The Accidental History of Solar Power

January 05, 2017 by Guest User in Energy

If you’re even the least bit interested in taking some sort of personal action on climate change, you inevitably wind up researching solar power. And when you research solar power, you come across an obscure, hard-to-parse, seemingly content free term: net metering. Buckle up folks, we're going full energy nerd.

If you’ve heard of net metering, I challenge you to come up with a definition of what it is in the next 15 seconds; I bet you can’t. And yet, this indecipherable term has been the center of some of the most heated energy battles of recent years. California, Nevada, Iowa, Texas, Maine, Vermont, New York, Utah, Hawaii, and Massachusetts have all struggled with it. The fight over net metering in Nevada even attracted the attention of both of the main Democratic presidential hopefuls, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.

This battle is happening all over the country, state-by-state, and each fight has its own local flavor when it comes to this argument.

But what the heck is net metering? Why are we so worked up about something that, on its face, looks to be nothing more than a simple billing mechanism? And this is the question that gets me interested: Where the heck did this fight come from?

The answer to this last question is that net metering is something of a historical accident, born at the cross-roads of necessity and ingenuity, but without much forethought.

So read on, this is the accidental history of net metering.

The Father of Solar

Like me, Steven Strong is an energy nerd. Unlike me, he’s also a talented engineer and innovator. He’s a guy who, when Toyota came out with the Prius got to work hacking the thing, installing a lithium-ion battery back and turning it into a plug-in electric car, years before the car company was ready to do the same thing.

His office in central Massachusetts is small and unassuming, and when I met him there and commented on this, one of his employees smiled and said, “You’d never know that this is where ‘the father of solar’ works.”

Steven got his start as a young engineer working on the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline in the years of the Carter administration, but then there was the whole Arab oil embargo, there was a scandal where contractors were falsifying some of the required safety measures on the pipeline, and so he resigned and returned to Boston to become and architect and found his own solar design company.

“Back in the seventies, solar photovoltaic, which is what you’re probably thinking about when I say solar panels, was something like 65 times more expensive than it is today, and electricity was cheap.”

This was in the early seventies, when solar power, besides being on satellites in outer space, wasn’t really a thing, yet. But Steven did manage to get work. In particular, he landed the contract to put a solar array, one of the first of its kind, onto a 286-unit, federally-subsidized, low-income housing complex. The building looks kind of like a big college dorm: it’s brick, and it’s pretty unremarkable looking.

aN EARLY PHOTO OF THE BUILDING, SOLAR PANELS STILL INTACT.

At this time, commercially available solar power was used to heat hot water. (To oversimplify, the systems were basically rows of pipes, painted black, that allowed the sun’s rays to heat up the water inside.) The solar system he installed was one of the largest solar thermal systems in New England, and he estimates it met something like 80% of the building’s annual hot water requirements.

But back in the seventies, solar photovoltaic, which is what you’re probably thinking about when I say solar panels, was something like 65 times more expensive than it is today, and electricity was cheap. But Steven Strong, who always wanted to push the envelope, convinced the developer of this building to let him install a couple of photovoltaic panels up there too.

But there was this question: how do you wire them up?

The Accidental Part

Whenever the sun is shining, obviously the electricity from the panels would go towards running all the stuff—water pump, hot water heaters, lights and fridges—in the building.

But then what happens when the sun’s not shining? Or what happens if the sun is shining and there’s nothing going on in the building? Today we take the answer to these questions for granted. We assume that when you’re not using it, the extra energy can just feed out into the grid, but when Steve Strong was wiring up this building, that was not a given.

He decided to configure the system so when there’s no sun, the building would buy electricity just like any other building, and the little dials on the electric meter would roll in one direction.

But if the sun was shining, and the appliances in the building weren’t using any energy, the electricity would flow out onto the grid, and the little dials on the meter would just roll in the other direction…backwards.

“It was intuitive, and it was almost just like, that’s just the way it should be. We’re producing electrons that are just as valuable as the ones delivered by the coal plant or the heavy residual fuel oil driven plant, and so it just made sense,” Steven told me.

He didn’t ask for permission from the utility to feed electricity back into the grid. He didn’t show them a design and say here’s what I’d like to do. The developers told him they would handle all of that.

“There’s one thing in your career that you should learn early, which is that it’s better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.”

“And it turned out that they didn’t say anything to the utility purposefully,” Steven said. “So when the system was complete and ready to start up, one of the brothers came up into the mechanical penthouse in the top of the building and said, ‘how are we doing with the solar, Steven?’”

“And I said, ‘Well, Peter it’s ready to go. We just need to get permission from the utility to connect with the grid.’ And he threw the switch and said, ‘that’s OK, we’ll take care of that.’ And he told me at the time, ‘There’s one thing in your career that you should learn early, which is that it’s better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.’”

(I will note here, at least one of these developers, went on to have an extremely checkered history, accusations of rape, drug charges, and other really crazy stuff.)

Instead of asking permission, they had a big ribbon cutting ceremony. They invited the head of the national renewable energy lab, all the senators and congresspeople from Massachusetts, and even President Carter. The President was planning on coming, but they put the kibosh on his appearance at the last minute because there was a strike at a nearby shipyard and the Secret Service told him to stay away.

And at this event, a torrent of important people stood up and spoke about how great the building was, how forward thinking it was, and how it would be the way of the future. Then, the last person to talk was an executive from the utility.

“He basically praised how innovative the solar systems were and how forward thinking the developers were and that was it,” said Steven. Afterwards Steven said the developer told him, “‘See I told you, I would take care of that... it wouldn’t be an issue.’ And he was right of course.”

And that, ladies and gentleman, was the birth of a little policy called net metering.

From Net Metering to “Net Zero”

That is also what the name means: when you’re producing, the meter runs in one direction and when you’re consuming, the meter runs in the other direction, so the practice is called “net metering” because you’re billed for your net consumption.

Those first grid-integrated solar photovoltaic panels didn’t last particularly long. They were blown off the roof of the building after little more than a year, according to the building’s manager George Picewick. The solar thermal panels heated the building’s water for more than 20 years, though, before they had to be removed because of a lack of maintenance.

And for Steven Strong, this project kicked off years of work on net metered buildings that catapulted his work into the spotlight. Very shortly afterwards, MIT came calling. They asked Steven to help them build a house that would be “energy independent,” by which they meant that it would generate as much energy as it used, even though it still relied on the grid. Today such a house is called a “net-zero” home. This house was built in Carlisle, Massachusetts and was on the cover of magazines like Popular Science, and written about in publications worldwide.

The cover of Popular Science from September of 1981 features the Impact 2000 house.

Because of all this attention, a local utility, Boston Edison, reached out to Steven Strong. They wanted to build a net-zero house too, and they called it the Impact 2000 House. This house was super-insulated, all electric (heated by a geothermal heat-pump), and all bedecked with solar panels.

It was also a public relations coup for the utility, which had been beset by protests focused on its new nuclear power plant. Steven Strong was also contacted by the producers of This Old House who decided to do the entire fifth season of the show about the construction of the Impact 2000 house.

“Solar power was seen as something that a few tech enthusiasts and environmental zealots would do, but certainly it wasn’t expected to spread to the masses.”

After that house, another utility asked Steven Strong to do a whole neighborhood of net metered solar homes, and the story of this weird billing trick just expanded from there. Before long Massachusetts regulators officially put a rule about net metering on the books, and other states followed suit, some even passed laws that formally established the practice. Now it’s allowed in 41 states, plus Washington, DC.

And for years not only was it totally non-controversial: solar power was seen as something that a few tech enthusiasts and environmental zealots would do, but certainly it wasn’t expected to spread to the masses. In hindsight this seems short-sighted, that a policy with the potential to shape the future of something as important as the electric grid would be allowed to grow so organically and without any real vetting or thought.

It was just a historical accident, that just sort of happened, kind of under the radar.

And Then Came SolarCity

Until, suddenly, solar started to get cheap. In 1980, a solar cell cost $30 a watt. Today, it’s more like 30 cents a watt. And starting in the mid-2000s, a bunch of really ambitious and well-financed companies started saying, Hey… we can make some money doing this. So from 2009 to 2010, the amount of solar in the US doubled. It doubled again from 2010 to 2011. It doubled again from 2011 to 2013 and from 2013 to today it’s on track to triple… again.

And some of this rapid growth came not just from large-scale solar farms (though much of it is that), but from people putting panels on their roofs, and reducing—and sometimes eliminating—their electric bills. That was made possible by net metering, and I think it's fair to say that back in the seventies, the electric companies did not see this coming.

And now they’re starting to push back. Which brings us to the litany of states where net metering became an intense and public energy policy debate that started us off in this story.

And why is it such a fight? Well, it all has to do with how we pay for electricity.

The utilities argue that net metered customers are using the grid to power their homes at night or on cloudy days, but they aren’t paying for the grid. This then means there is a smaller pool of people paying for the grid, and that smaller pool has to pay more.

Those who are sympathetic to this argument sometimes describe it as wealth redistribution.

“Back when Thomas Edison built the first electric power stations, there were no meters, so he actually billed people a monthly fee based on how many light bulbs they had.”

“It’s a… taking from the people who have not so much and giving it to the people who have more,” said Michael Harrington, who used to be one of the regulators of New Hampshire’s electric companies, and is now on the board of the New England Ratepayers Association, which advocates for lower electricity costs. “So it’s a reverse distribution of wealth from the way we normally do things in the United States, and I don’t think that’s right.”

