Legends of the fall: fallout shelters, dreams of falling, and autumnal vibes
It’s time to open our mailbag and answer your questions about fall – and not just the season. We’ve interpreted the theme to include everything from dreams about falling to fallout shelters and, um, tornadoes.
Plus, we reveal the long-anticipated winner of our poll on best alternatives for replacing the term “leaf-peeping.”
Question 1: Why do so many have recurring dreams about falling?
Question 2: How do tornadoes figure in myths around the world?
Question 3: How deep does a fallout shelter need to be?
Question 4: Are berries ripening earlier because of climate change?
Do you have a question about the natural world? Submit it to the Outside/Inbox! Send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or call our hotline: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.
Featuring: Abhinav Singh, Nani Pybus, David Monteyne, Shaheen Dewji, Richard Primack, Nicole Herman-Mercer, Katie Spellman
Our free newsletter is just as fun to read as this podcast is to listen to. Sign-up here.
SUPPORT
Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member of Outside/In.
Follow Outside/In on Instagram or Twitter, or join our private discussion group on Facebook
An ouroboros, or snake eating its tail, at the Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris, France. German chemist August Kekulé claimed to have seen this image in a dream, finally revealing the chemical structure of the benzene ring. Image by Leo Reynolds on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
LINKS
On dreams
German chemist August Kekulé claimed to have pictured the ring structure of benzene, after dreaming of a snake eating its own tail
A study on the threat simulation theory of dreaming
On fallout shelters
Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War, by David Monteyne
A calculator to estimate your personal annual radiation dose
Fallout Five Zero, a photographic chronicle of the Boston area’s now defunct shelters
On berries
Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods by Richard Primack
A study on Indigenous knowledge on climate-related changes to berry production in Alaska
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, produced and mixed by Felix Poon, Justine Paradis, Taylor Quimby, and Jessica Hunt
Edited by Taylor Quimby and Justine Paradis.
Executive producer: Rebecca Lavoie
Music for this episode by Jharee, Thea Tyler, and Blue Dot Sessions.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Felix Poon: So I want to ask you, Nate.
Nate Hegyi: Yes.
Felix Poon: What do you think of when you think of like the trope-y-est of fall tropes?
Nate Hegyi: Oh, I mean, obviously pumpkin spice lattes. Decorative gourd season. I think of leaf looking. We're not going to say the P word. The P word is banned on this show now.
Felix Poon: I guess we should explain for those who don't get the reference. What was the episode we did where we looked for alternatives to.
Nate Hegyi: It was our last outside in box roundup…. When we talked about. I'll say it, I'll say it now and then we'll never say it again. Leaf peeping. It's a bad word. No one peeps at leaves.
[MUX IN]
Felix Poon: Well we actually asked for alternatives to calling it “leaf-peeping” and it was voted on by our listeners. Do you want to know what new term won?
Nate Hegyi: Yes.
Felix Poon: Tree tourists
Nate Hegyi: I like “tree tourists” a lot more.
Felix Poon: I don’t know it’s kind of a little boring don’t you think?
Nate Hegyi: It is but that’s exactly what they are. You’re touring around looking at trees.
Felix Poon: Well let me mention some runner-ups. There were Color chasers, leafers, and my personal favorite, Itsy bitsy teeny weeny golden leaf and tree perceivers.
Nate Hegyi: [laughter]
Felix Poon: Hey do you wanna go itsy bitsy teeny weeny golden leaf and tree perceiving this weekend?
[MUX SWELL]
Nate Hegyi: I’m Nate
Felix Poon: I’m Felix
Nate Hegyi: And this is Outside/In, and today, we dive into our Outside/Inbox to answer your questions about the natural world – this time, the theme is fall.
[STINGER]
Felix Poon: And so Nate, just to clarify, we’re not just talking about the season of fall, right?
Nate Hegyi: No, we’re trying to be clever, talking about everything surrounding the word fall.
Felix Poon: Right, like, like the literal act of falling, like this first question.
Sydney: Hi, I’m Sydney, from Natural Bridge, Virginia. And I was just wondering if you could answer the question: why does everyone seem to have that same dream where you're falling off a cliff but you wake up just before you hit the ground? Thanks.
Nate Hegyi: Here I am with producer Justine Paradis answering that question.
<<BEGIN DREAMS OF FALLING>>
Justine Paradis: To answer this one, I talked with Dr. Abhinav Singh. He’s the medical director of the Indiana Sleep Center. And I asked him what he thought.
Abhinav Singh: It's a fascinating question. Dreams have always fascinated us from time immemorial because dreams form that fabulous shoreline between the mind and the brain where physiology meets psychology.
