Border Trilogy

Thanks for listening to these stories. This is the last one on the album. It’s three pieces from the same place—the Sonoran Desert, 60 miles southwest of Tucson, the border with Mexico. From an air conditioned car, the landscape looks beautiful and serene, but it’s actually one big open graveyard for people who died trying to walk into the United States.

In March of 2005, photojournalist Julian Cardona wrote to me saying there were 1000-3000 people crossing the line, everyday, near Sasabe, Sonora. He said I should come down and he’d help me with the story. So the first part of this trilogy is with Julian on the Mexican side—the people getting ready to cross.

The second and third part are with Charles Bowden on the U.S. side, where the land is a national wildlife refuge. I went there with Bowden a few days after being in Sasabe with Julian. Bowden lived nearby in Tucson and had been writing about the border for decades. He believed it was his moral responsibility as a writer to show people what was happening there. He was also on the board of directors for the wildlife refuge. That’s why the refuge security guard, Slyvester, agreed to talk to me, and it’s why he invited us to dinner with his wife and kids. This is the second part of the trilogy.

The third part happened that same night. After dinner, instead of going back to Tucson, Bowden and I drove south on a dirt road, across the refuge, to the barbed wire fence marking the border. The sky had a million stars, but it was so dark I couldn’t see the microphone in my own hand.

These stories aired in 2005 on NPR’s “Day to Day,” and then in 2006 on NPR’s “Hearing Voices” as part of a larger program that won a Peabody Award for reporting on the US/Mexico border in 2007.

I’d like to thank Alex Chadwick (of “Day to Day”) for telling me I should put Charles Bowden and Julian Cardona on the radio. And thanks to Barrett Golding (of “Hearing Voices”) for producing the show that won the big award.

Thanks for listening to these stories that aired on the radio, one time, a long time ago.

Finally, thanks very much to everyone who has donated to support this podcast. I depend on your donations to keep going. If you feel like helping out, please go to homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.

Over There

As the war correspondent for a men’s fashion magazine in the late 1990’s, I was given one directive: There will be blood in the first paragraph!

This was a time of relative peace and calm, when it seemed the United States would rule the world for at least the next couple hundred years. My job was to go to places where people were still acting up, causing trouble, shooting and killing, and find someone who was bleeding—because this is what men (with money) in the late 1990’s wanted to read in between ads for underwear, wristwatches, and cologne.

I went to “some fucked up places” and wrote the stories, but I kept failing to follow the directive about blood. So my job was on shaky ground. Then 9/11 happened.

This story is about going to Afghanistan in November of 2001, the beginning of the war on terror. Esquire Magazine refused to send me, so I went on my own. The story I wrote, “Over There,” was published in Harper’s Magazine in 2002. This radio story, produced years later, is composed of excerpts from the print story. It was edited and mixed by Larry Massett, and was broadcast, in 2010, by the NPR program “Hearing Voices.”

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free and then decide whether they are worthy of a donation. Thanks very much to everyone who has gone to homebrave.com and pressed the DONATE button.

A Trip To Cambodia

This story changed my life. Until then, 1997, I’d always done stories about things where I live, what I call home. When J.J. Yore (producer of “The Savvy Traveler”) asked me to go to Cambodia, I didn’t even have a valid passport.

Then, when the story aired, one night in 1997, David Granger (editor of Esquire Magazine) heard it in his limousine on his way home from work in Manhattan. He listened then called me on the car phone. He said he wanted me to be Esquire’s war correspondent.

“Esquire has always had a war correspondent,” he said, “but now there are no wars going on, so we’re just going to send you to some really fucked-up places.”

It was like a door opened, and I stepped into a whole new world.

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free and then decide whether they are worthy of a donation. Thanks very much to everyone who has gone to homebrave.com and pressed the DONATE button.

Swim Lesson

In the summer we would drive across the country to Squam Lake in New Hampshire. My wife’s parents had a house there in a quiet bay with a beach, with loons and moose. The lake was perfect for swimming.

Swim Lesson was produced in 1995, with (a lot of) help from Jay Allison of Transom.org.

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free, and then decide whether they are worthy of a donation. If so, please go to homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.