This (in very rough terms) is how utility rate structures work: a utility is a big company that invests a ton of money in poles and wires, and they also pay for energy to send across those poles and wires. Then, they take all of their customers and they divide the cost of all of those expenses up between all of them and they spread it around, charging different kinds of customers slightly different kinds of rates based on how they use electricity.

It has basically been like that since the first electric meter was invented: back when Thomas Edison built the first electric power stations, there were no meters, so he actually billed people a monthly fee based on how many lightbulbs they had. The entire business model is based on a piece of equipment that is more than 100 years old, and the utilities argue that under that business model, if 50 percent of the people in the United States went solar and started net metering, a big chunk of the money that they’re saving winds up being money that’s not going towards the poles and wires.

But What if Solar is Saving us Money?

Except, we’re not 100% sure that’s true.

There’s another former New Hampshire regulator, Cliff Below (he’s also the former state lawmaker who wrote the initial net metering law here in New Hampshire) who argues that solar might be doing more good than harm

“Net Metering was initially thought of as a rough justice,” he told me in an interview. He said when net metering first came along there was this belief that, “there were benefits particularly to solar, because increasingly for New England, peak demand was being driven by air conditioning loads, which was driven by sunlight landing on buildings and heating things up.”

To understand this argument, you have to understand that even though on your electric bill you pay the same amount for every unit of energy, all electrons are not created equal. In reality, every five minutes there is a new auction for energy and so every five minutes we’ve got a new price for energy. When demand is low, prices are low, and they can actually go negative, usually at night. (As in power plants will pay us so they don’t have to shut down.) When demand is high prices can be insane: 100 times higher than normal.

But again, the utilities take all of those costs, they average them all out, they divide them by their customers, and you never see that variation on your bill.

So the thing is: if solar panels are producing at times of day that are really high value—sunny, hot, air conditioning heavy days—the electrons coming off the panels might be worth substantially more (on average) than all of the electrons on the grid (on average). And maybe, just maybe, even the very generous rate net metered customers are getting doesn’t fully reimburse them for what they’re making.

There’s more to this argument. If done properly, solar might reduce the need to build new power lines, substations or other infrastructure, but most of those other facets stem from this same principal. Solar tends to produce at times when the grid is most in need of electrons.

So How Can We Know Who’s Right?

“These problems are often put out there as very difficult problems to solve. They’re actually not, in my view, that difficult to address, but we need to just put all of the numbers on the table.” That’s the assessment of Jessika Trancik, she’s a professor of energy studies at MIT.

Jessika’s point is that we can answer this question for every individual solar array if you look at the data. When is it producing? What are the power prices at that moment? What kind of neighborhood is it in on the grid? What’s the load on that circuit? Is it helping on that circuit or is it hurting on that circuit?

You can take all that data and she says, “look at each different location and understand how the situation what the situation looks like today and how that’s likely to change over time. But I think that’s all very doable.”

But in order to do this, you need the data. That means installing smart meters on solar arrays so we can see the minute-by-minute production of the panels. It means getting the data from the utilities to know if the solar panels are producing at a time when they are needed in the given neighborhood that they are in.

And it could also mean paying solar producers prices that make more sense: as in prices that are different for different times of day.

Here in New Hampshire, people are arguing about what to do with the state’s net metering program, and most of the fixes that people are proposing are pretty blunt instruments. In my opinion, they are kind of disappointingly blunt.

If you’re a net metered customer in New Hampshire, you’re getting paid about seventeen cents per kilowatt hour. So seventeen cents is the starting point.

“The way we pay for electricity doesn’t reflect the way electricity is actually generated and the actual costs that are incurred.”

The utilities say, you should get the same price that other power-plants get: which is more like four to six cents a kilowatt hour—one third as much. Solar people generally don’t want regulators to touch net metering, and they want them to keep the rate at seventeen cents. And then you’ve got a range of people in the middle who seem to be just picking a number somewhere in between the two. “Oh maybe we could make it 12 cents.”

For the Jessika Tranciks of the world, (steely energy economist academics), this is not really getting at the root problem, which is: the way we pay for electricity doesn’t reflect the way electricity is actually generated and the actual costs that are incurred. And there is one proposal on the table in New Hampshire that would start to shift that model.

“It is clearly inappropriate in today’s technological age to continue to charge people the same price for electricity 24/7, when the cost of providing people electricity varies, sometimes by orders of magnitude, depending on the time of day and the time of year,” said Don Kreis, the state’s consumer advocate. Don’s job is to watch out for people who pay electric bills, he’s looking out for the little guy.

Don wants solar customers to have the option to move to a Time-of-Use rate, a rate that would pay you more if your solar is cranking out electrons during high price times, like later in the afternoon. On the flip side, this rate would also mean that you pay more, if you’re using more energy in the afternoon. To make this really simple, every day there would be a higher price between 2pm and 8pm.

This is cracking open the door to a totally different way of paying for energy. Instead of abiding by this crazy illusion that every electron is worth the same, it acknowledges that when demand is high, electricity gets expensive, and maybe we should let people know that.

How Far Could This Go?

Jessika Trancik, from MIT, wants to take that concept even a step further. Remember, every five minutes, there’s a new auction and a new energy price every five minutes. She thinks we should all have a little display in our houses that says, here’s the price of energy, right now. In her mind that price could change every hour, and it could be capped, so customers are sheltered from the most extreme fluctuations of the grid.

In this world, every home, not just solar homes, would be outfitted with a little display telling you what the price of electricity is at that moment. Perhaps it could be color-coded, to give you a clue about whether that price is high or low. With that information, we could all make choices about when to run our driers or our dishwashers, and maybe manufacturers would make devices that could read that display and automatically respond: flipping on in the middle of the night, say, if electricity prices drop to zero or lower. In this world, solar producers would get paid based on what the grid price is from moment to moment, and the whole question of shifting costs from rich to poor would be rendered moot.

Of course, this dream relies on a lot of technology that simply has not yet been deployed, may well be very expensive, and needs to be protected from cyber-attacks… all of which are profound concerns for the utilities that are being asked to do this.

“It’s high time for everybody to take a look and see what a rational bit of well-designed public policy would be.”

But for Don Kreis, the consumer advocate, a policy like net metering—one that was created accidentally, without forethought or design, and without regard for the markets it would impact—cannot stand forever.

“The fact is, it wasn’t like the commission on uniform state laws got together and said, ‘Let’s design a net metering statute that will promote the development of distributed generation in this really logical rigorous way,’” Don said, laughing in his office, “No! It just happened by accident!”

Without a moment’s pause he continued. “And it’s high time for everybody to take a look and see what a rational bit of well-designed public policy would be.”

So that’s one way the world could change. Or we could just go back to billing based on how many light bulbs you own. There’s always that.

Outside/In was produced this week by:

Sam Evans-Brown with help from Maureen McMurray, Taylor Quimby, Molly Donahue, Jimmy Gutierrez, and Logan Shannon

Thanks this week to Bob Johnstone, whose book Switching to Solar led me to Steven Strong, and to Haskell Werlin who rushed back from a funeral to talk solar policy with me.

Music this week was from Jahzzar, Jason Leonard, Blue Dot Sessions and Podington Bear. Check out the Free Music Archive for more tracks from these artists.

If you’ve got a question for our Ask Sam hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-603-223-2448. Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Millionaires' Hunt Club

December 29, 2016 by Guest User in Pursuits, What is Wilderness

Sam is going to take us all hunting this week. Not hunting for animals, but instead, hunting for the secret of what’s behind that 26-mile fence cutting through the woods of New Hampshire, and why some people want it to stay a secret.

From my very first days as a reporter in New Hampshire, I started to hear about a place hidden up in the woods of New Hampshire. A place full of unfamiliar animals from other places, but fenced off from the rest of the state, and kept quiet. I never heard about it directly — it was always through a guy who knew a guy, who had been inside — but the more I heard about the place, the more unbelievable it seemed.

This massive, private park was called a “millionaires hunt club” and “the most exclusive game preserve in the United States” and yet there were many people I know who had lived their entire lives in this state, but had never heard of it. So what is the secret of what’s behind that 26-mile fence cutting through the woods of New Hampshire, and why do some people work so hard to keep it a mystery?

Helen M. Derry at corbin park central station, courtesy brian meyette.

Officially it’s called the Blue Mountain Forest Association, but everybody who knows about it calls it Corbin Park. (Seemingly shortened from Corbin’s Park… we’ll get to the origin of the name.) It’s near the border with Vermont and it’s huge, though its exact size seems to be something of a mystery. Regardless, at somewhere between 24,000 and 26,000 acres this park is actually bigger than something like 60 percent of New Hampshire towns.

You can find the chain-link fence that encircles the entirety of the park at the end of any number of long rough dirt roads that lead to locked gates. It feels almost like like stumbling across a military base full of UFOs or some similar secret. The fence itself looks sturdy, if slightly weather-worn, and at regular intervals features small signs reprinted hundreds of times, “the enclosed park fence and signs are protected by a special law of this state and any person trespassing herein or in any way violating that law will be prosecuted.”

I got my introduction to the park from a man named Brian Meyette, a retired database administrator, who lives in an off-the-grid home, right next to the fence. “In the fall it’s cool, because you get elk bugling in here,” he said as we walked down his icy driveway, “I actually even came down here once because I could hear one and it sounded like he was bugling just inside the fence.”

Elk, in case you didn’t know, are a Western thing. We don’t have them in New Hampshire. Except on the other side of this fence. And that’s not the only thing that’s over there.

“Any time people come up here to work or anything, they always say, ‘oh did you see the pigs?’ said Brian, laughing. When he says pigs, he’s referring to Eurasian wild boar, imported from Germany into New Hampshire. “And no,” Brian continued, “normally you come down here and it’s just you see a bunch of trees, that’s all you ever see.”