Nate Hegyi: Oh man, he’s like a secret poet. That was beautiful.
Justine Paradis: So, there is so much we still don’t know about dreams and sleep. But let’s start with physiology. What’s happening when we dream? In the 1950s, scientists discovered REM sleep - that’s rapid-eye movement sleep.
Abhinav Singh: The brain is firing on all cylinders. It's not slow. It's very fast. The eyes are fast. Consumption of energy is high, the heart rate's erratic… And it is during this state where we dream very vividly is what the understanding is.
Justine Paradis: We do also dream in other phases of sleep, but this is when the dreams that we remember take place.
Nate Heygi: Okay, this is when we’re having that falling off a cliff dream.
Justine Paradis: And this is about a quarter of your sleep. Your brain is super active during REM sleep.
Abhinav Singh: Memories are being archived and put away… Certain kinds of memories are processed in dream sleep versus certain kinds of memories are processed in non-dream deep sleep.
Justine Paradis: And emotional regulation. Meaning, processing emotions so when you’re awake, you’re better able to let things go and not get overly bothered by, say, getting cut off in traffic.
Nate Hegyi: This is your “let things roll off your back” ability.
Justine Paradis: Yeah, and whether or not dreams are part of those functions, or just happening at the same time – we don’t know. There are also stories of people working on really difficult problems, and having the solution come to them in a dream. Like this happened to a chemist, famously.
Abhinav Singh: The famous, you know, benzene ring solution that had fascinated organic chemists forever was solved in a state of dream.
Nate Hegyi: Really! That’s so cool.
Justine Paradis: I know. But let’s also now turn to that other lens – the psychological. Just within Western psychology, there are many different theories about what dreams mean. Over a century ago, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams – still read today. It interprets dreams as containing meaningful symbols and revealing our unconscious desires.
Another theory says: dreams are an opportunity for threat simulation – so, like a rehearsal for real life, maybe dangerous events.
Nate Hegyi: Like falling off a cliff.
Abhinav Singh: All of us have had these dreams, all of us. And it almost triggers [00:12:00] full wakefulness.
Justine Paradis: Others say: dreams are meaningless.
So, Abhinav was a bit reluctant to venture into the “mind” realm – but he gave it a go. He said that that “trip and fall” dream, it’s an abrupt emotion – like pain, or fear. Maybe repetitive dreams are a type of fear management.
Abhinav Singh: Maybe it was evolution's way of trying to resolve these difficult situations so that it doesn't bother you and you can move on with your day. Maybe it was the natural way to protect you from mental health ailments such as depression. I don't know, I’m speculating here.
Justine Paradis: The last thing that he said was: the important thing is that you are dreaming, and it’s a good thing if you do remember some dreams. If you’re excessively dreaming and it’s bothering you, or you’re not dreaming at all, you should say something to your doctor.
Abhinav Singh: Maybe once a week is normal to recall your dreams… And that's the take home message. Dream on, you know. Dreaming is healthy.
Nate Hegyi: Dream on.
[MUX]
<<END DREAMS OF FALLING>>
Nate Hegyi: Do you have any recurring dreams Felix?
Felix Poon: Uh, I actually have this recurring thing where I fly.
Nate Hegyi: Oh cool.
Felix Poon: But it’s not like a bird, I’m like, working my legs as if I’m running. and I’m able to like kind of soar into the air and
Nate Hegyi: Oh man that’s a great dream. That sounds so fun.
FP:
What about you Nate?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah I keep having the same dream, I’ve had it like since I was a kid of there being a tornado, and I have to save all my friends and family members but I can’t find them. And so it’s just like, yeah it’s, I think it’s a stress dream. It’s definitely a stress dream.
Felix Poon: Well actually since you mentioned tornadoes, we could go into this next question we have about tornadoes
Which, I did not know this before Nate, but tornadoes have their peak season around May and June, but apparently they get a second wind in the fall around October.
Nate Hegyi: Here’s producer Jessica Hunt.
<<BEGIN TORNADOES>>
Jessica Hunt: Today, Nate, we have a team question from some fans in Vermont.
Jeanie and friends: Hi, outside in this is Jeanie and several of my friends from Burlington, Vermont. And our question is, does anybody else want to pitch in? Where else in the world besides the Midwestern United States do tornadoes occur. And are they featured in any mythologies or traditions of indigenous peoples from other areas? Or from this area? We haven't heard of any mythologies, including tornadoes, and we're curious if they're represented. Thanks. We hope you answer questions bye.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, that's awesome. I love I love that it was a group question.