Finding Amnesia

These are my thoughts after watching Trump’s speech last night:

Right now, in the United States, you’re either in Trump’s gang or you are not; and, if not, you’re getting your ass kicked, over and over, for fun and pleasure by people in the Trump gang. This is what’s happening. This is the show now—a WWF Smackdown of woke-ass liberals, and the rest of the world can go to hell.

Yesterday I thought I should stop what I’m doing and start talking to Trump supporters to ask them “what are you thinking?” But today I know what they are thinking—they want to kick my ass and laugh about it. There’s got to be a better plan.

This morning I thought about going to Ukraine, and maybe I will, but for now I am going to finish this “album” project because it has a beginning, middle, and end to it, and it would be wrong to stop in the middle. I’m sorry, I was blown off course for a bit by difficult circumstances, but I back at it now.

Finding Amnesia, produced and edited by Alix Spiegel and Ira Glass, aired on This American Life in 1997.

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free and then decide whether they are worthy of a donation. If so, please go to homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.

Working For The Friendly Man

I am hesitant to post a 30-year-old story on this day before Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress, laying out his plans for our future. For Trump, the pedestal has never been higher, and I’m afraid he will declare that he has been chosen by God to be King of the World. This just doesn’t seem like the time to be looking back.

So I will post Working For The Friendly Man, but then I’m going to pause this “album” project for a while in order to produce stories about what’s happening now. I’ll put them in Season Three.

Thanks to everyone who has supported this project. I very much appreciate your help. If you would like to donate then please go to homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.

Working For The Friendly Man, produced and edited by Alix Spiegel and Ira Glass, aired on “This American Life” in 1996. The introduction is by Ira Glass.

The Test

(This is the eighth part of an album I am building. For more information please go to homebrave.com.)

Everything changed, for me, when Ira Glass started “This American Life” in 1996. I’d been working odd jobs, trying to support my family, and pretty much failing. Then Ira called and asked that I contribute stories for his new show. He wanted me to write about the odd jobs I’d been taking. So I went back to the beginning, just after I quit my “real” job.

The Test, produced and edited by Alix Spiegel and Ira Glass, aired on This American Life in 1996.

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free, and then decide whether they are worthy of a donation. If so, please go to homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.

The Dry Wall

The next few stories come from a difficult period—for me and other independent radio producers. In the 1980’s, there was federal funding for new NPR programs and new kinds of radio stories, but by the early 1990’s the funding had pretty much disappeared.

At that time, I had a family, a wife and three young kids. So I took a “real” job as a reporter for the local NPR station. For the first time, we had a regular paycheck, family health insurance, and a retirement account. I, however, just could not fit into the system, and I quit after only five months, without having a backup plan.

I did odd jobs, anything to get by, and in the meantime I worked on our house, trying to make it a better place to live. I also started recording things around my house—the city ambience, my kids, friends who came by. It was a tough time, and yet so easy in many ways compared to now.

The Dry Wall aired on the NPR program “Soundprint” in 1993. I think. It aired nationally, somewhere, because Ira Glass heard it and told me he liked it.

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free and then decide whether they are worthy of a donation. If so, please go to homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.

The Death of Ruth Tuck

This is an odd one—a radio play, a docu-drama, about how we, as a culture, deal with death and dying. Ruth Tuck is a fictional character, an elderly woman who dies alone in a hospital. She has one friend, two daughters, and an ex-husband who don’t talk to each other. Before and after she dies, Ruth is cared for by professionals, people who are paid for their services. It’s a sad story, with both actors and “real” people. I wish I could remember their names, but I do not.

The Death of Ruth Tuck aired nationally on a short-lived “radio art” series (the name I’ve also forgotten) in 1986. I know Joe Frank heard it in Los Angeles, because he called and said he thought it was real. I said, no, it’s a play.

Thanks very much to Kenny Larsen for coming up with Ruth and her family.

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free and then decide whether they are worthy of a donation. If so, please go to homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.

The Green River

(This is the fifth story in an album I am building. For more information please go to homebrave.com.)

This story began as a series of stories produced for “Weekend All Things Considered” over the summer of 1991. I’d spend a week or so on the river then come home and send a story to WATC, and then go back and float another section of the river, come home and send another story, and so on. Here they are all together, with music by Pat King (recorded in my house).

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free and then decide whether they are worthy of a donation. If so, please go to homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.