But while you might not see them, there are elk bugling and Eurasian wild boars hustling around behind those fences.

But why?

The trouble with finding the answer to that question is that no one inside of Corbin's Park wants to talk about it. Corbin’s Park is a member’s only club. If you are a reporter, and identify yourself as such, not only do the employees of the park not want to talk to you, but the members don't want to talk to you, the people they have invited as guests don't want to talk to you, even some regular folks in town don't want to talk to you.

Meet Austin Corbin

Basically the only way to talk about Corbin's park today is to start by talking about Corbin's park 100 years ago. The farther back in time I went, the easier it was for me to find people who wanted to talk about this place, which is what brought me to Larry Cote. Cote is a retiree, and chair of the Newport Historical Society, which is where all the historical documents about Corbin’s Park have come to be kept.

“This is our 4th year and you’re the first person who’s asked about it, so I’d say it’s pretty rare that somebody’s got a lot of inquisitive-ism,” Cote told me as we dug through binders full of photos and letters.

Here are the outlines of the history of the park. It starts with a guy named Austin Corbin born in 1827, grandson of the town doctor in Newport, New Hampshire, who left home to go to Harvard as a young man. He then he went to Davenport, Iowa where he fell into real-estate and banking, and became one of the founders of the American banking industry alongside giants like J.P. Morgan.

After making a lot of money in the midwest, he then headed out to New York, where he invested in some swampy property out in an underdeveloped borough: Brooklyn. “He drained the swamp, he tore down the shacks, he built two hotels — the Oriental and the Manhattan — and that’s how Coney Island got started,” said Cote.

But as he was amassing his fortune, part of him just wanted to go back to New Hampshire. So he hired an agent to start buying up farms in the towns around his childhood home. In so doing, he didn’t exactly endear himself to the locals. “There’s people that say he was a robber and all that stuff,” said Cote, who was quick to defend Corbin, saying the farmers got fair prices for their land. Even so, there was even a rhyme that people in Croydon — one of the towns bordering the park — started saying about this time:

“Austin Corbin, grasping soul,

Wants this land from pole to pole.

Croydon people bless your stars,

You’ll find plenty of land on MARS.”

Corbin bought sixty some-odd farms, (again, in New Hampshire, this is the size of an entire town) and he set about building his very own dream game reserve.

“The elk cost him $5,000 dollars. The Moose $1,500, the buffalo $6,000, deer and antelope $1,000, wild boar pigs $1,000 dollars, and then additional other animals were another $5,500,” said Cote as he read from a ledger from the park’s archives. Caribou, reindeer, big-horned sheep, pheasants, Himalayan Mountain goats. The park contained animals from all over the world, like an exotic, cold-weather safari.

But just when the park was really starting to shape up, Austin Corbin and his son decided to take some new horses for a day of fishing and picnics by a nearby lake. His driver hitched some new horses to the buggy, but didn’t give them blinders and when Corbin opened a parasol the horses spooked. The carriage was overturned, and both Corbin and his coachman were killed.

For a few decades, the park was operated by Austin Corbin’s son (charmingly but confusingly also named Austin Corbin) and these are what you might call the ‘Golden Years’ of the park. Famous people like Teddy Roosevelt came to hunt, and a world renowned naturalist takes up residence in the park to make observations and take notes. The park’s buffalo were — at least according to some — instrumental in restoring Bison to the American West.

In the early days, the park was open to the public. Every Wednesday, they were invited in to explore and there was even a winter carnival held there when the townsfolk came in for a deer hunt, ski jumping, a ball, and a banquet.

But after Austin Corbin the senior died, his fortune slowly began to ebb away. Austin Corbin the son can’t quite replicate whatever business magic his dad had, and Cote said that the when Corbin the son died in 1938, he was more or less penniless. That same year, a massive hurricane blew down huge amounts of the fence that kept the park enclosed, and boar and elk escaped in large numbers. The park fell into disrepair, until eventually in 1944 his family gave it up and a group of wealthy hunters took it over.

As time went by, the park dropped further and further from the public eye. Today, most people I talk to who are from New Hampshire have never heard of the place.

These days, whatever’s going on in Corbin’s park, stays in Corbin’s park.

Except for when not everything stays inside.

Hunting around the edges

“Back in 1987 we believe,” Sonny Martin began explaining to me over the phone, before his wife shouted from the background (“Eighty-six!”), “Oh now, my wife corrected me, ‘86.” Martin is the now retired former owner of a hardware store in Lancaster, New Hampshire — some 70 miles north of Corbin’s Park.

“So, somewhere, 1st of November, I was sitting in my tree-stand. It was getting dusky, I always call it next to dark,” said Sonny, falling into the rythms of a story he’s obviously told more than a few times, “Well, the next thing I knew, out comes this wild boar, and he just moves out into the middle of the clearing. He reminded me like a train, the way his legs moving, you know, I’ve always said that. And he just stood there, and does this ‘take your best shot.’”

Martin did take his best shot, and he mounted the head of the boar that he killed that day and for years it hung on the wall behind the register at his hardware store.

gate around corbin park, photo by sam evans-brown

Wild boar can weigh more than 200 pounds, and need to eat more than 4,000 calories a day. They’re aggressive, a nuisance to farmers, and they reproduce like crazy. It’s not unusual for one sow to have six piglets per litter, and sometimes they have two litters per year. To top it all off, they’re smart and wiley. One federal wildlife control official I interviewed said once they design a fence that can hold water, it will be strong enough to hold a pig.

“I mean it was kind of… it was a little bit unbelievable to see something laying there,” Martin said of the animal.

Martin is not the only one to have killed one of the escaped pigs of Corbin park. Technically, the wild boar that escape Corbin’s Park are property of Corbin’s Park, and hunters outside the fence aren’t allowed to shoot them without permission. But the park is liable for any damage to crops or lawns that an escaped boar might cause, so from what I’ve gathered from talking to locals and neighbors, they’re fine with letting local hunters clean up the problem for them. State Fish and Game doesn’t want to issue permits to hunt the pigs because they don’t want to create a demand among hunters for a species that in other parts of the country has become an invasive pest. (Now that you know to look for it, you’ll start to regularly see headlines about men arrested for transporting and releasing wild boar to new places to get new populations going.)

So, with this unregulated hunt, there’s something of a symbiotic relationship going on: local hunters experience the thrill of hunting exotic game without being a part of Corbin’s exclusive club, and they take care of one of the park’s more troublesome issues. I’ve spoken with several people who say they’ve hunted pigs outside the fence, including one who said he shoots multiple ones every year, but none of them agreed to be interviewed in front of a microphone.

It’s another layer of secrets. Not only is what happening inside the fence shrouded in mystery, but some of the activities outside the fence are happening under the radar too. Secrets within secrets: a Russian matryoshka doll of secrets.

But what’s happening today, on the inside?

I tried for a very long-time to talk to someone who is a member of Corbin Park. I called the president of the park. I called the superintendent a bunch of times. I called two other members whose names I managed to find. I even eventually wrote a letter to the park’s general address.

No response.

I did succeed in talking to a number of people who have been guests and hunted inside the park and even managed to talk to a current member, but none of these folks wanted to be interviewed in front of a microphone. I was also able to pull the park’s tax returns, because it’s a non-profit, and they file numbers of how many animals are shot each year with Fish and Game.

So here’s what I learned.

There are 30 members. We know who some of these folks are, because their names show up as directors of the park on the tax-forms: one is the CEO of a plastics company that makes things like spout on a can of whipped cream; there’s a self-made millionaire whose company built a stealth boat they’re trying to sell to the US military; there’s the owner of a major gun manufacturing company, who also happens to own Austin Corbin’s old mansion; and there’s even one of the descendents of the Von Trapp Family Singers, from the Sound of Music.

central station, corbin park. image via google maps.

These 30 members and their guests shoot somewhere between 200 and 600 wild boar every year, and between 40 and 120 deer and elk.

From the tax forms you can see that the park makes money off of meat-cutting (members can pay to have their meat butchered for them) but most of their income comes from membership dues, which cost something in the neighborhood of $25,000 dollars a year.

To become a member, you also have to buy the shares of a former member. No one told me how much it cost them to buy into the club initially, but I was told that calling it a millionaire’s hunt club is not an exaggeration.

So why all the secrecy? These are wealthy people who don’t want to attract the attention — and perhaps the resentment — of those who don’t approve of their habits. And believe me, there’s plenty of resentment.

“You can’t get into it. It’s the biggest secret. It’s the millionaires hunt club. The most exclusive game preserve in the United States,” said Rene Cushing in an interview, a New Hampshire state legislator who says that on the political spectrum he leans toward the socialism, “Millionaires only, and New Hampshire peasants need not apply.”

Cushing tried to get a bill passed to require the people who hunt boar inside Corbin Park to buy a New Hampshire hunting license, which is not currently required. I asked him why he felt their exclusivity was a reason to go after the club members.

“I don’t think it’s fair that the people who go surf-casting, pay their $8, pay the Fish and Game Department, should end up subsidizing the Fish and Game Department when they have to go to Corbin Park to respond to a hunter being shot, or when they have to go up to 89 and pick up a wild boar that’s escaped from this fenced in property, and the rest of us are picking up the tab,” said Cushing, “It’s just about fairness.”

I think this is why it’s so hard to talk to members of Corbin Park. The probably feel like just laying out the facts of this place — the cost, the invasive species escaping into the state, the overwhelmingly male membership and guests — will prompt a negative reaction from the Rene Cushing’s of the world.