Jessica Hunt: I know it sounds like they were sitting around talking about it and they were like, we've got to ask outside in.
Nate Hegyi: So obviously we get a lot of tornadoes here in the United States where like where outside of the US do you see a lot of tornadoes?
Jessica Hunt: Tornadoes have happened on every continent except Antarctica. And if you superimpose a map of tornadoes over a map of the world, you'll find that most tornadoes happen in agricultural areas like Ukraine, for one, which, as we've learned lately, grows a lot of the world's wheat. So the plains of Eastern and southern Europe, up by the Yellow River in the northern part of China, as well as India and Pakistan, what all those places have in common is access to warm, moist air from nearby oceans and seas, which helps make the rain that irrigates crops, but also combines with cooler air to occasionally form supercells, the big storms that sometimes produce tornadoes. Now on to the mythology part of the question. Have you ever heard of Baba Yaga?
Nate Hegyi: No, but it sounds intriguing.
Jessica Hunt: I learned about Baba Yaga from Nonie Pybus, who researches global tornado myths at Oklahoma State University.
Jeanie and friends: So how do you recognize tornado beliefs and the mythic elements of a tornado? Will in Slavic traditions, you know, Russia, Ukraine, you have Baba Yaga, the witch with the long nose and the mortar and pestle flying through the forest, destroying the forest and even leaving concentric circles on the ground. You have the same sort of character in Australia and Finland. In China, the tornado literally is translated as the wind whirled by the dragon.
Jessica Hunt: And then sub-Saharan Africa, where the Bantu people and the Bantu language are associated with the spread of farming. Across Africa. We see more myths about tornadoes.
Jeanie and friends: One of them I always loved was the one legged light God, and these were the Giants legs coming down to earth.
Jessica Hunt: And Nani says you'll find similar imagery in indigenous cultures here in the U.S.. I spoke with a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Sequoyah Quinton, a photographer and tornado chaser, and he told me some tribal elders would refer to tornadoes as dead man walking. And he sent us some pictures I want to show you.
Nate Hegyi: Okay. All right. I'm pulling them up now. And sure enough, so so they are actually two tornadoes and they really do look like a person kind of running across the landscape.
Jessica Hunt: That's so neat, Nanni says. There's one thing that all these myths have in common. Tornadoes are always treated with respect and reverence by indigenous peoples around the world. And while the myths may not be written down, they may actually be present as symbols. We just don't realize that's what we're looking at.
Jeanie and friends: Look at a witch or anything with long crooked things, snake iconography, flying, rolling heads, horned serpents, the snakes rising up out of the water, long tails dipping down from the clouds, spirals, spirals, spirals, spirals everywhere.
<<END TORNADOES>>
Nate Hegyi: That was producer Jessica Hunt on tornadoes on how they figure into Indigenous myths and other myths from around the world.
Now Felix have you had any experience with tornadoes?
Felix Poon: Um, personally no, but. I wasn’t there at the time, but the town I went to high school in, experienced a tornado that took the roof off the highschool. And so, this was after I graduated. I revisited there some time later, and it was a very odd experience, because nothing was as I remembered it. They redid the track, they redid like, the whole building, I was like, I went here for highschool, but I didn’t.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, wow. That’s wild.
Anyways, we do have more questions to answer, but first, if you’re liking the show, consider supporting us by going to outside in radio dot org, and making a donation. We’ll be right back after this break.
<<MIDROLL BREAK>>
Nate Hegyi: Welcome back to Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi.
Felix Poon: I’m Felix Poon.
Nate Hegyi: And today, we’re answering your questions about fall. Fall the season, fall the literal act of falling.
Felix Poon: And this next question that Taylor Quimby answered, is about fallout shelters.
<<BEGIN FALLOUT SHELTERS>>
Taylor Quimby: this week’s question comes to us from a listener named Jordan White:
Jordan: Ok, quick question. How deep does a fallout shelter need to be in order to remain effective? I mean, a nuclear explosion is huge - and I would imagine that the particles would seep into the earth. So how deep can those radioactive particles go?
Nate Hegyi: So Nate, when you picture a fallout shelter - what comes to mind?
Nate Hegyi: I picture that…remember that movie Ten Clover Field Lane, do you remember that?
Taylor Quimby: Oh yeah, that was a good movie.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, that whole movie is set in a fallout shelter. It’s just an underground bunker. It’s dark, there’s no windows. That’s what I imagine.
Taylor Quimby: I had that same image, but then I reached out to a guy named David Monteyne.
David is an architectural historian and wrote a book called Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War.
And he told me that me, you, and Jordan are all making a very common mistake.
