What to Carry, What to Burn with Blair Braverman

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