Reporters sniffing around the fences of the park inevitably puts them into a bind, though. If they talk to reporters, it could encourage more reporters to do more stories, which means more people talking (some negatively) about this gigantic exclusive park. If they don’t talk, then the eventual stories that do come out sound like this one, where the members seem somehow shady, for exercising their right to not comment.

The members probably feel like outside the fence, they can’t win.

So what is Corbin Park?

corbin park central station, photo by sam evans-brown

It’s 26,000 acres of rocky New Hampshire land, fenced off, stocked with elk, eurasian wild boar and white-tailed deer. It’s private, but you can get in if invited by a member, or if you ask on the right day. It was built over 100 years ago, by a super-wealthy banker. Every year, hunters inside shoot somewhere between 200 and 600 wild boar, and between 40 and 120 elk and deer. The animals are fed through the winter to help keep the populations up, but you’re not allowed to hunt around the feeding sites.

Members can get the meat butchered and smoked on site. They can stay in cabins and old farmhouses - the ones that are still standing - that are sprinkled throughout the park. They can hike up Croydon and Grantham peaks, the two tallest mountains in Sullivan County, which are inside the fence.

It’s expensive to be a member, and only 30 people are allowed to be members. When someone wants to sell their shares, you’ve got to know a guy who knows a guy if you want to buy them; there’s no announcement in the papers.

And we also know that most of the people who live near this park, folks like Brian Meyette, have no problem with the place and tend to say it’s a good neighbor. The park is quiet, pays its taxes.

However you feel about all that… it’s up to you.

In the end, I don’t think Corbin Park is actually a mystery. At one point, I spoke to Heidi Murphy a lieutenant with Fish and Game, who has been inside to help the park staff with occasional issues with bears.

“It’s just you know a big huge patch of woods with some hunters that are camping out in some cabin,” she said, laughing at my insistence that it must be more interesting than that.

“It’s, you know, it’s New Hampshire woods,” she shrugged.

Outside/In was produced this week by:

Sam Evans-Brown, with help from Maureen McMurray, Taylor Quimby, Molly Donahue, Jimmy Gutierrez, and Logan Shannon.

Special thanks to David Allaben and Tony Musante from the USDA. By the way, if you see an escaped boar in New Hampshire, you should report it to those guys.

Thanks also to Ken Hoff, who volunteered his time and his skills to give us an airplane ride over Corbin’s Park

This week’s episode featured tracks from [tk tk tk]. Check out the Free Music Archive for more tracks.

Theme music by Breakmaster Cylinder

HumaNature - Hoofprints on the Heart

December 22, 2016 by Guest User in Fauna, Pursuits

This week on the show we’re bringing you something a little different, a story from someone else. Caroline Ballard and Micah Schweizer started HumaNature, which is based in Wyoming, and they’re part of the team responsible for bringing us the story of a man, his walk through an unfamiliar culture and an unexpected friendship, in a couple of different ways.

Jon set out on the longest, toughest walk of his life. But along the way, he met someone who helped carry the weight.

See more photos from Jon and listen to more episodes from HumaNature at this link: HumaNaturePodcast.org

The piece was produced by Erin Jones, Anna Rader, and Micah Schweizer and hosted by Caroline Ballard. HumaNature is a production of Wyoming Public Media.

Seattle Denver Arms (Instrumental) by Loch Lomond is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License. Based on a work at http://needledrop.co/artists/Loch-Lomond

The 2nd Greatest Show on Earth

December 15, 2016 by Taylor Quimby in How We Use It

A quick note: this episode previously appeared in our podcast feed back in the spring of 2016, as an individual segment in one of our hour-long episodes we produced to air on New Hampshire Public Radio. So you might have already heard it, but…you might not have! And because there have been recent reports about a proposed new hotel for the summit, we thought it all the more relevant.

Mount Washington is famously home of "The World's Worst Weather", but it also hosts a huge amount of tourist infrastructure. Senior producer Taylor Quimby brings us this tale of how the mountain was conquered, and how that process became the template for mountain tourism nation-wide.

Voices From Mount Washington

As part of our research for this story, we went to the New Hampshire Historical Society in Concord to check out the Summit House Guest Register from 1854 - an incredible document where early tourists would sign their names and often leave short poems or comments about their stay on Mt. Washington. What’s really fascinating is the diversity of reactions and writing styles contained in the guest register - everything from dreary verse about bad weather, to religious expressions of praise for the mountain, and the view. We mocked up some playful recordings of the more colorful entries.

Early Slam Poet?

*THis PHOTO is OF THE 1854 MT. WASHINGTON SUMMIT HOUSE GUEST REGISTRY, WHICH IS HOUSED AT THE NEW HAMPSHIRE HISTORICAL SOCIETY IN CONCORD, NH.*

Here’s an excerpt from one by Mary Huntington, who visited the summit on July 17th, 1854. We think it sounds a little bit like a slam poem:

Sulky & Glum

Here is another from August 20th of the same year. We’re not sure about the author on this one, but it sounds a little bit like an Edgar Allen Poe poem, or maybe a drinking song:

Near Death Account

Image from page 50 of "The White Mountains of New Hampshire : in the heart of the nation's playground" (1917)

On August 15th, 1854, a man from Philadelphia named W.N. Conckle penned a frightening account of his near-death experience on the summit, as he climbed through a terrific August storm. Here’s just a bit:

Two Opposing Views

Tip Top House, Mount Washington, N. H. | White, Franklin, 1813-1870 -- Photographer — *Tip Top House, Mount Washington, N. H. |* White, Franklin, 1813-1870 -- Photographer

And finally, excerpts from two entries that appear back to back in the register - one a glowing appraisal of them mountain’s breathtaking scale, and another somewhat less enthusiastic review:

Outside/In was produced this week by:

Taylor Quimby, with help from Sam Evans-Brown, Maureen McMurray, Molly Donahue, Jimmy Gutierrez, and Logan Shannon.

Special thanks to Cornelius Allsopp, a former project manager for Harvey Construction - he headed the construction of the awesome Sherman Adams Visitor Center, and knows personally how hard it is to build on Mt. Washington.

Also thanks to Jeff Leich, Executive Director of the New England Ski Museum, and Rick Russack, founder and president of WhiteMountainHistory.org.

And thanks also to the New Hampshire Historical Society, which houses the 1854 Summit House Guest Register.

Thanks to our historical re-enactors for this story, Kevin Flynn, Starskee Suavé, Sean Hurley, Maureen McMurray, and Taylor Quimby, as the voice of obnoxious circus man!

This week’s episode featured tracks from Podington Bear. Check out the Free Music Archive for more tracks.

Theme music by Breakmaster Cylinder

Don't Cheer For Me Argentina

December 08, 2016 by Guest User in Pursuits

Sam won’t tell you this, but he’s a really great athlete. He has another secret, too. There’s this photo of him leading a ski race, and it’s plastered on the side of a city bus in Argentina. So, how did Sam wind up on the side of a bus? This story explains.

Hey, Is That Sam...On the Side of a Bus?

A couple of months ago, I got a surprise blast from the past, in the form of a Facebook post. One of my coworkers captured the moment on her phone.

If you’ve been listening to the show, it won’t surprise you to hear that I participate in a variety of endurance sports. But it might surprise you to know that my participation caused me to be plastered all over the side of a bus in Argentina.

So today, I’m going to tell the story of how I wound up on that bus, but I’m also going to tell the story of the man who got second place. A racer named Martin Bianchi, who made a split second decision in that race that would change the course of his athletic career–and his outlook on life.

Martin Bianchi Goes to Torino

Martin grew up in Ushuaia, Argentina which bills itself as the southernmost city in the world. It's so far south, it's one of the cities that scientific voyages to Antarctica depart from. He started skiing young, and during his teenage years he chased the snow. He would spend part of the year in Spain, racing the mountains of the Pyrenees. Then travel back to his home in Argentina, go to school and have another winter ski season in the Southern Hemisphere, racing in Ushuaia.

After missing out on the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics due to a knee injury, he went to the winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, when he was 24. He only qualified for one race, “and out of about 100 competitors, I finished 86th,” he recalls, “So, I was pretty close to last place.”

All too often, this is the fate of skiers from countries without any real national teams, coaches, support networks, or competitive race circuits. They spend their whole life training, and then wind up in 86th.

But when he returned home after the Olympics, there were no Argentine athletes preparing to take up the mantle in four years, ensuring a continuous line of Olympians. So even though he’d gotten married right before the Olympics, and was thinking about having kids, he kept training.

“There’s always something that’s calling you back to the trails. At that time it was that there weren’t many athletes behind me. It was like if I quit, there wouldn’t be anybody.”

He got a job teaching part-time phys-ed to kindergartners. It wasn’t enough to support a family, but it allowed him to keep training.

Sam Goes to Ushuaia

When I was 22, I was obsessed with cross-country ski racing. I never seriously thought I was good enough to go to the Olympics, but I was pretty into it and at one point was ranked pretty well nationally.

In the summer of 2008, I flew to Ushuaia to train. Remember, it’s the southern hemisphere so it was their winter. I found a gig helping out at a restaurant next to the ski trails. I slept above the kitchen, even though the building had no heat or electricity once its power generator shut off for the day. I washed dishes for a few hours in the afternoon, helped with any tourists who stayed for snowshoe tours in the evening, but the rest of the time, I skied. Hours of skiing every day.

All of that training led up to the big event in Ushuaia, a race called the Marchablanca. Historically, back before competitive cross country skiing was all about lycra and lightweight, narrow skis that require carefully groomed snow, the race used to cross over the spine of the Andes. Today it’s a pretty standard 13 mile race that has turned into a festival.