David Monteyne: To answer that question, you kind of have to distinguish between the bomb shelter, and the fallout shelter.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah so, bomb shelters are trying to protect you from he the actual explosions - and are therefore underground - but fallout shelters are to protect you from the radioactive particles that can literally “fall out” of the sky after drifting thousands of miles away from a nuclear explosion.
And those don’t have to be underground at all.
David Monteyne: In theory a fallout shelter could be in a glass skyscraper.
Nate Hegyi: Okay that’s definitely surprising. I always assumed under ground. That’s a fallout shelter, underground.
Taylor Quimby: To determine what’s safe, it’s all in the math.
David Monteyen: It’s an equation of mass and distance. So you want enough mass between you and the radiation…
David Monteyne: and you want enough distance, or some combination of the two.
Taylor Quimby: So think of it this way - the less dense your barrier or wall is, the thicker it has to be – or, the more distance you need to have between the shelter and the source of radiation.
David Monteyne: So if the floor plate is big enough that you can get away from the windows, and with a glass sky scraper there’s not a lot of horizontal ledges or things like that for fallout to settle on, so if you’re on the middle floors of this skyscraper in theory, you’re fine from fallout.
I mean, if the bomb went off like in a different city. I mean you’re screwed if it goes off in New York City and you’re in the city, right that’s when you want a bomb shelter.
Taylor Quimby: Oh totally. So in the 1960s the federal government designated fallout shelters all across the country, partially because they realized they couldn’t do bomb shleters for everybody that’d be too expense. There were 19 thousand fallout shelters in new york city alone - and you know they’re in commonplace buildings: schools, hospitals…
David Monteyne: I toured one that was in a basement, but it was in a basement of a early 20th century bank building, like a neoclassical bank.
Taylor: I did find a really cool website that basically tracks all of them in Boston. And some of them have barrels of water, and like high energy biscuits hidden away..
Nate Hegyi: I wouldn’t trust those high energy biscuits.
Taylor: David actually told me he did eat one, but they’re all super rancid because they’re like, 50 years old.
Nate Hegyi: No that was a bad idea David. Don’t eat old biscuits.
But, but but but, another thing to think about when we’re talking fallout is the type of radiation we’re trying to protect ourselves against.
Shaheen Dewji: So in one year the average person is exposed to 6.2. millisieverts. So a sievert is a unit of dose.
Half of that you get just by existing from the environment. These are natural.
Taylor Quimby: So this is Shaheen Dewji, a radiological engineer and professor at Georgia Tech.
And she reminded me that radiation is everywhere. It comes from the sun, it comes from the Earth’s crust. Nate, when you eat a fruit salad, you’re literally eating radioactive isotopes.
Shaheen: Bananas contain radioactive potassium.
Nate Hegyi: Oh man, I’m getting radiated every time I eat my fruit salad.
Taylor Quimby: Just a teeny tiny very safe amount it’s not gonna hurt you.
Taylor: But for more dangerous types of radiation, the type of shielding that you would want, might really differ.
For example, you’ve heard of radon gas?
Nate Hegyi: yeah we heard all about it growing up
Taylor: So radon is radioactive, but it only harms you when you breathe it in, because…
Shaheen Dewji: You could literally stop it by holding out your hand. An alpha particle won’t even penetrate the dead layer of your skin.
On the other hand, another radioactive material, Cesium 137, which IS one of the many products of a nuclear explosion, produces gamma rays that can penetrate metal.
Shaheen Dewji: So to reduce the intensity of cesium 137 by 50% you’d need about .7 centimeters of lead.
Equivalently, you can also use about a centimeter and a half of steel. Or just under 5 centimeters of concrete.
Nate Hegyi: Okay, so in summary: a fallout shelter doesn’t have to be underground at all, and determining safety when it comes to radiation depends on the type of radiation, the dose, and the duration.
Taylor: Exactly, you nailed it.
Nate Hegyi: Ok… but the question is: how many bananas would you have eat to die of radiation sickness?
Taylor Quimby: You have to eat 10 billion bananas all at once.
Nate Hegyi: I could do that, that’s easy.
Taylor Quimby: Wow you must really like bananas.
IBS
Nate Hegyi: IBS for sure.
[MUX]
<<END FALLOUT SHELTERS>>
Nate Hegyi: Okay so far, we’ve been interpreting the fall theme of the show pretty loosely – you know, falling asleep, fall-out shelters – but here’s a question that is ACTUALLY related to early fall, or at least, end of summer. It has to do with berries and when they ripen.
