polar bears are gonna target her.
39:36 Sarah Marshall? They are.
39:37 Speaker 01 Because she has money.
39:38 Sarah Marshall? That's kind of like how I feel like if I'm on a plane, then God isn't gonna crash the plane if I'm reading about a plane crash while I'm on the plane.
39:47 Speaker 01 But thank you for your sacrifice.
39:48 Sarah Marshall? It's worked every time. Yeah.
39:50 Speaker 01 Luckily, Ada's jobs are mostly indoors. So she's not out setting the traps or carrying the driftwood. The men are carrying guns all the time for self-defense and for hunting, but Ada just avoids that. She's also terrified of guns. So whenever any of the guys shoot, she like, squeaks and covers her ears and tries to hide. She, she has a very sensible fear of polar bears and guns.
40:15 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
40:16 Speaker 01 The guys hunting is pretty successful, at least at first. They shoot their first polar bear very early on. It's so much meat that they can't even carry it back. They just have to cache it. So they leave the meat there basically and go, go out and pick up more meat when they need to, like they're going to the grocery store.
40:33 Sarah Marshall? What do we know about what polar bear meat tastes like?
40:36 Speaker 01 I don't know what polar bear meat.
40:37 Sarah Marshall? What are the, what are the macros in polar bear meat?
40:41 Speaker 01 I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I've eaten black bear and it's sort of like steak. But I don't know about polar bear.
40:48 Sarah Marshall? I mean, does it have like, I imagine as a polar bear, well, I guess it depends on the time of year, but is there like a good amount of fat for them to be eating?
40:55 Speaker 01 I imagine so. I think any, any northern animal has a, has a pretty considerable amount of fat.
41:01 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
41:03 Speaker 01 This is, this is great. Once they start getting the polar bears, then they can fatten up the dogs. The dogs are healthier. They're getting chunky. Ada is just like singing hymns all day. She's immediately lonely. She's immediately homesick, but she also is trying to be brave. And so she's singing these hymns and Goll is eating candy from his 26 boxes. They're shooting craps in the evening. It turns out that Crawford, the Canadian student, is super funny. He was the editor of his university's comedy magazine and he's just telling bad jokes all the time. They can't get away from them, but they all secretly love them.
41:40 Sarah Marshall? As you mentioned, the dogs getting healthy, a very slutty looking dog walked by across the street with like the sort of, I don't know, like the like tan coat with black at the tips.
41:54 Speaker 01 Really?
41:54 Sarah Marshall? And kind of that like mask face. Yeah. And a nice brushy tail. Yeah. Like very, very classic whole kind of look. I just thought that was nice.
42:03 Speaker 01 Slud dogs. They're everywhere.
42:05 Sarah Marshall? This might not be how your brain likes to work, but is, who would be in your movie of this? I'm like, what if the Canadian Crawford? In my very specific brain, I'm like, I'm imagining him as Robert Sean Leonard circa Dead Poets Society. Just like, but which means that I imagine him to look like he, you know, could be blown away easily.
42:31 Speaker 01 Who else would you cast?
42:34 Sarah Marshall? I feel like I don't know the other guys as well, but just, it feels like this is, this is like unfolding cinematically in my brain because I think you're telling, you tell stories in a way that makes it easy to sort of like picture them and feel like you can envision them. And I feel like this is, this seems like an exciting time and like a time when you have people who are sort of young and experienced getting to do something that's really novel and amazing and exciting and that you can't talk about the rest of it without kind of showing that level of excitement, maybe that people are feeling initially. I don't know. Like you wouldn't, this wouldn't be a movie for like a bunch of like jaded looking people to be in.
43:20 Speaker 01 No, they're all full of, they're full of energy.
43:23 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
43:24 Speaker 01 Ada is, Ada is struggling. The guys are full of energy and Ada is fighting really, really hard to be brave. She's so lonely. But overall, everyone's doing their, working on their projects. Crawford's sketching animals, Knight's hunting, Ada's sewing and cooking and singing hymns and everyone's getting along. After a few weeks, Ada starts to act weird. She really abruptly stops singing hymns and she almost entirely stops talking. She just, she won't sew, she won't cook. She leaves the tent where they're all living together and she just moves into another shelter alone. And this is pretty concerning behavior. It happens really abruptly.