“Maybe the best way to understand our cross-country skiing culture, in Tierra del Fuego is to go to the Marchablanca,” says Martin.

Hundreds of people show up to race and watch the Marchablanca, including many who show up to compete wearing goofy costumes, but there are a few competitive racers in the pack.

And that is how I found myself on a starting line with Martin Bianchi.

Race Day

The race immediately separated out into a pack of five skiers, and then four, and then after just a few minutes, there were only three of us: Martin Bianchi; a skier who would later go on to race in the Sochi Olympics, Federico Cichero; and me.

The course of the Marchablanca is a single, 21 kilometer loop. It weaves in and out of the forest, but the majority of it travels over big open plains of frozen peat moss. And all throughout those forests and frozen bogs there’s a secret hazard lurking beneath the snow.

“In particular, in those years, we were experiencing a plague: the beaver,” Martin explains. “Beavers were brought here in 1946, for fur hats and clothing. Later, when that didn’t work out, they had the bright idea of just letting them go. And when they released the 10 pairs of beavers that there were at that time, they bred and populated the entire island, and now they estimate there are more than 90,000 beavers.”

Beavers, in Tierra del Fuego, are an invasive species. How about that?

“And it has an impact on the ski trails. Often, they simply build up a dam and flood the trail. So we have to do a lot of beaver control, and back then they weren’t doing it!” says Martin.

The start of the race. Marchablanca 2008

This lack of beaver control led to a crucial moment in our ski race, and as it turns out, in Martin’s life. Though I had no idea about any of this until I called him back up to ask him about his memories of this day. Here’s what he remembers from that moment:

“Well, if I remember right, we were trading off who was leading, as we went. And I knew that in that moment I could win because we were about on par with each other. And I had faith that in the final big climb, I could get some distance on you.

“But I got a surprise, and I’m being sincere, here, Sam. That before that climb, which they call the subida de los hacheros, I couldn’t pass you. And so I climbed the hill behind you, without being able to pass you, going a maybe a little slower than I would have liked to go, because generally I’m good at going uphill.

“When we got to the top of the climb, we had to turn sharply to the right and go down a hill. And this downhill ended by going over a beaver bog. Much to your surprise!

“The ski tracks—which normally you get into the tracks when you go down a hill— the tracks went over the beaver dam, over a part which rose up because of a rock, and the trail groomer had passed over that. So the tracks weren’t level and they sort of threw you into a jump.

“This downhill drop slope was very fast. It was short but very steep. And when we finished the climb and started to go down, we got into the tracks, I looked ahead and saw that the tracks went over the rock and I immediately realized there was a jump there.

This is an artist's rendering of what happened at the race. While artistic and historical license has been taken, we believe that this image is true to the essence, values, and integrity of a story that is cherished by millions of people worldwide. … — This is an artist's rendering of what happened at the race. While artistic and historical license has been taken, we believe that this image is true to the essence, values, and integrity of a story that is cherished by millions of people worldwide. **Artist:** Taylor Quimby

“And there, still ahead of me, you hit the rock, and went off the jump and you were knocked off balance and you went off the trail. And I passed you. I was able to avoid it and go around you.

“And it was in this moment that I said, ‘Well, that’s it, it’s over.’ I passed you with all the speed from this downhill slope. So right there I took fifteen, twenty meters, from you, easy. And you still had to make your way back onto the trail and regain your momentum.

“So I had this fantastic opportunity to go, to keep hammering, and leave you behind.

“But to tell you the truth, something happened in my head that told me this wasn’t right. You had climbed the hill well, you had done the downhill well. The only thing is that you hadn’t noticed that the trail had a jump in it—a thing that shouldn’t have been there—and it was because of that jump that you went off the trail, you lost all your momentum.

“And so, to me, the right thing to do seemed to be to wait for you.”

I didn’t fall, but I was standing way off the trail, with deep, heavy, powdery snow up to my knees or so. And I remember my heart just sinking to my stomach. We weren’t far from the finish, and I was almost positive that the race was over. But then, I looked over and saw Martin had slowed down. And as he glided past, he looked back over his shoulder and I heard him call out:

“Venga, Sam!”

I flailed my way out of the powder, and frantically skied back up the hill trying to catch Martin. Given how slow he was going, it didn’t take long before the racing came back together, and it was nip and tuck again.

The rest of the race was a bit of a blur. Right before the finish, our race merged into the trail being used by the more popular event, with people skiing in costumes.

“We were sprinting,” Martin remembers, “Dodging people left and right, you were shouting, I was shouting. It was a mess. When there were just 500 meters left, this I remember, I was pretty tired, and I saw you with this drive, this energy. That’s when I realized you were going to beat me.”

And I did.

For me, that was the end of the story. I won a race. They gave me a trophy. I went home. And telling people I won the National Ski Championship of Argentina was an eccentric biographical detail I could share at parties.

But then, years later. An email arrived in my inbox from Martin.

The Aftermath

It turns out there was something else that happened that day. Something which I had completely forgotten, but which Martin reminded me of when I spoke with him.

After the race, I came up to him, and asked him why he had waited.

“I said, ‘Yeah, sure Sam, I waited because I wanted us to have a clear winner,’ and we left it at that,” he says.

Later, when we were at the awards ceremony, apparently (again, I forgot all this) I tried to hand him the trophy, which he waved off. A representative from the Argentine Olympic Committee saw this exchange and asked what it was all about, so Martin told him the whole story.

“And for that year, 2008, they decided that the most exemplary gesture of sportsmanship in all of Argentina, was this situation that happened in the Marchablanca,” says Martin, “So they invited me to Buenos Aires for a dinner—a very big deal, a gala banquet—and they gave me a prize, in front of all the Olympic medalists from Argentina.”

This included the Argentine Soccer team, who won the gold medal in Beijing that year. (Messi was not in attendance, sadly.) This would be like being presented to a room full of the most famous athletes in the country. He met his country’s equivalent of Bob Costas, the Olympics host for NBC, and an article about him was featured in the country’s biggest newspaper.

Martin the Tiger | Photo Credit: Facundo Santana

“This is one of my best memories, so this race is going to stay with me for the rest of my life. And after getting this prize, I think it was kind of like a signal, that things were alright, I could retire, that I had done enough, I had left enough of a mark on the sport,” he says.

Now when Martin races, he does it for fun. He wears costumes, he skis with his wife, he doesn’t pressure himself. Today, he has 3 kids, a job in the ministry of tourism, which pays much better than part-time phys-ed teacher. He’s hung up his commitment to ski racing, but not his love for it.

“The next year, just to give you an idea, in 2009, I did the Marchablanca in a tiger costume,” he tells me. “I went from having been on the podium with you, second place, to the next year putting on a tiger costume and skiing the race together with my wife.”

“That was how I ended my racing career.”

And yes, years later, a photo of us together at the front of that race, was plastered all over the side of a city bus.

Outside/In was produced this week by:

Sam Evans-Brown and Logan Shannon, with help from Maureen McMurray, Taylor Quimby, Molly Donahue and Jimmy Gutierrez.

Special thanks this week to Martin Bianchi for taking the trouble to connect with us from the far end of another continent, and to Luis Antonio Perez for helping out with Spanish translation and being Martin’s voice in English.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

This week’s episode featured tracks from Blue Dot Sessions, Poddington Bear, and Tyler Gibbons. Check out the Free Music Archive for more tracks from these artists.

10x10: Traffic Circle

November 22, 2016 by Guest User in 10x10, Elementary School

In our series, 10X10, we take you on a journey to a 10X10 plot and uncover the secrets in spaces you’d never think to look. This time, we look for signs of extraordinary life, at the center of a traffic circle.

Two busy lanes of traffic curve around a median of weedy grass, and highways stretch out in four different directions. A McDonald's squats on one corner, a Wendy’s on the opposite side. And in the middle, what appears to be the world’s least interesting island, and our subject today.

It’s easy to be ho-hum about spaces like these, but if you look closely, you’ll discover that this ordinary traffic circle has the structure of a shortgrass prairie, more than twenty higher plant species, and a hidden world containing billions of microbes.

We took two biologists, separately, to this traffic circle in Lee, New Hampshire. The first, botany professor Tom Lee of the University of New Hampshire started counting plants as soon as we hopped over the curb. In all, he was able to identify more than 20 species of plants, including weeds, broad-leaf herbs—what you’d probably think of as ‘wildflowers’—and even some edible greens.

“This is a species called Wintercress,” Tom said. “It’s not native, but it has these rather succulent fleshy leaves that I believe you can put in a salad.” Of course the traffic circle isn’t exactly a farmer’s market. “I wouldn’t put these in a salad,” Tom added.

Of the species Tom identified on the traffic circle, only a handful are technically native to the area. He guesses that only six or seven of them were intentionally planted and the rest somehow crossed two lanes of traffic, all on their own.

“Some of them blew in on the wind,” Lee says. “The fleabanes and the dandelions have those little parachutes that carry them in on a breeze. But then there are seeds like those of the evening primrose, just small barrel-type things. My guess is they were carried on the bodies of vehicles on a rainy day, with some mud splattered up on the side, driving through here they hit a puddle, and the seeds are washed off and sent flying into the center of the circle where they germinate and grow.”

Underneath the surface of the traffic circle, another, smaller ecosystem is bubbling with activity. Nematodes are roundworms, and many of them are smaller than an eyelash and soils are teeming with them. “We know now that every phylum, ever major group of life above ground, is much reduced below ground,” says Dianna Wall, a nematode expert and biology professor at Colorado University, “It’s still represented in the soil, but it’s going to be at a much smaller size.”