The Avalanche

(This is the fourth story in an album I am building. For more information please go to the website, homebrave.com.)

The Wasatch Mountains, just east of Salt Lake City, are known for having the best snow in the world for powder skiing. Powder is the kind of snow that flies over your head as you ski through it. The snow flakes are big and dry—they take up space but weigh almost nothing, so skiing through them can feel like flying.

When we were kids we learned to ski by riding the lifts at the resorts, but after high school, in our twenties, we realized we didn’t need the chair lifts—we could hike up and ski down the mountain, pretty much any mountain, on cross-country skis. We had the whole Wasatch range to ourselves.

This was a beautiful, but dangerous thing. We knew how to ski, very well, but we were just learning about the mountains, and what can happen in the mountains.

One day in April, 1979, seven young men went backcountry skiing in Big Cottonwood Canyon. Late in the day, after hiking up and skiing multiple shots, one of the slopes avalanched and swept away three of the skiers. One ended up on top of the debris, freaked out but uninjured. Another was buried for 20 minutes, but was dug out by his friends. The third, Greg McIntyre, was buried and didn’t make it out alive.

Years later, I interviewed five of the six survivors, asking them to tell me the story from beginning to end.

The Avalanche aired on “All Things Considered” in the winter of 1987.

Thanks to Dwight Butler, Dave Carter, Chris Larson, Alan Murphy and Larry Olsen.

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free and then decide whether they are worthy of a donation. If so, please go homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.

The West Desert

(This is the third story in an album I am building. For more information, please go to the website homebrave.com.)

I think of this story as a cultural history of the Great Salt Lake Desert, the big landscape just west of my home in Salt Lake City. It used to be covered by an inland sea the size of Lake Michigan, but the climate changed and the water evaporated, leaving only salt.

The introduction is from “Roughing It,” by Mark Twain. He crossed this desert in a stagecoach in 1861.

The West Desert, edited by Art Silverman and Larry Massett, was broadcast in 1989 on “The Wild Room,” a weekly show out of WBEZ in Chicago, hosted by Gary Covino and Ira Glass.

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free and then decide if they are worthy of a donation. If so, please go to the website homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.

The Neighborhood

(This is the second story in an album I am building. For more information, please go to homebrave.com.)

The Neighborhood was inspired by Suburbia, a photo-essay book by Bill Owens. The photos are of Owens’ neighbors in a suburb of Livermore, California, during the late sixties and early seventies. They pose in their garages, bedrooms, backyards… with their stuff— their tools and toys, the accoutrements of suburban lifestyle. With each photo there is a short quote from the person in the photo. This combination, the photo with the quote, is somewhat magical. It’s like you can hear the people talking, like you are there, in the moment.

The story aired in 1988 on the NPR program “Soundprint” (now defunct).

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free and then decide whether they are worthy of a donation. If so, please go to homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.

Running After Antelope

(This is the first story in a larger album I’m building. For more information please go to the website homebrave.com.)

Forty years ago, 1985, I was sitting in Art Silverman’s office at NPR in Washington, D.C. Art was a producer for All Things Considered. I was an independent producer, mainly for Weekend All Things Considered. We were working on something, I don’t remember what, and NPR Science Editor Anne Gudenkauf came by to talk to Art.

“Hey, tell Anne your idea for a science story,” Art said to me.

So I said, “My brother, Dave, is a graduate student in vertebrate morphology at the University of Utah, and he has a theory that human beings evolved as endurance predators, able to hunt without weapons by chasing large mammals until they collapse from heat exhaustion. This summer we’re going to test his theory by trying to run down a pronghorn antelope in Wyoming.”

I thought it was a good pitch, but as I spoke I saw Gudenkauf’s eyes cross and when I was done she turned and walked out of Art’s office without comment. It seemed I had insulted her intelligence.

A year later, Running After Antelope aired on All Things Considered and NPR started using it in training sessions as an example for how to produce a science story. Many people scoffed at my brother’s theory, back in the beginning, but now it’s become an accepted theory of human evolution.

Larry Massett edited the story and wrote the introduction, read by Noah Adams.

The music comes from Dire Straits (Why Worry) and Talking Heads (Television Man).

I invite everyone to listen to these stories for free and then decide whether they are worthy of a donation. If so, please go to homebrave.com and look for the DONATE button.