44:07 Speaker 01 The men are worried about her and they are even more worried when she comes to them and announces that she has fallen in love with Crawford. In fact, not only is she in love with Crawford, she's gonna marry him. He, he is her soulmate, she tells them, but all of the other ones are plotting to kill her.
44:29 Speaker 01 And the reason she gives for this is that she has seen them sharpening their knives as naturally they would be doing and the shaman had warned her about knives. So she decides that this means that, that they're gonna kill her next. The guys are all trying to reassure her. They're pretty nice people. Every record indicates that they are just friendly, nice people and they're trying to reassure her, they're trying to take care of her. They're like, "Look, it's gonna be okay. We're just sharpening the knives for skinning animals. It's, we, we want you to feel safe. What's it gonna take?" Nothing is helping. She's just getting more and more paranoid. And she's also making Crawford really uncomfortable.
45:14 Speaker 01 He is not interested in her romantically, but she's being like pretty aggressive about things. She's just following him around. She actually won't let him sleep at night. She's just keeping him up multiple nights in a row, all night long, saying that they're meant to be together, they have to get married, he has to protect her from the other men. And she's also refusing to do her work.
45:37 Speaker 01 This is a problem because everything's planned out where they all need to be contributing in order to be able to get through the winter. So winter's coming fast. It's already getting colder. It's going to be a lot harder to do things when it's pitch black and 40 below. They're going to need their clothing. And Ada is not doing any of the things that that she had originally been doing and that she'd come there to do.
45:59 Sarah Marshall? Mm hmm.
46:00 Speaker 01 In fact, it's already starting to snow. Winter is coming so fast that the snowdrifts are building up. They're having to change their shelters around. They go ahead and they build walls for the snow house and they move in. It's pretty big. It's like 14 feet by 24 feet. And they do this really cute thing where they build like a tunnel through the snow coming out of the snow house with little rooms branching off it so that each sled dog has their own little room.
46:27 Sarah Marshall? Oh, it's like a little ranch house for sled dogs.
46:30 Speaker 01 Exactly. And then when they light the stove in the snow house, it warms up the rooms for the sled dogs, too.
46:36 Sarah Marshall? Hmm.
46:37 Speaker 01 Sled dogs can generally tolerate a lot of cold. They're adapted to it, but in order to be comfortable in the deep cold, they need a lot of calories, like three times as many calories. So this keeps the dogs cozy, but more importantly, it's a way of saving calories. They won't need as much meat.
46:53 Sarah Marshall? Hmm.
46:54 Speaker 01 Sadly, one morning, they wake up and one of their dogs is acting really strange. He's being very aggressive. He's trying to attack the other dogs and the people. He's a great dog whose name is Snowball, but he passes away pretty shortly after that, even though they've been trying to nurse him back to health. And they're worried at that point, like if he had rabies or something, they are trying to sort of clean the area so that none of the other dogs will get sick. And luckily, the other dogs stay healthy.
47:22 Sarah Marshall? Okay.
47:25 Speaker 01 Around this time, Ada goes missing.
47:30 Speaker 01 They find a note that she's left. And she's left her two most precious belongings, which are a ring that she has and what's called an ever-sharp pencil, which is, I looked this up, it's a really beautiful mechanical pencil that was very fancy and popular at the time, it had just been invented. Oh, wow. And it was really important to her, it was a very prized possession. Yeah. And the note says she's leaving those objects for Crawford. Immediately, the guys are panicked. They're like, what did she do? Where did she go? They start looking around and they find footprints leading away from their camp. They start running after the footprints. And the footprints are going for miles, mile after mile. And finally, they see Ada lying in the distance.
48:11 Speaker 01 And when they get closer, she gets up and she starts running away again, and a bottle falls out of her hand. And they see that it's a half-empty bottle of liniment, which they realize she has drunk in order to try to kill herself.
48:27 Speaker 01 It turns out that that morning, she had seen Knight sharpening his knife again, and was so convinced that he was gonna kill her, that she, she ran away and, and sort of tried to, tried to do it first. She's sick to her stomach from drinking the liniment, but otherwise, she's okay, and she's able to make a full recovery. The men carry her back to camp. They don't know what to do. Clearly, something's wrong with Ada psychologically. They wanna protect her, they wanna protect themselves. She's starting to ask them to kill her when she's asleep. It's just terrifying and erratic, and they, they don't know what to do. They are not trained for this, and there's no way to, to get her back home, or ask anyone for help.