By KDS444 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27606319

We wanted to know just how active the traffic circle soil is, so we asked UNH soil microbiologist Serita Frey to come take a sample. She bolted across the lanes of traffic with us and took out a tulip-bulb planter, and twisted it into the soil. “Normally,” Serita tells us, “in a handful of garden variety soil you would have in the order of two-hundred billion organisms in the soil.” The soil here is crumbly and dry, which is not a good sign, given that many soil organisms are technically aquatic animals–but according to Dianna Wall, microorganisms are a hearty bunch.

“You can put them under liquid nitrogen,” She says, “you can put them in a freezer. You can keep them on a shelf for sixty years…and then you bring them back into the lab and say ‘hey, here’s some water’ and you watch them come back to life.”

Back at Serita’s lab, we seal the soil in mason jars and let them sit for three days. Because—just like us—microorganisms exhale carbon dioxide, and you can measure how much biological activity there is by studying how much CO2 has accumulated in the jars.

For the sake of comparison, Serita has also brought a sample of soil from her husband’s garden, and incredibly, we discover that the soil from the traffic circle has significantly more biological activity.

Serita admits “I was not expecting that.” She points out that in order to do a proper measurement, we’d have to take more samples. Still, the fact that the traffic circle, clearly the underdog in this exercise, had come out on top is a perfect illustration of our point: there’s a lot going on in these overlooked places.

And for the most part that life is still a complete mystery to us.

“Soil is considered one of the most diverse habitats on the planet,” Serita says, “even more diverse than a rainforest in terms of the organisms that live there and the complexity of these relationships that we’re talking about. Tens of thousands of species in a handful of soil…and less than one to ten percent of those are known to science. We know that there are many species we just don’t know who they are and what they’re doing.”

So next time you’re driving on a boring stretch of highway, and you round a dusty, patch of overgrown grass, remember that those plants may have hitchhiked for miles on the mudflaps of tractor trailers to get there. Remember that there in the dirt there are billions of tiny organisms, predators and prey, that have never been named by science.

Outside/In was produced this week by:

Taylor Quimby and Sam Evans-Brown with help from Logan Shannon, Maureen McMurray, Molly Donahue and Jimmy Gutierrez.

Special thanks this week to our UNH experts Tom Lee and Serita Frey, for being willing to run across two lanes of traffic for this story. Serita’s crew is actually doing a DNA analysis of our soil microbes - but that’s not something you can do in just a couple days, so we’ll let you know what we find out once they get results back. Also, if you’re interested in learning the difference between roundabouts and traffic circles - go to RoundaboutsUSA.com. Quick primer - it apparently has something to do with Yield at Entry, Deflection, and “Flare”.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

This week’s episode featured tracks from Podington Bear and Ikimashoo Aoi. Check out the Free Music Archive for more tracks from these artists.

Always Wear Earth Tones

November 10, 2016 by Guest User in How We Use It

Tony Bosco hid in plain sight for more than two decades in the most densely populated state in the nation. How did he do it? And what makes someone exchange all of the comforts of their home for the simplicity of a shed in the woods?

Back toward the end of the summer, I teamed up with a local New Hampshire filmmaker, named Nick Czerula, who was headed down to New Jersey to do a profile of a guy named Tony Bosco.

Tony Bosco hid in plain sight for more than two decades in the most densely populated state in the nation. Exchanging the comforts of his home for the simplicity of a camp in the woods. I heard Tony's story over dinner over three years ago. A story of a woodsman chasing herds deer, on foot, as if he was living hundreds of years ago. I was told he had an intimate knowledge of the woods and area he lived. The punch line or what grabbed me was how moments before the hunt would begin, he would just appear before sunrise, out of the woods, ready. Turned out it was because these were his woods, his camp, his home. After three years of searching I found Tony, this video is his story and why he chose the path less traveled. Film by Nick Czerula | First AC - Ryan Mcbride | Boom operator - Sam Evans Brown | Music: Icelanders - Shimmer | Dustin Lau - We'll Leave Our Names Behind | Dustin Lau - A Love Language | Shot on Canon cameras. C300ii S120 powershot

Tony had lived in the woods in central New Jersey for more than twenty years, building secret shelters on private property, and camping just out of view of society.

Tony grew up in Piscataway, New Jersey. And he grew up in a pretty standard New Jersey way. He played football on the state champion team, chased girls, raised hell and got kind of lousy grades. But he also fished and camped and read books, like My Side of the Mountain.

He graduated high school, worked odd-jobs for a number of years and eventually moved to Florida where he drove a limo and worked for AT&T. But after around a decade in the rat-race Tony got fed up.

“You gotta work all the time,” he told us, “Too much work and no play.”

So, Tony moved back home, and just decided to walk away from it all. He walked into the woods. He had many different shelters, scattered about in a lot of spaces on the margins of towns in Middlesex and Somerset counties in New Jersey, but the patch of forest that Tony spent most of his years camping in was a piece of land owned by Rutgers University called Kilmer Woods.

Kilmer woods is about 370 acres. To put that in perspective, if you set up camp in the deepest part of this forest, you’re never more than a quarter mile from a paved road. Tony’s shelter was maybe a couple hundred yards from the nearest apartment building, and just a few hundred feet from the nearest trail.

Maybe you read about the hermit who lived in the woods of central Maine for 27 years, stealing food and supplies from second homes and summer camps that whole time, until he was finally caught. That was a crazy story, but it was also Maine, where there are huge tracts of forest that you can hide out in. This is a tiny island of second growth forest in the middle of a sprawling suburban center.

So, how does someone live un-noticed, on university property for years? Here’s how Tony said he pulled it off.

Seclusion

“Don’t put down foot-paths, don’t disturb the foliage, you got to be able to blend, and always wear earth tones,” Tony explains, “Not black, black stands out like white in the woods, you got to wear the earth tones, the browns, the greys, greens.”

Photo courtesy of Nick Czerula - nickcz.com

Tony’s shelter was tall enough so you can sit up in it, but not stand. That made itharder to spot through the scrub. It had screens to keep the bugs out, windows and doors. It was made of leftover construction materials, and painted to blend in. There were branches and pine-boughs strewn all around it, and it was covered with branches from plastic Christmas trees. The brush in Kilmer woods is thick, and Tony would strategically weave saplings together, arrange dead fallen branches, even haul in old christmas trees that people threw out each year. He would thicken the woods up in certain places to subtly redirect anyone who had decided to leave the trail.

Nick Czerula, who grew up nearby, used to ride his bike through Kilmer woods when he was a kid. “Honestly, my mind is blown because we weren’t only riding there, we were digging there. We were building stuff maybe we shouldn’t like jump trails and stuff. And we never ran into anybody,” he says.

He says when he and Tony met the first time, they had lunch “and I said to him I thought I had almost found him once because I found a deer path or a tunnel, and he laughed, and he said ‘well where’d you end up’ and I said ‘nowhere’ and he said ‘exactly because that’s where I wanted you to end up.’”

Tony calls seclusion “A number 1” in terms of the most important priority for someone who is sleeping outdoors on property they don’t have permission to use “so you don’t have to count on people being honest.”

Keep Clean

Tony’s camp was right near a little brook, which he would wash off in year round.

“I would wash every single night, icicles come off my hair, I didn’t care,” he says, “You’ve gotta sleep clean, you’ve gotta stay clean.

This has the obvious benefit of helping him to stay kempt, which helped him to hold jobs, but in speaking to healthcare professionals who work with populations of homeless people, it also helps ward off the dermatological infestations -- scabies, lice, crabs -- that plague people who sleep outside night after night without changing their clothes.

The mantra of keeping clean hold true for your feet as well. Often-times people who are living outdoors will come into a clinic with cases of trenchfoot.

“Rotating your shoes is important, because you want to use them, let them air out, use another pair, let them air out, use another pair… I myself have never had foot issues,” Tony says.

Keep Warm

Tony slept on futon mattresses. (“You get the nice six-inch ones because the nine-inch ones are hard to carry out into the woods.”) His shelters were just wide enough that they could accommodate the futons as long as they folded up on the edges, so when he slept he became “Tony the Hotdog.”

In the winter he found he had to up his calorie intake, because “If you don’t eat enough … 3 o’clock in the morning, your eyes pop open, and you’re freezing.” Tony kept his shelters stocked with provisions from grocery stores (which included many products from Little Debbie, judging by the detritus he showed us), and by hunting deer.

“In New Jersey, you’re allowed, per person, legally, like 100 deer!” he says.

Steer Clear of Trouble

But the truth is, when we get down to it, surviving the elements of a New Jersey winter is not incredibly hard. Even up here in Northern New England there are people who spend the whole winter outside. Generally, it’s not exposure that kills homeless people. “It’s usually a combination of addiction and ignorance,” says Tony, “And there are people who just plain give up. They get to the point of desperation, and they just just plain give up!”

A recent study in Boston found the top cause of death among its homeless population was drug overdose. After that came cancer, mostly lung cancer and liver cancer. (Think smoking and drinking combined with then not going to the doctor for years.) Violence causes some deaths, and doctors say violence is a big cause of injury among their patients.

The kinds of deaths you might associate with survival situations: freezing to death, starvation, dehydration… didn’t even make the list.

So if we ask ourselves, how did Tony survive all of those years sleeping outside… sure his secrecy, his hygiene, his systems for keeping warm and employed, they were important. But most of all he survived because he avoided the worst parts of the human condition: he never grappled with mental illness. He steered clear of addiction.

Tony Lives Inside Now

Eventually, the Rutgers police department found his campsite, and confiscated his stuff, and left him a note that he could come collect it from them. When he did, they charged him with defiant trespassing.