<<BEGIN BERRIES>>
Owen: Hey Outside/In it’s Owen here from Barry, on the very south coast of Wales. Now anecdotally, the blackberry season here in Wales seems to be getting earlier and earlier. Now is New Hampshire experiencing climate-change-related fruit-ripening. And can anything really be done about it? I love the show by the way.
Nate Hegyi: Owen has such a great voice.
Felix Poon: I know right?
Nate Hegyi: But, I digress, what did you find out?
Felix Poon: So this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone – it is true…fruit is ripening earlier. And one researcher looking into this is Richard Primack. About 20 years ago, Richard started looking at the effects of climate change in New England.
Richard Primack: And just by chance, we wound up hearing that Henry David Thoreau, the author of the book Walden, had made very detailed observations of flowering times and tree leafing out times and bird migration times.
Felix Poon: so Richard and his team compared Thoreau’s observations from almost 170 years ago, to what we see today.
Richard Primack: And we found dramatic examples of how trees are leafing out about two weeks earlier now than they were in the past, that wildflowers are flowering about ten days earlier now than the past.
Nate Hegyi: Wow, two weeks earlier! That’s a lot. But, so what are the consequences of this?
Felix Poon: Richard says one of the that even with an earlier spring, you can still get a late frost that can kill the flowers of cherries, peaches, pears, and apples.
Nate Hegyi: That’s not great for fruit growers is it?
Felix Poon: Nope. And this isn’t just happening here in New England, it’s happening pretty much everywhere, including in communities that depend on fruit for their subsistence. For example on the west coast of Alaska, where both people and birds eat berries.
Nicole Herman-Mercer: and it supports this really huge migratory bird population and geese and ducks. And the indigenous communities also hunt them for subsistence.
Nate Hegyi: So berries are really important to the ecology and people here.
Felix Poon: Right. This is Nicole Herman-Mercer by the way, a social scientist with the US Geological Survey. Nicole worked with indigenous communities in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta to gather survey data on what they were noticing about berry habitat.
Nate Hegyi: I imagine they probably found earlier ripening times too?
Felix Poon: Yup! And this matters because there’s a short window of time for berry-gathering, and if this window now overlaps with, say, salmon season, then you’ve got a problem.
Katie Spellman: if the berries and the salmon are hitting on the same weekend. What are you gonna choose. You know what I mean?
Nate Hegyi: Oof, tough choice. I’d choose the salmon.
Felix Poon: Me too. This is Katie Spellman, a professor at University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Katie says while some folks here live fully subsistence lifestyles, others have cash economy jobs so they only have time to pick berries on weekends, and there’s usually only 4 weekends that berries are ripe. If you miss them, you can buy berries at the store, but that’s expensive because it’s a remote place where groceries have to be flown in.
Nate Hegyi: Okay, so is it all bad news berries? I mean, like our listener Owen was asking, what can be done about this?
Felix Poon: So one idea is to maintain berry patches on the north and south side of hills.. That way if you get a hot season, maybe the south side won’t get much fruit, but the north side will. And vice versa if you get a cooler season.
And another idea is to have a diversity of fruits by growing a food forest.
Katie Spellman: there's winners and losers at any one location when the climate is warming. And so like a whole bunch of different types of foods, right, in your community and in a community food forest so that you can be ready for those changes.
And the other thing that Nicole mentioned was to help the berry patches with snow. So, with climate change there’s less snow in the winters, and snow is an insulator that protects berry plants from the cold. So you can gather the snow around the berry plants to make sure they don’t freeze and die in cold spells.
Nate Hegyi: Hmm. Anything else?
Felix Poon: Not really. I mean, except, the obvious thing, of course…which I think Richard Primack put best:
Richard Primack: to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gasses, to use less fossil fuel
Nate Hegyi: Well said. That seems to be the answer to a lot of things these days. Thanks for looking into this Felix.
Felix Poon: My pleasure.
[MUX]
<<END BERRIES>>
Nate Hegyi: Well, that’s it for today’s episode. Thanks to everyone who has written or called in with questions. If you've got a question about the natural world or just thoughts that you'd like to share about the show, you can call our hotline. It is 844-GO-OTTER. You can also send a voice memo to our email and that's outsidein@nhpr.org. Or write to us on Twitter or Instagram. Our handle is outside in radio.
This episode of Outside In was produced and mixed by Felix Poon, Taylor Quimby, Justine Paradis, and Jessica Hunt. It was edited by Taylor Quimby, and Justine Paradis. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer.
Music in this episode was by Jharee, Thea Tyler, and Blue Dot Sessions
Our theme music is by Breakmaster cylinder.
Outside in is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.