49:11 Speaker 01 Knight wrote in his journal, he did have a bit of a sense of humor, he said, he said that Ada wanted to marry Crawford. She went on to say that if Crawford would not have her, she was willing to marry any one of the rest of us. Rather a gloomy statement for us.
49:28 Speaker 01 The men want to take care of her, but they don't know how.
49:32 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
49:33 Speaker 01 I mean, what would you do?
49:35 Sarah Marshall? I have no idea, you know, because they're in the middle of something that even if this hadn't been going on, would have been very tough margins, like tuck and go, everyone doing something they'd never done before, pretty much. So it's like adding in another one of those unprecedented situations on top.
49:52 Speaker 01 Yeah. I mean, but you also have to plan for, there's always going to be unprecedented situations added on top. Like, someone's gonna get sick.
50:00 Sarah Marshall? It does seem like they were sent up there on a wing and a prayer by this guy, but I don't know. I would have her spend more time brushing sled dogs. That would probably be good for her.
50:09 Speaker 01 That's a good one.
50:10 Sarah Marshall? Supervised.
50:11 Speaker 01 I don't know if it would work, but I do think that tends to help a lot of people. But they decide that because she's so fixated on Crawford, maybe that's upsetting to her because he doesn't, he doesn't love her back.
50:23 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
50:24 Speaker 01 So maybe it'll be better if she's not seeing him all the time. And it might be better for Crawford, too. He's, he's dealing with a lot. So they decide to build a second camp 15 miles away. And they're gonna make a trap line between the two camps so they can check their traps. And Crawford and Mar are gonna go live in the new place. While Gaul and Knight are gonna stay behind with Ada. And maybe that'll calm things down, just having a little bit of separation there.
50:52 Sarah Marshall? Okay. That seems like a lot of miles.
50:56 Speaker 01 It's, it's a lot of miles, but you know, they're, they're doing what they can do.
51:01 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
51:02 Speaker 01 Crawford and Mar move into their new camp. And the first day they wake up and guess who's there?
51:07 Sarah Marshall? Hmm. Ada.
51:11 Speaker 01 Ada's there. She's like, hey Crawford. She has walked 15 miles.
51:15 Sarah Marshall? She happened to be in the neighborhood. Wow.
51:17 Speaker 01 Knight comes over with the dogs and he mushes her back home. The next morning. Guess who's at the camp when Crawford wakes up again?
51:26 Sarah Marshall? My gosh, Ada.
51:28 Speaker 01 Ada.
51:29 Sarah Marshall? She's getting her steps in.
51:30 Speaker 01 At this point, the men, they really, really don't know what to do. They're spending all their time taking care of Ada, trying to keep her from getting hurt. At one point, she disappears in her nightgown for several days and they have to track her down. She's not only not contributing and not participating in tasks, but they don't have time to do things either. They need to be hunting, they need to be gathering food. They wish they could just beam her back to Nome, but they can't.
51:56 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
51:57 Speaker 01 They tie her to their flagpole and tell her that she can't eat anything except for bread until she starts contributing. This obviously is awful. It must be torture for Ada. I don't think they're doing it out of cruelty. I think they genuinely don't know how to keep her and them safe. And they're just desperate at this point, but poor Ada, poor, poor everyone. They don't know what to do. They're trying to keep her alive.
52:25 Sarah Marshall? Yeah, yeah. And also, you know, it's, it's gonna stop being wandering off weather, maybe.
52:30 Speaker 01 It's already not wandering off weather.
52:32 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
52:33 Speaker 01 Just as quickly as this all started, Ada goes back to normal. One day, she's carrying her suitcase into the wilderness. The next day, she sits down and she picks up her sewing supplies. And she says, what should I make? What do we need? And she starts singing hymns again. And she's friendly, she's cheerful. It's like nothing ever happened. So what did happen? Because this dominates their first period of time on the island.
52:57 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
52:57 Speaker 01 There's a journalist named Jennifer Niven, who's written a book called Ada Blackjack. And she worked closely with Ada's family. Her suggestion that she puts forward in the book is that Ada had something called Arctic hysteria, which is what's called a culture-bound syndrome. That means it's a disease that only shows up in a specific culture.