He moved on, found some other camping spots that he would rotate between, but not too much later, about three years ago, he got into a car accident. He was driving his van when he says another car blew through an intersection, leaving him with eleven damaged vertebrae and unable to work. So he had to come inside. These days he’s living with a high school friend, named Joe.

Being in his late fifties, Tony already outlived most people who spend decades sleeping outside.

When you ask Tony what the future holds for him, it’s hard to know what to make of his answer. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with society. I’m kind of looking forward to growing up one day and joining. I’m getting older now, physically,” he says… but then you can see him check himself and reconsider, “I don’t feel like it’s time... but I’ll move back out to the woods, and be happy.”

Photo by Ryan McBride for Nick Czerula courtesy of Nick Czerula - nickcz.com

Outside/In was produced this week by:

Sam Evans-Brown with help from Maureen McMurray, Taylor Quimby, Molly Donahue, Jimmy Gutierrez, and Logan Shannon.

Special thanks to Nick Czerula for hooking us up with Tony Bosco. Also we'd like to thank the numerous health care professionals we talked to for this story: Marianne Savarese, Jennifer Chisholm, and Paula Mann with Healthcare for the Homeless of Manchester, and Dave Munson and Travis Bagget with Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

This week’s episode featured tracks from Blue Dot Sessions, Spinning Merkaba, and Broke for Free. Check out the Free Music Archive for more tracks from these artists.

Nature is a Haunted House

October 27, 2016 by Guest User in Ghosts

Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Friday the Thirteenth, Blair Witch. It seems the woods make a great backdrop for scary stories, but why? Are we hardwired to fear the forest? Or, let’s throw it out there, do ghosts just like hanging out in the thickets? Sam goes on the trail with paranormal experts and talks with Lore’s Aaron Mahnke to find out what makes the woods so terrifying, and tests his own beliefs along the way.

Meet our paranormal experts

Rich Damboise is a nature photographer, screen printer, and ex-moto cross racer. He traded in his bike for an EMF reader and now speeds around New England investigating the paranormal.

Jerry “The Candyman” Seavey is a former pro-wrestler who hopped in the ring alongside Randy Savage, The Undertaker, and Shawn Michaels. He now gets his adrenaline rush chasing ghosts.

Rich and Candyman, along with a few other friends, run Adventure Cam-Paranormal, a YouTube series which investigates New England’s most haunted locations.

The Location

Rich and Candyman met the Outside/In crew at Vale End Cemetery in Wilton, New Hampshire which, according to the internet, is wicked haunted.

The Equipment

No ghost hunting expedition would be complete without the following tools.

EMF meter

...or electromagnetic field meter. This handy little tool can be easily purchased on-line and detects fluctuations in electromagnetic fields. If there are sudden bumps in activity, watch out! There could be a ghost, or power lines, near by.

Voice recorder

It’s always good for a paranormal investigator to have a voice recorder on hand because some ghosts want to be heard rather than seen. These ghostly recordings are known as EVP, or electronic voice phenomenon. A shotgun mic is a sure bet, but there are many recorders out there to suit any budget.

Camera

Photography is a must when capturing spirits who prefer to be seen and not heard. Things to look out for: orbs, aura, mist, spirits. Rich is a seasoned photographer with a professional camera, but budget models will work in a pinch.

Of course there are many other tools that Rich and Candyman use including camcorders, infra-red thermometers, flashlights, motion detectors, and a teddy bear called BooBuddy.

The results

Our paranormal investigation didn’t turn up any spirits, but it did bring us to a beautiful New England cemetery rich in history. Plus, Rich and Candyman have promised to take Sam to a haunted house and they assure us things WILL go bump in the night.

The Shadowy Side of the Outdoors

Former extreme athletes Rich and Candyman say that the adrenaline of paranormal investigations is a good substitute for the heart-pounding moto-cross races and wrestling matches. There is a logical connection between fear and adrenaline, but what’s causing the fear? Why are we scared of the dark? Why are so many spooky stories set in the woods? To get those answers, Sam spoke with a man steeped in the stuff. Aaron Mahnke, host of the podcast Lore.

Why can the woods be so frightening?

I think for a very long time the wilderness represented the unknown to us. I know we like to feel like we have a full understanding of what’s out there, we’re modern humans after all, but I think we’d be lying to ourselves if we said there was nothing left to learn or explore. Sometimes I tell people, go find a photo of the New Jersey pine barrens or forests of the northwest. There are places in this world that are so huge that we can’t say with confidence that we’ve mastered them completely. I think that’s where the fear comes from. We fear the things that we can’t control. The great outdoors are a beautiful place, but they also hide a lot from us.

"I think for a very long time, the wilderness represented the unknown to us...I think that’s where the fear comes from, right? Because, we fear the things that we can’t control. The great outdoors are a beautiful place, but they also hide a lot from us. And I think that’s how the wilderness casts that spell of fear over us." - Aaron Mahnke

Why are people drawn to spooky stories?

I think we really want to believe that we’re not alone. Yeah, there are 6.5 billion of us on the planet, which shouldn’t make us feel alone , but we do live pretty solitary lives. We got through things in our lives, like loss and separation, I think, to some degree, people believe in stories of ghosts because it gives them hope that there might be something more, that there might be a way to stay connected to the people to the people that they’ve lost. But I also think there’s an entertainment value to it. The things that ghosts might do, the noises they might make in the house, it makes a good story.

Do you believe in ghosts?

So what I tell people, even the preface makes me sound like I’m dodging the question, but I tell people that I believe the stories. I believe that people really believe that these things happened. I believe them and there’s value in listening and sometimes there’s value in repeating those stories. I try to ride the fence. It makes for a better storyteller when you don’t fully believe in one side or the other.

Outside/In was produced this week by:

Sam Evans-Brown, Maureen McMurray, Taylor Quimby, Molly Donahue, Jimmy Gutierrez, and Logan Shannon.

Music for this episode is from Uncanny Valleys.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Eat the Invaders - Lionfish

October 20, 2016 by Guest User in Fauna

This is Eat The Invaders - our occasional segment where we take a bite out of invasive species populations. On the menu today, one of the scariest, most voracious and intractable invaders out there: the lionfish.

After much discussion, the team over here at Outside/In has decided that lionfish look like a tropical fish, crossed with a peacock, crossed with a zebra, crossed with a set of Scottish bagpipes. They are flashy fish. It’s really no surprise that people with fancy aquariums like to show off by putting lionfish in them.

By The High Fin Sperm Whale - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

And really, once there were aquariums full of lionfish all over the country, it’s also no surprise that the fish got out. The mythical tale is that the current lionfish invasion began in 1992 when Hurricane Andrew rolled through Florida and smashed up an aquarium in Biscayne Bay. This story persists, even though the fish were actually first seen off the coast of Miami years before, and the biologist who suggested that theory has since discounted it.

It’s much more likely that this lionfish invasion started when disgruntled aquarium owners purchased a lionfish, discovered that the fish had a voracious appetite for their other favorite fish in the tank, and opted to dump their new purchase into the ocean.

Once there were enough free fish to find each other and breed, the stage was set for one of the most epic invasions ever observed.

The fish are a gape limited predator, meaning they will try to eat anything they can swallow. They are also suction feeding fish, meaning when they open their mouths, water rushes inside, “so the lionfish basically turns into the death star and it has this tractor beam. That’s how bad it is,” explains Rachel Bowman, a lionfish spearfisher from the Florida Keys. Lionfish feed on small reef fish that are a huge part of the ocean food chain, and one study in the Bahamas found that in just two years their arrival led to a 65% decline in the quantity of local fish.

Since everyone else is FL was spearing lions this weekend (8,089 total!!!), I spent my birthday weekend in the Bahamas! Thanks for the awesome birthday wishes, and a HUGE CONGRATS to everyone that participated in Lionfish Removal & Awareness Day, 8,089 fish is something to be proud of!!!! #wespearlionssoyoucanfish #lionfishhuntress #myfwc #lionfish #fwclionfish #workapole #zookeeper #neriticdiving

A photo posted by Rachel Lynn Bowman (@lionfishhuntress) on May 16, 2016 at 11:06am PDT

LOVE my new #deepapnea carbon fiber fins!! This is what happens when @lionfishlady and I go shoe shopping together!! #neriticdiving #lionfishhuntress #lionfish #myfwc #fwclionfish #floridakeys #deepapneafins #workapole #wespearlionssoyoucanfish

A photo posted by Rachel Lynn Bowman (@lionfishhuntress) on Jun 3, 2016 at 10:34am PDT

Squinty-eyed and smiling!! #myfwc #neriticdiving #lionfish #lionfishhuntress #zookeeper #floridakeys #fwclionfish #wespearlionssoyoucanfish

A photo posted by Rachel Lynn Bowman (@lionfishhuntress) on Apr 16, 2016 at 3:41pm PDT

Like many invasives, Lionfish are also prolific breeders. One female can lay 30 million eggs in a single year. Put those two things together—voracious appetite, and the ability to multiply exponentially—and you’ve got a spiny, bag-pipey, marine disaster.

Oh, and did I mention they are venomous? “I don’t have kids, but a friend of mine who has a son has told me that it’s right up there, it’s right up there with childbirth,” says Rachel, “It feels like your bones are expanding from the inside out.”

Luckily, they have one weakness we humans love to exploit: every fish yields two tasty fillets.

Lionfish meat has been compared to hogfish which is a cross between lobster and shrimp, grouper, snapper, and any number of things, but I would say that as a New Englander with a not terribly refined palate for such things, the fish tasted like any number of flaky white fish that you can get at the grocery store.

And speaking of the seafood counter, Whole Foods became the first grocery chain to offer the fish in its Florida stores this spring.

Now, you can find a smattering of articles out there with splashy titles like: “Why eating invasive species is a bad idea,” or “Eating Lionfish: effective conservation or a cure worse than the disease.”

As far as I can tell, the primary knock against the eating of lionfish is that it’s simply not an effective way to combat the invasion. And it may be true that no matter how many fish we spear, more will simply take their fallen comrade's place. I mean, 30 million fish eggs per female lionfish? Seriously, how do you compete with that?

We cooked the lionfish two ways: baked in butter, lemon, shallots, and white wine; and Spicy Grilled style. The first preparation was adapted from this basic recipe for cooking white fish. The second was adapted from a Rick Bayless recipe, with instructions below.

Rachel says on a good day, she’ll spear 120 pounds in a day. And when she’s been diving on the same reef for a few days, she says they do start to get harder to find, but after just a month or two of not being patrolled, reefs fill back up with the fish. And even then, spearfishers are only helping at the depths they can reach by diving in scuba gear. “I’ve got a brother in law that’s a commercial lobster trapper, and he pulls up traps from four, five, six hundred feet and they’re full of lionfish,” she says.

But, to the critics, Rachel points out every person who picks lionfish off a menu, is a diner who isn’t eating something else—grouper, or snapper, tasty fish which have a history of being over-eaten. And besides, what’s the alternative? Do nothing?

“You know what, it’s a hell of a lot better than sitting on the couch and saying you can’t put a dent in that population. I’m doing something,” she says, “And those people that sit there and say, well you’re not going to be able to make a difference. No, no one has ever made a difference by sitting there and saying that, have they?”

Outside/In was produced this week by:

Sam Evans-Brown & Logan Shannon with help from Maureen McMurray, Taylor Quimby, Molly Donahue, and Jimmy Gutierrez.

Special thanks this week to the REEF Environmental Education Foundation for helping us to find Rachel, and to Norman’s Lionfish for over-nighting some freshly caught—and conveniently de-spined—lionfish to us.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

This week’s episode featured tracks from Blue Dot Sessions and David Szesztay. Check out the Free Music Archive for more tracks from these artists.

Look Toward the Dawn

October 06, 2016 by Guest User in Pursuits

Today, we take a step back to imagine a world without a web of GPS satellites telling your smartphone where you are every second of the day. While this might sound scary, come along and maybe you’ll discover you have a secret sixth sense... one that’s been inside you all along, if you just knew how to turn it on.

Pop Quiz: Wherever you are right now, stand up and point southeast. Don’t take out your smartphone. Don’t look at a map. Just stand and point.

Ok, now you can check your phone. How did you do? If you’re someplace familiar, near a major highway or river, maybe you did ok. If you’re on the road, somewhere you don’t know well, chances are you weren’t even close.

In the grand scheme of human evolution, today’s maps, compasses, satellite enabled GPS networks, and well-marked roads and trails are a new frontier for our species. And this proliferation of new technologies has already fundamentally changed the way we perceive the world.

How did we used to get around?

You likely already know the most obvious answer to this question: the sun and the stars. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere the North Star is in the north, and in the Southern Hemisphere the Southern Cross points toward the south.

Duh.

Source: Hubblesite.org

The North Star or Polaris

The Southern Cross or Crux constellation

But even assuming you can identify the North Star and the Southern Cross (which…can you?) what do you do if it’s cloudy? What do you do if it’s the middle of the day and you’re close to the equator. If those are the only tools in your toolbox, there are times where navigation is going to get dicey, and you’re going to get lost.

In the 1970s, hoping to rediscover the art of navigating without tools, a hodgepodge of Hawaiian anthropologists and adventurers built a replica of a traditional sailing canoe, which they named the Hōkūleʻa. (Hōkūleʻa translates as “Star of Joy” and is the Hawaiian name for Arcturus, a star which—at the latitude of Hawaii passes—directly overhead every 24 hours.) Leading the way was a man named Mau Piailug - a fisherman from the tiny atoll of Satawal in Micronesia who still knew the traditional art of navigation.

Over the course of more than three decades, Piailug taught a new generation of Hawaiians how to navigate over long-distances at sea. With him—or his students—as captain, the Hōkūleʻa made a number of voyages without instruments, including a trip from Hawaii to Tahiti and subsequent trips all throughout Polynesia. Today the boat is on a 5 year journey that will take it all around the world.

Here’s the short version of how the navigators on-board the Hōkūleʻa find their way.

Photo: Courtesy of hokulea.com. Please see watermark for photo credit.

You’ve got to know your stars, cold.

If you want to sail thousands of miles without getting lost, you can’t only know the North Star and The Big Dipper. Navigators have a list of some 200 stars that they use in navigation. Day to day, they might only need 100 of them, but they know exactly where they rise, how they move across the sky and where they set.

Knowing the stars doesn’t just let you know the direction, it can also tell you your latitude. Polynesian navigators use their hands to measure the height of various stars off the horizon.

Since every navigator has different hands and different arm lengths, they all calibrate their hands to know how many degrees the width of a finger or the spread from thumb to pinky represents.

Think about this. These navigators stand out on the ocean, holding their hands up to the night sky over and over, night after night. They do it, so many times, that they knew exactly how high off the horizon certain stars should be when they hit the latitude they’re aiming for. They knew exactly what the sky should look like when they reach home.

That’s pretty cool.

You’ve got to be able to read the waves.

On the first three days of the Hōkūleʻa’s trip from Namibia to Saint Helena, the boat was completely surrounded by sea fog the entire time. Translation: no stars. Instead the navigators had to rely on being able to see the hazy glow of the sun shining through the fog in the early morning and late evening to orient themselves. In between, they navigated by the waves.

Navigators are up at dawn every day observing. Where’s the wind coming from? Where are the clouds? And then, they feel how the swells move beneath the ship in relation to their course. They lock onto that feeling. Try to memorize it. That feeling is their heading. And then when it’s cloudy, or the sun is straight up overhead, they navigate by that feeling. At sunrise and sunset they can take stock again, and adjust course if necessary.

You’ve got to pay attention to everything around you.

The first sign that sailors use to know they are close to their destination is not when they see the island itself; the first clue is the birds. The crew of the Hōkūleʻa look for two types of terns in particular: one which they see as many as 120 miles from land, and another flies 40 miles out to sea.

But the birds can be confusing. Nainoa Thompson (that's him in the photos below), the first Hawaiian to serve as navigator on the Hōkūleʻa, was so confused by a bird that appeared to be going the wrong way during his first trip to Tahiti, that he nearly turned the boat around. (The key was he hadn’t spotted the tiny fish in the tern’s mouth, indicating it was flying back to its nest, and they needed to follow it.)

In general, being a good navigator means constantly paying attention to all the clues the natural world is trying to give you. The direction of the wind, cloud formations, the way the horizon looks at sunrise and sunset.

Mao Piailug was said to be able to predict the weather with remarkable accuracy based solely on his observations of the clouds and light at sunrise, and to be able to point to the Southern Cross without a moment’s hesitation whenever asked. Paying attention like this hones your sense of direction until it is genuinely functioning more like a sense.

A sixth sense.

GPS is great, but what have we lost?

I am a big fan of GPS, and I’m not saying we should ditch this technology. (I mean, it might be worth tens of billions of dollars to the global economy). But here’s the question you should ask yourself next time you plug your destination into your phone instead of trying to figure things out with good old mental maps and landmarks: what have you lost by letting go of your sense of direction?

Technology has fundamentally changed the way we think of “direction”. Paul Puliot, the speaker for the Cowasuck band of the Abenaki people points out that the words for east and west in the Abenaki language actually refer to the location of the sun. “We were either traveling into the sun away from the sun or into the sunset,” he says.

Whereas we might think of direction in relation to our bodies, people used to think about direction in relation to the planet. There are actually whole languages that don’t have words like ‘left’ and ‘right’. Instead, if they were going to warn you of danger they might say, “Hey, watch out for that snake to the north of your foot!” And you’d just know where that snake was, because you just know… because you’d been paying attention, your whole life, to which way was which. You’d never get disoriented.

The good thing is, it’s not too late to start paying more attention to the world around you, and develop your navigational skills.

John Huth, a professor of particle physics at Harvard, decided he would learn how to navigate after being enveloped in a thick fog while kayaking in the Gulf of Maine. He managed to make his way to the shore, but the next day saw on the news that two other paddlers were caught in that same fog, got lost and died. Now he says, “I can look up in the sky and without having to name the names of stars or even having to think about it, I can find my way.” The need to exercise conscious thought to know which direction is which has fallen away.

Bruce Blankenfeld, who sailed on the Hōkūleʻa during its first few voyages and subsequently went on to become a master navigator himself, describes a similar awakening. “I remember looking at the sky as a youngster and all you’d see is like billions of dots of light up there,” he explains, “But now, you’re looking at a definite map, you know.”

I’m not suggesting that you never turn your GPS on ever again. But consider leaving it off occasionally, and starting to pay more attention to the natural cues that indicate which way is which. Maybe if you do, you’ll start to get your sixth sense back.

Outside/In was produced this week by:

Sam Evans-Brown & Logan Shannon with help from Maureen McMurray, Taylor Quimby, Molly Donahue, and Jimmy Gutierrez.

If you’ve got a question for our Ask Sam hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (1-844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

This week’s episode featured tracks from D-Lay, La Venganza de Cheetara, and Podington Bear. Check out the Free Music Archive for more tracks from these artists.