53:20 Speaker 01 Arctic hysteria shows up mainly in Inuit women in the winter when they've moved somewhere farther north than where they lived before. And historically, the symptoms sound a lot like what Ada was going through. There's social withdrawal, there's saying and doing inappropriate, sometimes sexual and romantic things, and disappearing out into the snow, just wandering off. I was reading more about this. It may be that this is the explanation, but there's also a lot of debate about whether Arctic hysteria really exists, because there aren't that many recorded incidents. And the main incidents that have been recorded are white people sort of quote unquote diagnosing
54:02 Speaker 01 Native women after they come into their communities and throw everything off and are exploiting them.
54:09 Sarah Marshall? Right. But, you know, as someone diagnosing what the problem is, you might not be in a position to realize that you are it.
54:17 Speaker 01 There's a guy named Dr. Lawrence Kiermaier, who is the director of a program on transcultural psychiatry at McGill University, and he said, quote, psychiatric case description transformed a situation of sexual exploitation of Inuit women by explorers into a discreet disorder worthy of a new diagnostic label. With hindsight, we can see how insensitivity to the impact of exploration on other peoples distorted the picture when vital information on social context was not included.
54:44 Sarah Marshall? Yeah, and I think pretty much whenever something is termed a syndrome, that means it's being diagnosed based on symptoms rather than cause, you know? And so, I mean, I remember doing like a very early You're Wrong About episode on Stockholm Syndrome, where when you break it down, it's like, well, it probably, it kind of made sense for these people to be sympathizing with the people holding them hostage if you look at the actual details of the story, you know? And it's a, I don't know, those diagnoses, I think, do reveal as much about the people creating them as the ones they're being applied to.
55:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, in Ada's situation, people who are under extreme stress have stress reactions. Like, to me, it seems clear she has some sort of mental health episode. She's under way more stress than the rest of them. She didn't want to do this trip, right? And she didn't ever agree to it under the conditions she's there under. So she's under a tremendous amount of stress that these guys are really not able to understand.
55:42 Sarah Marshall? And also, she's been through, it feels like, so many life and death situations, just that... We've heard about in this episode so far and that that has an effect on a person.
55:54 Speaker 01 Right, the cumulative
55:55 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
55:55 Speaker 01 Stress and trauma. Whatever it is, whatever caused it. I think we have to imagine that for her, the thing she believed during this episode felt completely real, even if it wasn't everyone else's reality.
56:09 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
56:10 Speaker 01 Her reality, what she experienced is that she was trapped on an island with people who were trying to murder her.
56:16 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
56:17 Speaker 01 And at the same time, she was being thrown away by the person she loved most. And it just must have been absolutely horrible, layer on layer of horrible.
56:27 Speaker 01 Luckily, the episode comes to an end. She comes back to herself. She's sort of friendly again. She seems happier. She's joking. Everyone's kind of shook up by the whole situation, but they, they even start to get to a point where they can all joke about it with each other. It is embarrassed, but I think the guys don't seem to hold it against her.
56:49 Speaker 01 And she really seems to, to be able to move forward and at, at least be doing better than she was before.
56:55 Sarah Marshall? Good.
56:56 Speaker 01 She, she does still have a crush on Crawford. That's real. He lights up her day, but.
57:01 Sarah Marshall? Yeah, she's only human.
57:03 Speaker 01 She knows it's not mutual and she just has a little crush for her own self. By the time all of this has resolved, it is full on winter. That far north, that means the sun has set and it is not going to rise above the horizon for months. We are in months of darkness. They have a lot of free time, obviously. They don't have electricity, so, so there's a limit to what they can do in the dark, but they read and they play and they hang out. Crawford and Mar have been out at the second camp, remember, but once Aida's better, they decide they're just going to move back with everyone else. They don't need to be separated and it also is just taking a lot of fuel and time to go back and forth. And by fuel, I mean literal meat for the dogs. That's the gas for their vehicle right now is meat for the dogs. They're all back together. They're trading books.
57:48 Speaker 01 It's really like kind of a sweet time. Humans don't hibernate, but we also kind of do.
57:54 Sarah Marshall? Yeah, we cuddle up like little potatoes.
57:57 Speaker 01 On January 25th, the edge of the sun comes over the horizon. Sarah, I can tell you firsthand what this is like because when I experienced it, it was by far one of the most intense experiences of my life.
58:10 Sarah Marshall? Yeah, tell me about it.
58:12 Speaker 01 To be clear, Ada's from around Nome, which is below the Arctic Circle. And the Arctic Circle is the point where there's at least one day a year where the sun doesn't rise at all. She's used to cold, dark winters, but she's not used to going completely without any sunlight.
58:29 Sarah Marshall? Yeah.
58:30 Speaker 01 When I moved up into the Arctic, I was far enough north that the sun didn't rise for two months straight, which is about, about the same amount of time as what they're experiencing on Wrangell Island. The exact number of days actually depends on like the horizon, like if there are mountains and stuff, because that'll block the very edge of the sun. So I don't know if it's the exact number of days, but it's pretty close. My experience of this dark period of time, this time of darkness, as they call it in Norwegian, is it's, I liked it, it's kind of cozy, it's not pitch black all day long. There's like an hour in the middle of the day where you have this blue twilight. That's really pretty. There'd be northern lights like throughout the night and throughout the afternoon.
59:11 Speaker 01 I just wore a headlamp constantly, so I had it easy compared to them. One day at the end of January, I was outside digging dog houses out of the snow. And there had just been this blizzard, so I had to dig a bunch of snow to, you know, uncover all the dog houses. I wasn't really paying attention to anything. And then all of a sudden, everything around me caught on fire. Just this blaze of golden light from one horizon to the other, like being inside a flame. And I had this response, I've never felt anything else like this. But it was like my body was physically struck with the most intense joy. It wasn't happiness, it wasn't like normal happiness.
59:53 Speaker 01 It was like the most intense drug. It was a biological reaction. And the people, there were people around me, they just started laughing hysterically. We're all just grinning and like cracking up. And we're all just like drugged by the sun.
1:00:11 Speaker 01 This biological reaction was so strong that I wrote in my diary that day that I thought it was cool that I had spent a winter that far north. Because for the rest of my life, I would always be completely happy while the sun was in the sky.
1:00:28 Speaker 01 And I cannot emphasize the degree to which I truly thought this would be true for the rest of my life. That is how strong of a drug sunlight is when you haven't been seeing it.
1:00:39 Sarah Marshall? That's amazing.
1:00:40 Speaker 01 So this is what Ada's going through. And the other guys, Ada and Crawford and Mar and Gahl and Knight, they've made it through winter. It's still 30 below, it's gonna snow for months, blah, blah, blah. But there's this real sense of achievement, like the sun is coming up for a little bit longer every day. They feel like it's just downhill until summer and the ship's gonna come back. And Ada can go home and she's gonna get Bennett and bring him back to Seattle. And the guys can decide, like, do they wanna stay? Do they wanna go? They're gonna get a ton more food and supplies dropped off. They're gonna get letters from their family. Gahl can get more candy, like, it's just gonna be great.
1:01:17 Sarah Marshall? Stressing me out, stressing me out.
1:01:21 Speaker 01 They are, they're running low on food. But that's okay. It only needs to last a few more months.
1:01:30 Speaker 01 Back in civilization, Stephenson is completely broke. He does not have the money to send a ship back, to send supplies and get the people that next summer. Like, yeah, he's left them on the island and they're stuck, but he's justifying it to himself. He's saying, oh, it's okay if they're trapped there longer, right? They're gonna be fine. They're in the friendly Arctic.
1:02:01 Speaker 01 This ends episode one, the first half of the story. And the second half, the resolution, is already available. If you listen to this episode on You're Wrong About, you can head on over to my new podcast, What to Carry, What to Burn, for part two, which also features Sarah Marshall. And then stick around for a lot more stories like this. If you're already at What to Carry, What to Burn, thank you. I'm so happy you're here. I'm excited for everything coming up. And I'll see you very soon in episode two.
1:02:46 Sarah Marshall? And that is the first episode of Blair Braverman's new podcast, What to Carry, What to Burn. You can find the second episode and the conclusion of Ada's story, and you can subscribe for the rest of the series at the link in our show notes. And of course, you can find information about the show and Blair's other work at blairbraverman.com. This episode was edited by Blair Braverman. Thank you to the people who make you wrong about. Miranda Zickler is our producer. Nicole Ortiz is our administrative assistant. And you're our listeners. We can't do it without you either. Thank you to Blair Braverman for being our survival correspondent.
1:03:28 Sarah Marshall? And thank you, Blair, for making a show for me to listen to, because I have been wanting this for forever, and now I get to enjoy it. And I'm very happy about that. Find links to What to Carry, What to Burn, and all the other links your little heart could desire in this episode's description. And thank you to you for listening and for being here. We'll see you in two weeks.
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